Caroline stayed three days and was (if one forgot her remarks before dinner) a tolerable guest excepting that her knowledge of tragic, human experience was inexhaustible and that she left lipstick stains on everything. She had a broad mouth and she painted it heavily and there were purple lipstick stains on the cups and glasses, the towels and napkins; the ashtrays were full of stained cigarette ends and in the toilet there was always a piece of Kleenex stained purple. This seemed to Coverly not carelessness but much more—some atavistic way of impressing herself upon this household in which she would spend so short a time. The purple stains seemed to mark her as a lonely woman. When Coverly went to the site on the day she left Caroline was asleep and she had gone by the time he got home. She had left a smear of purple lipstick on his son’s forehead; there seemed to be purple lipstick everywhere he looked, as if she had marked her departure this way. Betsey was watching television and eating from a box of candy that Caroline had given her as a present. She did not look up when he came in and brushed away the place on her cheek where he kissed her. “Leave me be,” she said, “leave me be. . . .”
After Caroline’s departure Betsey’s discontents only seemed to increase. Then there was a night that, according to Coverly’s habit of eliminating facts, especially did not happen. He was kept late at the site and didn’t get home until half-past seven. Betsey sat in the kitchen, weeping. “What’s the matter, sugarluve,” he asked, or didn’t ask.
“Well, I made myself a nice cup of tea,” Betsey sobbed, “and a piece of hot Danish and I was just sitting down to enjoy myself when the telephone rang and there was this woman selling magazine subscriptions and she talked and by the time she was done talking my tea and my Danish were all cold.”
“That’s all right, sugar,” Coverly said. “You can heat it up again.”
“It isn’t all right,” Betsey said. “It just isn’t all right. Nothing’s all right. I hate Talifer. I hate it here. I hate you. I hate wet toilet seats. The only reason I live here is because there’s no place else in the world for me to go. I’m too lazy to get a job and I’m too plain to find another man.”
“Would you like to take a trip, sugar, would you like a change?”
“I been all over this country, it’s the same everywheres.”
“Oh, come back, sugar, come back,” he said, speaking in great love and tiredness. “I feel as if I were walking up a street calling after you, asking you to come back and you never turn your head. I know what the street looks like, I’ve seen it so often. It’s nighttime. There’s a place on the corner where you can buy cigarettes and papers. Stationery. I can see you walking up this street and I’m behind you, calling you to come back, to come back, but you never turn your head.” Betsey went on sobbing, and thinking that his words had moved her Coverly put an arm around her shoulders but she wrenched herself convulsively out of his embrace and screamed: “Leave me be.” The scream, like the piercing and hideous noise of brakes, seemed to be apart from the fitness of things.
“But, sugar.”
“You beat me,” she screamed. “You took off your belt and you beat me and you beat me and you beat me.”
“I never beat you, sugar. I never hit anybody but Mr. Murphy the night he stole our garbage pail.”
“You beat me and beat me and beat me,” she screamed.
“When was this, sugar, when did I do this?”
“Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I can’t remember every time.” She fled to her room and shut the door. He was stunned (or would have been stunned if any of this had happened) and it was a minute or two before he realized (or would have realized) that Binxey was crying in terror. He seized the little boy as an object of reason, love, animal warmth. He crushed him in his arms and took him into the kitchen. This was no time, it seemed, for reflection or decision. He cooked some hamburgers and after supper told the boy an asinine story of space travel as he did each night. These stories were no worse than the stories of talking rabbits he had been told as a boy but the talking rabbits had the charm of innocence. He turned off the light, kissed the boy good night and stopped at the bedroom door to ask Betsey if she wanted some dinner. “Let me alone,” she said. He drank a beer, read an old copy of Life, went to the window and looked at the lights on the street.
Here was (or would have been had he admitted the facts) the forlornness, the pain of an unexampled dilemma. The thief and the murderer all have their brotherhood and their prophets but he had none. Psychiatry, psychiatry, the word came to his mind as we put one foot in front of the other, but if he went to a doctor he would jeopardize his security clearance and his job. Any association with mental instability made a man unemployable in Talifer. The only way he could cling to his conviction that the devastating blows of life fell in some usable sequence was to claim that these especial blows had not fallen; and so making this claim he made a bed on the sofa and went to sleep.
This curious process of claiming that what had happened had not happened and what was happening was not happening went on in the morning when Coverly went to get a shirt and found that Betsey had cut the buttons off all of his shirts. This was inadmissible. He fastened a shirt with his tie, tucked it into his trousers and went to work but in the middle of the morning he went to the men’s room and wrote Betsey a note:
“Darling Betsey,” he wrote, “I am going away. I am desperate and I am not interested in desperation, especially quiet desperation. I have no address but I don’t suppose that makes much difference because in all the years we’ve been together you’ve never sent me a postcard and I don’t suppose you’re going to start writing me piles of letters now. I have thought of taking Binxey with me but of course this would be against the law. I love him more than I have ever loved anyone in the world and please be kind to him. You might want to know why I am going away and why I am desperate although I somehow cannot imagine you asking yourself any questions about my disappearance. I don’t know any of your family excepting Caroline and I sometimes wish I knew them better because I sometimes think you’ve got me mixed up with someone who caused you pain long ago. I know that I have a very difficult personality my family always said that Coverly was very odd and perhaps I am much more to be blamed than I will ever know. I do not like to cherish resentments, I do not like to be bitter or resentful and yet I often am. In the mornings of our life together when the alarm wakes me the first thing I want to do is to take you in my arms but if I do I know you will fling yourself away from me and so that is the way the days begin and usually the way they end. I won’t bother about saying anything else. As I said in the beginning I am not interested in desperation, particularly quiet desperation and so I am going away.”
Coverly mailed the letter, bought some shirts, cleared some annual leave and left for Denver that night, where he checked into a fourth-string hotel. There were cigarette butts on the bathroom floor and a pier glass arranged at the foot of the bed for questionable reasons. He had some drinks and went to a movie. When he came in at about midnight the elevator man asked if he wanted a girl, a boy, some dirty pictures or filthy comics. He said no thanks and went to bed. He went to a museum in the morning, to another movie and was having a drink at dusk in a bar when he felt his spirit genuflect, bend, stoop and kneel before what appeared to be the image of those worn Indian moccasins, ornamented with beads, that Betsey wore around the house. He had another drink and went to another movie. When he came in the elevator operator asked again if he wanted, a girl, a boy, a dirty massage, filthy pictures or obscene comics. He wanted Betsey.