Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

“I don’t drink as much as I did then. And I’m home a lot more.”

She looked at me fiercely for a moment. “You were drunk all the time,” she said. “Or at least whenever I saw you, which wasn’t often. Now you’re drunk only part of the time.”

That was her first acknowledgment that I had cut down, and I was glad to hear it. “Look,” I said, “we could read books together, the way we did when we were first married. We should take a trip to Europe and go back to some of those places in Florence. Or that house in Brussels.”

She just looked at me and sipped her beer thoughtfully.

“Hell,” I said. “In a week I can be finished with these damned mergers and with a coal deal I’m trying to make. I’ll have time on my hands. We can get… can get reacquainted.” I looked toward the big casement windows that faced Madison Avenue, where my new floodlights made the tops of the two big maples glow theatrically, as though for a stage setting. Then I looked back at Anna and saw that she was crying. “What’s wrong, honey?” I said.

She went on snuffling for a minute and then took a substantial-looking handkerchief from the pocket of her dress and blew her nose powerfully. “Ben,” she said, “I had a miserable time when we went to Europe. I hated that house in Brussels. I spent the time hooking rugs and trying to get some heat in that kitschy place while you paced around and fretted and made three-hour phone calls. It was horrible.” She blew her nose again, more softly this time, and then looked at me balefully. “What makes you think it’ll be any different if we do it again?”

“I didn’t know…,” I said. “I thought you liked Europe that time.”

There was hatred in her eyes now and in her voice. “I told you a half-dozen times when we were there I wanted to go home. I told you I hated Belgium. I felt uncomfortable in the restaurants, and the movies were insipid.”

“Honey!” I said. “I remember.” Actually I hadn’t, until she spoke of it. I felt immediately guilty. But, damn it, it had been ten years before. “And didn’t I have French movies brought over and we showed them in the living room? And I got a good cook and we ate in.”

She stood up all of a sudden, with her half-finished glass of beer in her hand, and stared at me and said, levelly, “You son of a bitch, Ben. It was just like that. You did this for me and you did that. You were telling me then how you were going to straighten things out and how you were going to change. Well, you didn’t change and you’re not going to and I’m ill with it. I have a sickness unto death of hearing about you and what you are going to do and how things are going to be different. There are only two things you do, Ben; you make money and you talk about yourself. And I’m sick of both of them.” She stopped and finished her beer.

Something in me was cringing. I knew what she said was true. I was obsessed with myself and with making money. But, damn it, I did pay attention to her when she spoke up loudly enough to compete with the three-alarm fire that was sometimes going on in my head. I felt wretched. “Anna,” I said, in all sincerity, “what do you want?”

And then she did something I had never seen her do. She gripped her beer glass, swung her arm, and threw the glass like a hardball against the far wall. Straight as a rocket. It crashed, fell, tinkled on the floor.

“Jesus!” I said, impressed.

“What I want,” Anna said, “is for those rioters out there to come and get you personally and hang you. And then burn you. I hate your insides, you self-centered son of a bitch.”

I just stared at her. I had sensed that she was furious for a long time—years, I think. And there it was. It seemed to clear the air in the room.

“Damn your egomaniacal soul ,” she said, and then turned and left the room.

I sat there for about twenty minutes. Then I got up, went to the pool table, racked the balls into their triangle, broke the rack, and started shooting straight pool. I ran all fifteen of them. But my stomach was in a knot. I was a son of a bitch. Self-centered and money crazy.

When the Mafia first came out of the closet, merged with the Teamsters and listed itself on the New York Exchange, I stayed away from the stock. Cosa Nostra Industries. I was suspicious, despite the predictions of better shipping of goods across the country. Well, as usual, I was right; shortages got worse in New York, and the arrival of food and goods became even more whimsical. During that time in my mansion there were never any potatoes available except on the black market, but there was an abundance of pears. Damned good ones top. After I finished running that rack of balls on the pool table, I went down the elevator to the living room, where there was a big Sèvres bowl of yellow and red Bartletts. I began eating them and pacing around, dripping juice on the floor for a while until I got a plate and held it under the current pear. They were remarkable—as succulent as fruit could be—and I must have eaten a dozen of them. “Orally deprived,” the Great Orbach had said of me, “lacking in deep and vital nourishment inside.” It was sure true. My mother’s breasts had looked like rotten turnips to me. When I drank I drank seriously . Planning a real estate sale or a merger I could chew my thumbs until they blistered. If I didn’t have the metabolism of a Brazilian fire ant I’d be fat. But I only sleep three or four hours a night and I’m normally pretty lean.

So I gobbled down those pears in my guilt and anger and helplessness and remorse over Anna. We had been married fifteen years and it seemed to be only grief. I ate another pear, dribbling juice down my chin, striding across the living room in my lumberjack boots. Jesus! I thought, what does she want?

I said that aloud, What does she want? , several times, and then realized I was fighting back the answer. It was obvious: she wanted me to care about her. And the truth of it was that I didn’t. Not anymore. Anna bored me. There was a sweetness in her somewhere—a kind of lost child—that appealed to me strongly. There was that intelligence that had drawn me to her in the first place. But right now it was all dust and ashes. It wasn’t enough. I ate another pear, more slowly this time. It would have tasted better with a little hard cheese, but that was two floors below, in the kitchen. I pictured Anna’s face as it had looked in that parsonage with her cultivated, genteel family. She had seemed so smart, straightforward and fresh. So unlike anybody else I knew. She’d had a nice round bottom then too, and big, amused eyes. Talking to her was like talking to an old friend. She didn’t flirt. She wasn’t devious. I felt I should grab her right then and marry her.

I proposed after we had known each other three months and she accepted. She told me the truth: she wanted to get out of that place near Canada, see the larger world. She didn’t want to finish college and be a schoolteacher. She wanted something “different” she said. Well, I never found out what that “different” thing was—although God knows I tried to. And she never did either. She didn’t know what she wanted; how in the hell was I supposed to?

I took her to an inn in Jamaica for our honeymoon; we stayed in a suite with a private swimming pool and private dock and our own croquet course. The bedroom was enormous, with white furniture and beds and white walls. There were nineteenth-century British paintings of flowers and horses and landscapes on the walls and three vases of flowers in the room. We had two bathrooms, tiled and huge, with a giant bowl of hibiscus in each—pink for her and blue for me. There was a stone balcony forty feet long over the rocks where the Caribbean splashed in clear blue and foam.