A silence caught the house. It was the ticking of the middling day of the settling suburban house that drove her mad. But there was this new presence in it with her. It sat back at the table. It sighed and, she could see it well, folded its hands in calm regard. It brushed its good haircut back from its temples and looked modestly unkempt and drowsily wild. It was tired. It was retired. It was going to get up in a minute or two and come get in the tub with her. This development was positively luminescent in its improbability, in its corniness, in its fairy-tale dynamic and melodrama. She had written her husband back into her life, her life back into itself; they maybe had one where before they had not. That this had happened was not, she thought — adjusting some heat into the tub via a hose that would make no sound, so that she could hear her husband move toward her — to be looked hard in the mouth. It was to be ridden. If anything happened, they were to fight or run, according to whether it was time to fight or run. Mrs. Hollingsworth knew all about it. Her husbands cologne came through the door before him.
It was of course the same cologne Forrest had worn and that she had dabbed on many times herself. He got in the tub in the same position as the wounded man. He did not say a word. His legs were out in front of them, like something on exhibit, straight and narrow and suit — pa]e. He shimmied them, setting up a small standing wave of ripples in the tub, and stopped and held his legs still. “I wonder if I can still run,” he said.
Mrs. Hollingsworth put her whole tongue in his ear, like a teenager. “If I can still do that,” she said, “you can still run. Did you really retire?”
“I am as retired as a dog ready for another dog to lie on top of him.”
Startled, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, “Hey! General Forrest said that!"
Her husband said, “I know General Forrest said that. Anybody went to Nathan Bedford Forrest High School knows that.”
“Anybody went” was Ray Oswald. Dogs under dogs was Forrest. The whole thing had been her husband, her apprehensions of fifty or a hundred too-familiar years with her husband, whom she had found again by making him a list, a list of her husband, a meal at last for him. And the man she had taken out of powder-blue oxford cloth and put in red plaid was her husband, wounded and tired on pin legs in her tub.
The best things in the universe are the out-of-mind and the invisible, those sunny caves of ice you forget when you wake up — as Coleridge put it before his hybridity was adjudicated. Mrs. Hollingsworth distrusted the fairy-taleness of all this, but not enough to not believe it. She and her husband had emerged from stupefaction, and she was not going to gainsay it. They were going to get on the horse of this new life, real or not, and ride. They were going to tear the very air with determination to win. They were not going to inspect the cause or weigh their slim chances. “Come in the bedroom, love,” she said to her retired skinny-legged husband. “You be canvas and I’ll be silk. I’ll be a thimble, you be silver. I’ll melt you into the ground. There is no operators manual for my gizmo.”
Her husband stood up and got himself a towel and headed for the bedroom. He had nothing on but that impish look, and he said not a word, a retired judge.