The bilge of the launch was full of gasoline and when she rolled at all this made a sloshing sound. The man, Harry Morgan, believed this sound was in his own belly and it seemed to him now that his belly was big as a lake and that it sloshed on both shores at once. That was because he was on his back now with his knees drawn up and his head back. The water of the lake that was his belly was very cold; so cold that when he stepped into its edge it numbed him, and he was extremely cold now and everything tasted of gasoline as though he had been sucking on a hose to syphon a tank. He knew there was no tank although he could feel a cold rubber hose that seemed to have entered his mouth and now was coiled, big, cold, and heavy all down through him. Each time he took a breath the hose coiled colder and firmer in his lower abdomen and he could feel it like a big, smooth-moving snake in there, above the sloshing of the lake. He was afraid of it, but although it was in him, it seemed a vast distance away and what he minded, now, was the cold.
The cold was all through him, an aching cold that would not numb away, and he lay quietly now and felt it. For a time he had thought that if he could pull himself up over himself it would warm him like a blanket, and he thought for a while that he had gotten himself pulled up and he had started to warm. But that warmth was really only the hemorrhage produced by raising his knees up; and as the warmth faded he knew now that you could not pull yourself up over yourself and there was nothing to do about the cold but take it. Be lay there, trying hard in all of him not to die long after he could not think. He was in the shadow now, as the boat drifted, and it was colder all the time.
The launch had been drifting since 10 o’clock of the night before and it was now getting late in the afternoon. There was nothing else in sight across the surface of the Gulf Stream but the gulf weed, a few pink, inflated, membranous bubbles of Portuguese men-of-war cocked jauntily on the surface, and the distant smoke of a loaded tanker bound north from Tampico.
“Well,” Richard Gordon said to his wife.
“You have lipstick on your shirt,” she said. “And over your ear.”
“What about this?”
“What about what?”
“What about finding you lying on the couch with that drunken slob?”
“You did not.”
“Where did I find you?”
“You found us sitting on the couch.”
“In the dark.”
“Where have you been?”
“At the Bradleys’.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. Don’t come near me. You reek of that woman.”
“What do you reek of?”
“Nothing. I’ve been sitting, talking to a friend.”
“Did you kiss him?”
“No.”
“Did he kiss you?”
“Yes, I liked it.”
“You bitch.”
“If you call me that I’II leave you.”
“You bitch.”
“All right,” she said. “It’s over. If you weren’t so conceited and I weren’t so good to you, you’d have seen it was over a long time ago.”
“You bitch.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not a bitch. I’ve tried to be a good wife, but you’re as selfish and conceited as a barnyard rooster. Always crowing, ‘Look what I’ve done. Look how I’ve made you happy. Now run along and cackle.’ Well, you don’t make me happy and I’m sick of you. I’m through cackling.”
“You shouldn’t cackle. You never produced anything to cackle about.”
“Whose fault was that? Didn’t I want children? But we never could afford them. But we could afford to go to the Cap d’Antibes to swim and to Switzerland to ski. We can afford to come down here to Key West. I’m sick of you. I dislike you. This Bradley woman today was the last straw.”
“Oh, leave her out of it.”
“You coming home with lipstick all over you. Couldn’t you even wash? There’s some on your forehead, too.”
“You kissed that drunken twerp.”
“No, I didn’t. But I would have if I’d known what you were doing.”
“Why did you let him kiss you?”
“I was furious at you. We waited and waited and waited. Y au never came near me. You went off with that woman and stayed for hours. John brought me home.”
“Oh, John, is it?”
“Yes, John. JOHN. John.”
“And what’s his last name? Thomas?”
“His name is MacWalsey.”
“Why don’t you spell it?”
“I can’t,” she said, and laughed. But it was the last time she laughed. “Don’t think it’s all right because I laugh,” she said, tears in her eyes, her lips working. “It’s not all right. This isn’t just an ordinary row. It’s over. I don’t hate you. It isn’t violent. I just dislike you. I dislike you thoroughly and I’m through with you.”
“All right,” he said.
“No. Not all right. All over. Don’t you understand?”
“I guess so.”
“Don’t guess.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic, Helen.”
“So I’m melodramatic, am I ? Well, I’m not. I’m through with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I won’t say it again.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet. I may marry John MacWalsey.”
“You will not.”
“I will if I wish.”
“He wouldn’t marry you.”
“Oh, yes, he will. He asked me to marry him this afternoon.”
Richard Gordon said nothing. A hollow had come in him where his heart had been, and everything he heard, or said, seemed to be overheard.