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By Root 9250 0

The wedding presents come to almost four hundred dollars, enough for a bedroom set from a department store, and a couch and two chairs for the living room. They extend their furniture with a few pictures, an inaccurate calendar scene of cows in a pasture at sunset, a cheap reproduction of "The Blue Door" and a Maxfield Parrish from an advertisement. On an end table, Natalie puts their wedding pictures, joined like book covers in a double frame. His mother gives them a whatnot and a collection of tiny painted cups and saucers with plump nude angels chasing around the circumference. They settle down in their three-room flat, and are very happy, very warm and absorbed in each other. By the end of the first year he is making thirty-five a week, and they are moving through the regular ordained orbit of friends and relatives. Joey becomes adept at bridge. Their marital storms are infrequent and quickly lost, the memories of them buried in the avalanche of pleasant and monotonous trivia that makes up their life.

Once or twice there is some tension between them. Joey, they decide, is very virile and the knowledge that she wants him less often than he needs her is bitter and sometimes ugly. This is not to say that their matings always fail or that they even talk or brood about it a good deal. But still he is a little balked at times. He cannot understand her unpredictable coldness; during their engagement she had been so passionate in her petting.

After the boy is born there are other concerns. He is making forty dollars a week, and working as a soda jerk in the corner drug store on weekends. He is tired, often worried; her delivery is a Caesarean, and they go into debt to pay the doctor. Her scar troubles him; despite himself he looks at it with distaste and she notices that. She is completely involved with the child, content to stay at home for week after week. In the long evenings, he wants her very often and contains himself, sleeping irritably. One night their coupling ends in a quarrel.

He has a bad habit in the middle. Always, despite his injunctions, he must ask, are you warm? Her smile is so noncommittal; he is vaguely angered.

A little, she will say.

He slows himself, rests his head on her shoulder, relaxing, breathing deeply. Then he moves again.

How are you now? Are you close, Natalie?

Her smile again. I'm all right, Joey. Don't worry about me.

He glides through the passage of several neutral minutes, his mind far away, imagining another child. They had the last one after discussing it and agreeing that they wanted a baby, but now he cannot afford another one, and he is wondering if her diaphragm has been set properly. He thinks he can feel it, which worries him. Abruptly, he is conscious of the pressure in his loins, the perspiration on his back, and he halts roughly, relaxing again.

How close are you?

Don't worry about me, Joey.

He is angry suddenly. Tell me, how close are you?

Oh, darling, I won't be able to tonight, it's not important, go ahead, don't mind me, it's not important.

The bickering offends both of them, makes them cold. He dreads his tasteless isolated throe, knows suddenly that he cannot do it, cannot lie afterwards on his bed depressed with failure.

For once he swears. To hell with it. And he leaves her on the bed, and walks over to the window, staring at the drab parchment of the shade. He is trembling, partially from cold.

She comes up beside him, nuzzling her body against his to warm him. The caress is tentative, uncertain, and it offends him. He feels her maternalness. Go away, I don't want a. . . a mother, he blurts, feeling doubt and then dread at the awfulness of what he has said.

Her mouth forms in the blank smile, wrinkles suddenly into weeping. She cries on the bed like a little girl. He realizes abruptly after two and a half years of marriage that when she forms that smile she is close to hysteria and terror and perhaps even loathing. The knowledge freezes in his chest.

After a moment he flops down beside her, cushions her head, and tries to comfort her weeping, his numb hand