But in the end she won out, won reluctant acceptance. She drove around the city and decided she would rather live at the beach. She found a tiny apartment in a blue and white motel on Siesta Key. Her door opened onto the beach. It was September, and it was hot, and there were few tourists. In the mornings she would see the high white cloud banks against the blue sky, and on many days the hard rain would come down in the afternoon, dimpling and washing the sand and ending with the same abruptness that it had come.
She had wired Jim Dillon her new address. Legal papers came, and she signed them and sent them back. Sympathy notes arrived. The most careful and intricate one came from the advertising firm.
She spent her days in a quiet pattern. In the early morning, she walked on the beach. Later she lay under the sun, walking gingerly down to swim in the warm water when the heat became too great. The sun blunted her energies, softening the edges of her grief. She was a tall woman with a strong, well-made, youthful body, with black crisp hair, unplucked black brows, eyes of a clear light blue. The sun tanned her deeply and the continual swimming tightened the tissues of her body. She would come in from the dazzle of the beach and take off her suit in the relative gloom of the small apartment and, catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror, be startled by the vivid contrast of deep tan and the white protected bands of flesh.
The bronze box was in the back of her closet.
It was time to think, to wonder how she had failed. And to wonder what would become of her.
The marriage had lasted seven years. They had met in New York. She was from upstate New York, from Rochester. She was working in the fiction department of a fashion magazine when she met him. David had done two short pieces for them. Virginia had read them and thought them quite strange, but she had liked them. A third story, according to the judgment of the fiction editor, needed reworking. The fiction editor had made a luncheon date with David Sherrel and had been unable to keep it. Virginia was sent along to the midtown restaurant to meet him, armed with the manuscript, the fiction editor’s notes, and some money from the petty cash fund.
They had been awkward and earnest with each other during lunch. David turned out to be tall, slim, blond and — in spite of Madison Avenue manners and clothing — rather shy. He had curious moments of intensity, after which he would slip behind his façade.
She had been dating several men, but after lunch with David the others all seemed very predictable and tasteless. The second time she saw him, he was very drunk. The third time she saw him it became evident to both of them that they would be married.
It had seemed to be a good marriage. She felt needed and wanted. She learned to accept his moods of black, hopeless depression, accepting them as the evil to be balanced against a gift of gaiety, of high wild fun, of laughter that pinched your side and brought you to helplessness. There was the deep stripe of the erratic in him. He seemed to be always on the verge of losing his job, only to regain favor by some exercise of imagination that not only re-established him as a valuable man, but usually brought a pay raise. Though he sneered at his job and his work and could talk at length about the artificial wonderland of the advertising agencies, when he was in ill repute, he could not then keep food on his stomach, nor could he sleep without sedatives.
He had a gift for the savage phrase. He could use words that hurt her. But out of her strength and her understanding, she forgave him. His apologies were abject. His affection was as cyclical as his moods. There would be weeks when he would be warm, loving. Then would come the coolness, and he would withdraw physically to the point where, should she touch him inadvertently, she could feel the contraction of his muscles. And that hurt as badly as did the words.
David always bad very good friends, very dear and close friends who would adore him for two months or three before, out of some compulsion, he would drive them off. No friend remained loyal very long.
In spite of their private difficulties, they maintained a united front. He never spoke harshly to her when there was anyone around to hear him. She was grateful for that, as she knew her pride was very strong. She loved him with all her heart. She wanted his life to be wonderful. She did everything she could to make him happy.
It all began to go wrong right after the beginning of the current year. He slipped, day by day, further into a mood of depression. Yet this depression was not like the others. The others had been like the black clouds of brief violent storms. This was like a series of endless gray days, unmarked by any threat of violence. It seemed to her to be more apathy than depression. He went through his days like an automatic device designed to simulate a man. There seemed to be no restlessness in him — just a dulled acceptance. Although he had always been very fastidious, he began to shave and dress carelessly, and to keep himself not quite clean. She tried in all the ways she could think of to stir him out of it. She changed scenes, set stages, planned little plots, but none of them worked. When, in unguarded moments, she would wonder if he was getting tired of her, fright would pinch her heart.
One day, out of desperation, she set a scene so crude that in prior years it would have been unthinkable. While he was at the agency she went into the small study where he had used to work during the evening. She found and laid out the incomplete manuscript of the book. She laid out fresh paper and carbon and second sheets in the way he had liked to have them before he had given up work on the book.
That evening she had taken his wrist and smiled at him and tugged and said, “Come on.”
He came along without protest. She turned on the desk lamp and showed him what she had done. He stood and looked at the desk and then he turned and looked at her with an absolute emptiness in his eyes. An emptiness that shocked her. “God, Ginny!” he said tonelessly. “Good God, what are you trying to do to me?”
“I thought that if you...”
But he had walked out of the room. He walked out of the apartment. By the time she got her coat on and got down to the street, he was gone. He came back within an hour, and he was back down in the grayness of apathy, unreachable, untouchable. She apologized for what she had done. He shrugged and said it didn’t matter.
In June there was one day of gaiety. One day when he was like himself. Yet not like himself. There was an ersatz quality to his gaiety, as though it were the result of enormous effort — even as though this were a stranger, an actor, who tried expertly to become David Sherrel. That was the day they ordered the car and planned a vacation trip. By the time the car was delivered he had no interest in it, and she could not get him to talk about the trip again. She felt wasted. The empty days and the empty nights went by and she smothered her resentment and refused to admit to herself that she was thoroughly, miserably bored.
On an evening in late July he was quiet at dinner — it had been months since they had been out together or had anyone in — and finally, as though saying something he had memorized, he said, “I know that I’ve been a mess lately, Ginny. I don’t know exactly what’s wrong. I feel as if, somewhere, I’ve lost all motivation. I want to try to get it back.”
“I want to help you.”
“I don’t want help. I talked to Lusker this morning. They’re giving me a six month’s leave of absence without pay. Lusker suggested psychiatry. I don’t think that’s the answer. I want to get away for a while.”
“I think it’s a wonderful idea, darling. We could go back up to...”
“I don’t think you understand. I have to get away by myself. I don’t know why. But that’s what I have to do.”
She looked at him, and her face felt stiff, tight, as though covered with a fine porcelain glaze. “You have to do that?”