Gerald's Game - Stephen King [52]
She couldn't argue with any of that. It was true.
Then how can you feel content, Jessie? How can you possibly feel content with things like that hanging over you?
She didn't know, but she did. Her sense of tranquility was as deep as a featherbed on the night a March gale filled with sleet roars out of the northwest, and as warm as the goosedown comforter on that bed. She suspected that most of this feeling stemmed from causes which were purely physical: if you were thirsty enough, it was apparently possible to get stoned on half a glass of water.
But there was a mental side, as well. Ten years ago she had reluctantly given up her job as a substitute teacher, finally giving in to the pressure of Gerald's persistent (or maybe 'relentless' was the word she was actually looking for) logic. He was making almost a hundred thousand dollars a year by then; next to that, her five to seven grand looked pretty paltry. It was, in fact, an actual annoyance at tax time, when the IRS took most of it and then went sniffing over their financial records, wondering where the rest of it was.
When she complained about their suspicious behavior, Gerald had looked at her with a mixture of love and exasperation. It wasn't quite his 'Why are you girls always so silly?' expression that one didn't start to show up regularly for another five or six years — but it was close. They see what I'm making, he told her, they see two large German cars in the garage, they look at the pictures of the place on the lake, and then they look at your tax forms and see you're working for what they think of as chump change. They can't believe it — it looks phony to them, a cover for something else — and so they go snooping around, looking for whatever that something else might he. They don't know you like I do, that's all.
She had been unable to explain to Gerald what the substitute contract meant to her . . . or maybe it was that he had been unwilling to listen. Either way, it came to the same: teaching, even on a part-time basis, filled her up in some important way, and Gerald didn't get that. Nor had he been able to get the fact that subbing formed a bridge to the life she had lived before she'd met Gerald at that Republican mixer, when she'd been a full-time English teacher at Waterville High, a woman on her own who was working for a living, who was well-liked and respected by her colleagues, and who was beholden to no one. She had been unable to explain (or he had been unwilling to listen) how quitting teaching — even on that final part-time, piecework basis — made her feel mournful and lost and somehow useless.
That rudderless feeling — probably caused as much by her in-ability to catch pregnant as by her decision to return her contract unsigned — had departed from the surface of her mind after a year or so, but it had never entirely left the deeper ranges of her heart. She had sometimes felt like a cliché to herself — young teacher-lady weds successful lawyer whose name goes up on the door at the tender (professionally speaking, that is) age of thirty. This young (well, relatively young) woman eventually steps into the foyer of that puzzle palace known as middle age, looks around, and finds she is suddenly all alone — no job, no kids, and a husband who is almost completely focused (one wouldn't want to say fixated; that might be accurate, but it would also be unkind) on climbing that fabled ladder of success.
This woman, suddenly faced with forty just beyond the next bend in the road, is exactly the sort of woman most likely to get in trouble with drugs, booze, or another man. A younger man, usually. None of that happened to this young (well . . . previously young) woman, but Jessie still found herself with a scary amount of time on her hands — time to garden, time to go malling, time to take classes (the painting, the sculpture, the poetry . . . and she could have had an affair with the man who taught the poetry if she'd wanted to, and she