The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [126]
They played bridge until ten, when Melissa yawned daintily and said that she was tired. Moses excused himself and was disheartened to see with what small steps she preceded him down the hall. At the stairs he put his arm around her waist—he had to feel for it in the folds of her drab dress—and kissed her cheek. She did not try to move out of his arm. Up in their room when he closed the door, shutting out the rest of the house, he watched to see what she would do. She went to a chair and picked up a circular sent from a dry-cleaning firm in the village and began to read this. Moses lifted the paper lightly out of her hands and kissed her. “All right,” she said.
He took off his clothes, jubilantly, thinking that in another minute she would be in his arms, but she went instead to her dressing table, tipped many pins out of a small gold box, separated a strand of hair with her fingers, coiled it, laid it flat against her skull and pinned it there. He hoped that she would make only a few curls and he looked at the clock, wondering if it would be ten or fifteen minutes. He liked her hair to be full and he watched with a feeling of foreboding as she took strand after strand, coiled it and laid it flat with a pin against her skull. This did not delay or alter his hopefulness or lessen his need, and trying to distract himself he opened a magazine and looked at some advertisements, but with the kingdom of love so soon to be his the pictures had no meaning. When the hair over her brow was all secured to her skull she started on the sides and he saw that he had a considerable wait ahead of him. He sat up, swung his feet onto the floor and lighted a cigarette. The sense of fullness and strength in his groin was at its apex, and cold baths, long walks in the rain, humorous cartoons and glasses of milk would not help him—she had begun to pin up the hair at the back of her neck—when the feeling of fullness changed subtly to a feeling of anguish that spread from his loins deep into his bowels. He put out his cigarette, drew on some pajama pants and wandered out onto the balcony. He heard her close the bathroom door. Then, with a sigh of real misery, he heard her start to run the water for a bath.
It never took Melissa less than three quarters of an hour to bathe. Moses could often wait cheerfully for her, but his feelings that night were painful. He remained on the balcony, picking out by name the stars that he knew and smoking. When, three quarters of an hour later, he heard her pull the plug in the tub he returned to the room and stretched out, his yearning rising to new summits of purity and happiness, on the bed. From the bathroom he could hear the clink of bottles on glass and the opening and closing of drawers. Then she opened the bathroom door and came out—not naked but dressed in a full, heavy nightgown and busily running a piece of dental floss between her teeth. “Oh, Melissa,” he said.
“I doubt that you love me,” she said. It was the thin, dispassionate voice of the spinster and it reminded him of thin things: smoke and dust. “I sometimes think you don’t love me at all,” she said, “and of course you put much too much emphasis on sex, oh much too much. The trouble is that you don’t have enough to think about. I mean you’re really not interested in business. Most men are intensely interested in their business. J. P. used to be so tired when he came home from work that he could hardly eat his dinner. Most men are too tired to think about love every morning and every afternoon and every night. They’re tired and anxious and they lead normal lives. You don’t like your job and so you think about sex all the time. I don’t suppose it’s because you’re really depraved. It’s just because you’re idle.