“Well,” she said uneasily, “if you really want to take the trouble...”
He dug around in the bookshelves and found something that looked all right. An historical romance. He read until his voice was hoarse. Then he smiled over at her. “There. I’ll read it to you bit by bit until we’ve finished it. Why on earth are you wearing that glazed look?”
She yawned. “Goodness! It’s sort of hypnotic, isn’t it?”
“Now we can talk,” he said jovially. “Just think. Good old nineteen-fifty is about gone.”
“And next year is nineteen fifty-one,” she said.
“We’ve had a good time this year in spite of... in spite of the international tension, haven’t we, darling? Hasn’t it been fun?”
“Dear, are you positive you feel all right?”
“I feel fine!” he snapped.
They went up to bed. He was first in. He lay in his bed with his fingers laced at the nape of his neck and watched her at the dressing table brushing her hair. Lovely girl. None better. Time to appreciate her.
He cleared his throat. “I love you, darling,” he said, proud of having achieved what sounded like a Boyer-esque intensity.
She twitched violently. She stood up and came over to his bed and put her hands on her hips and glared down at him. “I’m getting to the bottom of this right now.”
“But I—”
“Have you gone and gotten yourself all wound up in some tawdry little office affair? Have you? Have you? Who is she?”
He sat up, righteously indignant. “If you have no more faith in me than that—”
“What am I supposed to think when you come prancing home and posturing around and acting like somebody in the senior play at Jefferson High?”
“Now you listen to me, my dear!”
“I will not listen to you! Why didn’t you do it up brown? Why didn’t you come smirking home with flowers or candy or jewelry or something else to—”
“Laura, I—”
“And if you think that by imitating a garden variety Gregory Peck you can take my mind off what you’ve been doing... and... and... oh, oh, oh...”
The brush thudded to the floor and she crumpled on her bed. He reached out and patted her gingerly and ineffectually on the shoulder.
Laura wrenched away from his touch and increased the tortured tempo of her sobs.
And then he knew how he had to do it. He forgot his slippers. He padded down in his bare feet, turned on the lights, found the magazine on the table where he had put it when they had come back from the station.
He trudged upstairs with it, opened it to the proper page, shoved it under her arm. He stalked petulantly into the bathroom and slammed the door. After a time the sobbing stopped abruptly. There was a long period of silence and then a sound as if she were being slowly strangled. Then that, too, stopped.
She tapped on the door. Her tone was properly abject. “Harrison?”
“Go away. Go to bed. Go to sleep.”
“Please, Harrison!”
He unlocked the door and opened it cautiously, stared at her. “Whuff!” he said.
She pirouetted so that the black lace hem swirled around her ankles. “Remember it? Christmas. Four years ago.”
“What were you saving it for?”
“For a time like this, I guess.”
“Listen, Laura. If you ever, ever try to kid me about taking that quiz—”
She touched his lips with her finger tips. She looked oddly solemn, and very young. “I couldn’t. That would be like laughing at what you were trying to do.”
He put his arms around her. “Trying, and not much of a try.”
She pushed back and looked up at him. “Don’t think I’m not appreciative, now that I know. I’m a woman and I guess some part of me likes all those things they said in the test. But I know you, dear. You can’t put on an act. You have your own ways of telling me, and one of them is that look in your eye right this minute. When you lose that, I’ll really start fretting.”
He frowned. “That quiz didn’t give me any grade on a look.” Laura’s nose wrinkled enchantingly as she smiled. “Of course not, silly! Anybody can see that the person who wrote that quiz has never been married.”
