This is ridiculous,thought Ivor Balmi.
“Get out,” he said to her. She jerked her head up as though stabbed with an electrically charged wire. Her grey eyes were filled with ash, and the youthful look of her face aged in an instant. Old, old, old as Ninevah and Babylon; old as the first woman who had ever been sent away. Old, that old, very old, terror-old.
“Ivor …” she said.
“I don’t want it. I don’t want it at all,” he cried. His face was falling back into those lines they had held when first she had met him. He was independent, lonely Ivor Balmi; she saw him slip away as she watched.
“Go back to your daughter, lady. Go back and tell her what a bastard I am. That way you can both nurse the same images, you’ll cleave together, have something to belong to: The Society of Ivor Balmi Haters. Go on. Beat it, I don’t want all this feeling and needing and being one with one. That’s too much responsibility for me, it’s too much worry, too much anguish every day, caring what happens to someone else. I don’t want it. You’re making me fight, you’re throwing me into the struggle in the streets. I have to paint now.… I have to be good … I have to succeed … I don’t need it … let mealone …!”
“You’ve started painting with meaning, Ivor; what you do now has quality, it’s good …” she argued.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s good and that’s bad. I was content before. I did it, it was stinking, and I knew it. I didn’t have to struggle. Now it’s too much … too much … get out!”
But she would not go. So he forced her to go.
He used those subtle instruments of torture known only to men and women who have lived with each other for a time. Those weapons of word and inflection and facial expression that cut so much deeper than knives. He used them, and he used them ruthlessly for this was his survival he fought to retain, slashing at her, calling her names he tasted like salt as he spoke them.
“Stop playing with me, Meg’s mother,” he ordered. “You came here to play at love, and now you’ve had your game, so get out of my life. I don’t need you, or what you want, or what you offer.
“Lady bug, lady bug, fly away home,” he said, “your children are hippies, your house is on fire.”
And when the heavy fire door on the first floor had slammed behind her with a metallic clang, Ivor Balmi went to the window and stared out at the street.
The grey patina of dust and city soot that covered the glass lent everything a ghostly pallor.
The city had died once more. A cadaver stretched out at his feet, beginning to smell bad, as it once had, now that all the spring flowers were ash.
Once more he was alone. He needed to be alone. It was the only way he could live. Secure. Untroubled. He was whole once more, settled into a life that promised the security of poverty, mediocrity, loneliness. There were no surprises, but there were also no threats. It was — a life.
He stood staring at nothing for a long while, then went into the kitchen and found a bread knife, rusting on the sideboard. Fortunately, he was able to slash every painting in the loft, even while crying.