He was not a man to dissuade confidences even when he had no patience to listen to them or knew in advance, as he thought he did now, exactly what secrets awaited him.
Marjorie informed him, in a voice that belied itself with irony, of being neglected by her husband, of the lonliness and humiliation attendant on such neglect. She talked of herself as if she were the orphaned heroine of a novel of unremitting banality. Her story, though in itself heart-rending, refused sympathy and so moved him by its reticence, touched him by failing to touch him.
He kept his distance, was not about to make love to his employer’s wife, a rawedged, tight-nerved woman who publicly modelled her dissatisfaction.
“It sounds as if you’ve been treated badly,” he said.
“Like most people, I got what I bargained for, don’t you think?”
The question requested denial and he said that he thought most people got worse than they deserved. He said he wondered why she had trusted him, a man she barely knew, with such personal news.
She was telling him, she said, because there was no one else to tell and he had a sympathetic face — those blue eyes — and he was a writer whose work she admired. She had once read a novel of his that spoke to her.
“What novel was it?” he asked, opening his attention to her.
It was his first, she said, withholding the title, or the first that was published in the United Kingdom. It was she, in fact, on the basis of that book, who had brought him to Max’s attention and so had been midwife to what had turned into an extended collaboration.
“Then he does respect your opinion,” Terman pointed out. “You can’t have it both ways.”
“Max used to listen to me quite a bit,” she said, turning to look at something, some flash of movement, real or imagined, at the other side of the stream. “He’s not the same person he was. You’ve seen it yourself, haven’t you?”
“What I hear you saying, Marjorie, is that you think Max has got someone else.” Terman had the momentary notion that his son was watching him from the deep brush on the other side of the stream. The notion was unsustaining, fled like shadows from a light.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” she was saying. “When you confront him with the news he denies everything, treats you like an escaped loony. He denies everything.”
Her bitterness tortured her face. He wanted to ask her what had moved her in his book, though waited for a more appropriate time for his question. He had difficulty separating his own interests from the disinterest of listener.
“Every woman who’s ever entered our house he’s managed to bed down one way or another,” she said.
“You’re exaggerating, I think.”
“Everyone,” she insisted, aware of the implication for Terman, a mad thin smile invading her stoic’s mouth. “I have evidence,” she added mysteriously. “What do you think Sylvie and I were talking about when you watched us from the window?”
Her assertion evoked a passionate denial. “Marjorie, why should I watch you from the window?”
She laughed, a temporary distraction from abiding discontent. “I was joking,” she said. “Didn’t you look even a little? I was hoping you’d look.”
He said he regretted the missed opportunity, feeling the regret as he announced it. It was odd how language sometimes created a reality in its wake.
“I forced a confession out of Sylvie,” Marjorie said. “She denied it at first absolutely and categorically and I simply said, Sylvie you don’t have to lie to me, I’m fully aware of what’s going on. She kept to her story until she saw that I wasn’t buying a word of it, then she admitted that she’d been sleeping with my husband on and off for three years. I was horrified. You’re a friend of mine, I said to her, how could you possibly do something like that? Max wouldn’t let me alone, she said. Then she cried and asked me to forgive her.”
They came to a stile. “This is where our property ends,” she said.
“How do you know there were others?” Terman asked.
“You’ll find out about it soon enough,” she said. “When Max wants something — I know this from having lived with him for fourteen years — he’ll stop at literally nothing to get what he wants.”
Her discontent seemed contagious.
“He can’t help himself,” she said in his defense. “He’s addicted to having absolutely everything he wants.”
“If what you say is true, why do you stay with him?” It struck him, listening to himself, that his question couldn’t have been more predictable and banal had she written his lines for him.
“I really don’t see how I can continue living with him,” she said in a world-weary voice. “Yet of course one goes on, one must.”
“We ought to be getting back,” he said. (He didn’t say that; it was what, not quite listening to the next stage of her confidence, he had wanted to say.) It was before or after she had turned her ankle by stepping on a rock or distended root and found herself unable to walk. She sat on the grass forlornly, alternatly squeezing and stroking the injured ankle to assuage the pain. Terman offered his hand, suggested she walk lightly on the ankle rather that let it stiffen up.
“Don’t you see,” she said with sudden vehemence, “that this film your working on will never get made.”
He was leaning over her, offering his hand, a crazed sky overhead. “I don’t believe you,” he said, though it was not disbelief he was talking about, not that so much as his disinclination to share her pain.
“It’s gone on too long,” she said. “You know what I’m talking about.”
When he withdrew his hand, she asked if he was planning to leave her there.
“Why don’t you try to get up?”
“Why don’t you go and get some help? I’m not going to be able to walk.”
“You want me to go or you don’t?”
“I’m putting myself in your hands,” she said.
Terman squatted next to her, the posture precarious. “Let me look at the ankle,” he said. It was swollen slightly and would swell more. He didn’t know what he was looking for, what significances, and was aggrieved at the ankle for being in complicity with its owner. “You can lean your weight on me,” he said. “We can get back to the house that way.” It was beginning to rain delicately.
“I think I’m too big for you,” she said. “Do you know how much I weigh?”
“It’s a matter of public record,” he said.
Marjorie, who was almost his height, got to her feet with his help, balancing herself on her good ankle. For some reason, they found themselves in an embrace.
She moaned twice for each step they took, asked again and again if she were too heavy for him until the weight of the question were almost as heavy a burden as the woman herself. He was surprised at how leaden she felt, at the deadness of her weight.
The rain was a fine mist, a veil of grief. Walking with her in the drizzle, holding her up, her arm clamped around his neck, he sensed that someone was watching them through the sights of a gun.
Just on the other side of the stile, at the place where the pond reentered view, he lost his balance. She dug her nails into his chest as they fell.
She apologized for her weight.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “The grass was slick and my feet gave out.”
“You’re not attracted to me,” she said, “are you?” She disentangled herself, her teeth clenched against impending pain. “There’s no pleasure in our contact, is there?”
In pain himself, Terman had difficulty focusing on Marjorie’s complaint. “You’re an attractive woman, Marjorie,” he said.
“That ought to hold the old bitch a while,” she said. “Who the hell do you think you are?” She squeezed the neck of her ankle, punished and encouraged it.
His hip hurt but he was able to stand up without difficulty. He stretched the muscles of his legs, first the right then the left, then the right again. When he stretched the right leg, and only at a certain point, he could feel the stinging pains in his hip.