A Reasonable Man
She is waiting for the telephone to ring. It has not rung for at least six days, which is most unusual. Usually there would be a wrong number, or some sort of salesman trying to sell something she has never considered buying or that she did not know existed. In fact, it might be more than six days. At first she may not have been conscious that the phone was not ringing. You don’t notice something being absent for a day or two: a mislaid pen, clouds. It may well not have rung for quite some time.
She tells the man this at dinner, remarking on how unusual it is. The man likes to know exactly why she mentions things because he often cannot follow her. So she is in the habit, now, of mentioning something and commenting on it, explaining why she mentioned it at all. Of course, this is often more trouble than it’s worth, so their dinners are sometimes silent from beginning to end. They are good dinners. She is competent in that area. A home economics major, she fixes dinners that are not only good to eat, but balanced and nutritious. They rarely have colds. They have never had a major illness. Tonight they eat cream of asparagus soup, a salad of beans and pears on chopped lettuce, broiled chicken with mushrooms, a glass of white wine and baked custard.
“For heaven’s sake,” the man says. “It might have rung when you were out getting groceries. If you had been downstairs, it might have rung and you wouldn’t have heard it.” He raises a single green bean to his lips. She smiles at him. He chews swallows and smiles. Everything he says is logical. She follows perfectly. She does not believe that the phone rang when she was out buying groceries, and anyway, she bought groceries three days ago. She was not downstairs today, or yesterday. She frowns. Did she go down there yesterday? He lifts another piece of food to his mouth. He notices that she is frowning. “You see that, don’t you?” he says. Of course. She understands everything the man says.
The phone has not rung for seven days — assuming that it will not ring tonight. In a novel she is very fond of the main character tries to bring on her period by sleeping in white, on fresh bed sheets. She tries to think what she could do to make the phone ring. Perhaps make love to the man. That may be a little difficult, though, because he is still at a meeting and will be tired and hungry when he comes home. She will feed him and then seduce him. Another thing she might try, if this doesn’t work, is showering.
The man comes home. He looks as though he has been in a windstorm. He confirms that it is very windy out. “Look,” he says, pointing her toward the kitchen window. Leaves that they did not rake up during the winter blow across the yard. She is so glad! Usually her procrastination results in nothing good, but there are the leaves, blowing through the air and across the grass, which is already turning green.
“Didn’t you go out today?” the man asks.
“No. I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t have anywhere to go.”
“But you went out yesterday, I presume.”
“Yesterday?” (She is not a good liar.)
He nods again.
“I don’t think I went out yesterday. No.”
He sighs heavily. Seducing him will not be easy.
He brightens a bit at the table when she serves him marinated herring. He likes fish very much. The main course is beef stew, which he also seems to enjoy. They have oranges for dessert, coffee with milk.
“Tomorrow I guess you’ll be going out to do some errands,” he says. “Would you take my gray suit to the cleaners, please?”
“Certainly,” she says. She will tell him that she forgot. That will work for one day. But the day after tomorrow she will have to go to the cleaners. That might not be so bad: the phone might ring tomorrow, and then the next day she would have no reason to wait home because the phone would have rung recently. She smiles.
“Aren’t you going to answer me?” he says.
“I did answer. I said I would.”
He looks at her blankly. His eyes are blank, but his mouth is a little tight.
“I didn’t hear you,” he says, with syrupy graciousness.
She thinks that she, too, might have a hearing problem. After dinner, alone in the kitchen, she puts down the dish-towel and goes to the phone, puts her ear against it. Shouldn’t it hum like the refrigerator when it isn’t ringing? There is always some slight noise, isn’t there? She’s had insomnia in the past and felt as though there were a war going on in the house, it was so noisy. The faint hum of electrical appliances, the glow in the little box in back of the television when it’s not on. There must be something wrong with her hearing, or with the phone.
The next day she goes to the cleaners. There’s a way to make the phone ring! Go out and leave it and surely it will ring in the empty house. She is not as happy as she might be about this, though, for the obvious reason that she will not have the satisfaction of hearing the phone. Driving home, she tries to remember the last phone conversation she had. She can’t. It might have been with her neighbor, or with some salesman … a relative? If she kept a journal, she could check on this. Maybe now is the time to keep a journal. That way she could just flip back through the pages and check on details she has forgotten. She parks the car and goes into a drugstore and buys a blue tablet — actually it is called a theme book — and a special pen to write with: a black fountain pen, and a bottle of ink. She has to go back for the ink. She has never thought things through. At vacation time the man would stand at the front door saying. “Do you have beach shoes? Did you bring our toothbrushes? What about a hat for the sun? I know you brought suntan lotion, but what about Solarcaine?” She would run to her closet, to the bathroom, take down hatboxes, reopen her suitcase. “And Robby’s raft — did you put that in the trunk?” Yes. She always thought a lot about Robby. He always had the correct clothes packed, his favorite toys included, comics to read in the car. She took very good care of Robby. She does not quite understand why he must live with his grandmother. Of all of them, she took the best care of Robby. She does understand why he is with the man’s mother, but she does not like it, or want to accept it. She has been very honest with the man, has told him her feelings about this, and has not been converted to his way of thinking. She never did anything to Robby. He agrees with this. And she does not see why she can’t have him. There they disagree. They disagree, and the man has not made love to her for months — as long as the disagreement has gone on.
She is so frustrated. Filling the pen is harder than she thought — to do it carefully, making sure not to spill the ink or put too much in. And what details, exactly, should she write down? What if she wanted to remember the times she went to the bathroom the day before? Should she include everything? It would take too long. And it would seem silly to write down the times she went to the bathroom. The journal is to make her feel better. What would be the point of flipping back through her journal and seeing things that would embarrass her? There are enough things that embarrass her around the house. All the bowls that the man likes so much are a tiny bit lopsided. He agrees with her there, but says no value should be placed on a perfect bowl. Once he became very excited and told her there was no such thing as perfection — it was all in the eye of the beholder. He went on to talk about molecules; fast, constantly moving molecules that exist in all things. She is afraid of the bowls now, and doesn’t dust them. He wants her to dust them — to take pride in them. He talks and talks about the negative value of “perfection.” He put the word in quotes. This, he explained, was because he, himself, did not think in those terms, but it was a convenient word. He left the note on the door one morning before leaving for work, and she found it when she went into the kitchen. She asked about it. It is established that they can ask about anything. Anything at all. And that the other has to answer. She would like to ask him if he has had the phone disconnected. She can ask, but she is frightened to.