In the downpour of the glass and the wax and the roar Catherine walked across the room, up the steps and out the front door, as though through a blizzard of arrows and jungle and fever.
Because there always existed at the bottom of Maddy’s cynicism the cynic’s usual sense of failure, she was all the less prepared to accept the devastating failure of her marriage: it seemed too sudden and battling, and she hadn’t seen the early signs—which perhaps justified her sense of failure after all. When Llewellyn took Catherine out the front door that night, once again Maddy sat on the edge of the bed upstairs with her hands in her lap, looking out the window and wondering what to do. Slowly she removed a suitcase from the closet and opened it on the bed; she began to fill it up. By the time she had carried the process as far as Jane’s room, however, where the scenario would have her gather the child in her arms along with a favored toy or two, she had balked, reminding herself, I’m not really going to do this. Not really.
She had a glimmer of an idea, which was to go to Llewellyn’s study and read the script in progress; and for the moment she balked at this transgression too. Instead she put lane back to bed and went to bed herself. She seemed to toss endlessly, and thought, I’m fooling myself if I think I’ll sleep tonight. So it was a shock for her to wake, sometime early in the morning around three, and find she must have slept after all, since her husband was passed out on the bed next to her and she had no idea how he’d gotten there. He smelled of liquor. He also looked bruised and cut, and what instantly and inevitably flashed through Maddy’s mind was a scene in which the bruises and cuts were received at Catherine’s hands, never mind everything leading up to it. Downstairs, in the part of the house with the housekeeper’s room, things were quiet.
Thus transgressions now seemed appropriate. Maddy got up from her bed, put on her robe and went to the study. She slid open the door and went to the desk with the typewriter and several yellow pads of paper. She turned on the small desk lamp; there wasn’t a sound in the house. She opened up the folder in which her husband kept his script, except that there was no script. Instead she found a thin collection of fifty or sixty poems, and by the time she had read a few, she understood they all had the same subject: she could recognize her immediately, the hair the color of night and the rage to match, and her mouth the color of blood. Her eyes, he wrote, had the opaque rushing depthlessness of the blind, like the color of white skies and seas meeting at some point in the distance. They were poems about a face that was ignorant of its own image, and a man whose cognizance of that image divided his life in two. She closed the folder and shut off the light on the desk and thought to herself, The surprise is that I’m surprised.
Several times the next morning, as she lay in bed in a stupor of despair, she heard the phone ring and go on ringing many times before it stopped. About nine-thirty she looked over and Llewellyn wasn’t there, and the phone was ringing again. When she got to the top of the stairs lane was playing with her toys; she looked up at her mother in confusion. At the bottom of the stairs she saw Lew, not in the study where she’d expected to find him, but sitting in the living room staring, as he had before, at the spots of blood on the carpet. The phone had not stopped, and Maddy picked it up. On the other end was Eileen Rader, who began speaking before Maddy had gotten out a word. “Listen to me, Maddy,” Eileen said. She sounded very cold. “Lee’s fortunate I’m not calling the police after last night. A couple of other guests still may, and why Larry Crow doesn’t I don’t know, unless Lee’s got something he wants. Whatever is going on in your house is none of my business, but how it affects Lee’s work is. When Lee’s ready to face things, I want to talk to him, and it had better be soon if he’s still interested in a career.”
“Police?” said Maddy. Eileen hung up.
Maddy walked into the living room and looked at her husband. “Lew,” she said quietly, “we have to talk now.”
“I have this poem in my head,” he whispered. “Not the last poem but the poem after the last poem: I keep trying to find it. I keep writing closer to it, because I know when I get there I’ll be at the point of no return. If it means losing the house, if it means losing my family, if it means losing everything, I’m going to find this poem.”
“Lew,” said Maddy, “we have only one more chance before it’s too late.”
He nodded. He got up from the chair, he walked toward her and then past her, out the front door. She went over to the chair where he’d been and sat down in it. While she contemplated the blood on
