surface. You’re less tense—inside.”
He looked at her, astonished. It was true; he had not known it, had not admitted it to himself. He wondered at her power of observation.
She had seen little of him in these last few months. He had not entered her bedroom since his return from Colorado. He had thought that she would welcome their isolation from each other. Now he wondered what motive could have made her so sensitive to a change in him—unless it was a feeling much greater than he had ever suspected her of experiencing.
“I was not aware of it,” he said.
“It’s quite becoming, dear—and astonishing, since you’ve been having such a terribly difficult time.”
He wondered whether this was intended as a question. She paused, as if waiting for an answer, but she did not press it and went on gaily: “I know you’re having all sorts of trouble at the mills—and then the political situation is getting to be ominous, isn’t it? If they pass those laws they’re talking about, it will hit you pretty hard, won’t it?”
“Yes. It will. But that is a subject which is of no interest to you, Lillian, is it?”
“Oh, but it is!” She raised her head and looked straight at him; her eyes had the blank, veiled look he had seen before, a look of deliberate mystery and of confidence in his inability to solve it. “It is of great interest to me... though not because of any possible financial losses,” she added softly.
He wondered, for the first time, whether her spite, her sarcasm, the cowardly manner of delivering insults under the protection of a smile, were not the opposite of what he had always taken them to be—not a method of torture, but a twisted form of despair, not a desire to make him suffer, but a confession of her own pain, a defense for the pride of an unloved wife, a secret plea—so that the subtle, the hinted, the evasive in her manner, the thing begging to be understood, was not the open malice, but the hidden love. He thought of it, aghast. It made his guilt greater than he had ever contemplated.
“If we’re talking politics, Henry, I had an amusing thought. The side you represent—what is that slogan you all use so much, the motto you’re supposed to stand for? ‘The sanctity of contract’—is that it?”
She saw his swift glance, the intentness of his eyes, the first response of something she had struck, and she laughed aloud.
“Go on,” he said; his voice was low; it had the sound of a threat.
“Darling, what for?—since you understood me quite well.”
“What was it you intended to say?” His voice was harshly precise and without any color of feeling.
“Do you really wish to bring me to the humiliation of complaining?
It’s so trite and such a common complaint—although I did think I had a husband who prides himself on being different from lesser men. Do you want me to remind you that you once swore to make my happiness the aim of your life? And that you can’t really say in all honesty whether I’m happy or unhappy, because you haven’t even inquired whether I exist?”
He felt them as a physical pain—all the things that came tearing at him impossibly together. Her words were a plea, he thought—and he felt the dark, hot flow of guilt. He felt pity—the cold ugliness of pity without affection. He felt a dim anger, like a voice he tried to choke, a voice crying in revulsion: Why should I deal with her rotten, twisted lying?—why should I accept torture for the sake of pity?—why is it I who should have to take the hopeless burden of trying to spare a feeling she won’t admit, a feeling I can’t know or understand or try to guess?—if she loves me, why doesn’t the damn coward say so and let us both face it in the open? He heard another, louder voice, saying evenly: Don’t switch the blame to her, that’s the oldest trick of all cowards—you’re guilty—no matter what she does, it’s nothing compared to your guilt—she’s right—it makes you sick, doesn’t it, to know it’s she who’s right?—let it make you sick, you damn adulterer—it’s she who’s right!
“What would make you happy, Lillian?” he asked. His voice was toneless.
She smiled, leaning back in her chair, relaxing; she had been watching his face intently.
“Oh, dear!” she said, as in bored amusement. “That’s the shyster question. The loophole. The escape clause.”
She got up, letting her arms fall with a shrug, stretching her body in a limp, graceful gesture of helplessness.
“What would make me happy, Henry? That is what you ought to tell me. That is what you should have discovered for me. I don’t know. You were to create it and offer it to me. That was your trust, your obligation, your responsibility. But you won’t be the first man to default on that promise. It’s the easiest of all debts to repudiate. Oh, you’d never welsh on a payment for a load of iron ore delivered to you. Only on a life.”
She was moving casually across the room, the green-yellow folds of her skirt coiling in long waves about her, “I know that claims of this kind are impractical,” she said. “I have no mortgage on you, no collateral, no guns, no chains. I have no hold on you at all, Henry—nothing but your honor.”
He stood looking at her as if it took all of his effort to keep his eyes directed at her face, to keep seeing her, to endure the sight. “What do you want?” he asked.
“Darling, there are so many things you could guess by yourself, if you really wished to know what I want. For instance, if you have been avoiding me so blatantly for months, wouldn’t I want to know the reason?”
“I have been very busy.”
She shrugged. “A wife expects to be the first concern of her husband’s existence. I didn’t know that when you swore to forsake all others, it didn’t include blast furnaces.”
She came closer and, with an amused smile that seemed to mock them both, she slipped her arms around him.
It was the swift, instinctive, ferocious gesture of a young bridegroom at the unrequested contact of a whore—the gesture with which he tore her arms off his body and threw her aside.
He stood, paralyzed, shocked by the brutality of his own reaction.
She was staring at him, her face naked in bewilderment, with no mystery, no pretense or protection; whatever calculations she had made, this was a thing she had not expected.
“I’m sorry, Lillian...” he said, his voice low, a voice of sincerity and of suffering.
She did not answer.
“I’m sorry... It’s just that I’m very tired,” he added, his voice lifeless; he was broken by the triple lie, one part of which was a disloyalty he could not bear to face; it was not the disloyalty to Lillian.
She gave a brief chuckle. “Well, if that’s the effect your work has on you, I may come to approve of it. Do forgive me, I was merely trying to do my duty. I thought that you were a sensualist who’d never rise above the instincts of an animal in the gutter. I’m not one of those bitches who belong in it.” She was snapping the words dryly, absently, without thinking. Her mind was on a question mark, racing over every possible answer.
It was her last sentence that made him face her suddenly, face her simply, directly, not as one on the defensive any longer. “Lillian, what purpose do you live for?” he asked.
“What a crude question! No enlightened person would ever ask it.”
“Well, what is it that enlightened people do with their lives?”
“Perhaps they do not attempt to do anything. That is their enlightenment.”
“What do they do with their time?”
“They certainly don’t spend it on manufacturing plumbing pipes.”
“Tell me, why do you keep making those cracks? I know that you feel contempt for the plumbing pipes. You’ve made that clear long ago.
Your contempt means nothing to me. Why keep repeating it?”
He wondered why this hit her; he did not know in what manner, but he knew that it did. He wondered why he felt with absolute certainty that that had been the right thing to say.
She asked, her voice dry, “What’s the purpose of the sudden questionnaire?”
He answered simply, “I’d like to know whether there’s anything that you really want. If there is, I’d like to give it to you, if I can.”
“You’d like to buy it? That’s all you know—paying for things. You get off easily, don’t you? No, it’s not as simple as that. What I want is non-material.”
“What is it?”
“You.”
“How do you mean that, Lillian? You don’t mean it in the gutter sense.”
