“I never thought of it that way, but of course it’s all true.”
“Oh, yes,” said George Lockwood.
“You’re very deep, George.”
“Well, if I am, I get it from my father. And my grandfather, too, for that matter, although Grandfather wasn’t at all like my father. My father didn’t often show his true nature to outsiders, but underneath he was very deep. Very deep. True, he had the advantages of a good education and he was never poor. He was more polished, and knew how to get along with people. And yet he’d never let anyone take advantage of him, or become forward with him. He could be very cutting when someone overstepped the bounds. He was a remarkable man. The glass of fashion, even though some people thought it was wasted on Swedish Haven. But he didn’t do it for Swedish Haven. To be well groomed, well turned out, fine linen and all that—he did that for himself, his own satisfaction. And always keeping something back. A good appearance, letting people believe that what they saw was all there really was. But always keeping something back, and what he kept back was the real him. So that finally he died without any of us ever knowing him.”
“You could be talking about yourself,” she said. “You have no idea how often, when you talk about your father, you might as well be talking about yourself.”
“Nonsense,” he said.
“In fact, sometimes I think of you as—let me begin over again. Sometimes when I think of you and your father, I see you as a later edition of him. Like a book that the author wasn’t satisfied with the first time, and years later made a lot of changes, but kept the same book essentially.”
“What author? Did I change my father, or did my father change me as I got older? You’re talking nonsense,” he said.
“No, I’m not. The trouble with comparisons is we carry them too far. The thing we compare things to doesn’t have to be exactly the same as the original thing.”
“If anybody heard you, they’d think you’d been drinking,” he said.
“Be fair. You don’t like it when I see similarities between you and your father, so you deliberately confuse me. All the same, you are both alike. And the big difference is that you had him to model yourself after, and make improvements. Or anyway changes. I don’t necessarily believe they were improvements. Although you do. You are your father all over again, one generation later.”
“And I suppose he was his father, one generation later,” he said.
“Not a bit, not from everything I know,” she said. “Your grandfather had to struggle. He had to live day-to-day. He didn’t have much time to do anything else. But he made it possible for your father to have leisure to plan a life, a position in the community for himself and his family. And you’ve continued what he started. It’s nothing new. I’ve seen it happen in the coal regions. In the coal regions there are families that are now in the third generation of money, just like yours, here in Swedish Haven. And look at Philadelphia and New England. It’s nothing new. But it’s new to you because you’re doing it. And it’s new to me because I’m playing a part in it.”
“Oh, really,” he said.
“I am. I know that. Why did you marry me instead of some Swedish Haven girl with more money? Because even though I di’dn’t have a rich father, I was well connected. Why didn’t you marry one of the Gibbsville girls? There are lots of rich girls there, and you could have married one of them. But a Gibbsville marriage didn’t suit your purpose either.”
“I wanted to marry you, that’s why,” he said.
“I know you did. But whoever you married, George, you were never going to marry just the girl herself. Your father didn’t, and you didn’t either.”
“Are you saying that my father didn’t love my mother, and that I didn’t love you?”
“That isn’t what I meant to say, but I guess it’s what I believe. I’m not what you want.”
“What do I want, if you know so much?”
“Oh, you want me,” she said. “I’m a lady, and a very good housekeeper, and whenever you want to impress other people with the sort of wife you have, I’m satisfactory. But it’s finally begun to dawn on me, George, that I was more useful than anything else.”
“And when did that begin to dawn on you?” he said.
“When? I suppose it must have been about the same time that I began to realize that I had deceived myself about you.”
“How?”
“Well—you were a handsome, worldly-wise man. Rather evil, I thought at first. That was because of the effect you had on me, which was to stir up emotions inside me that either I didn’t know I had or else I was keeping hidden from myself. Doing what most girls do, who had the same kind of upbringing. And so I thought of you as a rather evil young man, but evil can be attractive, because there’s something warm about evil people. Warm and human. And the very nicest girls think they can turn the evil into good without sacrificing the warm and human qualities. Don’t forget, my father wanted to be a missionary.”
“So he said.”
“He believed it, and so did I, about myself. But after we’d been married I began to realize that you were not evil. You were cold and calculating, but not evil. And heaven knows, I’ve never been right for you in certain matters. I know you’d rather not discuss that, and I don’t care to either. But I expected you to make me love you the way you wanted to be loved. You knew everything and I knew nothing. You had a lot of experience and I’d had none. But you lost patience with me, and that was really how I discovered that you didn’t love me. If you had loved me, we would have—”
“We sleep together, and we have intercourse.”
“Yes, we have intercourse, but I’m not right for you. I’m there, and that’s all. It’s not me you want, only the place where you put yourself inside of me.”
“You get pleasure,” he said.
“Now I do. Because I learned how to. But you didn’t show me. It has nothing at all to do with loving each other. And if we can’t have love then, no wonder it’s missing everywhere else.”
“Often you’re the one that wants it.”
“Yes, nearly always. Seldom it’s you. And what do you think that tells me?”
“I don’t know. What does it tell you?” he said.
“Things that are too humiliating to put into words. I never thought it would be this way. I never thought I would be this way. I’ve found out how women can cheapen themselves and call it love. I never used to think it could be done without love, and finding out that it can ruined my self-respect.”
“I hadn’t noticed that,” he said. “You have a large supply of self-respect, it seems to me.”
“What anything seems to you, George, is only that and no thing more.”
“ ‘Quoth the raven,’ “ he said.
“ ‘Quoth the raven,’ “ she said.
The revelations in their conversation had the curious effect of making her seem, briefly, wantonly possessed, and he attacked her with a renewed vigor. But he as well as she was unaware of the rise and fall, irregularity and unpredictability of her sexual needs, and a night of unprecedented pleasure, as though between two erotically-minded strangers, was followed in the same week by a fiasco of dry pain for her and angry forced climax for him. They had talked too much without having created the tenderness that was essential to candor.