“It’s apparent that I’m on trial,” he said. “Am I entitled to hear the charge?”
“Of course. The charge is the same one that I have made before, although not so bluntly as I’ll make it now. You are charged with being a liar and an adulterer. Is that clear enough?”
“Quite. Can you support the charge?”
“In court? Not in this instance. Not yet. I probably could if I worked at it. Would you like to have me try?”
“I’d like to know exactly what you mean by this instance.”
“Certainly. This instance is a girl named Maggie McCall. She’s a student of yours, I believe. A girl young enough to be your daughter.”
Brad was a fair actor, having had much practice, and he managed a creditable expression of surprise.
“She is a student of mine. A very bad one, I might add, and nothing more. Where on earth did you get the fantastic idea that there was something between us?”
“I was told, and it’s the truth. Don’t lie to me, Brad, for it will do you no good.”
“I suppose, then, that I’m not even going to be allowed to defend myself.”
“You could only defend yourself by lying. It’s no good.”
“In that case, I must ask you what you are going to do and what you expect me to do.”
“What I’m going to do is something I’ll decide. What you do is your business. I don’t care. I no longer care. Do you know what I used to hope? I used to hope that you would lose your hair or your teeth or become crippled and ugly, anything like that, because I thought that then you might be reconciled to me and what I had to give you, that I might be enough for the man you might become. But I don’t suppose it would really have made any difference, or that you could have changed for any reason from what you are and what you have to be. No matter now, because I don’t care. I no longer care. Liar. Cheat. Profligate.”
He retrieved his briefcase and stood up slowly, clutching the case tightly to control the trembling of his hands.
“Thank you very much for your opinion,” he said, angry and embittered and also uneasy.
“It’s not opinion. It’s truth.”
“Then I must leave the house.”
“Not unless you wish. I’ll leave myself in a few days. I’ll go away somewhere. Perhaps to Europe. In the spring I’ll return and sell the house and go away again for good. You are to be out by that time.”
“So it’s all cancelled out. You and me. Our life and my career in this place.”
“Yes. Cancelled out.” Madelaine’s tone was blunt and final.
“I’ve no doubt that you could ruin me completely if you choose.”
“I may choose. I’ll have to decide if the satisfaction would be worth the dirty publicity it would entail.” She stood up and walked without pausing to the library door. “Now I’m going upstairs to my room. I have a sick headache.” She pressed against her eyes with a thumb and finger, holding to the knob of the door and swaying a little on her feet. “I think I’ll take a sedative and go directly to bed. Wanda is leaving early this evening. You’ll have to manage dinner for yourself.”
She was gone then, the door closed behind her. Brad sagged into the chair from which he had risen as if his bones had suddenly dissolved and left him limp. His face was gray and his lips were bloodless. For the first time in his life he looked old. Old and sick.
14
At seven o’clock, Brad went upstairs and tried Madeline’s door. It was not locked, and he pushed it a few inches into darkness and stood listening intently to the sound of deep and languorous breathing.
It seemed to him, standing in the dimly lighted hall at the threshold of the black room, that it was the whole house breathing, not merely Madelaine, the walls swelling and contracting to the rhythm of quiet breath against a quicker and barely perceptible drumming of a giant pulse.
Pushing the door farther into the room, admitting a swath of light from the hall behind him, he stepped into the light and out of it into darkness and made his way silently, after standing still for a moment while the pupils of his eyes adjusted, to the bed where Madelaine lay.
There was a tiny night lamp on her bedside table, and he turned this on with a soft click of the switch, the light fanning out to fashion in the darkness a small perimeter that encompassed the face of the sleeping woman.
Madelaine did not stir. She lay on her back with her hair spread upon the pillow. Her mouth was slightly open. Her breasts rose and fell to the deep and languorous cadence of her breathing and the breathing of the house.
She was heavily sedated, drugged in sleep and defenseless against all device. She would sleep this way for hours, and she had made in the end a fatal error. Having known her husband for what he was, she had failed to understand what he could, when driven, become.
Switching off the night light, Brad turned and left the room, closing the door behind him and standing for a full minute leaning against it in the hall, his own pulse thundering in his heart and head now that a decision had been made.
There had been no decision minutes before, when he had ascended the stairs compulsively. But he had known instantly, standing beside the bed in the dark room behind him, that Madelaine must die for his sake. It was not, he felt, so much a decision which he had made himself in that instant as a decision that had been made long ago without his connivance, and which he must now accept as part of an order of things he could not change.
Pushing away from the door, he went downstairs and into the library, where he dialed a number that rang a bell in the littered little apartment where Maggie lived.
The bell rang three times, bringing no response. He was about to hang up with a feeling of reprieve, the order of things having been changed after all, when suddenly, just after its beginning, the fourth ring was cut off, and Maggie’s voice came on. It had the lazy, mutilated sound that a voice has when it is heard through a yawn.
“Hello.”
“Maggie? This is Brad. Are you alone?”
“Yes. All alone. I was lying and wondering what to do, and I went to sleep. Would you like to see me, darling? Do you want me to meet you?”
“Not tonight. I have a departmental faculty meeting to attend.”
“Couldn’t we meet afterward? I want so much to meet you.”
“No. Not tonight. Listen to me, Maggie. We’re in trouble.”
“Trouble? Did you say trouble? Why are you talking so softly? I can hardly hear you.”
He became aware then that he had been whispering into the mouthpiece, not because it was a necessary precaution in a house that was empty, except for himself and the sleeping Madelaine, but only because he was reacting instinctively to the abortive influence of guilt. This struck him as being a dangerous sign, and he made a conscious effort to speak normally. His voice, however, in spite of the effort, was still conspiratorially low.
“Madelaine knows about me. Someone told her.”
“Knows? Did you say she knows? How could that be, darling, when we’ve been so careful and clever?”
“As I said, someone told her. She had a visitor this afternoon.”
She was silent, the open wire singing softly between them. There was in the singing sound of the wire a kind of incongruous deadliness, like a murderer humming in the midst of his work. She was apparently thinking at the other end of the wire, drawing a conclusion from what he had said. Finally, after almost half a minute, she expressed the conclusion succinctly.
“That God-damn Buddy!” she said.
“Just how much does Buddy know? Have you told him anything?”
“Certainly not. Buddy doesn’t need to be told things. He finds them out by being a sneak and a spy.”