Sitting on a ladder, painting Tony’s ceiling one summer Sunday, ten years into her marriage, a hundred years ago, when I was a young girl courting the boys, oh, a different person anyway, still sweet and soft about the edges. Hot day: sweat and paint dripping down her face, she rolled the nylon sponge over the stuccoed surface. Anthony suddenly appeared in the doorway: must be half time, or whatever they call it. When the commercials appear. He stood there for a minute, then said: “You’re doing it all wrong!” His voice grew to outrage. “Jesus, you’re leaving streaks!”
She turned to him coldly. “If you don’t like the way I’m doing it, why don’t
you
do it? I’d be glad of a break.”
“Idiot! Look at that patch!”
“It’s fine, Anthony, what are you talking about? It’s perfectly all right.”
He entered the room then, and walked around it, pointing wildly. “Look at that! And that!”
She sat back on the ladder and pushed her hair out of her eyes. Her fingers were wet and she could feel that she’d gotten paint on her forehead.
He kept screaming. “You’re making a frigging mess!”
“Anthony,” she said calmly, trying to calm him down, “there’s nothing wrong with it. The paint will dry fine. Look at that wall, there’s not a streak on it. I’ve done two rooms and I know how this paint works. It will dry fine. Look at Sydney’s room.”
But he kept circling, pointing, screaming. She watched him, incredulous. He saw streaks everywhere, when there were none at all.
“Anthony!” she yelled, finally. “Either shut up or finish the job yourself!”
He whirled around and shouted: “Bitch! Stupid bitch!” And stormed out of the room.
She sat on the ladder and cried, hating herself for crying, unable to do anything else. Why couldn’t she be harder? Things pressed around her heart. Self-pity: here she was working so hard while he watched a stupid football game and he dares to criticize? Hot and tired and sweating, didn’t she deserve appreciation? Oh, injustice, injustice!
But worse, and more frightening: what was wrong with him? Sweet Anthony, acting like this? Did he hate her? Why did he hate her? He’d been acting like this regularly, ever since his father died and his mother moved in with them. Was it his mother he hated? What could make him see streaks where there were none?
Something was terribly wrong. She cried for a long time, maybe just because she was hot and sweaty and daubed with paint. Maybe because she knew more than she could let herself know.
By nightfall, when she’d finished the ceiling and cleaned up the paintbrushes and the drop cloth and put the paint away, and made dinner and bathed the children and gotten them to bed—putting Tony in a sleeping bag on the floor of the girls’ room—which upset Anthony: “Are you going to make him sleep with
girls?
What else are you going to do to make a pansy out of him?” but which she overruled: “It is bad to sleep breathing in the fumes of fresh paint”—by then, he’d forgotten. He never praised the job she’d done, but he never brought up streaks again either. One had to be grateful for small favors.
But indeed, there were no streaks. It was over, another little tempest. Anthony’s rages came suddenly and left suddenly, and she was so grateful when they left that she did not sufficiently think about them. She did not want to think about them. Easier to tell herself,
that’s over
, and pretend it would never happen again. Because if she had thought about them, she would have had to recognize that something was corroding him. It was inexplicable. She tried hard to be sweet to him even when she didn’t feel sweet, to keep him calm. So another one was over and forgotten.
Except by her body. Forever after that, whenever he approached her, her body flinched a little. It was unconscious and probably barely perceptible, the way plants, they say, flinch at the approach of someone who has hurt them. She did not want him to touch her. As often as she could, she put him off sexually, and on the rare occasions when she pitied him or felt she owed him something, she submitted to his fuck the way she submitted in a dentist’s chair: just get it over with fast.
Did he sense that, do you suppose? With the part of him that never came up for air, never made it even into his conscious mind? Did that, perhaps, make him worse? If so, he never complained. He even seemed more solicitous of her sexually.
She sat there remembering, shuddering. Was it her body that was going to make the final decision about Victor? Couldn’t her mind have a little piece in the decision?
Because her mind had decided, firmly.
W
HEN THE BELL RANG
, her heart jumped a little, although she’d been expecting it. She ran downstairs to let him in. He looked pale in the dim hall light, and rumpled and tired, and he was smiling at her and she threw her arms around him and held him and he held her, and his body was heavy, he was leaning on her a little. She let him go and took his hand and led him upstairs and into the sitting room, and helped him with his coat and sat on the edge of the couch facing him as he lay there, and she stroked his face.
“Oh, you look so tired!” she lamented.
He reached up and pulled her down and kissed her and she lay against him. He stroked her back, and said, “oh, oh,” softly, in his throat. She sat up again and kissed him lightly, kissed his cheeks and his forehead and his eyes and the hollows of his throat. He put his hands on her face and caressed it, gazing at her.
He revived, gradually, and pulled himself up against the couch arm. “I had meetings. All day. From nine in the morning until now. And all I thought about was you.”
Despite herself, she gleamed. “What a lie!” she said. “You couldn’t do your job if all you thought about was me.”
“Did you do yours?” he asked, caressing her face still.
“Umm. Badly.”
“Well, me too.”
She smiled.
“How about a drink?”
“Oh. I don’t know. I’ll see.” She jumped up and fished around in the kitchen cupboard. She came up with a little gin, probably there from the time she had the Carriers for dinner. She looked at it: nearly empty. What can you do with gin and nothing else?
Victor was standing in the kitchen doorway.
She looked at him mournfully. (Oh, how she wanted to please him!) “I’ve some gin. But no mixer.” (But wouldn’t I want to please any guest, man or woman? Want to please a friend as much as I want to please him? Yes.)
Victor held out a brown paper bag with a bottle in it. “Brought some, just in case.”
“Do you carry little brown bags full of booze everywhere you go?”
“Yup,” he said, and came in and got out the ice and reached for glasses, but there was only one. “Got another glass?”
And then she remembered. Yes: two glasses, a cup, and a plate. Broken. She fished around in the dishwater in the sink, where her day’s dishes soaked, found a glass, rinsed it.
He poured drinks. She said nothing. She was biting the inside of her lip. He put his arm around her and they walked back to the sitting room. He lay back on the couch and drew her beside him. Her body went, it sat beside him, it leaned towards him, it yearned.
His eyes were milky with love. “I’m glad you let me come over. So glad.”
She smiled unsteadily.
“I know you’re tired.”
“No, not really.”
“You sounded tired. On the phone.”
“Actually,” she looked down at her drink, “I was angry with you.” Never was anger conveyed in a milder voice.
His head came up sharply. “Why?”
“Well … it was the way you left here last night. It hurt me.”
“Lorie,” he took her hand, “I really had to leave. I had early appointments, I was tired—I’d stayed up late the night before I came, looking over the papers I was bringing. And I had to see if there were messages.”
“You could have gone to the hotel, checked in, checked for messages, and come back here.”
“Yes, I thought of that. But if I’d come back … we’d have been up all night.”
Her face softened, but she forced herself onward: “But that’s not what I’m complaining about, anyway. Not that you left, but the way you left.”
“How in hell did I leave? I put on my coat and went out the door. How did you want me to leave?”
“You left like a businessman. The way a man leaves home in the morning, kissing his wife’s cheek and reminding her to have his grey suit cleaned. You turned me off, you turned yourself off, you canceled me. I don’t like being canceled.”
He groaned lightly, and lay there with his eyes shut.
Canceling me again?
“You’re sure I did that?” he asked, with open eyes.
“Sure.”
He closed his eyes again. And opened them again. “I’m not much good at this.”
“At what?”
“Whatever I’m doing. Introspection, I guess. I’m trying to remember how I felt last night, why I might have acted the way you say.”
Well, he tries. You have to give him that. He doesn’t just deny it, like AnthonyDougSaul….
“I was feeling very good, I know that. And warm. And cozy. And comfortable. I didn’t want to leave. I knew I had to get some sleep for today. I knew I had to … function. It’s always like that when …
“I know I have to function and I get up and get going. That’s all. It never occurred to me that anybody else—”
“Existed?”
“No!” he moaned. “That it affected anyone else, that it might hurt anyone. I still don’t understand why it did. Why you felt
canceled
.”
“It felt, well, what I was thinking was that you had compartments in your life, and I was just one of them. On which the door could be closed anytime you chose, even if I were present. It’s hard to explain. Because of course people who live together spend long stretches without talking to each other, the way I do with my kids. I’m in my study working, they’re reading in the living room or something. I mean, we’re not in constant contact. But I’m always
aware
of them, not just as bodies taking up space or needing to be fed, but as people, people I care about, people who feel and think. And I felt canceled as a person: I was a body, that couldn’t be denied, I had to be spoken to and kissed on the cheek and promised a telephone call. But nothing more. What I was feeling or thinking had been blanked out.”
He gazed soberly into space, listening. “I’m sorry,” he said finally, looking very gloomy. “I’m not conscious of doing that.” He brooded.
“Oh, it’s not that serious,” she smiled at him tenderly. “Although it felt so last night.” If he had seen her last night, would he have thought she was insane?
He tried to smile, but he was down.
Can’t take criticism?
“The thing is,” she began again, “it wouldn’t have been so bad, I mean, I wouldn’t have felt so bad, if you hadn’t acted, spoken, as if what we have matters in some way. Isn’t just casual. I couldn’t see why you’d act that way and then turn around and act another way.”
“But of course it matters!” He sat up sharply. “You had to know that. Didn’t you?”
“Well, you led me to think so. But then, when you were leaving, I thought not.”
“Now, wait a minute. You mean that if
I
thought it was more than casual, then
you’d
think it was more than casual? But if I didn’t, then you wouldn’t?”
She nodded.
“But what about
you?
What did you feel on your own, apart from me?”
A shadow passed in the back of her brain. She got up and walked across the room and sat in a rocker by the window. It was an ugly old chair, but you could curl up in it and rock, gently. It was comforting. She did this now, curled up in the chair, holding her drink, swishing it around in the glass. “There are times when I only want it to be casual. Most times. Back then, back when I had a sexual life. But there are times when I’d like more than sex, when I meet someone who’s interesting, someone I could care about. But I never let myself think about it, never let myself hope for more.”
He put his feet on the floor. “I don’t understand.”
No, of course you don’t understand WadeRansomDougShaneSaulMarsh …
“You mean to tell me,” he sounded indignant, “a woman like you sits around passively waiting to hear if a man is serious about her or not?”
“Well, it’s pride, you see. I pretend I don’t care. I never let anyone know I care.”
“But underneath, you’re doing what I said you were doing?”
“I guess so.”
“But why, Lorie!?”
She looked at him mutely, then down at her glass. She shook her head. “What else can I do?”
“You tell
them
.”
“Oh, Victor! You don’t know anything about this.
You
go out with
women!
”
He laughed.
“Women are different. Women always—almost always—want more than casual sex. You can count on their wanting more. I can’t count on that with men. You can’t even count on men meaning what they say. A friend of mind, Jill, had a lover named Herbert. He told her how wonderful she was, all the time. They’d been together a few weeks, maybe a couple of months, and one day, in a tender mood, Jill murmured ‘I love you’ to him. She never saw him again. He turned white, and just dropped her.”
“He was married.”
“Oh, of course. Who isn’t?”
“You aren’t.”
“Lots of
women
aren’t. But men are, all of them who aren’t gay. All of them who are over twenty-seven. Or so it seems.” She was smiling and he shook his head.
“Quite a world,” he smiled.
She gave him a little knowing look, cocking her head. “You’re pretty clever. You managed to pick up my attack on you and turn it into an attack on me.”
He laughed. “I didn’t intend that, I swear it!”
She smiled disbelievingly.
“Look, about my leaving that way,” he leaned back against the sofa, and stopped smiling, “I don’t know what to say. I’d like to say I won’t do it again, but the problem is I’m not conscious of doing it at all. I can only say I’ll never hurt you if I can help it.”
But of course you won’t be able to help it, will you. If I go on with this, I will be hurt. That’s automatic: he’s married.
And if I don’t?
She raised her head to look at him. He was gazing steadily at her. And again, as in the train, their eyes locked.