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 end-table 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 a 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