Sometimes, in the sleepy laziness that followed their love-making, he lay in what seemed to him a slow and gentle flux of sensation and unhurried thought; and in that flux he hardly knew whether he spoke aloud or whether he merely recognized the words that sensation and thought finally came to.
He dreamed of perfections, of worlds in which they could always be together, and half believed in the possibility of what he dreamed. "What," he said, "would it be like if," and went on to construct a possibility hardly more attractive than the one in which they existed. It was an unspoken knowledge they both had, that the possibilities they imagined and elaborated were gestures of love and a celebration of the life they had together now.
The life they had together was one that neither of them had really imagined. They grew from passion to lust to a deep sensuality that renewed itself from moment to moment.
"Lust and learning," Katherine once said. "That's really all there is, isn't it?"
And it seemed to Stoner that that was exactly true, that that was one of the things he had learned.
For their life together that summer was not all love-making and talk. They learned to be together without speaking, and they got the habit of repose; Stoner brought books to Katherine's apartment and left them, until finally they had to install an extra bookcase for them. In the days they spent together Stoner found himself returning to the studies he had all but abandoned; and Katherine continued to work on the book that was to be her dissertation. For hours at a time she would sit at the tiny desk against the wall, her head bent down in intense concentration over books and papers, her slender pale neck curving and flowing out of the dark blue robe she habitually wore; Stoner sprawled in the chair or lay on the bed in like concentration.
Sometimes they would lift their eyes from their studies, smile at each other, and return to their reading; sometimes Stoner would look up from his book and let his gaze rest upon the graceful curve of Katherine's back and upon the slender neck where a tendril of hair always fell. Then a slow, easy desire would come over him like a calm, and he would rise and stand behind her and let his arms rest lightly on her shoulders. She would straighten and let her head go back against his chest, and his hands would go forward into the loose robe and gently touch her breasts. Then they would make love, and lie quietly for a while, and return to their studies, as if their love and learning were one process.
That was one of the oddities of what they called "given opinion" that they learned that summer. They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them; and since the embodiment came before the recognition of the truth, it seemed a discovery that belonged to them alone. They began to collect these oddities of "given opinion," and they hoarded them as if they were treasures; it helped to isolate them from the world that would give them these opinions, and it helped draw them together in a small but moving way.
But there was another oddity of which Stoner became aware and of which he did not speak to Katherine. That was one that had to do with his relationship with his wife and daughter.
It was a relationship that, according to "given opinion," ought to have worsened steadily as what given opinion would describe as his "affair" went on. But it did no such thing. On the contrary, it seemed steadily to improve. His lengthening absences away from what he still had to call his "home" seemed to bring him closer to both Edith and Grace than he had been in years. He began to have for Edith a curious friendliness that was close to affection, and they even talked together, now and then, of nothing in particular. During that summer she even cleaned the glassed-in sun porch, had repaired the damage done by the weather, and put a day bed there, so that he no longer had to sleep on the living-room couch.
And sometimes on weekends she made calls upon neighbors and left Grace alone with her father. Occasionally Edith was away long enough for him to take walks in the country with his daughter. Away from the house Grace's hard, watchful reserve dropped away, and at times she smiled with a quietness and charm that Stoner had almost forgotten. She had grown rapidly in the last year and was very thin.
Only by an effort of the will could he remind himself that he was deceiving Edith. The two parts of his life were as separate as the two parts of a life can be; and though he knew that his powers of introspection were weak and that he was capable of self-deception, he could not make himself believe that he was doing harm to anyone for whom he felt responsibility.
He had no talent for dissimulation, nor did it occur to him to dissemble his affair with Katherine Driscoll; neither did it occur to him to display it for anyone to see. It did not seem possible to him that anyone on the outside might be aware of their affair, or even be interested in it.
It was, therefore, a deep yet impersonal shock when he discovered, at the end of the summer, that Edith knew something of the affair and that she had known of it almost from the beginning.
She spoke of it casually one morning while he lingered over his breakfast coffee, chatting with Grace. Edith spoke a little sharply, told Grace to stop dawdling over her breakfast, that she had an hour of piano practice before she could waste any time. William watched the thin, erect figure of his daughter walk out of the dining room and waited absently until he heard the first resonant tones coming from the old piano.
"Well," Edith said with some of the sharpness still in her voice, "you're a little late this morning, aren't you?"
William turned to her questioningly; the absent expression remained on his face.
Edith said, "Won't your little co-ed be angry if you keep her waiting?"
He felt a numbness come to his lips. "What?" he asked. "What's that?"
"Oh, Willy," Edith said and laughed indulgently. "Did you think I didn't know about your—little flirtation? Why, I've known it all along. What's her name? I heard it, but I've forgotten what it is."
In its shock and confusion his mind grasped but one word; and when he spoke his voice sounded to him petulantly annoyed. "You don't understand," he said. "There's no—flirtation, as you call it. It's—"
"Oh, Willy," she said and laughed again. "You look so flustered. Oh, I know all about these things. A man your age and all. It's natural, I suppose. At least they say it is."
For a moment he was silent. Then reluctantly he said, "Edith, if you want to talk about this—"
"No!" she said; there was an edge of fear in her voice. "There's nothing to talk about. Nothing at all."
And they did not then or thereafter talk about it. Most of the time Edith maintained the convention that it was his work that kept him away from home; but occasionally, and almost absently, she spoke the knowledge that was always somewhere within her. Sometimes she spoke playfully, with something like a teasing affection; sometimes she spoke with no feeling at all, as if it were the most casual topic of conversation she could imagine; sometimes she spoke petulantly, as if some triviality had annoyed her.
She said, "Oh, I know. Once a man gets in his forties. But really, Willy, you're old enough to be her father, aren't you?"
It had not occurred to him how he must appear to an outsider, to the world. For a moment he saw himself as he must thus appear; and what Edith said was part of what he saw. He had a glimpse of a figure that flitted through smoking-room anecdotes, and through the pages of cheap fiction—a pitiable fellow going into his middle age, misunderstood by his wife, seeking to renew his youth, taking up with a girl years younger than himself, awkwardly and apishly reaching for the youth he could not have, a fatuous, garishly got-up clown at whom the world laughed out of discomfort, pity, and contempt. He looked at this figure as closely as he could; but the longer he looked, the less familiar it became. It was not himself that he saw, and he knew suddenly that it was no one.