“You’re home,” he said.
“Yeah. Where else would I be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You might be cooking up apple pancakes for somebody or other.”
“I bought some pure maple syrup this afternoon. It’s expensive but I figured let’s live a little.”
He reached for her suddenly, one hand on her bottom, the other between her legs. He kissed her for a long time. When he released her she was dizzy and had trouble staying on her feet.
“Just what I say,” he said. “Let’s live a little.”
“Jesus.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Just you came on me by surprise.”
“I didn’t, but it sounds like fun.”
“Huh?”
“Coming on you. Feel this, will you? I been like this all day long.”
“You should of come home for dinner.”
“I never would of gone back.”
“I never would of let you. Let’s go upstairs.”
“What, and climb all those stairs? There’s a perfectly good couch in the living room.”
The next two days held to the pattern. Breakfast together, elaborately prepared and enthusiastically received, with an almost unreal warmth between them. Lovemaking at night, his potency on honeymoon level, her own satisfaction greater than anything she had ever known. And, for prelude and aftermath, more conversation than had been their custom.
And yet it was not conversation at all. It was talk, but it was not about anything.
On Thursday night she met him at the door. There was something in his eyes. She saw it immediately. He embraced her and put his hands on her but she sensed the difference in his response and in her own.
“There’s fresh coffee.”
“Good.”
She brought two cups. She thought of putting applejack in his but didn’t. He took a cup of coffee and put the cup down. “He was in tonight,” he said.
She knew who he meant but asked anyway.
“Markarian. Came over around ten thirty with a girl, took a table on the water side. Had two rounds, left a little after eleven.”
“Was that the first time since—”
“No. He was in Monday. Came in alone and had four or five quick ones at the bar. Talked with some of the regulars. Talked with me, I talked with him. Didn’t show a thing. Couple of times I’d look his way sudden to see if he’s giving me a look. But not once. Not one time. All the shitty actors in this town, I’ll tell you, he could give them lessons.”
“I told you how cool he was.”
“He was cool and I was cool. He didn’t let a thing show. And neither did I. He’s got no idea, I know. Last night, no, the night before. Yeah, Tuesday. He’s in there with his daughter. Karen?”
“That’s right.”
“Introduced me to her. Here she’s sitting with her Daddy and I’m seeing her in my mind with a black cock in her mouth. Not the point. Point is, she showed it.”
“Showed what?”
“Showed she knew it was my wife with her father the other night. I mean I sensed this from her that I hadn’t from him. Before that I had it in my mind that maybe you were making it up. Not really. I mean I knew it but I didn’t know it. You get me?”
“I think so.”
He started to say something, then lapsed into silence. She felt an undercurrent of nervous excitement moving inside her. It was not all she felt, there were other feelings, but it was there.
He said, “He’s cool and I’m cool and even the kid was cool. I never would have known anything from her if I didn’t know it in the first place. Everybody’s cool and I got something inside me that I don’t know what it is.”
“How do you feel about him?”
“Him? I don’t know. What’s there to feel? Do I want to kill him? No. Do I want to take a punch at him? No. Do I want him to walk in front of a train? No. I look at him, and I see him with you, the whole scene goes through my mind, and I don’t know what I feel.”
“Does it excite you?”
“I don’t know. Does it give me a hard-on? No. There’s excitement and there’s excitement. It does something. I don’t know what It does. The point isn’t how I feel about Markarian. Fuck Markarian. I mean he’s nothing. Unless — would you see him again?”
“No.”
“So he’s one night. One particular night he happens to be a cock with a man on the end of it. The point is not how I feel about him.”
“The point’s how you feel about me.”
“I guess. No.”
“Then what?”
“It’s how I feel about me, Melanie.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not myself.”
She put her hand on his arm.
“You hear that expression all the time but I never really knew what it meant before. I’m not myself. I look the same, I act the same on the surface, but I’m walking around wearing somebody else’s head. For years I was one particular person, and now I’m not the same man anymore. I don’t know who the hell I am.”
“Are you happier or sadder or—”
“It isn’t like that. It’s something different. It’s — Melanie?”
She looked at him. She had never seen his face so open.
“Melanie, I’m afraid.”
“Tell me.”
“I’m afraid and I don’t know what of.”
“Are you worried about your mind?”
“You mean worried I’m going crazy? I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy already. I don’t know how to say any of this because I can’t get it right in my own head to begin with. I’m afraid of not being myself. That I’m turning into a person I got no respect for. What kind of man is it that can only be a man by hearing his wife tell him what she did with somebody else? And then I’ll think that one day I’ll wake up and everything’ll be the way it used to be, I’ll be the way I was, and all of this is just something I’m going through. A stage. And when I think that I’m afraid, that makes me afraid too. Melanie, I don’t know what I want.”
“Whatever it is, you want it, but you don’t”
“Yeah.” She brought him more coffee. When she was seated beside him again he began talking about something that had happened in one of his earlier marriages. She followed the story trying to catch the point he was making, but couldn’t. When he finished he began discussing aspects of their current situation, puzzling it out, and then switched into a reminiscence of something that had happened thirty years earlier. Then she realized that the first story had had no point, that he was not telling her stories with points. He was working back and forth through his life and trying to tell her who he was.
He talked and she listened. She brought him more coffee until he said it was giving him the jitters, and then he switched to applejack. She brought the jug and a glass. He drank, but not heavily, taking small sips as punctuation as he moved from one recollection to another.
Around daybreak he paused, and he was silent for a long while before she realized he had finished. But the conversation was not finished. He was waiting for her to give it another direction.
She said, “Sully? I don’t have to do it anymore.”
“You could just stop.”
“Yeah.”
“You had a need, Melanie. The first time wasn’t to turn me on. It was for you.”
“So?”
“So why should you stop scratching if the itch don’t go away?”
“Maybe it went away.”
“Even if you think so—”
“How could I know for sure?”
“There’s no way.”
“I know I could stop if you want me to.”
“The question’s what you want to do.”