He stamped down the mustard with his feet until there was a space big enough for them both to sit down. On a hillside half a mile away, two horses were grazing.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” he said, watching the horses on the scarred hill. “Someone beat you to it by half an hour.”
“Who?”
“Evelyn.”
“What did she tell you?”
“The straight stuff, I suppose. You had a mentally defective son, and your husband apparently killed himself.”
“Why... why apparently?”
“It was never proved, was it? He could even have been murdered.”
“But there was no one to murder him.”
“Not even you?”
“Why,” she whispered, “why do you say such things to me?”
“They’re what I’m thinking.”
She covered her face with her hands. “Such ugly things. You’ve got no right.”
“The whole business is ugly, including the way you’ve tried to cover up, lie, bribe.”
“I had nothing to cover up. Only my pride.”
“Janet...”
“That first night, the way you looked at me — as if I was a real woman, not just the mother of an idiot, the widow of a suicide. I couldn’t bear to have you find out. But you wouldn’t understand. You’re too hard to feel any pity.”
“Am I?” he said bleakly.
“You have no heart. You must always figure things out, put them into words.”
“They have to be put into words. Janet, why did he kill himself?”
She didn’t raise her head. He pulled her hands gently away from her face so that she couldn’t hide, she had to look at him.
“Why?” he repeated.
“I don’t know. He was tired, I guess. You know that deep and terrible tiredness that carries on day after day as if you’ve never been to bed...”
“Janet! For God’s sake don’t romanticize it. ‘That deep and terrible tiredness’ — that sounds fine, but what in hell does it mean? Come off it. We’re talking about a man now, a real human being. You insult his intelligence, and mine, too, by this pretty violin obbligato about tiredness. Other people get tired. When they do, they yawn, turn off the lights and go to bed. Oh, Christ, what’s the use of talking to you?”
“Don’t talk then, Mark.”
“You’re like all the other romantics, the Shelleyans, the members of the ‘How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep’ school. I don’t care whose brother Death is. I only know it’s something to be avoided as long as possible, not something to dress up fancy and fall in love with, the way you’ve done. It’s an obsession with you, totally unrelated to fact or observation. Now try again, Janet. Why did he kill himself?”
“I told you...”
“Sure. He was tired.”
“You’re so cruel. Why do you want to hurt me?”
“I don’t.” A cruising bee grazed his cheek and he slapped at it impatiently. “I’m trying to save myself.”
“What from?”
“You. The branding iron.”
“I hate it when you talk like that. It’s untrue.”
He looked angry, but in a kind of melancholy way, as if the anger was only a surface substitute for another emotion. “Your memory’s short. Don’t you remember what you said to me this morning — that you’d rather kill me than go away from here and leave me with my family?”
“I didn’t really mean it.”
“Didn’t you? It fits in nicely. You’d like to see me dead. Not a mangled corpse, of course. That might cramp your obsession. But something neatly preserved, like the starfish you fixed for Jessie yesterday. You’d have a whale of a time in Madame Tussaud’s, Janet. All the pretty corpses with wax guts and wax blood.”
An airplane flew overhead, a swift silver fish in the sea of sky.
“I thought you liked me,” she said, incredulous. “I didn’t know you were thinking such terrible things about me. I wouldn’t have come here. I wouldn’t have—” thrown the stone that killed the gander, dead under the eucalyptus tree.
He said with an ugly smile, “Tell me, how did he kill himself?”
“He fell over the cliff.”
“He flung himself over, you mean?”
“I don’t know which. I wasn’t there. How could I know? He just went out one night and didn’t come back.”
“Didn’t you suspect his intention?”
“I... yes. He had tried once before.”
“What did you do about it?”
“Nothing. There wasn’t anything I could do.”
“Maybe you didn’t want to.” He was appalled by his own sadism, but he couldn’t hold the words back. They were a defense, his only defense against the knowledge that he had fallen in love with her. “Tell me, what was your reaction when you found out he was dead? That he was better off, out of this cold cruel world? How many euphemisms occurred to your Shelleyan mind?”
“Stop it,” she cried. “You’ve got no right to mock me like this and pry into my affairs.”
“I have a right to know what happened to your husband and why. You gave it to me by nominating me to take his place.”
“You make everything sound dirty and cheap.”
“I have to. You’ve been gorging yourself on euphemisms so long, you need an emetic. The main trouble with euphemism is that it’s habit-forming. You get so accustomed to disguising things that you lose track of what’s under which disguise.”
“I don’t understand some of the things you’re saying. I only know you hate me... you hate me...”
She flung herself down in the weeds, beating the ground with her fists.
“Janet, stop. You’ll hurt yourself.”
“I don’t care!”
He reached over and held her wrists together. “Stop now. Everything’s all right.”
With a little cry she turned and pressed her mouth against the back of his hand. “Mark — say you didn’t mean any of it.”
“I didn’t mean any of it.”
“I’ve never loved anyone before like this.”
“Don’t talk, darling.”
The wind had risen, and the wild mustard bobbed and curtsied as it passed. In the east, beyond the hill where the two horses were grazing, a bank of clouds had formed.
Her hair, blowing against his cheek, smelled of sun and brine.
“Everything looks beautiful to me now,” she said. “Does it to you, too, Mark?”
“Even the ants?” he said, brushing one from her temple.
“Even the ants. Everything.”
She had taken off her shoes. Her feet were large but perfect, the skin smooth all over, as if it had never felt the pressure of a shoe.
He spanned her ankle with one hand. “You have big feet.”
“Haven’t I though? Swimmer’s feet.”
“You like the water, don’t you?”
“Especially the sea. Do you know, I never saw the sea until I was grown up, and yet, when I saw it for the first time, I felt that I must have been born beside it. I recognized it — isn’t that odd? — I recognized it the way people sometimes recognize a house they lived in when they were children. It was more than recognition, though. I felt a sense of destiny. I remember thinking, here is my fate, here is the explanation, this is where I was born.”
The return of the amphibians, he thought again, the inverse evolution, the slow way to extinction. He said, “You’re a throwback, Janet. A mutation. What does the sea explain to you?”
“Everything,” she said. “Everything but love. The whole hideous and intricate scheme of life and death is in the sea, but not love.”