the time Gerald came home all the lamps were lit and his late supper was on the stove, plates were set out on the table, and wine was cooling; and facing him across the small table she complained about the number of days they must wait before his appointment.
“Must be lots of people throwing fits,” he said. And later, tossing the covers over himself, “Anyway, the serious things are nothing to worry about. By the time you’ve got a symptom you’re usually too far gone to do much about.” For a minute he lay gazing up, then he switched off the lamp to conceal his face. She heard him mutter half a word and then he was quiet. With his few words tonight he had expressed more pessimism than in all the years of their marriage. To indulge in pessimism, as to give way to anger or criticism, was to weaken the marriage, and he did not care to weaken it. He had never appeared to be dissatisfied with his life. He had not mapped out his life for a grand endeavor and been diverted. Everything about him gave evidence of his stolidity—his deliberation over small things, his way of absorbing circumstance rather than attacking it, the almost perverse unnecessity to change his existence, to strike, to wrestle, and she had clung to him for that enduring nature. But now, lying beside him, she felt in his being the invasion of futility, she felt his resentment of the specialist for his inaccessibility, and of her, his wife, for belittling him with her other life without him. The seizure and the suspense, the possibility that he might be at the mercy of physicians and of some malady and even of the end itself, all was enough of a belittlement. The husband who had always slept with a trusting face turned up toward the coming morning lay fearfully asleep, and she was afraid to touch him. She fell asleep with her hands tucked in under her heart.
Oh, God, what was going on? The obscene dolt, the faceless presence, the stranger in the night had lifted aside the hanging branches and was there, and he was cutting off her hair, crudely, with large, cold scissors. It fell in rippling, palely shining strands, moonlit, alive. It fell to the floor and the bedcovers, and her rage against that faceless presence gave way to an awful weakness as her hair was shorn. But was this really herself in a bed alone, a narrower bed? Was she really the young woman with the cropped hair, with the suffering face, the face gone beyond suffering? Was this herself? Oh, God, dear God, it was herself and she was dying years before Gerald. And how young she was, this woman, herself, who was never to know that old age she had so senselessly feared. Wailing, she struck weakly at the faceless presence cutting off her hair, but he went on cutting. In the bed someone suddenly moved, someone beside her rose up and bent over her. It was Gerald, and her terror over herself was over him instead. With both hands she gripped his wrist, calling his name into his large, gentle hand that was soothing and calming her into waking.
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