Poul Anderson - The Dancer from Atlantis

“Full moon tonight,” he said. “Come up on deck with me. It should be. beautiful.”

“No, I’m tired,” she answered. “You go. I’d rather stay here.”

Duncan Reid made himself look squarely at his wife and say, “I thought this was our trip.”

Pamela sighed. “Of course. Later, dear, please. I’m sorry to be such a rotten sailor, but I am. All the bad weather we’ve been having till now. Oh, the pills kept me from getting actually sick, but I never felt quite good either.”

He continued to regard her. A dozen years ago. when they married, she was well endowed. Later a waxing plumpness became her despair, dieting her anguish. He had tried to say, “Don’t weep over it. Take more exercise. Mainly, remember you’re still a damned attractive woman.” And she was, fair-complexioned, blue-eyed, with soft brown hair and regular features and gentle-looking mouth. But he was less and less often able to say it successfully.

“Seems I made a mistake, booking us onto a ship.” He heard how bitterness tinged his voice, and saw that she did too.

“Well, you knew I can’t go on your sailboat,” she retorted. “Or backpacking or—” Her head drooped, as did her tone. “Let’s not start that quarrel again.”

His glance went past her, across the impersonal coziness of their cabin, to the picture of their children on the dresser. “Maybe we should,” he replied slowly. “We don’t have to worry about them for a while, what they might overhear. Maybe we should bring things out into the open at last?’

“What things?” She sounded almost frightened. For an instant he saw her immaculate gown and grooming as armor. “What are you talking about’?”

He retreated. “I ... I can’t find words. Nothing obvious. Spats over ridiculous issues, irritations we learned to live with very early in the game, or imagined we had—I’d, uh, I’d hoped this could be, well, I told you, a second honeymoon—” His tongue knotted up on him.

He wanted to cry something like: Have we simply been losing interest in each other? Then how? Nothing physical, surely; not to such a degree; why, I’m a mere forty, you thirty-nine, and we still have enough good times to know how many more we might have. But they’ve been getting steadily more rare. I’ve been busy and you, perhaps, have been bored in spite of your assorted bustling, around; after dinner I’ll, read a book in my study while you watch television in the living room, till the first who grows sleepy says a polite good night and goes to bed.

Why won’t you come on deck with me, Pam? What a night it must be for love! Not that I feel hot especially, but I want to feel hot, for you. I could, if you’d let me.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, and patted his head. He wished he could tell how real the gesture was. “I am tired, though.”

“Of me?” came out before he could stop it.

“No, no, no. Never.” She came to him, laid arms around his waist. He patted her back. To him both motions felt automatic.

“We used to have adventures,” he said. “Remember? Newly wed and poor and making do.”

“I didn’t think scrimping along in that horrible cramped apartment was an adventure.” She broke off her words, but also from him. “L,et me get my coat, darling.”

“Not as a, uh, duty,” he protested, knowing that was the wrong thing to say but not sure what would have been right.

“I’ve changed my mind. .I could use a stroll.” Her smile was extremely bright. “It’s stuffy in here. And the ventilator’s noisy.”

“No, please. I understand. You do need rest.” He stepped to the closet and fetched his own topcoat in one hurried motion. “And I’ll be kind of galloping. Want to stretch my legs. You don’t enjoy that.” He avoided seeing her face as he departed.

Topside he did in fact stride himself breathless around and around the main deck. Once he went up to the fore-peak, but left it after he came upon a young couple neck-ing there. Presently he felt somewhat less churned and stopped by the rail for a smoke.

The wind, rain, fog, and heavy, hacking waves of spring-time in the North Pacific had died down. The air was cool, alive with unnamed sea odors and a low breeze, and it was clear; despite the moon, he had seldom seen as many stars as glittered in that lucent blackness. The light lay in a shivering road across waters whose crests it made sparkle and whose troughs it made sheen like molten obsidian. They murmured, those waters, and rushed and hissed and lapped, most softly in their immensity, and took to themselves the throb of engines and gave back the slight trembling of hull and deck.

His pipe started, Reid cradled the bowl in his hand for a bit of warmth and hearthglow. He had always found peace on the sea. Lovely and inhuman. Lovely because inhuman? He’d attempted to make Pam see that, but she didn’t care for Robinson Jeffers either.

He stared at the moon, low to, aft. Does it make any difference to you that four men’s footprints have marked you? he wondered. Recognizing the thought as childish, he looked outward and ahead. But yonder lay the seemingly endless war. And behind, at home, was the seemingly endless upward ratcheting of hate and fear; and Mark, and Tom (as he, a proud nine years of age, now insisted on being called), and little, little Bitsy, whom there was so short a time to cherish before they must walk forth into a world breaking apart beneath them. When you considered those things, what importance had two people, middle-class, slipping into middle age, other than what was conferred on them by the inverse square law?