by Edna O'Brien
“I must go,” Eleanor said, and looked at him as if there were some means of becoming invisible and staying.
“So must I,” his wife said, and it was apparent that she wanted them to go together, to have a chinwag perhaps. Eleanor touched the counterpane beneath where his feet were and left hurriedly, as if she were walking on springs instead of high-heeled patent shoes. No chinwag, no nothing with this self-claimed seer. Yet something in her wanted to tell it, to have it known there and then, to have each person speak their mind. She ran down the stairs, crossed the road, and stood trembling in the porchway of the pub, dividing her glance between the darkness of the hospital doorway and the welcoming soft pink light inside the pub itself. When she saw the woman, the wife, emerge in a black coat with a little travel bag, she felt momentarily sorry for her, felt her defeat or perhaps her intuition in the way she walked down the street. She watched her and thought that if they had been at school together or were not tom between the same unfortunate man, they might have some crumb of friendship to toss at one another.
Back at his bedside making the most of the two minutes the sister had allowed her, she looked at him and said, “Well.”
“What did you think?” he said.
“She talks a lot,” she said.
“Now you see,” he said, and then he held her and she knew that there was something that she did not see, something that existed but was hidden from her. Some betrayal that would one day come out.
“I am not jealous,” she said.
“How could you be?” he said, and they sobbed and kissed and rocked back and forth, as if they were in their own room.
“I would like you to have a baby,” he said.
“I’ll have twins,” she said.
“My wife says if it was anyone but you.”
“But me,” she said, and she could feel herself boiling.
His wife had gone on a short holiday in order to recoup her strength so that they could finalize the marriage. Eleanor had flown over to see him and was staying in a hotel a few miles from where he lived.
“She won’t let me see the children,” he said.
“That’s what everyone says, that’s standard.”
“I had to lie about your key.”
“How did she find it?”
“In my pocket,” he said, then asked if he should demonstrate it.
“No,” she said, “don’t.”
The question escaped out of her: “Do you sleep together?”
“Once …” he said. “I thought it was honorable.”
“Don’t,” she said.
“It’s a big bed, it’s almost as big as this room.”
Although she meant to hold her tears at all costs, they accrued, dropped onto the toasted sandwich and into the champagne that he had bought her and onto the orange-colored napkin. They were like rain softening the paper napkin. He squeezed her hand and led her back to the hotel room; there he undressed her, washed her, powdered her, and put her to dry in a big towel, then told her he loved her, that he would always love her, and she lay inside the towel listening to the crows cawing, then the rain pelting off the roof, and the old trees with their old branches groaning, then the spatters against the windowpane, and she thought of the daffodils getting soaked as he clasped her through the warm towel and begged of her to let him in, always to let him in. Later that evening when she caught the plane back he simply said, “Soon, soon.” All through the journey, talking to a juggernaut who sat next to her, she kept thinking, Soon, and yet there was one little niggle that bothered her, his saying that he would have to tax the car next day, because his wife liked everything to be kept in order.
The night his wife returned he phoned her from a booth and said he was never in all his life so incensed. He said he had no idea what he might do next. She did not know it then but he had a black eye caused by a punch from a ringed finger, and wounds around the thighs where he was ridiculed for being a cunt. She said he ought to leave at once, but he was too drunk to understand. The next day when he phoned he said everything was going to be more protracted but that he would phone when he could, and that she was to be well, be well. He was with her within twenty-four hours, sitting on the swivel chair, pale, bruised, and so disheveled that she realized he had known more ordeal in a day than in the sum of his life. He kissed her, asked her to please, please, never pull his hair by the roots, because he minded that more than anything. They made love, and on and off throughout the day and in his short sleeps he kept threshing about and muttering things. He dreamed of a dog, a dog at their gate lodge, and when he told her she felt inadequate. She would have to replace wife, children, animals, a sixteen-room house, the garden, cloches, the river, and the countryside with its ranges of blue-black mountains. As if he guessed her thoughts, he said sadly that he owned nothing, and the little stone he once gave her would be the only gift he could afford for a while. The theater design was complete, but no other offen of work loomed. That was the other thing that galled. He had busied himself in craven domesticity and let his work slide. He had beggared himself.
He would telephone her when he was out and say he was on his way “home, so to speak.” He was seeing various friends and, though she did not know it, getting communiqués from his wife to come back, to come back. The evening he broke it to her, he first asked if she had seen a rainbow in the sky and described how he saw it when standing in a bus shelter. Then he coughed and said, “I rang my wife,” and she gulped.
“My wife isn’t like you, she never cries, but she cried, she sounded ill, very ill,” he said.
“She’s a maneuvering liar,” she said.
“I have to be there,” he said.
“Go now,” she said, not wanting the ritual of a wake, and in fact he bad forestalled her in that, because his wife was flying at the very moment and they had arranged to meet in a friend’s house, empty, as it happened.
Then followed their first dirty quarrel, because he had told her so many hideous things that his wife had said about her, so many outrageous untruths.
“She’s mad,” she said. “It’s a madhouse.”
“I’ll tell you what a madhouse it is,” he said, and proceeded to describe how as a farewell barter his wife had induced him to make love to her and was now in the process of looking for an abortionist.
“You mean you did,” she said.
“In the morning I’m always, a man is always …”
“You went in.”
“I didn’t ejaculate.”
“She stinks.”
“It stinks,” he said, and as he left she clung to his sleeve, which must have been clung to a few mornings earlier, and she saw his hair so soft, so jet, his eyes bright hazel and overalive, and then she let go without as much as a murmur.
“I’ll always love you,” he said.
She walked with him in imagination up the road, to the house where his wife waited, to their embrace, or their quarrel, or their whatever, and all night she kept vigil, expecting one or the other of them to come back to her, to consult her, to include her, to console her, but no one came.
The Sunday he was due to arrive back, she went into the country, both to escape the dread of waiting and to pick flowers. She picked the loveliest wildflowers, put them all around the house, then put the side of salmon in a copper pan, peeled cucumber, sliced it thin as wafers, proceeded to make a sauce, and was whipping, stopping every other minute for the sound of the telephone, when in fact the doorbell rang. He was in a sweat, carrying a bag of hers that he had once borrowed. Yes, his wife had insisted on coming with him and was in the friend’s house a mile away, making the same threats about writs, about custody, about children, about his whoring. They drank and kissed and ate dinner, and it was the very same as in the first wayward weeks when he kept kneeling by her, asking for special favors, telling her how much more he loved her. Around midnight he said he had no intention of going back to the house where his wife was, and falling half asleep and still engaged in the t
angle of love, he thanked her from the bottom of his heart and said this was only the beginning. Next day when he telephoned, his wife demanded to see him within the hour, but he decided not to go, said, “Let it stew.”
They were invited by friends of Eleanor’s to the country, and he chose what she should wear, he himself having only the clothes that were on his back, his suitcase being in his wife’s possession. It was a beautiful house and he had some trepidation about going.
“Look, black swans,” she said, pointing to the artificial lake as they drove up to the avenue and stepped out onto the very white gravel, her shoes making a grating sound. The butler took their bags, and straightaway, with their hostess, they set out for a walk. The lawn was scattered with duck droppings and swan droppings and fallen acacia petals. It was a soft misty day, and the black swans were as coordinated and elegant as if they were performing a pageant. It was perfect A few last acacia flowers still clung to the bushes and made a little show of pink. In the grotto one of the guests was identifying the hundreds of varieties of rock there. Had they stayed outside they could have watched a plane go by. He loved planes, and for some reason to do with portent, she kept count of them for him. When she entered the dark and caught him by surprise, their two faces rubbed together and their breaths met That night in a different bed, a four-poster, they made love differently, and he told her as he tore at the beautiful lingerie that she had bought for the occasion that never had he loved her so much as earlier in the dark grotto, with her big eyes and her winged nose looming over him. The tom silk garments fell away from her and she felt at last that they had truly met, they had truly come into their own.
He went back, but in his own time. Each night when he phoned he said there was no question now of their losing each other, because he was recovering his self-esteem. Then he returned sooner than she expected, in fact unannounced. She was hemming curtains, lovely cream lace curtains that she had bought with him in mind. They went to the kitchen and he said yes, that his wife had come again and was making the same contradictory threats, one minute telling him to get out, the next minute begging him to stay, showing him her scarred stomach, scars incurred from all her operations. He was wearing a striped seersucker jacket, and it was the first time that she saw him as his wife’s property, dressed expensively but brashly. He was restless, and without knowing it, she kept waiting for the crisis.
“I can’t phone you in the future,” he said.
“You can,” she said, coaxing him.
“They listen at the exchange,” he said.
“I insist,” she said, and began in jest to hit him. All of a sudden he told her how he had thrown his wife out of a room the night before and how he realized he wanted to kill her.
“And?” she said.
“She came back to say she was bleeding from the inner ear.”
“And?” she said.
“Good, I said.”
There was a dreadful silence. They sat down to eat a bit of bread and cheese, but the jesting was over. Next day he went to inquire about work, and when he came home in the evening, everything was friendly but something needed to be said. He was going to be incommunicado, he said, thus making it impossible for his wife to find him. Next night they went to a party and she made certain not to ding to him, not to make him feel hemmed in. Yet they had to rush to the little cloakroom to kiss. He lifted her dress and touched her lingeringly, and she said wasn’t he the philanderer, then. On the way home she expressed the wish to be in Paris, so they could have breakfast and dawdle all day. What she really wished was not Paris but a place where they could be free. It was a midsummer night, and they decided to go into the square and sit under a tree where the pigeons were mildly cogitating. He gave her a borough council rose and said would she keep it forever, even when it crumpled. He said there was no doubt about it but that she was psychic, that his wife, who always wore girdles, was now buying the same panties as her. He had seen them in a case—white, brown, and cream, with the maker’s name and little borders of lace. She asked a question. He said no, there had not been a reunion, but that he went into the bedroom to get his book from the bedside table and there they were on the top of the opened suitcase.
“I would like to be there, just once, invisible,” she said.
He shook his head and said all she would see would be himself at a table trying to draw something, his wife in her cashmere dressing gown, coming in, snatching it out of his hand, saying, “You cunt, don’t forget that, you louse,” then going on about her worth, her intelligence, the sacrifice she had made for him, leaving the room to down another glass of wine, coming back to start all over again with fresh reinforcements, to get into her stride.
“Are you hiding something, Jay?” she said.
“Only that I love you passionately,” he said, and together they held the rose, which was dark red and vibrant as blood.
A few days later he was remote, refused to eat or drink, and was always just short of frowning when she entered the room. He sat and watched cricket on television, and sometimes would get up and mime the movement of the batsman, or would point to one of the fielders who were running and say how miraculous it was. A few times he went upstairs to kiss her, kisses of reassurance, but each time when she commenced to talk, he was gone again. Young love, outings to the country, a holiday, all those things seemed improbable, a figment. They were too racked by everything. She was glad that there was a guest for dinner, because he became his old self again, warm and friendly; then he sang and in the course of singing put one lock of her hair behind his ear, which made him look like a girl. They met each other’s glance and smiled and it was all like before. The friend said no two people were so well matched and they drank to it. In bed he tossed and turned, said it would have been better if he stayed in a hotel, so as not to disturb her sleep, said all in all he was a very spoiled person and that he would have to get a steady job. He said he had to admit that his wife was now nothing, no one, although he had dreamed of her the previous night, and that he was hoping that she would go far away and, like a Santa Claus, send back some of her money. Yes, it was like that. All his past life was over, finished; then he doubled over with pain and she massaged him gently, but it gave no relief; he said the pain went right through to the fillings of his teeth.
“You have something to tell me?” she asked.
“Yes.” He said it so quietly that the whole room was taut with expectation. The room where eight months previously she had heard the unfathomable death knocks, the room to which they climbed at all hours, drinking one another in, the room where the sun coming through the gauze curtains played on the brass rungs of the bed and seemed to reveal and scatter imaginary petals, the room where he gave her one drop of his precious blood instead of a gold wedding ring. What he had to tell her was that he was giving it all up, her, his wife, his family, his beautiful house, the huge spider’s web that he had got himself into. For a moment she panicked. He once told her that he would like to go to a hotel room and write to the people concerned—herself, his children, his wife—and, as he implied, put an end to himself. She thought not that, not that, no matter what, and for a second rehearsed a conciliatory conversation with his wife where they would both do everything to help him. He could not be allowed to.
“I’ll leave here tomorrow,” he said.
“Where will you go?” she asked.
“I’ll go home to say goodbye.” And in those few words she knew that he would go home not to say goodbye but to say “Hello, I’m back.” She prayed that by the morrow he would change his mind and feel less conclusive about things.
I am not dead, she thought, and clutched at objects as if they could assure her of the fact. Then she did rash things, went outdoors, but had to be indoors at once, and barely inside was she than suffocation strangled her again, and yet out in the street the concrete slabs were marshy and the spiked railings threatening to brain her. It was the very same finality as if someone had died and she could see, without look
ing, his returned latchkey, its yellow-green metal reflected in the co-green of her ring stone. The ring she had taken off the previous night in order for her fingers to be completely at one with his fingers. It was not long after that he said it, and it seemed to her that she must have precipitated it in some mysterious way, and that maybe she had made him feel lacking in something and that it need never have happened, but that it had happened and he had suddenly announced that there was no room for her in his life, that she was not someone he wished to spend his life with, that it was over. Instantly she was off the cliff again. The night and the morning were getting crushed together: the night, when he told her, and the morning, when he had packed every stitch while she was having a shower and had his bag down in the hall and was whistling like a merry traveler.
