“Yes, but if you don’t eat anything it’s not expensive. It’s just the food that costs. I met some people I knew and we talked, they were going to a party and invited me and I went along. We were watching the news about the riots on TV and no one wanted to get out, so the party just went on and on. That’s about all, a lot of people stayed overnight and so did I.” She slipped off her dress and hung it up, then put on wool slacks and a heavy sweater.
“Is that all you did, just spend the night?”
“Andy, you’re tired. Why don’t you get some sleep? We can talk about this some other time.”
“I want to talk about it now.”
“Please, there’s nothing more to be said…”
“Yes there is. Whose apartment was it?”
“No one you know. He’s not a friend of Mike’s, just someone I used to see at parties.”
“He?” The silence stretched tight, until Andy’s question snapped it. “Did you spend the night with him?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Of course I want to know. What do you think I’m asking you for? You slept with him, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
The calmness of her voice, the suddenness of her answer stopped him, as though he had asked the question hoping to get another answer. He groped for the words to express what he felt and, finally, all he could ask was “Why?”
“Why?” This single word opened her lips and spilled out the cold anger. “Why? What other choice did I have? I had dinner and drinks and I had to pay for it. What else do I have to pay with?”
“Stop it, Shirl, you’re being…”
“I’m being what? Truthful? Would you let me stay here if I didn’t sleep with you?”
“That’s different!”
“Is it?” She began to tremble. “Andy, I hope it is, it should be — but I just don’t know any more. I want us to be happy, I don’t know why we fight. That’s not what I want. But things seem to be going so wrong. If you were here, if I was with you more…”
“We settled that the other night. I have my work — what else can I do?”
“Nothing else, I suppose, nothing…” She clasped her fingers together to stop their shaking. “Go to sleep now, you need the rest.”
She went into the other room and he did not stir until the door clicked shut. He started to follow her, then stopped and sat on the edge of the bed. What could he say to her? Slowly he pulled off his shoes and, fully dressed, stretched out and pulled the blanket over him.
Tired and exhausted as he was, he did not fall asleep for a very long time.
4
Since most people don’t like to get up while it is still dark, the morning line for the water ration was always the shortest of the day. Yet there were still enough people about when Shirl hurried to get a place in line so that no one ever bothered her. By the time she had her water the sun would be up and the streets were a good deal safer. Besides that, she and Mrs. Miles had fallen into the habit of meeting every day, whoever came first saved a place in line, and walking back together. Mrs. Miles always had the little boy with her who still seemed to be ill with the kwash. Apparently her husband needed the protein-rich peanut butter more than the child did. The water ration had been increased. This was so welcome that Shirl tried not to notice how much harder it was to carry, and how her back hurt when she climbed the stairs. There was even enough water now to wash with. The water points were supposed to open again by mid-November at the very latest, and that wasn’t too far away. This morning, like most of the other mornings, Shirl was back before eight and when she came into the apartment she saw that Andy was dressed and just ready to leave.
“Talk to him, Shirl,” Andy said. “Convince him that he is being a chunkhead. It must be senility.” He kissed her good-by before he went out. It had been three weeks since the fight and on the surface things were the same as before, but underneath something had changed, some of the feeling of security — or perhaps love — had been eroded away. They did not talk about it.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, peeling off the outer layers of clothing that swaddled her. Andy stopped in the doorway.
“Ask Sol, I’m sure he’ll be happy to tell you in great detail. But when he’s all through remember one thing. He’s wrong.”
“Every man to his own opinion,” Sol said placidly, rubbing the grease from an ancient can of dubbing onto an even more ancient pair of Army boots.
“Opinion nothing,” Andy said. “You’re just asking for trouble. I’ll see you tonight, Shirl. If it’s as quiet as yesterday I shouldn’t be too late.” He closed the door and she locked it behind him.
“What on earth is he talking about?” Shirl asked, warming her hands over the brick of seacoal smoldering in the stove. It was raw and cold out, and the wind rattled the window in its frame.
“He’s talking about protest,” Sol said, admiring the buffed, blackened toe of the boot. “Or maybe better he’s talking against protest. You heard about the Emergency Bill? It’s been schmeared all over TV for the last week.”
“Is that the one they call the Baby-killer Bill?”
“They?” Sol shouted, scrubbing angrily at the boot. “Who are they? A bunch of bums, that’s who. People with their minds in the Middle Ages and their feet in a rut. In other words — bums.”
“But, Sol — you can’t force people to practice something they don’t believe in. A lot of them still think that it has something to do with killing babies.”
“So they think wrong. Am I to blame because the world is full of fatheads? You know well enough that birth control has nothing to do with killing babies. In fact it saves them. Which is the bigger crime — letting kids die of disease and starvation or seeing that the unwanted ones don’t get born in the first place?”
“Putting it that way sounds different. But aren’t you forgetting about natural law? Isn’t birth control a violation of that?”
“Darling, the history of medicine is the history of the violation of natural law. The Church — and that includes the Protestant as well as the Catholic — tried to stop the use of anesthetics because it was natural law for a woman to have pain while giving birth. And it was natural law for people to die of sickness. And natural law that the body not be cut open and repaired. There was even a guy named Bruno that got burned at the stake because he didn’t believe in absolute truth and natural laws like these.
“That’s too simple, Sol. Things aren’t really that black and white…”
“Oh yes they are, no one wants to admit it, that’s all. Look, we live in a lousy world today and our troubles come from only one reason. Too goddamn many people. Now, how come that for ninety-nine per cent of the time that people have been on this earth we never had any overpopulation problems?”
“I don’ know — I never thought about it.”
“You’re not the only one. The reason — aside from wars and floods and earthquakes, unimportant things like that — was that everybody was sick like dogs. A lot of babies died, a lot of kids died, and everybody else died young. A coolie in China living on nothing but polished rice used to die of old age before he was thirty. I heard that on TV last night, and I believe it. And one of the Senators read from a hornbook, that’s a schoolbook they used to have for kids back in colonial America, that said something like ‘be kind to your little sister or brother, he won’t be with you very long’. They bred like flies and died like flies. Infant mortality — boy! And not so long ago, I tell you. In 1949 after I got out of the Army, I was in Mexico. Babies there die from more diseases than you or I ever heard of. They never baptize the kids until after they are a year old because most of them are dead by that time and baptisms cost a lot of money. That’s why there never used to be a population problem. The whole world used to be one big Mexico, breeding and dying and just about staying even.”
“Then — what changed?”
