Alison Lurie - Truth and Consequences

For a moment, Alan had had the impulse to do this, but he stopped himself as he realized that the kitchen was full of other appliances and cookware that might be thrown, that might not miss. If he had been well, he wouldn’t have cared, but in his present condition any further injury could make his pain unbearable. Jane is a violent woman, he thought. I’ve been married to her for sixteen years and I never knew this.

“I am telling the truth,” he insisted, beginning to feel like a complete louse.

Jane did not reply, only stood and stared at him, her arms full of wrecked metal parts.

“It’s late now,” he said, “and I’m in a lot of pain. I think we should just go to bed and sleep on it.”

“All right,” she said in a voice of great weariness. “But I’m not going to sleep in the same bed as you.” With a gesture of angry distaste, she shoved the pasta machine down into the kitchen trash can.

“I didn’t say you had to,” Alan had retorted. “Go on. We’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Maybe,” Jane said. “You can use the bathroom first,” she added. It was the same sentence she had spoken almost every night for a year and a half. Since he hurt his back, it had taken Alan longer to undress and put on his pajamas and brush his teeth and swallow his prescriptions and get into bed and arrange his many pillows and fall asleep. When Jane came to join him, he would usually still be awake. Then they would put their arms around each other, and he would report on his pain, discuss the events of the day, and plan for tomorrow. But now the tone of the familiar phrase was no longer casual and considerate—it was harsh and flat.

And when Alan, with groans and curses, had climbed into the antique four-poster, Jane had not come to lie beside him. As he lay there in the dim glow of the bathroom night-light, he could hear her small slippered feet descending the stairs to the downstairs guest room.

Two-thirty a.m. He turned over, trying not to aggravate Old Clootie, staring into the dark. Why was it, he thought, that Delia, who had never said she loved him or promised him anything, made him feel better whenever he saw her, and Jane—who loved him, and had done so much for him—made him feel worse? Why was it that when he was with Delia, though his back still hurt, it was as if the pain were beside him and not within him—an unwelcome companion, but not a devil possessing and torturing him? Maybe it was because Delia never asked how he was feeling or expressed a condescending pity for him—and in the long run, in Alan’s opinion, all pity was condescending.

He turned over again, groaning. Then, finally, the pills he had taken began to work, and he drifted into an uneasy, guilty sleep.

It was late when Alan woke, almost nine. His back still hurt, but his head was clearer. You made a bad mistake last night, he told himself. You’ve got to remember that Delia is a visiting scholar at the Unger Center who will only be in town until next May. Whereas Jane is your wife who has promised to be true to you forever, in sickness and in health. You have to make it up with her. You don’t have to admit anything, but you have to apologize for upsetting her and tell her that you love her and are very grateful to her. Because it’s true—it must be true, even if you don’t feel it now.

Alan groaned. The house around him was quiet: probably Jane was still asleep in the downstairs guest room. Well, let her sleep. He hauled himself up, feeling the familiar angry clutch of the lizard in his spine as he did so. He put on a navy-blue plush robe and slippers, used the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and went downstairs to make coffee.

The kitchen was empty, but stuck to the center of the table was a yellow Post-It note:

I’ve gone to stay at my mother’s, will phone later. J.

Oh, Christ, Alan thought. It’s too late. I’ve already burnt my bridges. An image appeared in his mind of an eighteenth-century “Chinese” ornamental bridge he had photographed in an English park for his book on architectural follies. Originally it had been decorated in wood and plaster, with carved dragons painted red and gold and blue. But the arch at the far end (not visible in his photo) had been damaged in a recent fire, and a gilt rope was strung across the near end, warning visitors not to cross. He could not remember now whether the bridge had been scheduled to be repaired or demolished.

Suppose his bridges were truly burnt, and Jane had left him for good and was out of his life? Suppose he was free to see Delia, to be with her whenever they wanted? It was what she wanted too, he was almost sure of it. The way she sighed when he touched her, the way she widened her silver-gray eyes and gazed into his when they arranged to meet—and when they did meet—Unlike Jane, she was always erotically inventive, sometimes amazingly so. She couldn’t really care for that useless person Henry Hull, her whole manner when she spoke of him suggested this. If she were free too—

It would mean trouble and pain, it would mean blame and guilt. But so what? He remembered something Delia had said more than once, that it was not important for an artist to be happy, or to be good. “We’re above all that,” she had told him. “What’s important for us is to do our work.” Right now, he was neither happy nor good, but he was working, and if he had Delia—

Alan glanced again at the note on the table, its dark-blue ink, its familiar neat girlish penmanship—and now he noticed another line of writing at the bottom, an afterthought in pencil:

Ham sandwich in fridge.

He knew what that meant: it meant that Jane still felt responsible for his welfare. To be sure of this, he opened the fridge and saw the sandwich, on a white plate with a slice of dill pickle beside it, the whole tightly covered with plastic wrap. He knew that there would be mustard and mayonnaise on the rye bread, and he could see the red-leaf lettuce that he preferred. There was no mistaking the message : whether he wanted her there or not, Jane was still in his life.

THIRTEEN

“Something awful has happened,” Jane told Henry as she climbed into his SUV late Saturday morning at the nearly deserted Farmers’ Market. Most of the stalls were empty; only a few sellers shivered in down jackets and knitted wool hats behind displays of pumpkins, potatoes, and homemade jams. A thin, mean wind gusted from the lake, where a rim of ice clung to the withered grass of the shore.

“You’re shivering,” Henry said. “I’ll turn up the heat. Now give me your hands. Oh, so cold.” He pulled off Jane’s driving gloves and took her chilled fingers in his own, warmer ones. “All right. Tell me.”

Though she had resolved not to break down, Jane could not keep back a strangulated sob or two as she related the events of yesterday afternoon and evening. Henry did not interrupt, only nodded occasionally, holding or rubbing her hands all the while. Gradually it dawned upon her that he was not registering shock or astonishment. “Yeah,” he merely said several times as she told the story, and again when she had finished. “Yeah.”

“How do you mean, ‘Yeah?’ ” Jane asked, looking at him. Henry did not answer, only shrugged inside his duffle coat. “You’re not surprised,” she said suddenly. “You already knew.”

“Well. More or less.”

“But you didn’t say anything to me.” Jane pulled her hands away.

“I—I could have been wrong,” Henry stammered. “I mean, I didn’t know for sure it was Alan this time.”

“This time?” She stared. “You mean something like that has happened before?”

In the silence that followed, she heard only the rough hum of the car heater.

“Yeah,” Henry said finally. “But see, from Delia’s point of view, it’s not serious, it’s just something she needs sometimes. It doesn’t have anything to do with her feelings for me.”