“Well, I know how you dance,” she said.
“If my partner happens to like to dance that way,” he said.
“It’s easy to blame the woman,” she said. “Well, I have some letters to write.”
“Who to?”
“What?”
“These letters you have to write. Whom are they to? You always use that excuse, letters to write, but you don’t mail two letters a week.”
“How do you know I don’t smuggle them out and post them in town?”
“Well, you could, of course. But do you?”
“I’m going to let you worry about that. It’ll give you something to occupy your busy mind.”
He smiled faintly. “Mark my words, I shall do that very thing. All right, go write your mythical letters. I’m driving in to town. Is there anything you want?”
“From town? No. Unless you’d care to stop in at Mrs. Mohler’s and ask her if my embroidery hoops have arrived.”
“Embroidery hoops?”
“I’ve taken it up,” she said.
“Have you really? Mrs. Mohler teaching you?”
“She said she would.”
“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. You do as you please, but I don’t care to set foot in Mrs. Mohler’s shop. She’s a gossip, a busybody. She had a lot to say about Agnes and me when Agnes was sick.”
“Yes, I suppose she did,” said Geraldine.
“Oh, you knew that?”
“I surmised it.”
“Surmised it from what?”
“Does it matter? She promised to teach me embroidery, and I’m told she’s the best in town. I don’t encourage her gossip but I must have something to do.”
“How many times have I heard that?” said George.
“You’ll go on hearing it till I find something,” she said.
He had got his hat and topcoat out of a closet. Now he sat down and folded the coat over his lap and dangled the hat in his thumb and forefinger. “Before you go upstairs to write those pressing letters, could you spare a minute?”
She replied by taking a chair.
“When you were married to Buckmaster, you did a lot of entertaining. You did a certain amount of traveling, and visiting your friends, having them visit you. But since you’ve been married to me you haven’t made any effort to do more than the absolute minimum of entertaining. Granted there’s nobody much in Swedish Haven, but there’s plenty of activity in Gibbsville, as much as anyone could want. You dismiss the Gibbsville people as small-town hicks, and you pick out the ones that are hicks to bolster your argument. But you know full well that the town has more than its share of men and women that went to the best schools and have as good social connections as the people you and Buckmaster used to see. Gibbsville has its Rotarians, but it also has its Ivy Club people and whatever else you want to name. It isn’t Long Island, it isn’t the Philadelphia Main Line, but I don’t seem to recall that you and Buckmaster cut a very fancy figure in those circles. Hardly anybody in Gibbsville goes to Palm Beach, but they do go to Orlando, and in the summer to Fisher’s Island and Mount Desert, by preference. In London they stay at Brown’s Hotel, by preference and by habit. So your argument that they’re small-town hicks doesn’t stand up. It’s just that you aren’t willing to make the effort.”
“You never did, with Agnes,” she said.
“Not very much, but Agnes had never been socially inclined, and you had. Also, Agnes was a full-fledged member of the coal region hierarchy, and you came here a stranger. You had to make some effort, and you refused to. You won’t play golf, you won’t even play bridge, and when you’ve been invited to play golf or bridge you’ve acted as though you’d been asked to join the ladies auxiliary of one of the fire companies. Those people are better than that, and they’re not your inferiors, Geraldine. Some of them have more money than I have or Buckmaster had, and most of them come from families that go back two or three hundred years. Old Pennsylvania towns named for their ancestors. Old New England towns, too, because not all of them are old Pennsylvania. A hundred years ago or more a lot of them came down from Connecticut and Massachusetts. You don’t know anything about the local history, because you don’t care to.”
“I’m not interested in any history,” she said.
“Well, then, tell me what you are interested in? If you showed any interest in anything, I’d encourage it. You bought two expensive vases that caught your eye, and I was rather hopeful that at last I had some clue to the sort of thing you were interested in. But no. You pass them fifty times a day and never look at them. You’ve never mentioned them since they were put in place. In fact, a couple of months ago I changed their places. They don’t match exactly, and I wanted to see if you’d become aware of that, but you hadn’t.”
“I was told they did match,” she said.
“They’re a pair, but one of the dragons faces to the right and the dragon on the other vase faces to the left.”
“Oh, I knew that for heaven’s sake,” she said.
“But you didn’t know I’d changed their position,” he said.
“Well, what if I didn’t? Good Lord, I have other things to think about.”
“What?” he said.
“I knew I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Well, you did say it, and I’ve asked you what the things are that you have to think about? And don’t tell me Mrs. Mohler’s embroidery lessons.”
“I won’t,” she said.
“All right, what?”
“I think about you,” she said.
“Tenderly, of course.”
“Not any more,” she said. She sat up straight. “I’m afraid of you.”
“Afraid of me?”
“Not physically. But I’ve become afraid of what you’re doing to me. Mentally I’m not your equal, and I’ve always known that. I knew I had a better mind than Howard’s—”
“You had a mind, therefore it had to be better than whatever he has that passes for a mind.”
“But one of the things that attracted me to you was your mind. From the very beginning you were able to exert some kind of a mental control over me. The other men I’ve known were attracted to me. Not for my mind, of course. Anything but. But when I met you, conditions were reversed. The physical attraction was there, but secondary. No man had ever twisted around everything I said, even the simplest things. First it was a sort of teasing me, making little jokes about things I said. But then you began to change my whole mental outlook.”
“Allow me to correct you. You had no mental outlook. I may have encouraged you to create one.”
“Well, why did you?” she said.
“Because I was attracted to you physically.”
“Oh, I knew that, but why did you have to—”
“I didn’t have to. I wanted to,” he said. “I was determined to marry you, not just to have an affair with you. At my age a man ought to know what he wants in a woman. Casual affairs at my age can be had with young girls, and should be. But if you find a woman that’s physically attractive, a mature woman, you ought to have the good sense to get more out of her than two or three nights in bed with her. You can know all about a young girl in two or three nights, if only because she is a young girl and has so little else to offer. But a reasonably mature woman, who’s been going to bed with a man or men for twenty years, more or less, she’s gone beyond the kindergarten stage and the nervous self-consciousness of the young.”
“Tell me about Agnes,” said Geraldine.
“No, I won’t tell you about Agnes,” he said. “All right, I will tell you about Agnes, enough for the purpose of this discussion. She had a first-rate mind, but she thought fucking was a sin. She was a hot little piece, but it was all for herself. She believed that the less pleasure you gave the man, the less sinful she was.”