Harlan Ellison - Shatterday

What had she done that was so awful, apart from the constant attempts at suicide, the endless remarks intended to make him feel inadequate, the erratic behavior, the morning he had returned from ten weeks of basic training a day earlier than expected and found her in bed with some skinny guy from on the block, the times she took off and sold the furniture and cleaned out the savings account? What had she done beyond that? Oh, hell, Martha, nothing much.

He couldn’t say that. He had to encapsulate the four years of their marriage. One moment that summed it up.

He said, “I was trying to pass my bar exams. I was really studying hard. It wasn’t easy for me the way it was for a lot of people. And she used to mumble.”

“She mumbled?”

“Yeah. She’d walk around, making remarks you just knew were crummy, but she’d do it under her breath, just at the threshold of audibility. And me trying to concentrate. She knew it made me crazy, but she always did it. So one time… I was really behind in the work and trying to catch up… and she started that, that…” He remembered! “That damned mumbling, in the living room and the bedroom and the bathroom… but she wouldn’t come in the kitchen where I was studying. And it went on and on and on…”

He was trembling. Jesus, why had she asked for this; it wasn’t in the script.

“… and finally I just stood up and screamed, ‘What the hell are you mumbling? What the hell do you want from me? Can’t you see I’m busting my ass studying? Can’t you for Christ sake leave me alone for just five fucking minutes?’ “

With almost phonographic recall he knew he was saying precisely, exactly what he had screamed all those years ago.

“And I ran into the bedroom, and she was in her bathrobe and slippers, and she started in on me, accusing me of this and that and every other damned thing, and I guess I finally went over the edge, and I punched her right in the face. As hard as I could. The way I’d hit some slob in the street. Hard, real hard. And then somehow I had her bedroom slipper in my hand and I was sitting on her chest on the bed, and beating her in the face with that goddam slipper… and… and… I woke up and saw me hitting her, and it was the first time I’d ever hit a woman, and I fell away from her, and I crawled across the floor and I was sitting there like a scared animal, my hands over my eyes… crying… scared to death…”

She stared at him silently. He was shaking terribly.

“Jesus,” she said, softly.

And they stayed that way for a while, without speaking. He had answered her question: More than she wanted to know.

The mood was tainted now. He could feel himself split—one part of him here and now with the naked Martha, in this bedroom with the light low—another part he had thought long gone, in that other bedroom, hunkered down against the baseboard, hands over eyes, whimpering like a crippled dog, Cindy sprawled half on the floor, half on the bed, her face puffed and bloodied. He tried desperately to get control of himself.

After some long moments he was able to breathe regularly. She was still staring at him, her eyes wide. He said, almost with reverence, “Thank God for Marcie.”

She waited and then said, “Who’s Marcie?”

“Who was Marcie. Haven’t seen her in something like fifteen years.”

“Well, who was Marcie?”

“She was the one who picked up the pieces and focused my eyes. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d have walked around on my knees for another year… or two… or ten…”

“What happened to her?”

“Who knows? You can take it from our recently severed liaison; I seem to have some difficulty hanging on to good women.”

“Oh, Mike!”

“Hey, take it easy. You split for good and sound reasons. I think I’m doomed to be a bachelor… maybe a recluse for the rest of my life. But that’s okay. I’ve tried it three times. I just don’t have the facility. I’m good for a woman for short stretches, but over the long haul I think I’m just too high-pressure.”

She smiled wanly, trying to ease what she took to be pain. He wasn’t in pain, but she had never been able to tell the difference with him. Precisely that inability to penetrate his façade had been the seed of their dissolution. “It was okay with us.”

“For a while.”

“Yeah. For a while.” She reached across him to the nightstand and picked up the heavy Orrefors highball glass with the remains of the Mendocino Gray Riesling. “It was so strange running into you at Allison’s party. I’d heard you were seeing some model or actress… or something.”

He shook his head. “Nope. You were my last and greatest love.”

She made a wet, bratting sound. “Bullshit.”

“Mmm. Yeah, it is a bit, ain’t it.”

And they stayed that way, silently, for a while. Once, he touched her naked thigh, feeling the nerve jump under his hand; and once, she reached across to lay her hand on his chest, to feel him breathing. But they didn’t make love again. And after a space of time in which they thought they could hear the dust settling in the room, she said, “Well, I’ve got to get home to feed the cats.”

“You want to stay the night?”

She thought about it a moment. “No thanks, Mike. Maybe another night when I come prepared. You know my thing about putting on the same clothes the next day.” He knew. And smiled.

She crawled out of bed and began getting dressed. He watched her, ivory-lit by the single bed lamp. It never would have worked. But then, he’d known that almost from the first. It never worked well for an extended period. There was no Holy Grail. Yet the search went on, reflexively. It was like eating potato chips.

She came back to the bed, leaned over and kissed him. It was the merest touch of lips, and meant nothing. “Bye. Call me.”

“No doubt about it,” he said; but he wouldn’t.

Then she left. He sat up in bed for a while, thinking that it was odd how people couldn’t leave it alone. Like a scab, they had to pick at it. He’d dated her rather heavily for a month, and they had broken up for no particular reason save that it was finished. And tonight the party, and he was alone, and she was alone, and they had come together for an anticlimax.

A returning. To a place neither had known very well. A devalued neighborhood.

He knew he would never see Martha again.

The bubble of sadness bobbed on the surface for a moment, then burst; the sense of loss flavored the air a moment longer; then he turned off the light, rolled over onto the dried wet spot, and went to sleep.

He was hacking out the progression of interrogatories pursuant to the Blieler brief with one of the other attorneys in the office when his secretary stuck her head into the conference room and said he had a visitor. Rubbing his eyes, he realized they had been at it for three straight hours. He shoved back from the conference table, swept the papers into the folio, and said, “Let’s knock off for lunch.” The other attorney stretched, and musculature crackled. “Okay. Call it four o ‘ clock. I’ve got to go over to the 9000 Building to pick up Barbarossi’s deposition.” He got up and left. Kirxby sighed, simply sitting there, all at once overcome by a nameless malaise. As though something dark and forbidding were slouching towards his personal Bethlehem.

Then he went into his office to meet his visitor.

She turned half-around in the big leather chair and smiled at him. “Jerri!” he said, all surprise and pleasure. His first reaction: surprised pleasure. “My God, it’s been… how long…?”

The smile lifted at one corner: her bemused smile.

“It’s been six months. Seem longer?”