He pulled up the covers and got under them, lying on his back.
“You’re so good to me,” she said.
“Baby.”
“Can I be good to you?”
“Not tonight.”
“Nothing I could do?”
There was nothing she could do because there was nothing that would work. He could not stay married for more than five years because he could never find a woman he could go on wanting for more than two or three years. It didn’t seem to matter how young she was or how beautiful, or how much she did or didn’t love him, or what she did or didn’t like to do in bed. Any other girl in the world right now and he’d be a bull, a prize stallion with the mare’s fee paid, but here he was with the most attractive woman in the world and there was nothing she could do because nothing would work.
“Let’s just get some sleep,” he said. “I’m beat.”
“Me too. Sully? Is it me?”
“You kidding?”
“I just wondered.”
“Too much work is all. I’m no kid, and I was on my feet all day.”
“Well, you made me feel awful good. Love me?”
“Love you,” he said, and kissed her and turned away.
Five
Olive McIntyre’s hair had turned silver-gray overnight when she was twenty-nine. Since then her face had had almost thirty years to grow to match the hair and hadn’t yet succeeded. Her brow was unlined, her eyes keen and vital. She was a tall woman, bigboned and stout; men never thought of her as pretty and never failed to regard her as attractive.
When Linda rang the bell of her white clapboard house, Olive led her inside to the kitchen, seated her at a round oak table, poured out two cups of fresh coffee and sat down opposite her. “You’re a damn sight better off without the son of a bitch,” she said by way of preamble. “But nobody can live on thirty a week this side of Pakistan. If you’d lived in New Hope longer you wouldn’t look so surprised. You can’t move your bowels here without the word getting around. Made any plans yet?”
“No.”
“Well, let’s put our heads together. Dumb as we are, the two of us ought to come up with something.”
Olive had never been inclined to beat around bushes. She always found it more natural to walk right over them. She was the only child of a Presbyterian minister who had in turn been the son and only heir of a Scotch-Irish immigrant who got rich in the Pennsylvania oilfields and went on to own railroads and newspapers. Olive’s father had spent little of the money while losing a great deal of it through bad investments; every few years Olive would turn up another batch of worthless securities in the attic. At first she had burned them. Now she sold them in bulk to a local shop which framed old documents and sold them as wall hangings. “Daddy always insisted those czarist bonds would be worth something, and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right after all,” she’d said more than once. “Twenty-five cents a piece for a trunkful. A fraction less than the original purchase price, but it’s the principle that’s important.”
But there was no way for the minister to lose everything, and after his death Olive put her inheritance solid issues and never thereafter had the slightest difficulty living on her income. Except for occasional vacations, she spent every night of her life under the roof of the white clapboard house where she had been bom. Her wealth and social position enabled her to live as she wanted, unchallenged by anyone. Her dour view of the human race in turn enabled her to regard wealth as convenience and social position as an absurdity.
It was widely believed that the night Olive’s hair turned gray was the same night she married Clement McIntyre. “One night with Clem and she just turned white, and one look at that gray hair on the pillow next to him and Clem felt the need of a drink. Her hair never went brown again and he never stopped drinking, and one’s as likely as the other in time to come.”
It was a good story, the sort men enjoyed telling whether they really credited it or not. There was no truth in it. Olive’s hair went gray three years before she met McIntyre and as many years after her first night in bed with a man. She received her first proposal of marriage three days after her eighteenth birthday. It was the first of a dozen, none of which she ever considered accepting. Then at thirty-two she took a walk along the Towpath and passed a man sitting at an easel and gazing at an empty canvas. He had a three-day growth of beard and his pants were spotted with paint.
She took the same route back two hours later, not having thought of him since. He was still there in the same position and the canvas was still blank.
“It’s coming along nicely,” she said pleasantly.
“It’s finished.”
“Is it for sale?”
He turned and looked at her for the first time. Some life came into his eyes. “It’s too personal a statement for me to take money for it,” he said. “But I’ll give it to you, if you like.”
“I’d love to have it.”
“It’s yours.”
He handed it to her. She moved to take it, then withdrew. “You didn’t sign it,” she said.
“I’ll sign it on the back. I don’t like signatures on the front. They distract.”
He signed the back of the blank canvas. She thanked him again and went home with the blood singing in her veins. She did not look at his signature until she was inside her house with the door closed. “Clement McIntyre,” she said aloud. “Mrs. Clement McIntyre. Olive Drew McIntyre. Olive McIntyre.” She liked the sound of it, and in less than two weeks it was her name.
He was an alcoholic painter who had drifted into town just two days before she met him. He arrived in a Model-A Ford with the back full of canvases. In two days he had shown his work to every gallery in town and had found no one willing to display him. His paintings and his car and the clothes on his back were all he owned in the world. All he wanted to do on earth was to drink and to paint, and he was better at the former than the latter. No one in New Hope could figure out how on earth he persuaded Olive Drew to marry him.
He didn’t. It was she who persuaded him, and it took her the better part of a week. At first he couldn’t believe she was serious. Then he decided she was crazy. He told her if all she wanted was a husband she could do better than him. She said if all she wanted was a husband then she had picked a funny time to decide it, because she had already turned down half the town.
“I didn’t want them and I don’t want the other half. I want you.”
“Then you’ve got to be crazy.”
“If I’m too crazy to live with you can always get back in the car and leave. I wouldn’t let the bloodhounds after you.”
“How could I marry a woman I never slept with?”
“Now you’re talking,” she said. “The bedroom’s upstairs. You want to take a fresh drink with you?”
“I want to take the whole bottle.”
In bed they were perfect together. He was utterly astonished, and candid enough to say so. She was not surprised at all, because it had gone exactly as she had expected, exactly as she had known it would be from their first exchange of words on the Towpath.
She said, “Well?”
“Well, you’ve got to be crazy to want to marry me, but I’d have to be crazier to turn you down. As far as that goes I might have to marry you. Meaning I didn’t use anything. I was going to pull out but I got carried away.”
“Thank God for that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t have children. I had an operation a couple of years ago and they had to take out some spare parts. Everything’s in working order but I can’t ever get pregnant. You ought to know that ahead of time. I never cared to have children myself, but it means a lot to some people.”