If she did, she thought, he’d probably yell at her for waking him up.
She rolled over on her stomach, closing her eyes tight, wishing that sleep would come already. She was on her merry way to hell on a road paved with the best of intentions and she didn’t know what to do about it. She was riding to hell at top speed in a jet-propelled supersonic bus with the destination sign plainly marked FIRST STOP — HELL. And the bus was in high and locked in gear.
What the hell, she thought sleepily.
At least it was a nice ride.
The bus got there the following Thursday.
It started simply enough. It was Thursday night, the night to put the paper to bed and to stay up all day Friday, the night that was the toughest night of all. She was in the outer office proofing galleys; Don was in his private office working on the editorial.
Pete Chatterjee stalked into the outer office. He was the managing editor, the man next in command to Don, a short, wiry-haired junior with a perpetual frown and an equally perpetual case of five o’clock shadow.
She looked up and smiled at him when he walked in, although she didn’t like him much.
He didn’t smile back. Instead he stormed into the inner office. He slammed the door behind him, hard, but the door didn’t stick and swung open again.
Linda could hear the conversation through the open door. She probably could have heard it anyway — Pete was talking in an extremely loud tone of voice.
“I was down at the shop,” he said. “Jesus Christ — you only got four galleys set so far!”
“I know.”
“You know what night this is? This is Thursday, damn it. How the hell are you going to put out a paper with a lousy four galleys in type?”
“The paper’ll come out.”
“When? Ten o’clock tomorrow night?”
“We’ll be out on time.”
“We’ll be late,” Pete said. “We’ll either be late or we’ll stink so bad they’ll smell us in Nova Scotia. What in hell’s wrong with you?”
She didn’t hear what Don said.
“Look,” Pete was saying, “if it was just this once it would be all right. But it’s every week for the past two months, Don. Tuesday nights were supposed to be devoted to staff training sessions. When was the last time we had one of those?”
“They were a waste of time.”
“Of course they were a waste of time. But the staff didn’t know they were wasting their time, you lardhead. They thought they were doing something very important, which meant staff morale was higher as a result, which meant they were with us. You know how many staffers quit us in the past two months?”
“There’s always a drop—”
“Not like this one. And another thing — the content of this rag has been getting consistently worse. How in hell did that raccoon feature wind up on page five?”
“As a favor to Ken Swinnerton—”
“You don’t print thirty inches of tripe as a favor to Ken Swinnerton. Thirty inches of crap about the goddamned raccoons in the goddamned forest, for God’s sake! Now who in the goddamned world outside of Ken Swinnerton—”
“All right, I was a little short.”
“Thirty inches! And the page two make-up — you must have made up that page right on the stone, it was so lousy. You must have taken all the little diddley-shit that was left over and stuck it on page two and set the heads yourself.”
Don didn’t say anything.
“Look,” Pete said, a little lower in volume this time, “I didn’t come in here to raise hell because I like to raise hell. You know that.”
“Decent of you.”
“Don, listen to me. Look, I don’t care who you lay or how often you lay her, but that little piece in the outer office is taking up so much of your damned time that you’re not putting in any time on the damned paper. You—”
“Pete, not so loud for Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t care whether she hears me or not — you’re not screwing champion, you’re the editor, dammit. If she’s so goddamned insatiable I can get half a dozen guys to slip it to her whenever she’s just too hot to take it any more. But I’m pretty damned sick of the way you spend every minute of every day with the little—”
She didn’t hear what came after that. She couldn’t. She was already out of the office and down the hallway to the stairs.
Crying.
The break-up itself came just two days after that. It was inevitable at that point. For two days she had been walking around in a sort of daze, not hearing people when they spoke to her, not hearing or talking or eating or sleeping or doing much of anything.
Lines flew through her head — the lines from Julius Caesar where Portia says:
Am I yourself
But, as it were, in sort of limitation,
To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed,
And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs
Of your good pleasure? If it be no more,
Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife.
That was all she was, something for Don to talk to when he felt like it, to take to bed when he wanted company under the covers. And now she was just ruining his life, taking up time that he had no right to give to her.
She couldn’t live with him or without him.
The blow-up, when it came, was over something that didn’t matter at all. They were at the apartment, talking about a book that Don had read, and she didn’t even remember later what the book was. That, she thought afterward, might give some indication of how vital the quarrel was on the surface.
Anyway, she said something, and Don said that her statement was stupid, and she said he thought he was so smart all the time, and pretty soon they were shouting back and forth, saying things that were mean, taking out everything upon each other in the guise of an argument.
But it wasn’t an argument, not really. Fundamentally it was an outpouring of everything, all the hates and frustrations that had built up between them. She was letting go of all the fear and worry that had been growing day by day; he was hitting out with all the similar emotions of his own.
It was, in short, an argument that should have ended in bed. Arguments of this nature are best settled in bed, with genitals doing the job much better than words can ever hope to do. But the argument did not end in bed. It didn’t get to bed, for that matter, because they broke up before they could tumble into the hay.
Almost before she knew what had happened he had told her to leave, that they were no good for each other and that it would be better if they didn’t see each other any more. They weren’t shouting any more — now they were trying to discuss the whole thing sensibly like reasonable adults.
And then she was saying all right, she would leave, she agreed with him, it was better that way.
And she was picking up the books and clothes that she had been keeping at his place and heading for the door.
At the doorway she faltered. She dropped the books to the floor, remembering the way she had dropped an armload of books the time they first met. And the tears spilled out all at once and she turned and ran to him, clutching at him, burying her face against his chest and soaking his shirt-front with tears.
But that didn’t change things. A few moments later she was on her way again, and this time she held her tears back and carried her clothes and books down the stairs and out of the building. She walked, dry-eyed, back to her own dormitory on campus. She went to her room. Ruth was out and she closed the door and got into bed.