room.
The woman appears, alarm etching transient scars on her forehead. Her husband is beyond himself. Her husband is shooting poison through his arteries. Her husband is releasing another cloud of animal temper. It is mist that clings. It hangs over the furniture, drips from the walls.
It is alive.
So through the days and nights. His anger falling like frenzied axe blows in his house, on everything he owns. Sprays of teeth-grinding hysteria clouding his windows and falling to his floors. Oceans of wild, uncontrolled hate flooding through every room of his house; filling each iota of space with a shifting, throbbing life.
He lay on his back and stared at the sun-mottled ceiling.
The last day, he told himself. The phrase had been creeping in and out of his brain since he’d awakened.
In the bathroom he could hear the water running. He could hear the medicine cabinet being opened and then closed again. He could hear the sound of her slippers shuffling on the tile floor.
Sally, he thought, don’t leave me.
“I’ll take it easy if you stay,” he promised the air in a whisper.
But he knew he couldn’t take it easy. That was too hard. It was easier to fly off the handle, easier to scream and rant and attack.
He turned on his side and stared out into the hall at the bathroom door. He could see the line of light under the door. Sally is in there, he thought. Sally, my wife, whom I married many years ago when I was young and full of hope.
He closed his eyes suddenly and clenched his fists. It came on him again. The sickness that prevailed with more violence every time he contracted it. The sickness of despair, of lost ambition. It ruined everything. It cast a vapour of bitterness over all his comings and goings. It jaded appetite, ruined sleep, destroyed affection.
“Perhaps if we’d had children,” he muttered and knew before he said it that it wasn’t the answer.
Children. How happy they would be watching their wretched father sinking deeper into his pit of introspective fever each day.
All right, tortured his mind, let’s have the facts. He gritted his teeth and tried to make his mind a blank. But, like a dull-eyed idiot, his mind repeated the words that he muttered often in his sleep through restless, tossing nights.
I’m forty years old. I teach English at Fort College. Once I had hoped to be a writer. I thought this would be a fine place to write. I would teach class part of the day and write with the rest of my time. I met Sally at school and married her. I thought everything would be just fine. I thought success was inevitable. Eighteen years ago.
How, he thought, did you mark the passing of almost two decades? The time seemed a shapeless lump of failing efforts, of nights spent in anguish; of the secret, the answer, the revelation always being withheld from him. Dangled overhead like cheese swinging in a maddening arc over the head of a berserk rat.
And resentment creeping. Days spent watching Sally buy food and clothing and pay rent with his meagre salary. Watching her buy new curtains or new chair covers and feeling a stab of pain every time because he was that much farther removed from the point where he could devote his time to writing. Every penny she spent he felt like a blow at his aspirations.
He forced himself to think that way. He forced himself to believe that it was only the time he needed to do good writing.
But once a furious student had yelled at him, “You’re just a third-rate talent hiding behind a desk!”
He remembered that. Oh, God, how he remembered that moment. Remembered the cold sickness that had convulsed him when those words hit his brain. Recalled the trembling and the shaky unreason of his voice.
He had failed the student for the semester despite good marks. There had been a great to-do about it. The student’s father had come to the school. They had all gone before Dr. Ramsay, the head of the English Department.
He remembered that too; the scene could crowd out all other memories. Him, sitting on one side of the conference table, facing the irate father and son. Dr. Ramsay stroking his beard until he thought he’d hurl something at him. Dr. Ramsay had said—well let’s see if we can’t straighten out this matter.
They had consulted the record book and found the student was right. Dr. Ramsay had looked up at him in great surprise. Well, I can’t see what… he had said and let his syrupy voice break off and looked probingly at him, waiting for an explanation.
And the explanation had been hopeless, a jumbled and pointless affair. Irresponsible attitude, he had said, flaunting of unpardonable behavior; morally a failure. And Dr. Ramsay, his thick neck getting red, telling him in no uncertain terms that morals were not subject to the grading system at Fort College.
There was more but he’d forgotten it. He’d made an effort to forget it. But he couldn’t forget that it would be years before he made a professorship. Ramsay would hold it back. And his salary would go on being insufficient and bills would mount and he would never get his writing done.
He regained the present to find himself clutching the sheets with taut fingers. He found himself glaring in hate at the bathroom door. Go on!—his mind snapped vindictively—Go home to your precious mother. See if I care. Why just a trial separation? Make it permanent. Give me some peace. Maybe I can do some writing then.
The phrase made him sick. It had no meaning anymore. Like a word that is repeated until it becomes gibberish that sentence, for him, had been used to extinction. It sounded silly; like some bit of cliche from a soap opera. Hero saying in dramatic tones— Now, by God, maybe I can do some writing. Senseless.
For a moment, though, he wondered if it was true. Now that she was leaving could he forget about her and really get some work done? Quit his job? Go somewhere and hole up in a cheap furnished room and write?
You have $123.89 in the bank, his mind informed him. He pretended it was the only thing that kept him from it. But, far back in his mind, he wondered if he could write anywhere. Often the question threw itself at him when he was least expecting it. You have four hours every morning, the statement would rise like a menacing wraith. You have time to write many thousands of words. Why don’t you?
And the answer was always lost in a tangle of because and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws.
The bathroom door opened and she came out, dressed in her good red suit.
For no reason at all, it seemed, he suddenly realized that she’d been wearing that same outfit for more than three years and never a new one. The realization angered him even more. He closed his eyes and hoped she wasn’t looking at him. I hate her, he thought. I hate her because she has destroyed my life.
He heard the rustle of her skirt as she sat at the dressing table and pulled out a drawer. He kept his eyes shut and listened to the Venetian blinds tap lightly against the window frame as morning breeze touched them. He could smell her perfume floating lightly on the air.
And he tried to think of the house empty all the time. He tried to think of coming home from class and not finding Sally there waiting for him. The idea seemed, somehow, impossible. And that angered him. Yes, he thought, she’s gotten to me. She’s worked on me until I am so dependent of her for really unessential things that I suffer under the delusion that I cannot do without her.
He turned suddenly on the mattress and looked at her.
“So, you’re really going,” he said in a cold voice.
She turned briefly and looked at him. There was no anger on her face. She looked tired… “Yes,” she said. “I’m going.”
Good riddance. The words tried to pass his lips. He cut them off.
“I suppose you have your reasons,” he said.
Her shoulders twitched a moment in what he took for a shrug of weary amusement.
“I have no intention of arguing with you,” he said. “Your life is your own.”
“Thank you,” she murmured.
She’s waiting for apologies, he thought. Waiting to be told that he didn’t hate her as he’d said. That he hadn’t struck
“And just how long is this
