“Why don’t they now?”
“Because the kind of fool who would take it they don’t want.”
“So you can’t take out the nine thousand that belongs to you and put it back later when you’re making all this big money?”
He suddenly felt inexpressibly weary. He went back to his chair and sat down and said, “Just why do you think I can’t ask for it?”
“Because you’re supposed to be infallible about everything or they’ll think you’re not good enough for the top of their pyramid.”
“I couldn’t have said it more accurately. Apparently you do understand.”
“I’ve listened. You listen.”
“Of course, honey.”
“I’m proud of you. Keep that in mind. I know you can do what they think you can. I can see how it can be pride with you too. But a woman has a different slant. I know you can do it. You know you can do it. So what are we proving and who are we proving it to by standing around in this... thin air?”
“What do you mean?”
“You seem to work harder all the time, and you get less kick out of it. You never come home any more just busting with triumph, Ben. The things we do together are all... obligations, carefully planned, never on impulse. I claw you for no reason. You snarl for no good reason. We live with these two kinds of pressure every waking minute — your job pressure, and this stupid, ludicrous thing of just barely being able to make ends meet on a salary most people in the country would consider real wealth.”
“I don’t think I’m trying to prove—” He broke off.
“Please don’t go all haughty and stuffy. An electrician was here last week.”
“What has that got to do with—”
“He came to fix the refrigerator. He bought a beat old cabin cruiser two years ago. He’s been working on it himself for two years. As soon as school is out, he and his wife and two kids are going down the inland waterway to Florida. He found time to study navigation and small-boat handling in night school. It’s almost three months away, but he’s so excited about it he glows like a lantern when he talks about it.”
“I should go to night school and learn how to fix refrigerators.”
“Stop that, Ben. Please. All this is hurting our marriage. You’re honest enough to see that. It’s hurting the kids, this atmosphere of continual tension. I’m in favor of vast success and golden years, I guess. But not at this price. I mean that. Not at this price.”
He looked at her for one long moment. “Just what are you saying, Ginny? It has the sound of an ultimatum.”
“What good is the golden future if you ruin the good things while waiting for it?”
“Other people are able to—”
“This isn’t other people. This is me. I can’t afford the big leagues, Ben. Emotionally, I can’t afford them. I’m sorry.”
“What do you plan to do?”
“I don’t want to hang around and watch what we have left go the same way the rest of it went. I better ask you the same thing. What do you plan to do?”
“Live up to... my maximum potential.”
“When every morsel of joy has gone out of it, and all you have left is pride? Is that enough?”
“It looks like it will have to be, honey.”
“And you won’t take the slightest risk of upsetting their... big fat opinion of the crown prince?”
“Not the slightest.”
There was destruction in the long silence, and they looked away from each other. When love is twisted, a marriage can end, even though love is still there. It needs only the words of ultimatum to be said, and then the dreadful effects of pride.
The words were there, waiting to be said. Each of them believed the other one to be blindly selfish, and wondered that it had not been more evident up until now.
“We’re both tired right now,” Ben said gently, and so the words were not said. But the narrowness of it had frightened them both.
Ben Weldon could not sleep that night. He left the bedroom at two in the morning, so quietly that Ginny did not awaken. He made coffee, and he sat at the kitchen table. He went to the drawer where Ginny kept the cigarettes for their entertaining and opened a fresh pack. At dawn his mouth had a bitter taste, and half the pack was gone. He located the budget summary he had prepared for the interview with Semmins, and a copy of the balance sheet he had prepared for his meeting with Hyde.
He thought of many things, and he made a decision, but it gave him no feeling of relief. He sneaked back into bed a half hour before the alarm went off. When he came out to breakfast, Ginny stared curiously at him and said, “You were up in the night?”
“For a little while.”
“What did you do, smoke five cigarettes at a time?”
“Like a candelabra.”
When she drove him down to the station, they sat in the car waiting for the train to come into view up the tracks.
“It will rain later on,” she said.
“I’ve got that other raincoat in the office.”
“Ben... about last night.”
“Yes, honey.”
“You should know this. Even if you were willing to do it my way, it wouldn’t be easy — I mean I’d always be wondering if you were thinking I’d... held you back.” She gave a dry little laugh, and he saw where the morning light touched the little network of weather wrinkles at the corner of her blue blue eyes. “Nothing is easy any more, I guess,” she said.
“Don’t fret about it,” he said. “Here comes Old Unreliable.” He kissed her and got on the train and rode down toward the cold arena.
Brendan Mallory had flown back from London the previous day, and so his schedule was full. But his secretary was able to give Ben an appointment at 4:40. It was a dreamlike day for Ben Weldon. All day he had the feeling he was standing a half step behind himself and off to one side, watching himself go through the routines as one would watch a stranger.
All day he kept thinking of alternative possibilities, some of them logical, some of them absurd.
In his favorite alternative, Brendan Mallory would look up from his study of the figures, his eyes vivid with shock and concern, and say, “Why, I had no idea we’d been forcing you into such a ghastly position, Ben! Why hasn’t somebody brought this to my attention before? This is absurdly unfair! It shall be corrected immediately. A man carrying the load you’re carrying these days shouldn’t be forced to endure this kind of personal anxiety!”
In another scene, he had filled a gas tank and wiped the windshield and he was taking the money from the customer when the man looked at him intently and said, “Say, aren’t you the Ben Weldon that used to be with National?”
There was, of course, a background of hot sun and sandy beach, and his brown children playing on the beach, with Ginny near them, barefoot and splendid, and a boat anchored at a dock.
“You’re right, friend,” he would say, “but we got out of that ulcer trap. We didn’t know what real living was until we came down here, friend.”
There was another that kept slipping into his mind, making his stomach feel hollow. The word would be passed around in some mysterious way, and he would spend the sour, defeated weeks and months sitting in waiting rooms, filling out forms that would be filed away and forgotten, and the men he talked to would treat him with a brusque courtesy that did not quite conceal their contempt for the sort of man who would quit the team just before the Series.