“On the contrary, it’s a tie, unless the contours of the box deceive me.” He removed the paper. “As I thought. A tie. How very generous of you, Martha. I hope you didn’t pay more than a dollar for it?”
She had paid eighty-nine cents, but she had taken the precaution of having the clerk remove the price tag.
“I’d hate to think you were squandering money on me,” Charles said. “Let there be light, pull back the curtains, Martha. I want to examine this offering from the Greeks.”
Pale and angry, she crossed the room and opened the curtains. Charles was impossible. There wasn’t an ounce of gratitude in him. She had spent all of ten minutes selecting that tie.
“This is, Martha, a very important occasion. I can’t recall offhand that you’ve ever bought me anything before.” He rubbed the tie between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the texture. “Very nice indeed.” He turned it over and looked at the label. It bore the name of a nationally known firm who made one-dollar ties. “You’re incredible,” he said quietly.
“What are you talking about?”
“You make so many blunders and you make them in such an efficient, self-confident manner.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Like a child, always scheming and thinking you’re getting away with something.” He drew up his knee viciously and the box bounced off the bed.
She backed away, frightened and sincerely bewildered. She couldn’t understand why he was making a fuss. The tie was pretty, and what’s more, it looked expensive. She might have paid five dollars for it.
“The label, darling,” he said.
“What?”
“Not that I mind wearing dollar ties, I do most of the time, anyway. It’s your effrontery, because this is practically the first present you’ve ever given me. And more than effrontery, it’s your sly stupidity.”
“You can’t...”
“Sly, because you’ve no sense of human values, and stupid because you always overlook one or two details. You always think you can put something over on people, that no one is smart enough to catch on to you. And all the time you’re as transparent as glass.” He leaned back against the pillows. His voice was low but distinct. “You’d make a very poor murderer. They’d have you hanged within a month.”
There was a long silence. She said at last, in a bored way, “Well, that was quite a speech, Charles.”
“I have lots more material.”
“Have you?”
“Oh, yes. I’m gradually getting things straightened out, a detail here and there, a discrepancy — what the doctor said and what you said he said...”
“I don’t pretend to remember his exact words.”
“You haven’t the grace to pretend anything. For a whole month you’ve sat in that chair over there waiting for me to die.”
“That’s a lie.” And it was a lie. She didn’t want him dead. She had only thought, off and on during the years of their marriage, how pleasant it would be if Charles didn’t come home some night. That was natural, that was human, a lot of wives thought that about their husbands sometimes. It didn’t make her a criminal. Yet Charles treated her like one, exactly as if he’d read her mind and convicted her on her thoughts.
“That’s your secret, Martha. You don’t pretend anything. You haven’t even got sense enough to pretend you married me for anything but my money.” His voice had risen and his eyes glowed feverishly in their sockets. “Have you? Did you?”
She was startled by his fury, but in the back of her mind she felt a cold contempt for anyone who could lose his control so completely. She said, “I don’t believe you’re in any condition to talk.”
“I may never be in any condition to talk. You tried once and you’ll try again...”
“All this fussing about a tie. It’s disgusting.”
“Won’t you, Martha?” he shouted. “You will try again?”
“For heaven’s sake lower your voice. The servants will hear you.”
“I want them to hear, I want everyone to hear!”
Quietly, so he hardly realized she was moving, she backed toward the door and closed it. Then she stood against it, as if defying him to get up and push her aside and open it again.
“Open that door,” he ordered.
“Don’t be ridiculous. If you think I’m going to let an hysterical invalid make a fool of me in front of—”
“They’ll hear me anyway, I’ll see to it.”
“Have you gone completely insane, Charles? I’ve done nothing against you.”
He struggled to a sitting position and began to scream clearly and deliberately: “I accuse my wife of trying to kill me! I am perfectly sane. I have evidence. My wife...”
In two seconds she was across the room and had her hand over his mouth.
“Stop it. I warn you, Charles, stop it.”
He pulled feebly at her hand. Drops of sweat oozed out of his forehead and his screams were muffled into little animal grunts.
“I told you to be quiet,” she said. “You can’t fight me. I won’t take my hand away until you promise to be sensible.”
He was still for a moment and there was no sound but his labored breathing. Then, with a final spurt of strength, he sank his teeth into the palm of her hand.
She was too surprised to move. She felt her own warm blood and the thick frothy saliva from his mouth slide slowly down her wrist and touch the sleeve of her coat.
Filth, her mind shrieked. Filth, filth.
She stared in frozen horror at her hand.
Charles was smiling. “I can’t fight you, eh? Perhaps not according to the rules, but I do all right. Eh, Martha?” His mouth, smeared with her blood, was moistly red and voluptuous.
“Filth,” she said in a dazed voice. “You filth.”
She turned and walked blandly away, supporting her wounded hand with her good one, carrying it with tenderness and loathing as if it were her torn, bloody baby.
Confronted by the closed door she stopped, unable to comprehend that there was a door between her and escape, and that it must be opened before she could find water to wash this indescribable filth from her hand. She felt no pain, she seemed partially paralyzed as if Charles’s saliva was a poison that was swiftly destroying her nerve centers.
“Martha...”
“I must,” she said, “I really must — wash my hands. I must...”
“Turn around.”
She obeyed, slowly. Charles was still smiling, his rich, red mouth drawn back from his pink teeth, his eyes passionate and beautiful with fever.
“Did you ever put pennies in your mouth when you were a kid?” he said. “That’s how your blood tastes. Metallic.”
Her image began to waver before his eyes, to become larger and larger. White face, black dress, red blood. The colors bounced and jostled each other. Red face, black blood. She grew noisily, clinking like pennies, spreading into the corners of the room.
“Get out! Get out of my corners! Get out, get out!”
Chapter 5
The horror passed and she began to move with brisk economy. Holding a handkerchief against the palm of her hand, she pulled the sheet up over Charles. (How calm he looked now, as if he had purified himself by spitting out all his venom and bile on her.) She picked up the tie from the floor, replaced it carefully in the box and set it on the bureau. All that fuss about a tie, it was really disgusting. She would not permit herself to believe that he had any other reason for fussing. The sole reason was the tie, and she could fix that easily enough — she would simply never buy him another one.
She took a final look at Charles. Later, when he woke up, he would be apologizing all over the place, he would grovel as he usually did after he’d lost his temper. She would, not too readily, of course, accept his apologies and they would resume their life together as if nothing had happened.