The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [127]
He heard the squeaking of chalk. His bower was replaced with the atmosphere of a schoolroom and his roses seemed to wither. In the glass he saw her pretty face—opaque and wanton—formed to express passion and sweetness, and thinking of her capabilities he wondered why she had put them down. That he presented difficulties—the flights and crash landings of a sentimental disposition—that he sometimes broke wind and picked his teeth with a kitchen match, that he was neither brilliant nor beautiful belonged in the picture—but he did not understand. He did not understand, picking back over her words, what right she had to make the love that kept his mind open, and that made even the leaking of a rain gutter seem musical, a creation of pure idleness.
“But I love you,” he said hopefully.
“Some men bring work home from the office,” she said. “Most men do. Most of the men that I know.” Her voice seemed to dry as he listened to it, to lose its deeper notes as her feelings narrowed. “And most men in business,” she went on thinly, “have to do a lot of traveling. They’re away from their wives a lot of the time. They have other outlets than sex. Most healthy men do. They play squash.”
“I play squash.”
“You’ve never played squash since I’ve known you.”
“I used to play.”
“Of course,” she said, “if it’s absolutely necessary for you to make love to me I’ll do it, but I think that you ought to understand that it’s not as crucial as you make it.”
“You’ve talked yourself out of a fuck,” he said bleakly.
“Oh, you’re so hateful and egotistical,” she said, swinging her head around. “Your thinking is so crude and mean. You only want to hurt me.”
“I wanted to love you,” he said. “The thought of it has made me cheerful all day. When I ask you tenderly you go to your dressing table and stuff your head with pieces of metal. I felt loving,” he said sadly. “Now I feel angry and violent.”
“And I suppose all your bad feelings are directed towards me?” she asked. “I’ve told you before that I can’t be all the things you want. I can’t be wife, child and mother all at once. It’s too much to ask.”
“I don’t want you to be my mother and my child,” he said hoarsely. “I have a mother and I will have children. I won’t lack those things. I want you to be my wife and you stuff your head with pins.”
“I thought we had agreed before,” she said, “that I can’t give you everything you want. . . . ”
“I have no stomach for talk,” he said. He took off his pajamas and dressed and went out. He walked down the driveway and took the back road to the village of Scaddonville. It was four miles and when he got there and found the streets dark he turned back on a lane that went through the woods where the mildness of a summer night seemed at last to replace his vexation. Dogs in distant houses heard his footsteps and went on barking long after he had passed. The trees moved a little in the wind and the stars were so numerous and clear that the arbitrary lines that form the Pleiades and Cassiopeia in her chair seemed nearly visible. There seemed to be some indestructible good health in a dark path on a summer night—it was a place and a season where it was impossible to cherish bad feeling. In the distance he saw the dark towers of Clear Haven and he returned up the driveway and went to bed. Melissa was asleep and she was asleep when he left in the morning.
Melissa was not in their room when he returned in the evening and looking around him hopefully for some change in her mood he saw that their room had been given a thorough cleaning. This in itself might have been a good sign but he saw that she had taken the perfume bottles off her dressing table and thrown out all the flowers. He washed and put on a soft coat and went down. D’Alba was in the hall, sitting in the golden throne, reading a Mickey Mouse comic and smoking a big cigar. His taste in comics was genuine but Moses suspected that the rest of the picture was a pose—a nod toward J. P.’s tradition of near-illiterate merchant princes. D’Alba said that Melissa was in the laundry. This was a surprise. She had never