James Baldwin - Another Country

She said, “Admiration and love are very different.”

“Are they? I’m not so sure. How can you touch a woman if you know she despises you? And if a woman admires a man, what is it, really, that she admires? A woman who admires you will open her legs for you at once, she’ll give you anything she’s got.” She felt his heat and his presence above her like a cloud; she bit one knuckle. “You did — you did, for me, don’t you remember? Won’t you come back?”

Then she did look up at him, tears falling down her face. “Oh, Richard. I don’t know if I can.”

“Why? Do you despise me so much?” She looked down, twisting the handkerchief. He squatted beside the chair. “I’m sorry we’ve got so far apart — I really don’t even know how it happened, but I guess I got mad at you because — because you seemed to have so little respect for”—he tried to laugh—“my success. Maybe you’re right, I don’t know. I know you’re smarter than I am, but how are we going to eat, baby, what else can I do? Maybe I shouldn’t have let myself get so jealous of Vivaldo, but it seemed so logical, once I thought about it. Once I thought about it, I thought about it all the time. I know he must be alone a lot, and — and you’ve been alone.” She looked at him, looked away. He put one hand on her arm; she bit her lip to control her trembling. “Come back to me, please. Don’t you love me any more? You can’t have stopped loving me. I can’t live without you. You’ve always been the only woman in the world for me.”

She could keep silence and go into his arms, and the last few months would be wiped away — he would never know where she had been. The world would return to its former shape. Would it? The silence between them stretched. She could not look at him. He had existed for too long in her mind — now, she was being humbled by the baffling reality of his presence. Her imagination had not taken enough into account — she had not foreseen, for example, the measure or the quality or the power of his pain. He was a lonely and limited man, who loved her. Did she love him?

“I don’t despise you,” she said. “I’m sorry if I’ve made you think that.” Then she said nothing more. Why tell him? What good would it do? He would never understand it, she would merely have given him an anguish which he would never be able to handle. And he would never trust her again.

Did she love him? And if she did, what should she do? Very slowly and gently, she took her arm from beneath his hand; and she walked to the window. The blinds were drawn against the night, but she opened them a little and looked out: on the lights and the deep black water. Silence rang its mighty gongs in the room behind her. She dropped the blinds, and turned and looked at him. He sat, now, on the floor, beside the chair that she had left, his glass between his feet, his great hands loosely clasped below his knees, his head tilted up toward her. It was a look she knew, a listening, trusting look. She forced herself to look at him; she might never see that look again; and it had been her sustenance so long! His face was the face of a man entering middle age, and it was also — and always would be, for her — the face of a boy. His sandy hair was longer than usual, it was beginning to turn gray, his forehead was wet, and his hair was wet. Cass discovered that she loved him during the fearful, immeasurable second that she stood there watching him. Had she loved him less, she might have wearily consented to continue acting as the bulwark which protected his simplicity. But she could not do that to Richard, nor to his children. He had the right to know his wife: she prayed that he would take it.

She said, “I have to tell you something, Richard. I don’t know how you’ll take it, or where we can go from here.” She paused, and his face changed. Be quick! she told herself. “I have to tell you because we can never come back together, we can never have any future if I don’t.” Her stomach contracted again, dryly. She wanted to run to the bathroom, but she knew that that would do no good. The spasm passed. “Vivaldo and I have never touched each other. I’ve”— be quick! — “been having an affair with Eric.”

His voice, when he spoke, seemed to have no consciousness behind it, to belong to no one; it was a mere meaningless tinkle on the air: “Eric?”

She walked to the bar and leaned on it. “Yes.”

How the silence rang and gathered! “Eric?” He laughed. “ Eric? ”

It’s his turn now, she thought. She did not look at him; he was rising to his feet; he stumbled, suddenly drunken, to the bar. She felt him staring at her — for some reason, she thought of an airplane trying to land. Then his hand was on her shoulder. He turned her to face him. She forced herself to look into his eyes.

“Is that the truth?”

She felt absolutely cold and dry and wanted to go to sleep. “Yes, Richard. That’s the truth.”

She moved away and sat down in the chair again. She had, indeed, delivered herself up: she thought of the children and fear broke over her like a wave, chilling her. She stared straight before her, sitting perfectly still, listening: for no matter what else was lost, she would not give up her children, she would not let them go.

“It’s not true. I don’t believe you. Why Eric? Why did you go to him?”

“He has something — something I needed very badly.”

“What is that, Cass?”

“A sense of himself.”

“A sense of himself,” he repeated, slowly. “A sense of himself.” She felt his eyes on her, and also felt, with dread, how slowly the storm in him gathered, how long it would take to break. “Forgive your coarse-grained husband, but I’ve always felt that he had no sense of himself at all. He’s not even sure he knows what’s between his legs, or what to do with it — but I guess I have to take that back now.”

Here we go, she thought.

She said, wearily, helplessly, “I know it sounds strange, Richard.” Tears came to her eyes. “But he’s a very wonderful person. I know. I know him better than you do.”

He said, making a sound somewhere between a grunt and a sob, “I guess you do —though he may have preferred it the other way around. Did you ever think of that? You must be one of the very few women in the world—”

“Don’t, Richard. Don’t. It won’t change anything, it won’t help.”

He came and stood over her. “Let’s get this straight. We’ve been married almost thirteen years, and I’ve been in love with you all that time, and I’ve trusted you, and, except for a couple of times in the army, I haven’t had anything to do with any other woman. Even though I’ve thought about it. But it never seemed worth it. And I’ve worked, I’ve worked very hard, Cass, for you and our children, so we could be happy and so our marriage would work. Maybe you think that’s old-fashioned, maybe you think I’m dumb, I don’t know, you’re so much more— sensitive than I am. And now — and then—” He walked over to the bar and set his glass down. “Suddenly, for no reason, just when it begins to seem that things are really going to work out for us, all of a sudden — you begin to make me feel that I’m something that stinks, that I ought to be out of doors. I didn’t know what had happened, I didn’t know where you’d gone — all of a sudden. I’ve listened to you come into this house and go and look at the boys, and then crawl into bed — I swear, I could hear every move you made — and I’d stay on in the office like a little boy, because I didn’t know how, how, to come close to you again. I kept thinking, She’ll get over it, it’s just some strange kind of feminine shift that I can’t understand. I even thought, my God, that maybe you were going to have another baby and didn’t want to tell me yet.” He bowed his head on the bar. “And, Jesus, Jesus — Eric! You walk in and tell me you’ve been sleeping with Eric.” He turned and looked at her. “How long?”