“Yes.”
All the angry words were close to the surface. She suppressed them. She stood up slowly and began to clear the table.
“It’s all right, then?” he asked.
“It looks as though it will have to be, David.”
He left two days later. She packed for him. She kissed him and told him to write. She went down to the car with him. He stood and looked at her, and he looked shy and lost, and she thought it was like sending a child to camp, or to war. He opened his lips as though to say something, then turned abruptly and got into the car. It was a Sunday morning in Manhattan. The streets were empty. She stood and watched the blue and white car turn the corner. She went back upstairs. She prepared carefully for tears. She put on a robe, stretched out on her bed with a big box of tissues at hand. She lay and waited for the tears. They did not come. She thought of the sweet little things and the sad little things, and tried, through pathos, to force tears. But they did not come. She realized she was trying to pump up tears the way some women seek out sad movies. She got up quickly, and on that day she gave the apartment the most thorough cleaning it had ever had.
He sent a card from Augusta and one from Jacksonville and a third and final card from Sarasota saying that he would stay there for a time and let her know should he move on. There was an address she could write to. She wrote often, not knowing if he even bothered to read her letters.
Now the marriage was quite over. It had ended.
She lay on the still hot beach, plastic cups over her eyes, feeling the sun grind into her body. And she tried to understand.
There were two things that had happened to her, long before David, that seemed to point out the direction of understanding.
One had happened in high school, during the first week of a course in Natural History. She could not remember the name of the instructor. He had been a small, wide, balding man with a sharp penetrating voice and a sarcastic manner. He had pictures of prehistoric animals and lizards and birds, cleverly faked.
In essence he said, “These creatures no longer exist. They died out. Their own development brought them to a dead end. They had some fatal flaw which finally made it impossible for them to survive in a changing environment. They could not adapt. It is an oversimplification to call them nature’s mistakes. They were just dead ends in nature’s endless experimentation.”
And so it could be possible to say that David had within himself the flaw which made survival impossible. The flaw did not have to be isolated and described. It could be enough to know that it was there.
The second incident had happened when, in college, she had had a date with a young instructor, a man named Val Jerrenson. As he was not permitted to date students, they had to be secretive about it. It had been a warm Saturday in May and they had gone down to an amusement park on the shore. They had been standing talking near a shooting gallery, and Virginia, looking over Val’s shoulder, saw the head of Val’s department walking toward them, frowning slightly.
Virginia had put her hand out quickly, and Val had taken it instinctively. Raising her voice a little, she had said, “Well, I have to run along, Mr. Jerrenson. Nice to run into you like this. I’ll have to catch up with the other girls.” She then looked directly at the head of the department and said, “Oh, Hello, Dr. Thall! I didn’t know Mr. Jerrenson was with you. I really have to run.”
When Val finally came back to the car, she was sitting there waiting for him, giggling.
After they had driven far enough to be safe, Val had looked at her with an odd expression and said, “You know, Virginia, you frighten me a little. You have such a perfect instinct for survival. Such a gift for living. You are an organism designed to function perfectly in its environment. Such strength is a little disturbing.”
So add the two together. The flawed organism. And the survival organism. Living together, making a life together. She sensed that the marriage had made her stronger, because it had called on her strength; it had demanded it. Yet she had not wished to be strong. She had wanted a man who could dominate her. In the very beginning she had thought David such a man.
Thus, if it had added to her strength, had it not also added to his weakness? Would not David have been better with a silly girl, a gay careless erratic clinging little thing? Or was the flaw too deep?
There was one thing that she learned during the long days on the beach. She learned that her love was not as great as she had thought it. It made her ashamed to realize that. Yet in all honesty, it was an admission she had to make. And it was the final act which had cut love down to a manageable stature. It had been such a childish and insulting death. It was as though, out of petulance, he had flung something at her, had struck her in the face with sticky unpleasantness. She had cared for herself, keeping herself as handsome as she could, as fresh and alive and sweet-smelling, ready and waiting for him. Through marriage his need of her had been sporadic. His withdrawn periods seemed a denial of her. And now he had consummated the final denial.
She could feel grief, a sense of loss, a sense of inadequacy — yet it was not a sharpness that pierced her heart. It was more like thinking of a death that had happened long ago. David had died long ago, and he moved through the eternity of memory, blond, slim, tall, with soft sensitive mouth, dulled eyes, a look of rejection. The ashes were soft and gray in the bronze box. And ashes had no life, no history. They were always old.
She knew at last when it was time to go back. When she awakened on Tuesday morning, she knew that she had spent enough time in this place. A healing process had finished. She could go back and face friends and dispose of his personal possessions and give up the apartment and find something to do.
She looked at herself with utmost clarity and knew that any job she could find would not be enough. She knew that she would look for a man. A strong man. A man with courage and integrity and a sure sense of his own place. She knew that, at thirty, she had never been more attractive. With this man she would find herself. He would not need strength to lean on. He would exude strength, and that strength would make her feel like a woman, rather than a mother or a guardian. There would be children, as many as she could have. And all this would not be a rebound from David. It would, instead, be an acceptance of the years lost, and a desire to do, with those that were left, what she had been meant to do from the very beginning.
When she left in the rain on Wednesday morning, she was more than a little amused at her careful planning, at her incredible certainty that the future would be just as she desired it.
Steve Malden drove steadily north on Route 19 in a dark green Plymouth sedan. He was a big man, big in every dimension, big in hand and wrist and shoulder — slow-moving, with a look of competence and power. His hair was black and thick and cropped short, and black brows nearly met over the bridge of his nose. His cheekbones were high and solid, his nose just enough hooked to give him an Indian look.
It was the first time in five years that Malden had driven anywhere without a specific mission, a clear idea of where he would go and whom he would see. This was supposed to be a vacation. That was what they had called it. But vacation was a word that was supposed to give you a lift, a feeling of anticipation and excitement — not this dulled restlessness. He had a vague idea of heading west, maybe swinging down into Mexico.
There had been no vacation in five years. He had not wanted a vacation, and he had not wanted this one. It had been forced on him. Bellinger, chairman of the committee had said, “Take a break, Steve. You can’t keep going on the way you are. You’re like a mechanical man. Take a break now or the job will break you.”