Gordon was running hot water over a box of strawberries. He knew it would happen like this. Auden had said so. After her first few words he seemed not to hear what she said. He had always known that this was the way it would come.
He answered, “I see” and “Of course I understand” and “I see” several more times. He kept his hand between the hot and the cold. Preserving the colourful wrapper intact assumed great importance.
Then suddenly she was leaving him. His life was changing right now.
“I want to live by myself for a little while.”
“A little while?”
“I don’t know how long.”
“In other words it could be a very long time.”
“Perhaps.”
“In other words you have no intention of returning.”
“I don’t know, Gordon. Can’t you see I don’t know?”
“You don’t know but you have a pretty good idea.”
“Gordon, stop. You won’t get anything out of me like that. You never have.”
At this point it occurred to Shell that when she had begun to speak to him she had not intended to leave but to give him a last chance.
“Stay here.”
He turned off the tap, pushed the box with deliberation into a corner of the sink as though it were a chessman, and wiped his hands. It was an ugly voice he used. The words were less than a plea and more than a proposition.
“Stay. Don’t break up our marriage over this.”
“Is it so little?”
“Women have affairs,” he said without philosophy.
“I was with a man,” she said incredulously.
“I know.” And the softer: “It’s not the end of the world.”
But she wanted it to be the end of the world. She wanted a mark on the forehead to prove the union was rotten. That he was fighting for his life was difficult for her to perceive. She interpreted his speech as part of his daily affront. Now he wanted to formalize the disaster.
“I won’t interfere. I won’t ask you questions.”
“No.”
He thought she was bargaining.
“You’ll get it out of your system. You’ll see, we’ll weather this.”
“No!”
He never understood to what she was shouting “No.”
Even men of limited imagination can sometimes imagine the worst. So he could not have been really surprised to see her packing one day, or to hear themselves discussing who would take what bureau, what candle-mould, or to find himself on the telephone making arrangements with movers to save Shell the trouble. For years now he had known he didn’t deserve her; it was a matter of time. Now it was happening and he had already imagined his gentlemanly role.
Shell visited her parents in Hartford. They still lived in the big white house, just the two of them. Officially they regretted the separation and hoped she’d soon return to her husband and her senses. But she had a long talk with her father as they walked over the property. The leaves were drained of green but they had not yet turned bright. She was surprised how easily she was able to talk to him.
“He had no right,” was all he said about Gordon, but it was a handsome old man speaking, who had lived out some kind of man’s life, and it fortified her.
He let her talk, inviting it with his silence and the paths he chose. When she was through he spoke about the first growth of some trees he had planted.
She could not help feeling that her mother regarded the breakup as a sinister triumph of heredity, like haemophilia in a royal child that had seemed too healthy.
Shell was lucky to be able to rent a small apartment on 23rd Street. She didn’t want to get too far from the Village. Except for a tiny kitchen, bathroom, and vestibule, she lived in one room. She stood the tall clock beside the entrance to the main room. She painted the walls lavender and threw lavender translucent draperies over the windows, which seemed to etherize the light, make it thin, and perfume the air with cool colour.
It was not her home in the same way her body was not her own. She merely lived in them. She watched herself move among the pretty things. She didn’t believe that she was the proper woman to have such a good career job, or to leave a husband or to entertain a lover. It horrified her.
She would not see Med again, of course, and one afternoon in the cafeteria she told him why. She was not created for a minor adventure. Their interview was interrupted by a young man whose curious declaration moved her unreasonably.
Breavman thought about her all the time but he experienced no lust for her. This was new. He thought about her presence with no longing. She was alive, her beauty existed, she was pulling on her gloves or pushing back her hair or staring at a movie with her huge eyes. He did not want to tear down the theatre in his fantasy and rescue her from the dark fiction. She was there. She was in the city, or some city, some train, some castle or office. He knew their bodies would move together. That was the least of it.
He didn’t think of himself as a lover. He knew they would lie mouth to mouth, happier, safer, wilder than ever before. One of the comforts of her merely being was that he need make no plans.
Once or twice he told himself that he ought to find her, ask people. It wasn’t necessary. He was willing to enter into homage whether he saw her again or not. Like a Wordsworthian hero, he did not wish her his.
He didn’t even remember her face too perfectly. He hadn’t studied it closely. He had lowered his head and dug his pen into napkin poems. She was what he expected, was always expecting. It was like coming home at
