“Be gentle,” she said again, searching for him with her body, then leading him to the bed as though he were taking her. “Do you love me very much?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, suddenly exhausted.
On the bed, a white chenille spread covering it, in and out of their clothes (his argyle socks still on), they played with deadly seriousness, a child’s game. His heart wasn’t in it.
“Poor old Peter,” she said, climbing on top of him, pinching, biting, pulhng hair. “You give up?”
Didn’t he always? And he was suspicious. More than ever he was suspicious. The proof — how subtle! — was in the apparent absence of proof.
Suspicion roused him. When she rolled away for a breather he came on.
Her eyes pleaded for something. What?
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said, convalescing (the disease of private terror), her eyes the shutters of a haunted house.
He hesitated. Nothing came of nothing.
“I’m afraid of pain,” she said, which didn’t help his cause.
He retreated; then, with the courage of anxiety, returned to the attack (not to be outdone by his betrayer), kissed her breasts, her mouth, in love with her, his wife, his child-bride of twenty-one — suspicious. She did her best.
Their devils made love, their angels in private terror. Was this what it was all about? And yet there was pleasure, he worried, one inner eye watchful. And was she there at all?
He listened for her song, and heard it, and didn’t hear it — and was it even meant for him? — his own song, his one note of song rising finally to its occasion, running its gamut amid cheers, plummeting, dying its life as if no one cared. (And she cared, she said.)
Their love words were sung in silence, a more tenuous music. A more exacting silence.
As he was falling asleep she asked, her mouth to his ear, “Will you still love me when I’m not a child any more?” He thought to answer, thought he had, and dreamed it instead: Yes. And what was the question?
Sleepless in his dreams, he awoke in the dark, heavy and dull with sweat; her head, a stranger, weighted on his shoulder.
When he freed his arm she mumbled something unintelligible from the dark pools of her sleep, and shivering, wrapped the blankets around her, curling up into them, an intimacy of need which excluded him.
Lonely, he prowled the dreamlike room, a maze of shadows, feeling about on chairs and tables for his watch. It was always good to know the time, especially at night when you couldn’t sleep. After a while he found the watch on an end table, curled up against the belly of Lois’s purse. As nearly as he could make out, it was either five after three or one-fifteen, though he had no confidence that he was even looking at the right side of the watch. And then he lost interest in the time. There were other things. Lois’s black purse, for instance.
The more he looked at it, tight-mouthed as it was, the more secrets it seemed to contain. And Lois, who had no right to secrets, was asleep.
He carried the purse to the bathroom, holding it in his arms as though it were breakable, and alone in his sanctuary, bolted the door. He waited a while before he switched on the light, a painful brilliance, the tile shining at him like monstrous teeth.
When he snapped it open, it yawned at him. A good spy, though inexperienced, newly obsessive, he looked around him, listened carefully for counterspies. The bed creaked. An all-night radio blared across the street. Fastidious, thick-fingered, Peter washed his hands, the purse resting open on the closed seat, awaiting surgery.
What does a woman keep in her pocketbook? If she was Lois, she kept everything she couldn’t bear to throw away — souvenirs from old cracker jacks boxes, a broken sea shell, two empty lipsticks, a ball of silver, the cellophane from an old cigarette pack — everything. And a poem which he had to unfold to read. Only four lines long, it was neatly printed on a half-sheet of loose-leaf paper, which had been folded over several times into a small square packet. This was more like it; the secret agent in him exulted, though he couldn’t get over the feeling that he was dreaming it all, or someone else was. He read:
All us birds
Have too many feathers
To fly
So we fly …
Underneath, she had written: Remind Peter to buy coffee. He put everything back (in its place, he hoped) and closed the purse. Then on impulse, remembering something he had forgotten — the wallet at the bottom of things — he opened it again. It was there, in her red wallet, that he found, surprised at finding it, what he had been searching for.
And what did he find? Like most explorers, he wasn’t sure (an undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns). He held it up to the light, a photo of Lois and some boy Peter had never seen before, a handsome couple in bathing suits, familiar with each other, her arm about his waist, his on her shoulder, the ocean in the background. Lovers? How could there be any doubt? It was an old picture — from last summer perhaps — but the fact that she still kept it in her wallet was evidence, more evidence than he wanted, of betrayal. He glowered at the boy, younger and handsomer than himself, his wife’s lover. Then. And now? The photo was its own testimony. That he had been wronged was as clear as his own reflection, which stared blearily, raw-eyed at him from the medicine-cabinet mirror — a mild, ugly face incapable of outrage. Who could blame Lois for preferring the boy in the picture? Peter could. And he did. Who else could he blame?
He was putting the picture back into its laminated case, in a sleepwalker’s calm, when someone knocked on the door, startling him.
“What are you doing in there, Peter?” Lois said.
What was he doing? He pulled the chain, stuffed the wallet into the purse, snapped the purse closed, and worried that she knew what he was doing. “I’ll be right out,” he called, pulling the chain again absent-mindedly.
“Are you sick or something?” she said. “Peter?”
“What?”
“You’ve been in there for hours, honey. Are you all right?”
“I’ll be out in a few minutes,” he said, trying to think of some reasonable explanation for his behavior, which had none. He had no idea what to do with Lois’s pocketbook, which loomed menacingly on the toilet seat as though there were a bomb inside.
When he listened closely he could almost hear the bag ticking, or was it the kitchen clock he heard? Some other bomb? If the roar in his head was any indication, something was going to explode. He had been in worse predicaments — especially in the Army — but he had never, or so it always seemed at the present, been so thoroughly in the wrong. An absurd predicament for a grown man, still growing.
He washed his hands again, the same bleak face glaring at him owlishly in the mirror.
In a few minutes he evacuated the bathroom, carrying the handbag behind his back. A shadow, Lois was standing there, waiting for him.
“Peter, what’s the matter? What are you holding behind your back?”
With a sigh, he gave up the purse.
She took it from him with barely a sound — a sharp, sudden groan of breath — and went in a great hurry to her dresser, putting the bag away noisily in the bottom drawer.
On her way back to the bathroom she muttered in a strange voice, not looking at him, “You just can’t be trusted, can you?” And then she was in the bathroom, the door locked against him.
He hovered outside the door a few minutes, his head crowded with explanations, but when she gave no sign of coming out, he straggled hopelessly to the bed, bumping his knee against some provident chair in the dark.