However, I did not vomit. Instead I looked into the mirror. I saw there a man who in less than seven months would be forty-five, a man with three marriages etched about his eyes, the corner of whose mouth drooped downwards from a lifetime talking on the phone. I splashed cold water on my face and joined Helen in the room. “That was Brian,” I said. She said nothing, she could not look at me. My own voice sounded nasal and toneless. “He doesn’t usually call in the evenings…” And still she said nothing. What did I expect? That she suddenly be of a mind to confess an affair with my chauffeur? Helen was a silent woman, she did not find it hard to conceal her feelings. Nor could I confess what I felt. I was too afraid of being right. I could not bear to hear her confirm the very idea that threatened again to make me vomit. I merely threw out my remarks to make her shore up her pretense… I so badly wanted to hear it all denied even while knowing the denial to be false. In short, I understood myself to be in Helen’s power.
That night we did not sleep together. I made myself up a bed in one of the guest rooms. I did not want to sleep alone, in fact the idea was hateful to me. I suppose (I was so confused) that I wanted to go through the motions so that Helen would ask me what I was doing. I wanted to hear her express surprise that after all these happy months together I was suddenly, without one word being said, making my bed in another room. I wanted to be told not to be foolish, to come to bed, our bed. But she said nothing, absolutely nothing. She took it all for granted… this was the situation now and no longer could we share a bed. Her silence was deadly confirmation. Or was there a slender possibility (I lay awake in my new bed) that she was simply angry at my moodiness. Now I was really confused. On and on into the night I turned the matter over in my mind. Perhaps she had never even seen Brian. Could the entire matter be of my own imagining? After all, I had had a bad day. But that was absurd, for here was the reality of the situation… separate beds… and yet what should I have done? What should I have said? I considered every possibility, good lines, cunning silences, terse aphoristic remarks that ripped away at the flimsy veil of appearance. Was she awake now like me, thinking about all this? Or was she fast asleep? How could I find out without appearing to be awake? What would happen if she left me? I was completely at her mercy.
I should bankrupt language if I tried to convey the texture of my existence over the following weeks. It had the arbitrary horror of a nightmare, I seemed a roast on a spit which Helen turned slowly with a free hand. It would be wrong of me to attempt to argue in retrospect that the situation was of my own making; but I do know now that I could have ended my misery sooner. It became established that I slept in the guest room. My pride prevented me from returning to our nuptial bed. I wanted Helen to take the initiative on that. It was she after all who had so much explaining to do. I was adamant on this point, it was my only certainty in a time of bleak confusion. I had to hang on tightly to something… and you see I survived. Helen and I barely talked. We were cold and distant. Each avoided the other’s eye. My folly was in thinking that if I remained silent long enough it would somehow break her down and make her want to speak to me, to tell me what she thought was happening to us. And so I roasted. At night I woke from bad dreams shouting and I sulked in the afternoons and tried to think it all out clearly. I had to carry on my business. Often I had to be out of the house, sometimes hundreds of miles away, certain that Brian and Helen were celebrating my absence. Sometimes I phoned home from hotels or airport lounges. No one ever answered, and yet I heard between each throb of the electronic tones Helen in the bedroom gasping with mounting pleasure. I lived in a black valley on the verge of tears. The sight of a small child playing with her dog, the setting sun reflected in a river, a poignant line of advertising copy were enough to dissolve me. When I returned home from business trips, desolate, craving friendship and love, I sensed from the moment I stepped through the door that Brian had been there not long before me. Nothing tangible beyond the feel of him in the air, something in the arrangement of the bed, some different smell in the bathroom, the position of the decanter of Scotch on its tray. Helen pretended not to see me as I prowled in anguish from room to room, she pretended not to hear my sobs in the bathroom. It might be asked why I did not dismiss my chauffeur. The answer is simple. I feared that if Brian left Helen would follow. I gave my chauffeur no indications of my feelings. I gave him his orders and he drove me, maintaining as he always had his faceless obsequiousness. I observed nothing different in his behavior, though I did not care to regard him too closely. It is my belief that he never knew that I knew, and this at least gave me the illusion of power over him.
But these are shadowy, peripheral subtleties. Essentially I was a disintegrating man, I was coming apart. I was falling asleep at the telephone. My hair began to loose itself from my scalp. My mouth filled with cankers and my breath had about it the stench of a decaying carcass. I observed my business friends take a step backwards when I spoke. I nurtured a vicious boil in my anus. I was losing. I was beginning to understand the futility of my silent waiting games with Helen. In reality there was no situation between us to play with. All day long she sat in her chair if I was in the house. Sometimes she sat there all night. On many occasions I would have to leave the house early in the morning, leave her sitting in her chair gazing at the figures in the carpet; and when I returned home late at night she would be still there. Heaven knows I wanted to help her. I loved her. But I could do nothing till she helped me. I was locked in the miserable dungeon of my mind and the situation seemed utterly hopeless. Once I was a man hurrying by a shop window and glancing carelessly in, now I was a man with bad breath, boils and cankers. I was coming apart.
In the third week of this nightmare, when there seemed nothing else I could do, I broke the silence. It was all or nothing. Throughout that day I walked in Hyde Park summoning the remaining shreds of my reason, my will power, my suaveness for the confrontation I had decided would take place that evening. I drank a little less than a third of a bottle of Scotch, and toward seven o’clock I tiptoed to her bedroom where she had been lying for the past two days. I knocked softly, then, hearing no reply, entered. She lay fully dressed on the bed, arms by her sides. She wore a pale cotton smock. Her legs were well apart and her head inclined against a pillow. There was barely a gleam of recognition when I stood before her. My heart was pounding wildly and the stench of my breath filled the room like poisonous smoke. “Helen,” I said, and had to stop to clear my throat. “Helen, we can’t go on like this. It’s time we talked.” And then, without giving her a chance to reply, I told her everything. I told her I knew about her affair. I told her about my boil. I knelt at her bedside. “Helen,” I cried, “It’s meant so much to both of us. We must fight to save it.” There was silence. My eyes were closed and I thought I saw my own soul recede from me across a vast black void till it was a pinprick of red light. I looked up, I looked into her eyes and saw there quiet, naked contempt. It was all over, and I conceived in that frenzied instant two savage and related desires. To rape and destroy her. With one sudden sweep of my hand I ripped the smock clean off her body. She had nothing on underneath. Before she had time to even draw breath I was on her, I was in her, rammed deep inside while my right hand closed about her tender white throat. With my life I smothered her face with the pillow.
I came as she died. That much I can say with pride. I know her death was a moment of intense pleasure to her. I heard her shouts through the pillow. I will not bore you with rhapsodies on my own pleasure. It was a transfiguration. And now she lay dead in my arms. It was some minutes before I comprehended the enormity of my deed. My dear, sweet, tender Helen lay dead in my arms, dead and pitifully naked. I fainted. I awoke what seemed many hours later, I saw the corpse and before I had time to turn my head I vomited over it. Like a sleepwalker I drifted into the kitchen, I made straight for the Utrillo and tore it to shreds. I dropped the Rodin forgery into the garbage disposal. Now I was running like a naked madman from room to room destroying whatever I could lay my hands on. I stopped only to finish the Scotch. Vermeer, Blake, Richard Dadd, Paul Nash, Rothke, I tore, trampled, mangled, kicked, spat and urinated on… my precious possessions… oh my precious… I danced, I sang, I laughed… I wept long into the night.