“He asked you what?” he said, his voice coming from a long way away.
“To marry him.”
“Why?”
“Because he loves me. Because he wants me to live with him. He makes enough money to support me.”
“You’re married to me.”
“Not really. Not in the church. You wouldn’t marry me in the church and it broke my poor mother’s heart as you well know. I was so sentimental about you I’d break anyone’s heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It’s broken and gone. Everything I believed in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn’t it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have? And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I’m deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It’s half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to anymore. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I’m through with you and I’m through with love. Your kind of picknose love. You writer.”
“You little mick slut.”
“Don’t call me names. I know the word for you.”
“All right.”
“No, not all right. All wrong and wrong again. If you were just a good writer I could stand for all the rest of it maybe. But I’ve seen you bitter, jealous, changing your politics to suit the fashion, sucking up to people’s faces and talking about them behind their backs. I’ve seen you until I’m sick of you. Then that dirty rich bitch of a Bradley woman today. Oh, I’m sick of it. I’ve tried to take care of you and humor you and look after you and cook for you and keep quiet when you wanted and cheerful when you wanted and give you your little explosions and pretend it made me happy, and put up with your rages and jealousies and your meannesses and now I’m through.”
“So now you want to start again with a drunken professor? “
“He’s a man. He’s kind and he’s charitable and he makes you feel comfortable and we come from the same thing and we have values that you’ll never have. He’s like my father was.”
“He’s a drunk.”
“He drinks. But so did my father. And my father wore wool socks and put his feet in them up on a chair and read the paper in the evening. And when we had croup he took care of us. He was a boiler maker and his hands were all broken and he liked to fight when he drank, and he could fight when he was sober. He went to mass because my mother wanted him to and he did his Easter duty for her and for Our Lord, but mostly for her, and he was a good union man and if he ever went with another woman she never knew it.”
“I’ll bet he went with plenty.”
“Maybe he did, but if he did he told the priest, not her, and if he did it was because he couldn’t help it and he was sorry and repented of it. He didn’t do it out of curiosity, or from barnyard pride, or to tell his wife what a great man he was. If he did it was because my mother was away with us kids for the summer, and he was out with the boys and got drunk. He was a man.”
“You ought to be a writer and write about him.”
“I’d be a better writer than you. And John MacWalsey is a good man. That’s what you’re not. You couldn’t be. No matter what your politics or your religion.”
“I haven’t any religion.”
“Neither have I. But I had one once and I’m going to have one again. And you won’t be there to take it away. Like you’ve taken away everything else.”
“No.”
“No. You can be in bed with some rich woman like Helène Bradley. How did she like you? Did she think you were wonderful?”
Looking at her sad, angry face, pretty with crying, the lips swollen freshly like something after rain, her curly dark hair wild about her face, Richard Gordon gave her up, then, finally:
“And you don’t love me anymore?”
“I hate the word even.”
“All right,” he said, and slapped her hard and suddenly across the face.
She cried now from actual pain, not anger, her face down on the table.
“You didn’t need to do that,” she said.
“Oh, yes, I did,” he said. “You know an awful lot, but you don’t know how much I needed to do that.”
That afternoon she had not seen him as the door opened. She had not seen anything but the white ceiling with its cake-frosting modeling of cupids, doves and scroll work that the light from the open door suddenly made clear.
Richard Gordon had turned his head and seen him, standing heavy and bearded in the doorway.
“Don’t stop,” Helène had said. “Please don’t stop.” Her bright hair was spread over the pillow.