Wolfe, Gene - The Best of Gene Wolfe

I complied. “It might be less awkward if you employed your husband’s name. Use a false one if you like. Tom, Dick, or Harry would do, or even Mortimer.”

“That wouldn’t be him, and I don’t want to say it. Aren’t you going to ask if he beat me? I went to the battered women’s shelter once, and they kept coming back to that. I think they wanted me to lie.”

“You said that you left home yesterday, and I’ve seen your face. It isn’t bruised.”

“Now up here. He didn’t. Oh, he knocked me down a couple times, but not lately. They’re supposed to get drunk and beat you up.”

I said that I had heard that before, though I had never understood it.

“You don’t get mean when you’re drunk.”

“I talk too much and too loudly,” I told her, “and I can’t remember names, or the word I want to use. Eventually I grow ashamed and stop talking completely, and drinking as well.”

“My husband used to be happy and rowdy—that was before we got married. After, it was sort of funny, because you could see him starting to get mad before he got the top off the first bottle. Isn’t that funny?”

“No one can bottle emotions,” I said. “We must bring them to the bottles ourselves.”

“Kiss me.”

We kissed. I had always thought it absurd to speak of someone enraptured by a kiss, yet I knew a happiness that I had not thought myself capable of.

“Larry was really smart, like you. Did I say that?”

I managed to nod.

“I want to lie on top of you. Just for a minute or so. Is that all right?”

I told her truthfully that I would adore it.

“You can put your hands anyplace you want, but hold me. That’s good. That’s nice. He was really smart, but he wasn’t good at talking to people. Socially, you know? The stuff he cared about didn’t matter to us, and the stuff we wanted to talk about didn’t matter to him. But I let him kiss me in his dad’s car, and I always danced the first and last numbers with him. Nobody cares about that now, but then they did, where we came from. Larry and my husband and I. I think if he’d kept on drinking—he’d have maybe four or five beers every night, at first—he’d have beaten me to death and that was why he stopped. But he used to threaten. Do you know what I mean?”

I said that I might guess, but with no great confidence.

“Like he’d pick up my big knife in the kitchen, and he’d say, ‘I could stick this right through you—in half a minute it would all be over.’ Or he’d talk about how you could choke somebody with a wire till she died, and while he did he’d be running the lamp cord through his fingers, back and forth. Do you like this?”

“Don’t!” I said.

“I’m sorry; I thought you’d like it.”

“I like it too much. Please don’t. Not now.”

“He’d talk about other men, how I was playing up to them. Sometimes it was men I hadn’t even noticed. Like we’d go down to the pizza place, and when we got back he’d say, ‘The big guy in the leather jacket—I saw you. He was eating it up, and you couldn’t give him enough, could you? You just couldn’t give him enough.’

“And I wouldn’t have seen anybody in a leather jacket. I’d be trying to remember who this was. But when we were in school he was never jealous of Larry, because he knew Larry was just a handy man to me. I kind of liked him the way I kind of liked the little kid next door.”

“You got him to help you with your homework,” I said.

“Yes, I did. How’d you know?”

“A flash of insight. I have them occasionally.”

“I’d get him to help before a big quiz too. When we were finishing up the semester, in Social Studies or whatever, I wouldn’t have a clue about what she was going to ask on the test, but Larry always knew. He’d tell me half a dozen things, maybe, and five would be right there on the final. A flash of insight, like you said.”

“Similar, perhaps.”

“But the thing was . . . it was . . . was—”

She gulped and gasped so loudly that even I realized she was about to cry. I hugged her, perhaps the most percipient thing I have ever done.

“I wasn’t going to tell you that, and I guess I’d better not or I’ll bawl. I just wanted to say you’re Larry, because my husband never minded him, not really, or anyhow not very much, and he’d kid around with him in those days, and sometimes Larry’d help him with his homework too.”

“You’re right,” I told her, “I am Larry, and your name is Martha Williamson, although she was never half so beautiful as you are and I had nearly forgotten her.”

“Have you cooled down enough?”

“No. Another five minutes, possibly.”

“I hope you don’t get the aches. Do you really think I’m beautiful?”

I said I did, and that I could not tell her properly how lovely she was, because she would be sure I lied.

“My face is too square.”

“Absolutely not! Besides, you mean rectangular, surely. It’s not too rectangular either. Any face less rectangular than yours is too square or too round.”

“See? You are Larry.”

“I know.”

“This is what I was going to tell, if I hadn’t gotten all weepy. Let me do it, and after that we’ll . . . You know. Get together.”

I nodded, and she must have sensed my nod in a movement of my shoulder, or perhaps a slight motion of the mattress. She was silent for what seemed to me half a minute, if not longer. “Kiss me; then I’ll tell it.”

I did.

“You remember what you said in the kitchen?”

“I said far too many things in the kitchen, I’m afraid. I tend to talk too much even when I’m sober. I’m sure I couldn’t recall them all.”

“It was before that awful man came in and took my room. I said the people going to Hell were dead, and you said some were and some weren’t. That didn’t make any sense to me till later when I thought about my husband. He was alive, but it was like something was getting a tighter hold on him all the time. Like Hell was reaching right out and grabbing him. He went on so about me looking at other men that I started really doing it. I’d see who was there, trying to figure out which one he’d say when we got home. Then he started bringing up ones that hadn’t been there, people from school—this was after we were out of school and married, and I hadn’t seen a lot of them in years.”

I said, “I understand.”

“He’d been on the football team and the softball team and run track and all that, and mostly it was those boys he’d talk about, but one time it was the shop teacher. I never even took shop.”

I nodded again, I think.

“But never Larry, so Larry got to be special to me. Most of those boys, well, maybe they looked, but I never looked at them. But I’d really dated Larry, and he’d had his arms around me and even kissed me a couple times, and I danced with him. I could remember the cologne he used to wear, and that checkered wool blazer he had. After graduation most of the boys from our school got jobs with the coal company or in the tractor plant, but Larry won a scholarship to some big school, and after that I never saw him. It was like he’d gone there and died.”

“It’s better now,” I said, and I took her hand, just as she had taken mine going upstairs.

She misunderstood, which may have been fortunate. “It is. It really is. Having you here like this makes it better.” She used my name, but I am determined not to reveal it.

“Then after we’d been married about four years, I went in the drugstore, and Larry was there waiting for a prescription for his mother. We said hi, and shook hands, and talked about old times and how it was with us, and I got the stuff I’d come for and started to leave. When I got to the door, I thought Larry wouldn’t be looking anymore, so I stopped and looked at him.