But that warmth was really only the hemorrhage produced by raising his knees up; and as the warmth faded he knew now that you could not pull yourself up over yourself and there was nothing to do about the cold but take it. He lay there, trying hard in all of him not to die long after he could not think. He was in the shadow now, as the boat drifted, and it was colder all the time.
The launch had been drifting since 10 o’clock of the night before and it was now getting late in the afternoon. There was nothing else in sight across the surface of the Gulf Stream but the gulfweed, a few pink, inflated, membranous bubbles of Portuguese men-of-war cocked jauntily on the surface, and the distant smoke of a loaded tanker bound north from Tampico.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
“Well,” Richard Gordon said to his wife.
“You have lipstick on your shirt,” she said. “And over your ear.”
“What about this?”
“What about what?”
“What about finding you lying on the couch with that drunken slob?”
“You did not.”
“Where did I find you?”
“You found us sitting on the couch.”
“In the dark.”
“Where have you been?”
“At the Bradleys’.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. Don’t come near me. You reek of that woman.”
“What do you reek of?”
“Nothing. I’ve been sitting, talking to a friend.”
“Did you kiss him?”
“No.”
“Did he kiss you?”
“Yes, I liked it.”
“You bitch.”
“If you call me that I’ll leave you.”
“You bitch.”
“All right,” she said. “It’s over. If you weren’t so conceited and I weren’t so good to you, you’d have seen it was over a long time ago.”
“You bitch.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not a bitch. I’ve tried to be a good wife, but you’re as selfish and conceited as a barnyard rooster. Always crowing, ‘Look what I’ve done. Look how I’ve made you happy. Now run along and cackle.’ Well, you don’t make me happy and I’m sick of you. I’m through cackling.”
“You shouldn’t cackle. You never produced anything to cackle about.”
“Whose fault was that? Didn’t I want children? But we never could afford them. But we could afford to go to the Cap d’Antibes to swim and to Switzerland to ski. We can afford to come down here to Key West. I’m sick of you. I dislike you. This Bradley woman today was the last straw.”
“Oh, leave her out of it.”
“You coming home with lipstick all over you. Couldn’t you even wash? There’s some on your forehead, too.”
“You kissed that drunken twirp.”
“No, I didn’t. But I would have if I’d known what you were doing.”
“Why did you let him kiss you?”
“I was furious at you. We waited and waited and waited. You never came near me. You went off with that woman and stayed for hours. John brought me home.”
“Oh, John, is it?”
“Yes, John. JOHN. John.”
“And what’s his last name? Thomas?”
“His name is MacWalsey.”
“Why don’t you spell it?”
“I can’t,” she said, and laughed. But it was the last time she laughed. “Don’t think it’s all right because I laugh,” she said, tears in her eyes, her lips working. “It’s not all right. This isn’t just an ordinary row. It’s over. I don’t hate you. It isn’t violent. I just dislike you. I dislike you thoroughly and I’m through with you.”
“All right,” he said.
“No. Not all right. All over. Don’t you understand?”
“I guess so.”
“Don’t guess.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic, Helen.”
“So I’m melodramatic, am I? Well, I’m not. I’m through with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I won’t say it again.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet. I may marry John MacWalsey.”
“You will not.”
“I will if I wish.”
“He wouldn’t marry you.”
“Oh, yes, he will. He asked me to marry him this afternoon.”
Richard Gordon said nothing. A hollow had come in him where his heart had been, and everything he heard, or said, seemed to be overheard.
“He asked you what?” he said, his voice coming from a long way away.
“To marry him.”
“Why?”
“Because he loves me. Because he wants me to live with him. He makes enough money to support me.”
“You’re married to me.”
“Not really. Not in the church. You wouldn’t marry me in the church and it broke my poor mother’s heart as you well know. I was so sentimental about you I’d break any one’s heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It’s broken and gone. Everything I believed in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn’t it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have? And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie.
Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I’m deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It’s half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I’m through with you and I’m through with love. Your kind of picknose love. You writer.”
“You little mick slut.”
“Don’t call me names. I know the word for you.”
“All right.”
“No, not all right. All wrong and wrong again. If you were just a good writer I could stand for all the rest of it maybe. But I’ve seen you bitter, jealous, changing your politics to suit the fashion, sucking up to people’s faces and talking about them behind their backs. I’ve seen you until I’m sick of you. Then that dirty rich bitch of a Bradley woman today. Oh, I’m sick of it. I’ve tried to take care of you and humor you and look after you and cook for you and keep quiet when you wanted and cheerful when you wanted and give you your little explosions and pretend it made me happy, and put up with your rages and jealousies and your meannesses and now I’m through.”
“So now you want to start again with a drunken professor?”
“He’s a man. He’s kind and he’s charitable and he makes you feel comfortable and we come from the same thing and we have values that you’ll never have. He’s like my father was.”
“He’s a drunk.”
“He drinks. But so did my father. And my father wore wool socks and put his feet in them up on a chair and read the paper in the evening. And when we had croup he took care of us. He was a boiler maker and his hands were all broken and he liked to fight when he drank, and he could fight when he was sober. He went to mass because my mother wanted him to and he did his Easter duty for her and for Our Lord, but mostly for her, and he was a good union man and if he ever went with another woman she never knew it.”
“I’ll bet he went with plenty.”
“Maybe he did, but if he did he told the priest, not her, and if he did it was because he couldn’t help it and he was sorry and repented of it. He didn’t do it out of curiosity, or from barnyard pride, or to tell his wife what a great man he was. If he did it was because my mother was away with us kids for the summer, and he was out with the boys and got drunk. He was a man.”
“You ought to be a writer and write about him.”
“I’d be a better writer than you. And John MacWalsey is a good man. That’s what you’re not. You couldn’t be. No matter what your politics or your religion.”
“I haven’t any religion.”
“Neither have I. But I had one once and I’m going to have one again. And you won’t be there to take it away. Like you’ve taken away everything else.”
“No.”
“No. You can be in bed with some rich woman like Helène Bradley. How did she like you? Did she think you were wonderful?”
Looking at her sad, angry face, pretty with crying, the lips swollen freshly like something after rain, her curly dark hair wild about her face, Richard Gordon gave her up, then, finally:
“And you don’t love me any more?”
“I hate the word even.”
“All right,” he said, and slapped her hard and suddenly across the face.
She cried now from actual pain, not anger, her face down on the table.
“You didn’t need to do that,” she said.
“Oh, yes, I did,” he said. “You know an awful lot, but you don’t know how much I needed to do that.”
That afternoon she had not seen him as the door opened. She had not seen anything but the white ceiling with its cake-frosting modeling of cupids, doves and scroll work that the light from the open door suddenly made clear.
Richard Gordon had turned his head and seen him, standing heavy
