Or maybe it is because Roger is doing all the talking himself at that moment, poetry having gone into a slump, you might say. “Moonlight,” Roger is saying, looking at the moon like he owned it too; “I can’t stand it any more. I run to walls, an electric light. That is, moonlight used to make me feel sad and old and I would do that. But now I’m afraid it don’t even make me feel lonely any more. So I guess I am old.”
“That’s a fact,” the poet says. “Where can we talk?”
“Talk?” Roger says. He looked like a head-waiter, anyway: a little bald, flourishing, that comes to the table and lifts off a cover and looks at it like he is saying, “Well, you can eat this muck, if you want to pay to do it.” “Right this way,” he says.
They go to the office, the room where he writes his books, where he doesn’t even let the children come at all. He sits behind the typewriter and fills his pipe. Then he sees that the poet hasn’t sat down. “Sit down,” he says.
“No,” the poet says. “Listen,” he says. “Tonight I kissed your wife. I’m going to again, if I can.”
“Ah,” Roger says. He is too busy filling the pipe right to look at the poet, it seems. “Sit down.”
“No,” the poet says.
Roger lights the pipe. “Well,” he says, “I’m afraid I can’t advise you about that. I have written a little poetry, but I never could seduce women.” He looks at the poet now. “Look here,” he says, “you are not well. You go on to bed. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”
“No,” the poet says, “I cannot sleep under your roof.”
“Anne keeps on saying you are not well,” Roger says. “Do you know of anything that’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t know,” the poet says.
Roger sucks at the pipe. He seems to be having a little trouble making it burn right. Maybe that is why he slams the pipe down on the desk, or maybe he is human too, like a poet. Anyway, he slams the pipe down on the desk so that the tobacco pops out burning among the papers.
And there they are: the bald husband with next week’s flour and meat actually in sight, and the home-wrecker that needs a haircut, in one of these light blue jackets that ladies used to wear with lace boudoir caps when they would be sick and eat in bed.
“What in hell do you mean,” Roger says, “coming in my house and eating my food and bothering Anne with your damned . . .” But that was all. But even that was pretty good for a writer, an artist; maybe that’s all that should be expected from them. Or maybe it was because the poet wasn’t even listening to him.
“He’s not even here,” Roger says to himself; like he had told the poet, he used to write poetry himself, and so he knew them. “He’s up there at Anne’s door now, kneeling outside her door.” And outside that door was as close to Anne as Roger got too, for some time. But that was later, and he and the poet are now in the office, with him trying to make the poet shut his yap and go up to bed, and the poet refusing.
“I cannot lie under your roof,” the poet says. “May I see Anne?”
“You can see her in the morning. Any time. All day, if you want to. Don’t talk drivel.”
“May I speak to Anne?” the poet says, like he might have been speaking to a one-syllable feeb.
So Roger goes up and tells Anne and comes back and sits behind the typewriter again and then Anne comes down and Roger hears her and the poet goes out the front door. After awhile Anne comes back alone. “He’s gone,” she says.
“Is he?” Roger says, like he is not listening. Then he jumps up. “Gone? He can’t — this late. Call him back.”
“He won’t come back,” Anne says. “Let him alone.” She goes on upstairs. When Roger went up a little later, the door was locked.
Now get this. This is it. He came back down to the office and put some paper into the typewriter and began to write. He didn’t go very fast at first, but by daylight he was sounding like forty hens in a sheet-iron corn-crib, and the written sheets on the desk were piling up. . . .
He didn’t see or hear of the poet for two days. But the poet was still in town. Amos Crain saw him and came and told Roger. It seems that Amos happened to come to the house for something, because that was the only way anybody could have got to Roger to tell him anything for two days and nights. “I heard that typewriter before I crossed the creek,” Amos says. “I see that blue dressing-sacque at the hotel yesterday,” he says.
That night, while Roger was at work, Anne came down the stairs. She looked in the office door. “I’m going to meet him,” she said.
“Will you tell him to come back?” Roger said. “Will you tell him I sent the message?”
“No,” Anne said.
And the last thing she heard when she went out and when she came back an hour later and went upstairs and locked her door (Roger was sleeping on the sleeping-porch now, on an army cot) was the typewriter.
And so life went on in its old, pleasant, happy way. They saw one another often, sometimes twice a day after Anne quit coming down to breakfast. Only, a day or so after that, she missed the sound of the typewriter; maybe she missed being kept awake by it. “Have you finished it?” she said. “The story?”
“Oh. No. No, it’s not finished yet. Just resting for a day or so.” Bull market in typewriting, you might say.
It stayed bullish for several days. He had got into the habit of going to bed early, of being in his cot on the sleeping-porch when Anne came back into the house. One night she came out onto the sleeping-porch, where he was reading in bed. “I’m not going back again,” she said. “I’m afraid to.”
“Afraid of what? Aren’t two children enough for you? Three, counting me.”
“I don’t know.” It was a reading lamp and her face was in the shadow. “I don’t know.” He turned the light, to shine it on her face, but before it got to her face she turned, running. He got there just in time to have the door banged in his face. “Blind! Blind!” she said beyond the door. “Go away! Go away!”
He went away, but he couldn’t get to sleep. So after a while he took the metal shade off the reading lamp and jimmied the window into the room where the children slept. The door from here into Anne’s room wasn’t locked. Anne was asleep. The moon was getting down then, and he could see her face. He hadn’t made any noise, but she waked anyway, looking up at him, not moving. “He’s had nothing, nothing.
The only thing he remembers of his mother is the taste of sherbet on Sunday afternoon. He says my mouth tastes like that. He says my mouth is his mother.” She began to cry. She didn’t move, face-up on the pillow, her arms under the sheet, crying. Roger sat on the edge of the bed and touched her and she flopped over then, with her face down against his knee, crying.
They talked until about daylight. “I don’t know what to do. Adultery wouldn’t get me — anybody — into that place where he lives. Lives? He’s never lived. He’s—” She was breathing quiet, her face turned down, but still against his knee — him stroking her shoulder. “Would you take me back?”
“I don’t know.” He stroked her shoulder. “Yes. Yes. I’d take you back.”
And so the typewriting market picked up again. It took a spurt that night, as soon as Anne got herself cried off to sleep, and the market held steady for three or four days, without closing at night, even after Pinkie told him how the telephone was out of fix and he found where the wires were cut and knows where he can find the scissors that did it when he wants to.
He doesn’t go to the village at all, even when he had a free ride. He would spend half a morning sitting by the road, waiting for somebody to pass that would bring him back a package of tobacco or sugar or something. “If I went to the village, he might have left town,” he said.
On the fifth day, Amos Crain brought him his mail. That was the day the rain came up. There was a letter for Anne. “He evidently doesn’t want my advice on this,” he said to himself. “Maybe he has already sold it.” He gave the letter to Anne. She read it, once.
“Will you read it?” she said.
“I wouldn’t care to,” he said.
But the typing market is still steady, so that when the rain came up this afternoon, he had to turn on the light. The rain was so hard on the house that he could watch his fingers (he used two or three of them) hitting the keys without hearing a sound. Pinkie didn’t come, so after a while he quit and fixed a tray and took it up and left it on a chair outside Anne’s door. He didn’t stop to eat, himself.
It was after dark when she came down the first time. It
