Ray Bradbury - Long After Midnight

"I know, I know, you have to drive all day, and you're tired, and you just got over a strep infection in Mexico City, and you're afraid it'll come back and you want to take it easy on your heart, and the least I could do is to keep my nose clean and the arithmetic neat. I know it all by heart. I'm only a writer, and I admit I've got big feet."

"You won't make a very good writer this way," he said. "It's such a simple thing, addition."

"I didn't do it on purpose!" she cried, throwing the pencil down. "Hell! I wish I had cheated you now. I wish I'd done a lot of things now. I wish I'd lost that air-pressure gauge on purpose, I'd have some pleasure in thinking about it and knowing I did it to spite you, anyway. I wish I'd picked these beds for their hard mattresses, then I could laugh in my sleep tonight, thinking how hard they are for you to sleep on, I wish I'd done that on purpose. And now I wish I'd thought to fix the books. I could enjoy laughing about that, too."

"Keep your voice down," he said, as to a child.

"I'll be god-damned if I'll keep my voice down."

"All I want to know now is how much money you have in the kitty."

She put her trembling hands in her purse and brought out all the money. When he counted it, there was five dollars missing.

"Not only do you keep poor books, overcharging me on some item or other, but now there's five dollars gone from the kitty," he said. "Where'd it go?"

"I don't know. I must have forgotten to put it down, or if I did, I didn't say what for. Good God, I don't want to add this damned list again. I'll pay what's missing out of my own allowance to keep everyone happy. Here's five dollars! Now, let's go out for some air, it's hot in here."

She jerked the door wide and she trembled with a rage all out of proportion to the facts. She was hot and shaking and stiff and she knew her face was very red and her eyes bright, and when Senor Gonzales bowed to them and wished them a good evening, she had to smile stiffly in return.

"Here," said her husband, handing her the room key. "And don't, for God's sake, lose it."

The band was playing in the green zocalo. It hooted and blared and tooted and screamed up on the bronze-scrolled bandstand. The square was bloomed full with people and color, men and boys walking one way around the block, on the pink and blue tiles, women and girls walking the other way, flirting their dark olive eyes at one another, men holding each other's elbows and talking earnestly between meetings, women and girls twined like ropes of flowers, sweetly scented, blowing in a summer night wind over the cooling tile designs, whispering, past the vendors of cold drinks and tamales and enchiladas. The band precipitated "Yankee Doodle" once, to the delight of the blonde woman with the horn-rim glasses, who smiled wildly and turned to her husband. Then the band hooted "La Cumparsita" and "La Paloma Azul," and she felt a good warmth and began to sing a little, under her breath.

"Don't act like a tourist," said her husband.

"I'm just enjoying myself."

"Don't be a damned fool, is all I ask."

A vendor of silver trinkets shuffled by. "Senor?"

Joseph looked them over, while the band played, and held up one bracelet, very intricate, very exquisite. "How much?"

"Veinte pesos, senor."

"Ho ho," said the husband, smiling. "I'll give you five for it," in Spanish.

"Five," replied the man in Spanish. "I would starve."

"Don't bargain with him," said the wife.'

"Keep out of this," said the husband, smiling. To the vendor, "Five pesos, senor."

"No, no, I would lose money. My last price is ten pesos."

"Perhaps I could give you six," said the husband. "No more than that."

The vendor hesitated in a kind of numbed panic as the husband tossed the bracelet back on the red velvet tray and turned away. "I am no longer interested. Good night."

"Senor! Six pesos, it is yours!"

The husband laughed. "Give him six pesos, darling."

She stiffly drew forth her wallet and gave the vendor some peso bills. The man went away. "I hope you're satisfied," she said.

"Satisfied?" Smiling, he flipped the bracelet in the palm of his pale hand. "For a dollar and twenty-five cents I buy a bracelet that sells for thirty dollars in the States!"

"I have something to confess," she said. "I gave that man ten pesos."

"What!" The husband stopped laughing.

"I put a five-peso note in with those one-peso bills. Don't worry, I'll take it out of my own money. It won't go on the bill I present you at the end of the week."

He said nothing, but dropped the bracelet in his pocket. He looked at the band thundering into the last bars of "Ay, Jalisco." Then he said, "You're a fool. You'd let these people take all your money."

It was her turn to step away a bit and not reply. She felt rather good. She listened to the music.

"I'm going back to the room," he said. "I'm tired."

"We only drove a hundred miles from Patzcuaro."

"My throat is a little raw again. Come on."

They moved away from the music and the walking, whispering, laughing people. The band played the "Toreador Song." The drums thumped like great dull hearts in the summery night. There was a smell of papaya in the air, and green thicknesses of jungle and waters.

"I'll walk you back to the room and come back myself," she said. "I want to hear the music."

"Don't be naive."

"I like it, damn it, I like" it, it's good music. Ifs not fake, it's real, or as real as anything ever gets in this world, that’s why I like it.”

"When I don't feel well, I don't expect to have you out running around the town alone. It isn't fair you see things I don't."

They turned in at the hotel and the music was still fairly loud. "If you want to walk by yourself, go off on a trip by yourself and go back to the United States by yourself," he said. "Where's the key?"

"Maybe I lost it."

They let themselves into the room and undressed. He sat on the edge of the bed looking into the night patio. At last he shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and sighed. "I'm tired. I've been terrible today." He looked at her where she sat, next to him, and he put out his hand to take her arm. "I'm sorry. I get all riled up, driving, and then us not talking the language too well. By evening I'm a mess of nerves."

"Yes," she said.

Quite suddenly he moved over beside her. He took hold of her and held her tightly, his head over her shoulder, eyes shut, talking into her ear with a quiet, whispering fervency. "You know, we must stay together. There's only us, really, no matter what happens, no matter what trouble we have. I do love you so much, you know that. Forgive me if I'm difficult. We've got to make it go."

She stared over his shoulder at the blank wall and the wall was like her life in this moment, a wide expanse of nothingness with hardly a bump, a contour, or a feeling to it. She didn't know what to say or do. Another time, she would have melted. But there was such a thing as firing metal too often, bringing it to a glow, shaping it. At last the metal refuses to glow or shape; it is nothing but a weight. She was a weight now, moving mechanically in his arms, hearing but not hearing, understanding but not understanding, replying but not replying. "Yes, we'll stay together." She felt her lips move. "We love each other." The lips said what they must say, while her mind was in her eyes and her eyes bored deep into the vacuum of the wall. "Yes." Holding but not holding him. "Yes."

The room was dim. Outside, someone walked in a corridor, perhaps glancing at this locked door, perhaps hearing their vital whispering as no more than something falling drop by drop from a loose faucet, a running drain perhaps, or a turned bookleaf under a solitary bulb. Let the doors whisper, the people of the world walked down tile corridors and did not hear.