“What a shame! It would be nice in the morning if you had no place to go. Then we could talk and do other things and have a wonderful time.”
“Listen, Cornelia. You must listen to me. The time has come to discuss reasonably what we are going to do.”
“Do?” Her lids parted slightly, and he thought he could see, watching her intently, a quickened awareness under the shadow of lashes. “Is there something we have to do?”
“It should be apparent that something must be done. About you and me, I mean. Obviously we can’t go on like this indefinitely.”
“Has something happened that I don’t know about? Has someone learned about us and begun talking?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. Not yet. But it’s something that will certainly happen sooner or later.”
“I don’t care. I don’t give a damn,” she murmured in sleepy irritation.
“Don’t talk like that. It’s irresponsible. Of course you care, and so do I. We both stand to lose too much from a scandal. We could hardly survive it in our positions.”
“We’ll be very careful, darling. Haven’t I always been careful? Have I ever been the least bit reckless?”
“We’re being a bit reckless right now, it seems to me,” he stated.
“Yes, I suppose we are. I didn’t realize that it frightened you, however.”
“I’m not frightened. I’m only trying to be realistic.”
“Darling, you’re concerned over nothing. I’m sure of it. Everything will be all right until summer, at least, when the term is over. Then we can decide how to arrange matters most easily and quietly so that it won’t matter any longer what anyone sees or says or thinks about us.”
She was watching him now as intently as he was watching her. The light of the lamp seemed to gather and glitter in the pupils of her eyes, giving her a sly and calculating look. He reacted inwardly to the clear implication of her words with such horror and anger that he was in danger, for a moment, of being sick to his stomach. He was conscious at the same time of having developed suddenly a tic in his left eyelid. This, because it was absurd, had the effect of increasing his anger and complicating his effort to control himself.
“What in God’s name are you talking about?” he said. “I don’t understand you at all.”
“I’m talking about us and what we must do. Isn’t that what you wanted? I agree that we can’t go on like this indefinitely, although I don’t agree that there is an immediate urgency to change. Summer will be early enough. We had better get positions in another college for the fall, I think. It would be much better all around. You can get a divorce in the summer, or let Madelaine get one, and everything should be settled without difficulty by September.”
He was stunned by the extent and particulars of her planning. He had never dreamed that she had made such gross assumptions, or that she would be willing to make such fantastic commitments. He had completely misjudged her, and the consequences were beginning to look disagreeable.
Standing, he walked away from the bed and the light into the shadows of the room. Turning, he watched her from a distance.
“Jesus,” he said. “You’ve got it all worked out beautifully, haven’t you.”
Her eyes widened at the harshness of his voice. She sat up slowly in the bed, leaning back against the headboard and peering to see his face clearly in the shadows.
“You sound angry,” she said. “Have I said something to displease you? It’s only that I think we should wait for a time to settle things when it can be done quietly.”
“What in God’s name, I’d like to know, ever gave you the idea that I wanted to settle things that way at all?”
“What other way is there? You said yourself that something must be done.”
“So there must. We must simply quit meeting like this. Here or any place.”
She apparently had not heard him or could not understand him, for she continued to probe the shadows for his face with only the slightest expression of anxiety, as if she were waiting for the laugh or word or sign that would give away his brutal joke.
“What did you say?” she said. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“Oh, come off, Cornelia.” He tried to achieve a quality of lightness that would secure a reasonable response. “You know very well that there has never been any suggestion of permanence between us. We were two reasonably intelligent adults who knew what we wanted, and we’ve had it, and now it’s time to quit. It will be better for both of us if we do, and better now than later.”
However he may have expected her to react to this, it was certainly not as she did. Her face was older all at once, and she was apparently incited not so much to anger as to shame. An ugly flush suffused her flesh, and she reached down with one hand to pull up a sheet and cover her nakedness.
“You’ve tricked me,” she said. “You’ve told me lies.”
“No. I never tricked you. I never lied to you.”
“You deliberately let me believe what wasn’t true. That’s as bad or worse.”
“I thought we understood each other. I’m sorry if we didn’t.”
“And I thought you loved me. I had every right to think so.”
“You had no such right. I never said so.”
“Never said so? Did you say you never said so? Oh, God, that’s quite amusing. That’s really very amusing. I must merely have assumed it. Yes, that’s surely what I did. Forgive me, please, for assuming that you loved me, even though you never said so. I must have been confused by the way you acted. I assumed from the way you acted that you loved me. Isn’t that what they call what we have just done? Making love, I mean?”
She began to laugh softly, with desperate intensity, and he realized with apprehension that she had reached, almost instantly, the edge of hysteria. This was another reaction he had not expected, and he stood helplessly, wondering what to do, until she stopped laughing after a few moments as suddenly as she had begun, staring at him with a strangely abstracted expression, as though she could not remember what had amused her so. Then she began to scream.
Fortunately, it was more of a wail, a softer cry of anguish, and after his initial frozen terror at the possible consequences if she were heard outside or in another room, he leaped to the bed and gathered her into his arms and smothered the wail against his chest.
She was shaking violently. Her body was cold. To quiet her and to dispel the present threat that she was, he began to tell the lies that he had denied telling. She clung to him, her fingers like talons fixed in his back, and he thought with despair that he would have to try again in another place at another time, and that now, very soon, there would be no escaping another dreary pretense of passion that was, as she had charged, the greatest lie of all.
7
Couchant on the floor, belly down and her chin cupped in her hands, Maggie was watching television. On her face was a small frown of the most intense concentration — two vertical lines running parallel between her brows and her short nose. Her lips moved silently, forming the shapes of words, and she appeared to be repeating the words that were coming miraculously through her set all the way from Kansas City, and this was, in fact, exactly what she was doing.
Repeating things in this way was a habit of hers that gave her some sort of secret satisfaction. It was often disconcerting to people when they first became aware of it and were unused to it.
Lying there on the floor where she had been for twenty full minutes since seven o’clock, fixed and utterly still except for the slight movement of her lips and the barely perceptible movement of her breasts in breathing, she was so absorbed in what she heard and saw that she was even unaware of being a little cold because of being completely naked.