“Everyone has something. No one has nothing. No one but me.”
His head went down suddenly, into his wreathed arms. She gazed at him with moody tearless eyes, eyes that could not cry.
“That isn’t the answer. You cry for a moment, I’ve cried for a year. You lift your head, it’s over already. You light a cigarette, your eyes twinkle in the matchlight, now the matchlight’s gone, and now the tears are gone already too. How quickly they went. What tears are those, that a cigarette can dry and take away? I wish I knew how to shed that kind.”
“I must love you an awful lot,” he said dully, “for it to hurt me so.”
“Then think how I must have loved you.”
“You don’t?”
“I’m in pain. There isn’t room for both at once. You only feel one or the other. Oh, are you blind? Have I been that good? Have I hidden it that well? Can’t you see what you’ve done to me? Can’t you see you’ve made our marriage a hell for me?”
She turned from the chair back at last, as if it had defeated her: the barrier that she had not been able to move.
“Because I thought I was a wife, but I wasn’t. I was just a stranger living in your house with you, a stranger lying by you in your bed. Tack your valise, Marjorie. At five fifteen a train is taking us away.’ Oh, you don’t have to tell a stranger more than that. That’s all a stranger needs to know.
“One time too often you’ve done that to me. One time too many.”
She drew out the door, to go into the next room.
“Wait,” he said quietly. He began to count out strokes with the lighted tip of his cigarette, into the hollow of a supper-table saucer, definitive, irrevocable, until it had been stamped out. “I’m going to tell you what you want to know. I’m going to tell you why it is.”
She didn’t offer to come back to him.
“Wait for me. I’ll be back shortly.”
She watched him rise from the table and move away from her, in the opposite direction, toward the outside door.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going down to the corner a minute, to buy a bottle and bring it back here. I’m going to try to tell you something, and what I’m going to try to tell you — I can’t tell you sober.”
“Does it take liquor to make you open your heart to me?” she murmured. “How close we must be to each other.”
The outer door closed after him.
26
Sitting there alone, huddled disconsolate on a barebacked kitchen chair, back to front, he drank it as though it were the bitterest of medicines. Gripping the tumbler each time with force enough to have shattered it within his hand, grimacing with an anguish that didn’t come from taste, forcing the drink down, and then down again atop that, and then down once more, until it was all gone. The drink that was to tell his story for him, make his peace for him.
He stopped when he’d had three of them. Then he took the bottle and held it tipped over the sink, and drained it. Then he stowed it empty below on the floor, with a little swing and a thump.
He went into the bedroom. He didn’t ask her if she were asleep. He knew she wasn’t, she couldn’t have been, after what had passed between them before.
“Marjorie,” he said to her quietly. “Now I want to tell you what I have to.”
She didn’t answer.
He closed the bedroom door on the two of them, shutting off what pale light had been able to seep in from the outside. Then, alone in the gloom with her, he sought an armchair that stood off in a far corner, away from her, away from their bed, and lowered himself into it with an aching diffidence, the way a culprit does about to make his supreme plea before a tribunal that holds his final destiny in its hands.
27
The opallike tints of early morning, swirling cloudy gray and milky white and flecked with bloodspots of rose and crimson, flooding the room, found them as the night had left them. He in an armchair that stood off in a far corner. She in the bed, eyelids down, one cheek turned toward him.
Both inert. Both with their eyes closed. Yet neither one asleep. Unspeaking. Yet both so terribly aware of one another, that every nerve ached.
She didn’t ask me into the bed. That’s why I’ve sat the night out here like this, waiting for the word that never came. I could have, I should have — but I wanted that one word, as a token of forgiveness, at least of understanding. That one word that never came.
She never said a word from the time my voice stopped and the confession was through. As if she hadn’t heard. And yet I know she must have. I could hear the things it did to her breath. How it quickened it at this point, slowed it at the next; then took it away altogether. Then brought it back again, but wounded almost to the death, struggling for survival.
What good is it, speaking to her now? The time is past, the time of forgiveness. What good is it, saying her name now? For in the dark, there could have been two men in the room with her: an unknown man telling her a dreadful thing, and then her husband. But now, if she hears her name and she opens her eyes, there can be only one.
I’ll leave her alone awhile. I’ll let her be. Then perhaps when I’ve come back, her fright will have calmed, her bitterness will have softened. Her horror will have lessened.
Then I’ll say her name, and she’ll say mine, and we’ll find each other’s arms. We’ll be one again, as we were before. Not a dismembered two, on a chair in a corner, on a bed far off across a room.
He stood up, stiff and chill, and only after he had found his feet did he open his long-sealed eyes. Then he picked up his clothes from where they were and took them out with him and dressed outside. He didn’t look back at her as he left the room, he had no need to. He knew her eyes had never opened, he knew she’d never stirred. He knew she knew he’d gone.
He took a sheet of paper, when he was ready to go, and wrote out a note to her and left it on the table where she’d find it.
Marjorie— We’re taking the 5 o’clock train for San Francisco, so will you have everything packed and ready to go. I’ll be back for you by around 4 at the latest. Press.
Then he took his hat and he went out.
28
As he keyed the door and then swung it wide before him, the first thing he saw were their three valises, her large one and then the smaller one she also used and then his own, standing edgewise toward him in the hall, all strapped and readied. And atop them, folded neatly flat, his outer coat, which because of the season he had no need for wearing now.
And when he’d gone beyond, into what until just this morning had been their parlor — and now was just the anonymous parlor of some flat — he could see at a glance that the one or two accessories that were their own and did not belong with the flat had all been taken up and were gone from sight. The little things that had given the room its savor, that had said, “Marjorie and Prescott, and nobody else, live here; this room is theirs.” The curtains that had been on the windows; dotted Swiss, not very expensive, maybe, but never limp. A runner that had been across the table, to take some of the bareness away. A small-sized Mexican serape that she’d had tacked flat upon the wall, like a sort of miniature tapestry, in vivid stripes of emerald, fuchsia and orange. That shallow bowl for ashes that he’d picked up somewhere and clung to ever since, of some kind of heavy green glaze. That was about all, yet that was everything. All that was left was mission furniture and a nondescript rug. The room didn’t belong to them any more.