at me behind my back . . .”
“Show ‘em your real estate,” I said. “Nobody ever laughs at real estate.”
“Laugh! Go ahead! Why don’t you just admit you have nothing but contempt for me? Tell me I’m older than you are, and that I’m fat and stupid . . .”
I was tired of it. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, shut up and go to sleep.”
“Don’t you talk to me that way!”
“Well, stop talking like a fool.”
“A fool, am I? Well, maybe you’re right, at that. I didn’t have any better sense than to marry a cheap tom-cat that was just out for what he could get. . . .”
“All right,” I said. “So you did. So what are you crying about?”
“Oh! So you admit it?”
At that stage of the brain-washing I would have admitted to being a coloratura soprano for an hour’s sleep. “Yes. Just type out the confession and I’ll sign it.”
“You hate me, don’t you?
“If you say so.”
“No! I want to hear what you think.”
“I’m not paid to think,” I said. “I’m a gadget. I’m the Little Gem Home Companion, the do-it-himself household appliance with ears. It makes love, and listens to seven hours of crap without rewinding. . . .”
She sat up in fury and swung a hand at my face. I caught her wrist and held it while she struggled, her body a futile writhing of silver and velvet shadow in the moonlight. We’re probably an inspiring sight, I thought. I put my feet on the floor and stood up, pushing her back and away from me. She sprawled on the bed with her face down in the pillow. Neither of us had uttered a word. I stood for a moment feeling the difficulty in breathing because of the tight band across my chest, and then I turned and went out and down the stairs.
I padded barefoot through the hot darkness of the living-room. Going on back to the kitchen, I yanked open the door of the refrigerator, feeling the cold air pour out against my legs and feet as I took out a can of beer. I was dressed only in pajama bottoms, and in the light from the refrigerator I could see the shine of sweat on my arms and torso. The hell with her. She could take her jealous tantrums and her gourd-headed suspicions and erratic emotional pattern and her satin-upholstered bedroom talents and her late husband’s real estate and nuke a package of them. . . .
I slammed the fridge door shut and hit the kitchen light switch to locate the beer opener, savagely punched the can, took a drink of the beer, and then carried it down the short stairway at the back of the room beside the washing machine.
The big basement room, a sort of combination workshop and study, was mine; she rarely came near it except once or twice a month to supervise Reba’s cavalry-charge version of sweeping and tidying up. I clicked on the light. The room ran the full length of the basement. This end was finished in natural mahogany paneling I had put up myself; on the left were the recessed bookshelves with their rows of books, while the two glass-fronted cases on the right held the fly-rods and the three shotguns I owned. A heavy, leather-upholstered chair stood under a reading lamp near the bookshelves, and beyond it was an old couch retired from the living-room during the last redecorating cataclysm.
I was fed up. The old cynical detachment that had carried me through so many of these tirades was beginning to crack, for some reason, and I was losing my temper like a chump. I didn’t understand it. This was Barney Godwin? Being needled by a corn-fed blonde? Why didn’t I just pack and get out? It wasn’t worth it. I finished the beer, turned out the light, and lay down on the couch, staring moodily at the silvery sheen of moonlight beyond the basement windows. It was a long time before I went to sleep.
I awoke to coolness and the faint, gray beginnings of dawn. Even before my eyes opened I was aware that it was someone’s moving inside the room that had waked me, and then something settled softly over my body on the couch. I turned my head drowsily and looked up. She was leaning over me in a sheer nightgown, tucking the sheet about me. Still half asleep and without conscious thought I reached up and put my hand gently against her