— Sorry your hat and stick are on the floor.
— It doesn’t matter, old man.
— I suppose you’ll be going to Sanders on Thursday?
— Probably.
— Well, sleep well!
— Good night, Andy. Come in and see me when you feel like talking about it.
— Yes, indeed!
He patted Tom delightfully on the shoulder of his raincoat, smiled, and softly shut the door. A beautifully managed exit. Couldn’t have been better. And the idea of Tom’s sleeping. Good God. Who would sleep after this? Who? Himself only, for only himself would have the sense to get thoroughly and completely and obliviously drunk. Yes. Drunk. He was drunk already. He was beginning to feel gay. Rubbed his hands on his forehead and then together and stepped quite nimbly into the sitting room, where Bertha, her back turned, was looking at the books on the mantelpiece.
— Well, darling, now we can discuss this quite amicably and privately. Isn’t it nice? Now we can really go into it, without self-consciousness.
— I think you’re behaving revoltingly.
— Revoltingly! What the hell do you mean. I’m behaving like a perfect gentleman.
— You know what I mean.
— I’m damned if I do. But I’ll be delighted to hear. Have a drink?
— I think you might at least have kept sober, and not introduced, or tried to introduce, this element of disgusting farce.
— God, you make me laugh. Your usual total lack of perception. Blind as a bat. I suppose I ought to have sent some flowers first, in a taxi, with a little message? Congratulations and facilitations. The bridal chamber was decorated with roses and syringes. Typical of you not to see that the only way, the only way, of handling such a scene is humorously! Good jumping Jesus. It’s that, among other things, that’s always been wrong with us. Your heavy-handedness: this fatuous Brattle Street dignity: all these Goddamned poetic hypocrisies. I suppose we ought to be tragic about it, and behave like people in a novel, or an Ibsen play. Ought I to have apologized for having come into my own flat and then cried about it? Tragic! Who’s it tragic for, if not for me, supposing I wanted to give in to it? What the hell have I come back to? To a stinking void. To a part of myself that’s dead. Well, all right. That’s my funeral. Not yours, and not Tom’s. If I want to make a joke of it, for the moment, so as to avoid cheap sentimental dramatics, the sort you act in at Brattle Hall, you might at least have the intelligence to see why I do it, and that it’s my own business. I get drunk because I don’t want to be wholly conscious. Because, I admit it, I’m partly a coward, and don’t want to know, or to have you and Tom know, exactly how many volts of pain I’m carrying. Do you want me to cry? Do you want me to comfort you? Or do you expect just a calm rational discussion of the ethics and esthetics of sexual fidelity?
— There’s no use discussing anything, if you’re going to be merely abusive.
— There you go. If I state facts, I’m abusive.
— I think you might at least have tried to see my point of view. I’ve been starved—
— Yes, for Christ’s sake drag that up again, starved for love! You don’t know what love is. You’re a thirteen-year-old romantic, a bleached little Cantabrigian Madame Bovary. I want love, she cries, and pulls on a pair of tarpaulin knickers.
— Shut up!
She turned suddenly and glared at him, her mouth dreadfully relaxed, the tears starting quickly from her eyes. He was looking at her quite coldly, with the familiar hatred, the familiar deep ferocity and need to injure. She was beginning to suffer. Pursue the advantage. Grind it in, beat her down. Give her the works. Analyze the whole marriage, drag it all up by the roots, reveal her to herself for once and all, all the piecemeal horrors laid out like entrails on a bloody platter. Bumwad, bumwad, bumwad, bumwad. The whole prolonged obscene and fecal grapple in steadily deepening darkness, year after year of it, the burden upon his consciousness becoming hourly more foul and more frightful. The history of a bathroom. Dirty water. Dirty clothes. Dirty habits. The upright soul indifferent to filth. Jesus, angel of grief, come down to me: give us a speech as pure as ocean. A tumbler of neat gin, fiery strangulation, a cough, tears on his marble eye which might be misinterpreted, a sudden impulse to make them real. The awful contraction of the belly which precedes weeping. A new red edge provided for anger.
— All right — I’ll play the piano.… No, I won’t, either.
He played two bars of a Bach gavotte, then stopped.
— Isn’t it ridiculous. Why do we make such a fuss about it? Especially as we all flatter ourselves that we saw it coming. Or did we? I must confess though—
— What.
Bertha’s face was averted, her voice flat.
— I hadn’t really expected you to go through with it. I thought Brattle Street would be too much for you.
— I see. You thought as usual that I wasn’t quite human.
— Not at all. Don’t be in a hurry. I thought you were too damned moral. Or loyal.
— Loyal to what, exactly? I’d like to know.
— Oh, me, for instance.
— Yes! After you’d flaunted Molly—
— Don’t be more of a fool than you have to be.
— Besides, if you admit withdrawing from me, what difference does it make. You know our marriage hasn’t been a marriage for almost a year—
Of course. There was that. There was that, which he had forgotten. But how explain it to her? There was no explaining it. The problem of rhythm: the inevitable succession of approaches and retreats: love, indifference, hate — then over again, love, indifference, hate. Disgust, then renewed curiosity. Exploration, then renewed retreat. Soiled clothes, then sunlight, a concert, a few drinks, an evening of witty conversation, psychological discussion — and all of a sudden the divine recapitulation. Would this have occurred again? Had he really wanted it, or hoped for it, to occur again? Or had he at the bottom of his heart desired this precise consummation, this disaster? The sacrifice of everything. And in that case, why make a fuss about it: how could it hurt him? How, indeed. Step up, ladies and gents, and see the unwoundable pig.
— Oh, God, what’s the use.
— I meant to tell you that I thought I was falling in love with him. And that he was in love with me. He meant to tell you too.
— How long have these discussions been going on?
— I meant to tell you before anything happened. But you see—
— I suppose you want me to believe that tonight is the first time?
— No.
Well, by God, that opens up a nice vista into the past, doesn’t it.
To ask or not to ask. To pry or not to pry. He stared at the carpet, pushed a cigarette end with the toe of his muddy shoe, felt the blind agony beginning to contract his whole body. One night, or two. One week, or three. Before he left for New York, or after. In Tom’s flat, or here. To think this was sickness, madness, disruption. Drunken and maudlin disruption. What was Bertha, then, that even now he should suffer? This pale oval of female face, with the speckled gray eyes and the always too-innocent mouth? A mere face. A mere idea. A mere history, now finished. Or was it finished?
He picked up his glass and crossed to the table. Bewilderment. The empty glass in his right hand meaningless.
— Yes, a lovely little vista into the past. The past suddenly becomes the present, doesn’t it? And a damned pretty future.
— Well, you’ve always preached psychological freedom and honesty—
— Christ!
— Why not practice it?
— I can safely leave that to you!
— That’s not fair!
— That’s the coolest defense of whoredom—