I can’t speak but write on a pad: “She lies. I didn’t.”
“You might’ve that evening, as your wife said she distinctly saw you solicit a woman on the street and take her into your hotel and that’s what got her so mad to knock on your room door.”
I write: “Lies, lies, lies.”
“The court will tend to believe her. If not for the prostitute, who you could’ve gotten rid of before your wife got upstairs, then that she broke your jaw in self-defense. She’s witnesses to that.”
I write: “Hit her with chair for frightened death of her that’s why. She phoned hour before, said she’d kill me when she got to hotel.”
“You’ll never be believed. It’s not my job to suggest this, but drop the charges.”
I don’t. Case is thrown out of court. I later file for divorce, charging physical cruelty. My wife fights the divorce and wins. At the courtroom she’s so soft-spoken and sweet. Tells the judge I drink and beat her up every few months, etcetera. “But I still love him, don’t ask me why after all he’s put me through, and want him back.”
I get a legal separation and file for divorce the long way and even then it might not be granted if she doesn’t stop challenging it. “If you do get it despite her fighting it,” my lawyer says, “you’ll have to give her everything you own and more alimony a year than you now earn and which you’ll have to continue giving even if she remarries.”
I get my own apartment and go back to work. Melanie calls three to four times a week. She pleads with me to come back. I always hang up. Sometimes she follows me on the street, waits outside my office building and apartment house for me. I always get in a cab or duck into a subway and escape. She writes me ardent letters saying how she misses me, cries every night for me, wants me to make love to her, wants me to give her a child, letters like that. I rip them all up and eventually don’t even open them.
I try and think of a way to get her to take one last unprovoked swing at me in front of witnesses. Then I could charge her with assault and maybe win this time and also get a quick divorce because of her physical cruelty and a legal writ preventing her from seeing and speaking to me again. But why bother, because the judge would probably say her hitting me again was caused by all the past times I’d provoked her. I’m also afraid that the next time she hits me she might batter my brains or eyes so much that I’d become blind or knocked into insensibility for good.
About six months after our courtroom battle and a few weeks after she stopped calling and sending letters, I get a phone call.
“It’s me, don’t hang up,” she says. “I want to give you a quick uncontested divorce.”
“What’s the trick now?”
“No trick, darling, it’s love. I met a beautiful man and we want to get married.”
“I hope he’s a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than you.”
“He happens to be even thinner and shorter than you, but don’t be mean.”
“I can see why you want to marry him. So you can beat him up even worse than you did me.”
“Not true.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“And don’t argue with me either. You want the divorce or not? Don’t grant me it and you’ll never see the end of me for a lifetime.”
“I want it.”
We agree to file for divorce on the grounds of mutual mental cruelty. We get the divorce in a month, and a week later she marries. I saw the man at the divorce court. He’s a little guy all right, older and weaker-looking than me too. I wanted to warn him about her but then told myself to stay out of it. It’s his business. And if I say anything he might not marry her and then she’ll be on my back for life. Besides, if she does beat him up and he presses charges, the court and most of my old friends will know I wasn’t crazy after all. Two men pressing assault charges against the same woman — that’s no coincidence.
A year later she and her husband are in the newspaper. He’s in a very bad coma. His sister, the article says, got a call from her brother saying Melanie was trying to break down their bedroom door to attack him. When the sister got to the apartment she found her brother on the floor and Melanie kicking him repeatedly in the head. The sister tore into her, knocked her out with a pan and then called the hospital and police.
Melanie’s arrested. Her husband’s still in a coma. A newsman calls me and says “Mrs. Delray’s your ex-wife. So what do you think of the charges against her now — husband battering, attempted murder? Where it might end up a homicide, as he’s got no more than a fifty-fifty chance to survive. Even if he does she’ll still be in serious trouble, as he hasn’t got any chance of being anything but totally brain-damaged for the rest of his life.”
“If you don’t mind I’ll save what I have to say for the jury trial. Because I might be prejudicing the case if I told you all that happened to me and then because of some legal technicality she got away free,” and I hang up.
A LACK OF SPACE
They never let me out in the sun anymore. I don’t know why. My lawyer and I have never gotten a clear ruling on that. But when night comes and it’s dark, I’m allowed a ten-minute rest period outside. There I see the other suns — the stars. I learned that from some library books here and the newspaper articles I’ve been reading regarding this country’s space effort. The other stars are supposed to be suns, like ours, though in varying degrees of intensity depending on how big they are and how long they’ve been around. And every one of the other suns is capable of having its own solar system and our sun is only one of about one hundred billion in our galaxy and there are about five thousand galaxies in our cluster of galaxies and we’re all revolving together because we’re all held together by the force of gravitational pull each galaxy in our cluster exerts on the other, despite the fact that the closest galaxy to ours is two million light-years away from us and each light-year is approximately six trillion miles in length, and actually all of us — Earth, solar system, galaxy and cluster of galaxies — may be part of an even larger system called a cluster of clusters of galaxies, though because of limitations in astronomical equipment scientists haven’t discovered it yet. Meaning: no matter how big we think the universe is, it’s probably even bigger than that. Meaning: no matter how many billions of trillions of light-years of space we know about or can imagine going in every which direction starting from Earth, there’s probably trillions of trillions of times more space than that. So why do these prison officials have to be so petty as to deny me a relatively small sun to look at and which they know is what I like to look at and do almost most, and particularly in its setting state? And why only the night for ten minutes to see those other suns? Because I’m a condemned man, they probably reason, and they got to deny me more than the usual prison freedoms they deny the other men on death row, since I once committed that most heinous crime of all of making hay with a girl who was a minor and when she was through with me and tying her hair in back with a ribbon she said “God, if you’re not the worst lay in all these creations, then I don’t know who is,” and kept on repeating that opinion in various ways till I said lay off and she wouldn’t so I insulted her a bit and she said “Goddamn you, fag, you can’t go insulting me like that,” and still nude she grabbed a branch and came at me as if she was going to cream me with it, so I slapped it out of her hand and shoved her with my palm just to protect myself from the rock she was picking up and she fell back over her own foot and banged her head against the top of a tree stump and rolled off it onto some stones just as I leaped forward to stop her from rolling and falling, and knocked herself out and died. I knew I was in trouble and there was nothing I could do for her now, so I beat it out of there and someone found her soon after and the police came and the doctors at the hospital said she had been viciously attacked and carnally assaulted and some people in town said she was last seen riding off with me on the back of my motorcycle and I was picked up and charged with rape, murder and running away from the scene of a crime. I was jailed and written up in newspapers as a young mad killer and charged with the rape-murders of three other girls in the area, though those charges didn’t stand up, and brought to trial for the rape-murder of one Jenny Lou House and convicted and sentenced to die by hanging. For three years now I’ve had a stay of execution, since the state I was tried in has a law saying the crime I was convicted of carries a mandatory death penalty, and my lawyer who’s against capital punishment on any grounds except treason and for someone who kills a federal employee who’s on duty, even a postman, contends that that state law is unconstitutional. It’s taken him the three years to get my case to the nation’s highest court and in all that time I’ve never once seen the sun. And when I am allowed out in the high-walled six-by-six-foot space for my ten-minute rest period, I’m always accompanied by two guards with guns — as if I could ever escape to any other place but my adjoining locked cell — and the space is always brightly lit as a main city square might be, making it impossible some nights to see the stars.