I asked, ‘What are you here for?’
‘The old water works,’ he said yawning. ‘But nothing major.’
Kidneys, bladder, urine; a diagram flashed in my brain. ‘That’s good,’ I mumbled. Always polite. I cannot, even here, escape courtesy.
‘What about you?’ he mouthed, almost inaudible now.
‘One of those female things,’ I whispered. ‘Also not major.’
‘You married?’
‘Yes. Are you?’ I asked, realizing too late that he had asked because of the nature of my complaint, not because we were comparing our status as we might had we met at a party.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m married. But not happily.’
‘Pardon?’ Courtesy again, the scented phrase. Our mother had always insisted we say pardon and, as Charleen says, we are children all our lives, obedient to echoes.
‘Not happily,’ he said again. ‘Married yes,’ he made an effort to enunciate, ‘but not happily married.’
A surreal testimony. It must be the anesthetic, I thought, pulling an admission like that from a sheeted stranger. The effect of the pill or perhaps the rarity of the circumstances, the two of us lying here nose to nose, almost naked under our thin sheets, horizontal in midmorning, chemical-smelling limbo, our conversation somehow crisped into truth.
‘Too bad,’ I said with just a shade of sympathy.
‘You happily married?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I murmured, a little ashamed at the affirmative ring in my voice. ‘I’m one of the lucky ones. Not that I deserve it.’
‘What do you mean, not that you deserve it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, you said it,’ he said crossly.
‘I just meant that I’m not all that terrific a wife. You know, not self-sacrificial.’ I groped for an example. ‘For instance, when Martin asked me to type something for him last week. Just something short.’
‘Yeah?’ His mouth made a circle on the white sheet.
‘I said, what’s the matter with Nell? That’s his secretary.’
‘He’s got a secretary, eh?’
‘Yes,’ I admitted, again stung with guilt. This was beginning to sound like a man who didn’t have a secretary. ‘She’s skinny though,’ I explained. ‘A real stick. And he shares her with two other professors.’
‘I see. I see.’ His voice dropped off, and I thought for a minute that he’d fallen asleep.
Pressing on anyway I repeated loudly, ‘So I said, what’s the matter with Nell?’
‘And what did he say to that?’ the voice came.
‘Martin? Well, he just said, “Never mind, Judith.” But then I felt so mean that I went ahead and did it anyway.’
‘The typing you mean?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘So you’re not such a rotten wife,’ he accused me.
‘In a way,’ I said. ‘I did it, but it doesn’t count if you’re not willing.’ Where had I got that? Girl Guides maybe.
‘I never ask my wife to type for me.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Typing I don’t need.’
‘Maybe you ask for something else,’ I suggested, aware that our conversation was slipping over into a new frontier.
‘Just to let me alone, to let me goddamned alone. Every night she has to ask me what I did all day. At the plant. She wants to know, she says. I tell her, look, I lived through it once, do I have to live through it twice?’
‘I see what you mean,’ I said, hardly able to remember what we were talking about.
‘You do?’ Far away in his nest of sheets he registered surprise.
‘Yes. I know exactly what you mean. As my mother used to say, “I don’t want to chew my cabbage twice.”’
‘You mean you don’t ask your husband what he did all day?’
‘Well,’ I said growing weary, ‘no. I don’t think I ever do. Poor Martin.’
‘Christ,’ he said as two nurses began rolling him to the doorway.
‘Christ. I wish I was married to you.’
‘Thank you,’ I called faintly. ‘Thank you, thank you.’
Absurdly flattered, I too was wheeled away. Joy closed my eyes, and all I remember seeing after that was a blur of brilliant blue.
‘You haven’t read it yet, have you?’ Meredith accuses me.
‘Read what yet?’ I am ironing in the kitchen, late on a Thursday afternoon. Pillowcases, Martin’s shirts. I am travelling across the yokes, thinking these shirts I bought on sale are no good. Just a touch-up they’re supposed to need, but the point of my iron is required on every seam.
‘You haven’t read Furlong’s book?’ Meredith says sharply.
‘The new one you mean?’
‘Graven Images.’
‘Well,’ I say apologetically, letting that little word ‘well’ unwind slowly, making a wavy line out of it the way our mother used to do, ‘well, you know how busy I’ve been.’
‘You read Pearson’s book.’
‘That was different.’
Abruptly she lapses into confidence. ‘It’s the best one he’s written. You’ve just got to read it. That one scene where Verna dies. You’ll love it. She’s the sister. Unmarried. But beautiful, spiritual, even though she never had a chance to go to school. She’s blind, but she has these fantastic visions. Honestly, when you stop to think that here you have a man, a man who is actually writing from inside, you know, from inside a woman’s head. It’s unbelievable. That kind of intuition.’
‘I’m planning to read it,’ I assure her earnestly, for I want to make her happy. ‘But there’s the Susanna thing, and when I’m not working on that, there’s the ironing. One thing after another.’
‘You know that’s not the reason you haven’t read it,’ she says, her eyes going icy.
I put down the iron, setting it securely on its heel. ‘All right, Meredith. You tell me why.’
‘You
