“You don’t want it to be.”
“He’s jealous and possessive. I don’t call that love.”
“He’s that way because he’s uncertain of you.”
“He has no reason to be. I don’t know what Charles wants of me. I always have the impression that he wants me to do something, say something, be something that I’m not.”
Warmth, the doctor thought, he wants some signs of warmth in your nature. Oh, well.
He rose, suppressing a yawn. He was tired of talking and the woman depressed him. She seemed immovable and cold as marble, and if any of his words had ever struck her, they had bounced off again without leaving a dent. At the same time he felt somewhat sorry for her. She could not help her frigidity. Perhaps with another man she could have had a happy, or at least, normal marriage. He wondered whether at some level of her mind she was harboring a guilt complex, or whether the explanation was simply that Pearson was not impotent but sterile.
He picked up his instrument bag from the floor.
“How does your hand feel now?”
“It’s all right.”
“Good. Take care of it. Human bites are often more dangerous than animal bites.”
He departed with the feeling that he had just said something profound.
After he’d gone she discovered that all his talking and pretending to consult her had been mere camouflage, that the arrangements for Charles to leave had already been made. It was Laura who came down and told her.
“I heard them talking,” Laura said.
“You shouldn’t eavesdrop.”
“I didn’t eavesdrop. Charley’s door just happened to be open and I just happened to be sitting on the landing. He’s going away tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“To a cottage on the lake. It belongs to a friend of the doctor’s. Forbes is going with him because Forbes can cook. They’re going to take the Chevvy coupe. Charley said to leave the big car for you.”
“That was nice of him,” Martha said. She was oddly affected by Charles’s concern for her. Though he was ill, though he despised her and suspected her of the worst possible crime, he wanted her to be comfortable while he was away. At least that’s how it sounded at first. After she’d considered it a minute, she began to wonder uneasily if Charles’s irony was getting so subtle she couldn’t recognize it. Talking to him was so difficult these days. It was like walking through a room strung with invisible wires; you could be aware that the wires were there, but you couldn’t prevent yourself from stumbling over them if you moved at all.
The following morning MacNeil came again. He re-bandaged her hand and told her that Charles was going to leave in the afternoon. He spoke of the cottage vaguely as being on the lake but not too far from the city.
“Why aren’t you sending him to a proper nursing home if he needs attention? Forbes can’t look after him the way I did.”
“The hospitals and nursing homes are badly overcrowded,” MacNeil replied. “And Mr. Pearson perhaps doesn’t need as much attention as you thought he did. His main need is to get away from this house and from you, to put it bluntly.”
She saw Charles only once before he left. She was waiting at the front door to say goodbye to him when he came down the stairs with Forbes. From a distance he looked perfectly well, though he walked slowly and held onto the banister for support. At the bottom of the staircase he put his hand lightly on Forbes’s shoulder and they crossed the hall toward her, walking in step.
The interval before they reached her seemed interminable. She thought of saying something light to bridge the gap of time and mood, but when she finally spoke it was the wrong thing to say, and the wrong tone to say it in.
“Well, Charles,” she said heartily. “You’re all dressed up!”
He had on grey flannels and a tweed coat with a brown turtleneck sweater underneath. She couldn’t remember seeing him in such informal clothes before. They made him look younger and the bulky sweater helped to conceal his thinness.
“Am I?” he said.
Forbes, with a little nod to Martha, opened the door and went out.
“How are you feeling, Charles?”
“Fine.”
“I hope — get a good rest, won’t you?”
“Certainly.”
“Did you leave your address with Brown?”
He said flatly, “What do you want my address for?”
“Well, in case anything turns up.”
“Nothing will turn up.”
“It wouldn’t look right for me not even to know where you are.”
He regarded her quizzically. “No?”
“Why won’t you tell me where you’re going?”
“Because I don’t want to see you again for a long, long time. If you knew where I was, you might be tempted to run out and see me. Not for humanitarian reasons — merely to check up. You’re a great one for checking up on things.”
Forbes returned. “Everything’s ready if you are, Mr. Pearson.”
“I’m ready. Well, goodbye, Martha.”
“Good-bye.”
She raised her face perfunctorily for his kiss. He stared at her for a moment. Then he said coldly, “Aren’t you forgetting I bite, my dear?”
The door slammed.
She hurried into the living room and watched him from the windows. She saw Forbes help him into the coupe and lay a blanket over his knees, then Forbes got in beside him and started the engine. Before they drove off, they both began to laugh.
That was the picture of him she kept seeing over and over again — Charles looking quite healthy and young again in the turtleneck sweater, driving off to a place she didn’t know, laughing at a joke she couldn’t share.
Chapter 6
Time passed slowly for Steve. Each day dragged by on its club feet and fell exhausted into the grave of its brothers.
There were a hundred things he had planned on seeing and doing as soon as he returned; he had even made a list of them in a diary to while away the time in the English hospital. But now, when he took out the list and read it over, the things he’d written seemed pretty silly to him, futile excursions into the past. The past had been distorted or erased.
The city had never been bombed but it gave that effect. Time itself had been the bomb, annihilating the landmarks that he knew, destroying his friends and their houses and scattering their families. Some rebuilding had been done; his favorite bar was a supermarket, and the Star Building, where he’d worked as a cub reporter, had been torn down and risen from its ashes, a steel and concrete phoenix.
He paid a visit to the city editor one day. The city editor was the same man, but he had changed his style to match the new building. He wore a neat pin-striped suit, a tie and an efficient smile. The air-conditioned offices were dustless and sterile, and there wasn’t a single cigarette butt on the floor. Steve departed with a strong feeling of unreality.
Meanwhile he stayed on at the Neal Hotel. Once the symbol of elegance, the Neal catered now mostly to traveling salesmen and people like himself who wanted to avoid the five-day limit imposed by the better hotels. It was a depressing place, but it would do until he found an apartment. He had no desire to stay with his only relatives, a cousin and aunt who lived in the west end.
He had visited them out of politeness. It was the night after he met Martha on the street and he was feeling bitter. The long ride out on the streetcar depressed him even more.
They must have been watching for him, for as soon as he came in sight of the house Aunt Vi thrust the door open and shouted, “Steve!”
His cousin Beatrice stood behind her on the porch. She didn’t say anything, but she was smiling at him in a fixed, idiotic way.
He kissed them both, noticing and feeling ashamed of noticing, that Aunt Vi was a great deal fatter. Her plump prettiness had turned flabby and her soft chin had grown into jowls that sprouted coarse white hairs.