I know we have a pleasant house to live in, even if it is small. I know I love you.” There was a significant pause, in which she should have said, Of course I love you too. But she didn’t. He sighed. “I know we should be happy. There isn’t anything specific you can put your finger on that’s out-and-out wrong with us. So why do we argue all the time? Why, when we’re still together, we still have each other, and things are going along the right way—why aren’t we happy, Beth? Because we’re not. We sure as hell are not.”
Beth couldn’t look at him, at his frowning face. “If you’d pick up after yourself once in a while,” she said. “if you’d agree, just once, to let me do something I really want to do.” The spite in her voice piqued him.
“Oh! Now I understand. This would be a gloriously happy household if it weren’t for me, is that it? If the husband and father would just get the hell out, the family would be perfect. Right?”
“Cut the sarcasm, Charlie,” she said. She tried to sound firm but her chin trembled.
“I get it from you, dear. It’s catching,” he said. “Besides, I’m not convinced that you’ll swoon happily in my arms if I pick up my socks in the morning.”
She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “All right, Charlie, I’m at fault too. Is that what you want me to say? I fly off the handle, I’m cross with the kids. I—I—”
“You kick me out of bed three or four times a week.”
She turned a blazing face to him. “Charlie, goddamn it, I’m your wife. But that doesn’t mean that any time you feel like having me, I feel like being had. Three or four times a week is too much!”
“It didn’t used to be,” he said, his voice as soft as hers was loud. “What happened?”
Tears started to her eyes for the second time that evening and she turned away. “Nothing,” she exclaimed.
“Something must have happened, Beth. You just don’t want it anymore. Ever. You give in now and then to shut me up—not because you really want me.”
She covered her face with both hands and wept quickly with fear and confusion. “I don’t know what happened,” she admitted finally.
He leaned toward her, hating to hurt her. “Beth, I’d do anything for you,” he said earnestly. “I’d let you go model in Timbuktu if that would make you happy. But it won’t. All these things you think you want so badly—did you ever stop to examine them? What are they? So many escapes. You’re running away. The one thing you can’t stand, you can’t bear to face or live with or understand, is your relationship with me. Your home. Your kids. But mostly me. Are you sorry we got married, Beth? Tell the truth?”
There was a terrible, painful pause. It took all of her courage to admit, “I don’t know. That’s the truth. I don’t know.”
He shut his eyes for a moment, as if to recover a little.
“Do you love me, then?”
She swallowed. “Yes,” she said. Her courage would not stretch so far as to let her hedge on that one. “Do you love the kids?”
She caught her breath and bit her lip. I will be truthful, I’ll be as truthful as I can, she told herself sharply.
“Do you love the kids, honey?” he prompted her.
“When they’re not around,” she blurted, and gave an awful sob, covering her wicked mouth with one hand. When she could talk a little she said, “I love them, I love them terribly, but I just can’t stand them. Does that make any sense?”
He lay back on the bed and gazed at the ceiling. The sight of Beth tore his heart. “Not to me, it doesn’t,” he said. And seeing her despair, he added, “But at least it’s the truth, Beth, Thank you for that much, anyway.” There was no sarcasm in his voice now.
Beth got up and walked back and forth at the foot of the bed. “I know I’m not the world’s greatest mother, Charlie. Far from it.” She wiped her eyes impatiently. “Or the best wife. I guess I hound you all the time because I’m ashamed of my own behavior. At least that’s part of it. You’re no dreamboat yourself sometimes.” She turned to look at him and he nodded without answering.
“The trouble is, I just don’t know what I would be good at,” she said helplessly. “I don’t know what I want to do. I wish I could want something, good and hard, and it would be the right thing. Sometimes I wish somebody would tell me what I want. Maybe my ideas about traveling and the rest of it are just daydreams. Escape, or whatever you said. But Charlie, that’s not criminal. I need an escape. I really do.” She felt a note of semi-hysteria pulling her voice higher and higher and she stopped talking for a minute to catch her breath.
“I wanted to go to Mexico last year. You said no. I want to get that MG we saw in Monrovia. You said no. I have a couple of cocktails by myself in the afternoon and you blow your top. You think I’m headed for Skid Row. I ask to go home and visit Uncle John. No again.”
“The last time you visited Uncle John,” Charlie pointed out with heat, “I didn’t see you for four whole months.”
“And those four months saved my sanity!” she cried, thrusting her angry chin toward him.
He lighted another cigarette in offended silence.
After a moment she resumed, trying to keep her voice level, “Now I want to model a couple of days a week. Is that so very awful? Am I really a case for the bughouse because I want to escape once in a while?” She tried, with her voice, to make it seem ridiculous.
“If it were only once in a while,” he said sadly. They were silent again. Beth had stopped her pacing and he look at her lovely figure, shadowy beneath the nylon film of nightie. He wanted her so much … so much. At last he said, quietly, “Well, I guess it’s better than losing you to Uncle John for half a year.”
She turned around slowly and her face was grateful. “Thanks, Charlie,” she said. “I would have done it anyway, but—” She was sorry she had said it. He looked so despondent, utterly stripped of his husbandly influence, almost a stranger to her. “But I wanted you to approve,” she went on hastily. “I wanted to be able to tell you about it and everything.” He refused to look at her. “She—she’s doing it for nothing.” Beth added, hoping to make it more acceptable to him.
He laughed unpleasantly. “She’s doing it for something, Beth. Not money, maybe, but something. Vega’s not the kind of girl who does things for nothing.”
She went around the bed and sat down beside him. “Look at me, honey,” she said. “I want to thank you.”
“I know,” he answered, but the thought of her kiss suddenly made him weak and a little sick. He sat up, turning to give her his back and was suddenly mortified to feel her lips on it in a brief shy salute. He froze.
“Beth,” he said sternly. “Vega is a strange girl. You should know …”
“Know what?” she said eagerly.
“Cleve has told me,” he said reluctantly. “She’s been married a couple of times.”
“To
