'What is it?' Donna asked.
Her voice was dull, almost defeated. The two of them were sitting in the living room. Vic had not gotten home until nearly Tad's bedtime, and that was now half an hour past. He was sleeping in his room upstairs, the Monster Words tacked by his bed, the closet door firmly shut.
Vic got up and crossed to the window, which now looked out only on darkness. She knows, he thought glumly. Not the fine tuning, maybe, but she's getting a pretty clear picture. All the way home he had tried to decide if he should confront her with it, lance the boil, try living with the laudable pus ... or if he should just deep-six it.
After leaving Deering Oaks he had torn the letter up, and on his way home up 302 he had fed the scraps out the window. Litterbug Trenton, he thought. And now the choice had been taken out of his
hands. He could see her pale reflection in the dark glass, her face a white circle in yellow lamplight.
He turned toward her, having absolutely no idea what he was going to say.
He knows, Donna was thinking.
It was not a new thought, not by now, because the last three hours had been the longest three of her whole life. She had heard the knowledge in his voice when he called to say he would he home late. At first there had been panic - the raw, fluttering panic of a bird trapped in a garage. The thought had been in italics followed by comic-book exclamation points: He knows! He knows! He KNOWS!! She had gotten Tad his supper in a fog of fear, trying to see what might logically happen next, but she was unable. I'll wash the dishes next, she thought. Then dry them. Then put them away.
Then read Tad some stories. Then I'll just sail off the edge of the world.
Panic had been superseded by guilt. Terror had followed the guilt.
Then a kind of fatalistic apathy had settled in as certain emotional circuits quietly shut themselves down. The apathy was even tinged by a certain relief. The secret was out. She wondered if Steve had done it, or if Vic had guessed on his own. She rather thought it had been Steve, but it didn't really matter. There was also relief that Tad was in bed, safely asleep. But she wondered what sort of morning he would wake up to. And that thought brought her full circle to her original panicky fear again. She felt sick, lost.
He turned toward her from the window and said, 'I got a letter today. An unsigned letter.'
He couldn't finish. He crossed the room again, restlessly, and she found herself thinking what a handsome man he was, and that it was too bad he was going gray so early. It looked good on some young men, but on Vic it was just going to make him look
prematurely old and - and what was she thinking about his hair for? It wasn't his hair she had to worry about, was it?
Very softly, still hearing the shake in her voice, she said everything that was salient, spitting it out like some horrible medicine too bitter to swallow. 'Steve Kemp. The man who refinished your desk in the den. Five times. Never in our bed, Vic. Never.'
Vic put out his hand for the pack of Winstons on the endtable by the sofa and knocked it onto the floor. He picked it up, got one out, and lit it. His hands were shaking badly. They weren't looking at each other. That's bad, Donna thought. We should be looking at each other. But she couldn't be the one to start. She was scared and ashamed. He was only scared.
'Why?'
'Does it matter?'
'It matters to me. It means a lot. Unless you want to cut loose. If you do, I guess it doesn't matter. I'm mad as hell, Donna. I'm trying not to let that ... that part get on top, because if we never talk straight again, we have to do it now. Do you want to cut loose?'
'Look at me, Vic.'
With a great effort, he did. Maybe he was as mad as he said he was, but she could see only species of miserable fright. Suddenly, like the thud of a boxing glove on her mouth, she saw how close to the edge of everything he was. The agency was tottering, that was bad enough, and now, on top of that, like a grisly dessert following a putrid main course, his marriage was tottering too. She felt a rush of warmth for him, for this man she had sometimes hated and had, for the last three hours, at least, feared. A kind of epiphany filled her. Most of all, she hoped he would always think he had been as mad as hell, and not... not the way his face said he felt.
'I don't want to cut loose,' she said. 'I love you. These last few weeks I think I've just found that out again.'
He looked relieved for a moment. He went back to the window, then returned to the couch. He dropped down there and looked at her.
'Why, then?'
The epiphany was lost in low-key, exasperated anger. Why, it was a man's question. Its origin lay far down in whatever the concept of masculinity was in an intelligent late-twentieth-century Western man. I have to know why you did it. As if she were a car with a stuck needle valve that had caused the machine to start hitching and sputtering or a robot that had gotten its servotapes scrambled so that it was serving meatloaf in the morning and scrambled eggs for dinner. What drove women crazy, she thought suddenly, wasn't really sexism at all, maybe. It was this mad, masculine quest for efficiency.
'I don't know if I can explain. I'm afraid it will sound stupid and petty and trivial.'
'Try. Was it. . .'He cleared his throat, seemed to mentally spit on his hands (that cursed efficiency thing again) and then fairly wrenched the thing out. 'Haven't I been satisfying you? Was that it?'
'No,' she said.
'Then what?' he said helplessly. 'For Christ's sake, what?'
Okay ... you asked for it.
'Fear,' she said. 'Mostly, I think it was fear.'
'Fear?'
'When Tad went to school, there was nothing to keep me from being afraid. Tad was like. . what do they call it? ... white noise.
The sound the TV makes when it isn't tuned to a station that comes in.'
'He wasn't in real school,' Vic said quickly, and she knew he was getting ready to be angry, getting ready to accuse her of trying to lay it off on Tad, and once he was angry things would come out between them that shouldn't be spoken, at least not yet. There were things, being the woman she was, that she would have to rise to.
The situation would escalate. Something that was now very fragile was being tossed from his hands to hers and back again. It could easily be dropped.
'That was part of it,' she said. 'He wasn't in real school. I still had him most of the time, and the time when he was gone ... there was a contrast. . .' She looked at him. 'The quiet seemed very loud by comparison. That was when I started to get scared. Kindergarten next year, I'd think. Half a day every day instead of half a day three times a week. The year after that, all day five days a week. And there would still be all those hours to fill up. And I just got scared.'
'So you thought you'd fill up a little of that time by fucking someone?' he asked bitterly.
That stung her, but she continued on grimly, tracing it out as best she could, not raising her voice. He had asked. She would tell him.
'I didn't want to be on the Library Committee and I didn't want to be on the Hospital Committee and run the bake sales or be in charge of getting the starter change or making sure that not everybody is making the same Hamburger Helper casserole for the Saturday-night supper. I didn't want to see those same depressing faces over and over again and listen to the same gossipy stories about who is doing what in this town. I didn't want to sharpen my claws on anyone else's reputation.'
