The moment she heard Luke come in the door, she could tell that he was in a bad mood. Not that he slammed things or shouted or showed other signs of restrained violence. Luke’s bad moods didn’t work that way. They caused him to become guarded and withdrawn, a measure of the terrible desperation that made it imperative to erect defenses against the insight that would have acknowledged his essential failure. His failure was only the more merciless for being unexpected. In college, years ago, he had been handsome and charming and athletic, his prospects favorable. Since then, he had suffered a series of failures, always charged to bad luck, and now he sold real estate on commission for an agency that was not his own. It had become apparent that he lacked the ability to match his hopes, and he even lacked the knack of exploiting mediocrity. In fact, he was, or had been, an unintentional lie. In all innocence, he had deceived himself and Ella and all his friends. Of these, only he was still deceived.
“Darling, is that you?” she called, knowing very well that it was.
“Yes,” he answered, knowing that she knew.
He did not come directly into the kitchen, as he usually did, but went instead into their bedroom. Setting the table, two places in a house where even children had proved beyond the husband’s capacity, she could hear him moving around on the other side of the wall, and pretty soon she heard water running into the lavatory in the bathroom. The imperative thing, she thought, was somehow to prevent the encroachment of his mood upon hers. The fragile and shimmering spell of the evening must not be shattered for any reason whatever. She had a blind conviction that it could, if only it survived this threat, be sustained forever. She walked through the living room to their bedroom, and found him standing in the middle of the floor buttoning the cuffs of his shirt.
“Such a lovely evening!” she said.
“Is it?” He walked away from her, toward the dresser, without turning. “I hadn’t noticed. I had a bad day.”
“I’m sorry.”
She did not ask him what had been bad about his day. She didn’t want to know, felt a desperate need to avoid hearing it, but she knew immediately, with a first faint feeling of despair and hopelessness, that he was, unasked, going to tell her.
“I missed that sale I was working on,” he said. “I’m beginning to wonder if I’m not wasting my time with real estate. Maybe I ought to try something else.”
“Never mind,” she said. “Tomorrow will be better.”
He didn’t answer, and she saw, the terrible threat to her evening growing darker and more oppressive, that he was staring at the music box on the dresser.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s a music box,” she said. “When you open it, it begins to play, and a little ballerina comes up and dances to the music.”
“Where did you get it?”
“At a shop I passed on my way home. It was in the window.”
“How much did it cost?”
She was tempted to lie, to make her extravagance seem a little less flagrant than it was. But then, before the lie could be told, she understood that evasion was impossible, and that somehow everything must be saved or lost on this issue.
“Ten dollars,” she said. And added, as if impelled to make worse what was already bad enough, “It was almost all the money I had.”
For a moment he did not move or speak. Then, still silent, he reached out and picked up the music box. There was in his movement an awful restraint, a sign that he was exercising the last measure of control, and the effect was to give it a quality of slow-motion and a stark clarity of detail. He raised the lid, and the ballerina arose upon her toes, but the mechanism had run down, and she stood poised and waiting in an absence of sound and motion. Luke’s thumb and index finger, big and brutal and incredibly ugly, began to twist the key. The tiny bells began to ring, the ballerina began to pirouette. He twisted and twisted and kept on twisting…
* * * *
His name was Hadley. He had come, in response to her call, with two other men. For quite a long time they had remained in the kitchen, and she, sitting quietly on the edge of her bed with her feet primly together and her hands folded in her lap, could hear their movements and the low murmur of their voices. Now, at last, Hadley had come into the bedroom, which had grown dark as the light outside was drawn away by the sun, and he was sitting, after turning on a small bedside lamp, on the edge of a chair just outside the pale perimeter that the lamp cast. His hands were restless, and his voice was troubled.
“I don’t quite understand,” he said. “Please tell me again what happened.”
She stirred and sighed and lifted her eyes to the overcast of shadows below the ceiling.
“He broke my music box,” she said. “He was angry because I spent my last ten dollars for it, and he picked it up and wound it and wound it, and the spring broke inside, and it couldn’t play anymore. It will never play again.”
She was silent, hearing again the dying whimper of
