The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [180]
He tried a smile. “It’s supposed to be a sin.”
“Why?”
“Sins don’t have reasons. I don’t know why it’s a sin. I know I’m ashamed of myself.”
“I’m not.”
“There’s no reason for you to be. But I—”
“You keep acting as though you’re the one who did it. We both did it, and I was the one who—”
“I was the one who should have been able not to do it, kitten.”
She thought it over, shrugged. “Well, the thing is, I don’t think we have to put out our eyes and break our legs or anything.”
“‘Put out our—’ Oh, Oedipus. It was ankles, not legs.”
“Whatever it was. It happened. That’s all.”
He looked at her sharply. “Are you still—”
“Taking the pill? Is that what you were going to ask? Yes, I am.” She walked across the room and stood in front of him. “And do you want to know something? Do you really want to know something? I wish I stopped taking the pills. I really wish that. I wish I was pregnant, that’s how I feel about what we did.”
He drew her down to him. She sat in his lap with her arms around his neck and she wept, and he held her as he had held her before and stroked her hair and told her that it was all right, that everything was going to be all right. They both were still naked, and she was still the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life, but he held her now with no passion whatsoever. He laughed, and she asked why.
“The glass in the fireplace. I was just looking at it. Once again Mrs. Kleinschmidt wouldn’t approve.”
“Screw Mrs. Kleinschmidt.”
He held her close as they laughed together, held her now with no passion at all, but with all the love he had in the world.
There had been passion, but there would not be passion between them again. Mrs. Kleinschmidt would not approve, but Mrs. Kleinschmidt would not know, nor would anyone else. He did not have to put out his eyes.
THIRTY
On the ninth day following his admission, Clement McIntyre was discharged from Doylestown General. Olive wrote a check while he sat in a wheelchair grumbling that he could walk as well as the next man.
“It’s a regulation,” the nurse’s aide said.
“Silly damned regulation,” he said. “She was a patient, too. Paid full rates for the privilege of lying in one of your lumpy beds and listening to me use a bedpan. Doesn’t she rate a wheelchair ride?”
“Don’t mind him,” Olive advised. “He doesn’t mean anything by it. He’s sad to be leaving and this is his way of masking his sentiment.”
“Who would have guessed years ago that you’d turn out to be such a sarcastic bitch?”
“You see? That’s his way of telling me he loves me. You sit back and enjoy your ride, Clem. Enjoy the luxury. You won’t be pampered this way at home.”
She drove home and parked the car in the driveway. He got out unassisted and walked into the house and up the stairs without her help. He was short of breath by the time he reached their bedroom, and his face was pale.
“Sit down,” she said. “You’ll be more comfortable in bed, darling. Do you want help with your clothes?”
“Don’t need it.”
“I’ll get your pajamas.”
He sat up in bed, propped up with three pillows. He said, “It’s a hell of a thing. A man’s a man all his life and then he’s barely got enough of himself to walk a flight of stairs.”
“Climbing is hard exercise. I understand it’s more tiring than sawing wood.”
“What a mine of information you are.”
“Remarkable, isn’t it?”
“It truly is. But what I was saying. It’s a hell of a life when a man can’t live the way he’s used to living. You hear about these people they keep alive in hospitals for months or years, machines hooked up to them and tubes running in and out of them. Can’t make ’em better and won’t let ’em die, and what sense is there in that?”
“Some people just want to go on.”
“Some people don’t.”
She walked to the window. “It’s so close in here,” she said. “I should have told the Robshaw girl to open a window while she was here. It feels like rain, doesn’t it? We could use a little rain.