“Get to the point, you want to shout. Put a lid on your dime-store philosophy and get to the point. But instead you just lie there and wait for him to go on.
“‘Dell, I can’t live here anymore.’
“‘Why not?’
“‘Because we used to have something,’ he says, ‘and now it’s gone.’
“‘Not for me it isn’t,’ you say, hating yourself for saying it, for needing to say it. ‘For me it’s still the same.’
“‘Dell, I’m going to move out.’
“‘When?’
“‘Now, if you want.’
“‘That’s crazy,’ you say. ‘It’s the middle of the night. You don’t want to leave now.’
“‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind—’
“‘Of course I don’t mind.’
“‘First thing in the morning, then.’
“So he takes off his clothes and comes to bed. And he lies on his side of the bed and you lie on your side, and you wish you could just fall asleep but of course you can’t. And you wish you could stay on your own side of the bed but you can’t do that either.
“So you curl up beside him. He can’t sleep either, and you know what to do, how to touch him, and you get the response you want. He’s unwilling at first. As if he’s cheating her by being with you. But you know what you’re doing and he can’t help himself.
“And while it’s going on, all you can think is that it’s the last time, the last time.
“Afterward, he falls asleep. You try to sleep, and you can’t, and after a while you give up trying. You get up and walk around the room, and then you come back and sit on the edge of the bed while your mind just spins like a top.”
“He woke up. I still sat there, looking out the window, in the other room. He got out of bed and went into the bathroom and ran the water for his shower. I thought, This is probably the last time I’ll ever hear him take a shower. And hit his chest, like he does. And snort, like he does, to clear the water out of his nostrils.
“I thought, What a funny thing to think, at a time like this. Or is it? Maybe it’s the right thing to think at a time like this.
“He got dressed, and he came to the bedroom door a minute and looked in at me, before he was quite through, while he was measuring off the two sides of his necktie.
“‘I won’t come back tonight,’ he said. ‘I won’t come back anymore. I’ll send for my things instead, some time during the day.’ And then he added, as though he were asking my permission, ‘Okay?’
“‘Okay,’ I said. I still sat there.
“He said, ‘You act more dead than alive.’
“I said dully, ‘You would too.’
“He finished finally, and came out, set to go.
“I said, ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this, Vick?’
“‘Come on now,’ he said reproachfully.
“It was the funniest parting I ever heard of.
“He said, ‘What about money? You better tell me now.’
“‘That isn’t what I want,’ I said. ‘I can always get that. That’s the easiest thing to get there is.’
“He went out and closed the door after him.
“I still sat there.
“He came out of the building doorway down below on the street, and turned around and looked up at the window. He saw me looking down at him.
“He lifted his hat, tipped it way up high in parting salute to me. Then he stepped into a taxi the doorman had whistled up for him. The taxi drove off and my marriage was over.
“I never knew before what an insult it could be, how much it could hurt, how needling it could feel, to have your own husband exaggeratedly tip his hat to you like that.
“There was a bottle of goof pills in the medicine cabinet. I took them down. Then I brought a glass of water over. I sat down and kept switching from one to the other, until both were gone. The water tasted strange, but that was because I wasn’t used to drinking water straight.
“I no sooner did it than I came to my senses with a bang. I yelled at myself. What am I doing this for? Why should I make it even easier on him than it is already? I’m gonna live! I’m gonna live so that I can get hunk with him, get square with him, screw him up but good! And I grabbed up the phone and hollered into it, ‘Judas, Joseph, and Mary! Somebody send me a stomach pump up here quick, for the love of Pete!’”
“I met him on the street one day. It wasn’t planned, it was quite by accident. It was the sort of thing happens to two people maybe once in ten years in a town the size of New York.
“He looked at me and recognized me. Of course he recognized me, why shouldn’t he? I saw that he wasn’t going to stop, so I did instead, and that more or less forced him to stop against his will.
“He looked good and happy, and that didn’t make me feel good and happy.
“He said Well?
“I said Well?
“Then he said So?
“I said So?
“No great soundtrack of a conversation up to that point. But there were a thousand unspoken words in it. Hope and indifference and mockery and entreaty.
“Finally he said, ‘There’s no use standing here like this. We haven’t anything to say to each other.’
“I said, ‘If you think I’m going to give you up without a fight, you better think twice.’
“‘You already have,’ he said. ‘It’s over and done with. There’s nothing you can do about it.’ And he started to walk
“‘Isn’t there?’ I called after him. ‘Isn’t there? Watch. Watch and see.’ But he never even turned around again.
“That brought the thing to a head. That got it going, that brush-off on the street. Love ended there. There wasn’t any more love, only hate from then on. Hate, and figuring out how to hurt him.
“I worked on it, steady. While I earned my feed singing, I worked on it. While other men made love to me, I kept working on it. I worked on it in the morning, and I worked on it in the afternoon, and I worked on it at night.
“Finally, I thought I had a way figured to frame him, pin something on him he didn’t do. The details don’t matter now anymore. But I needed some help. So I turned to this friend I had, who still had connections from the old days, even though he’d gone legit a long time ago, the way most of the smart ones have.
“To my surprise, he wouldn’t have any part of it, and he talked me out of it and advised me to drop it. Those things always backfire, he said. They’re never foolproof. You’ll be the one to get hurt, Dell, not him. Let the guy go. Don’t keep trying to get him back. He made a clean break of it. Let it stay that way. Leave him alone.
“That was the man’s point of view, not the woman’s. And I was wise to his little personal angle too; he was in love with me himself, and Vick had been too much competition for him. He’d had to take a backseat the whole time I was married to Vick. No wonder he liked it better this way, Vick safely out of the way.
“Well, I gave that particular project up as unfeasible, but I didn’t quit for a minute. If he thought I’d quit trying, he didn’t know me.
“Since I couldn’t get at him himself, I decided maybe I could get at him through her. In fact the more I thought of it, the more I liked it. I decided this was the better way of the two. Do something to him, and he still had her to love him. Do something to her, and he didn’t have anyone to love him. That hurt the more of the two ways.
“She had religion of a sort, more or less. I had ways of finding out things. I found out she always went to early morning mass on Sundays. Seven o’clock mass. He never went, and she never went herself any other time the week around. She always went to this same little neighborhood church, and to get to it she had to pass through this deserted side street. On early Sunday mornings it was practically dead, not a soul around. There was a new development going up, and the old buildings that were still standing had all been vacated and boarded up. I saw that for myself. You know how they do, whitewash X’s marking the windowpanes. Then where the new construction was already well advanced, there was this long plank scaffolding to protect the sidewalk. Like they always put up, in case anything should fall from above. Walking along under it was almost like going through a long tunnel, it was so dim and walled in. And on Sunday morning no workmen would be around. She would be boxed in there, unable to advance, unable to retreat, if anyone caught her fairly in the middle of that confined place.