very chastely to
Hits of the Forties
. And don’t think I was so oblivious I didn’t see you snoogling behind the piano with Harry Saxon.”
“We weren’t behind the piano, we were on the bench. And he was just talking to me because he felt sorry for me. Everybody there felt sorry for me; you could have at
least
let somebody else dance
once
with Marlene, if only for show.”
“Show, show,” Richard said. “That’s your mentality exactly.”
“Why, the poor Matthews or whatever they are looked absolutely horrified.”
“Matthiessons,” he said. “And that’s another thing. Why are idiots like that being invited these days? If there’s anything I hate, it’s women who keep putting one hand on their pearls and taking a deep breath. I thought she had something stuck in her throat.”
“They’re a perfectly pleasant, decent young couple. The thing you resent about their being there is that their relative innocence shows us what we’ve become.”
“If you’re so attracted,” he said, “to little fat men like Harry Saxon, why didn’t you marry one?”
“My,” Joan said calmly, and gazed out the window away from him, at the scudding gasoline stations. “You honestly
are
hateful. It’s not just a pose.”
“Pose, show, my Lord, who are you performing for? If it isn’t Harry Saxon, it’s Freddie Vetter—all these dwarfs. Every time I looked over at you last night it was like some pale Queen of the Dew surrounded by a ring of mushrooms.”
“You’re too absurd,” she said. Her hand, distinctly thirtyish, dry and green-veined and rasped by detergents, stubbed out her cigarette in the dashboard ashtray. “You’re not subtle. You think you can match me up with another man so you can swirl off with Marlene with a free conscience.”
Her reading his strategy so correctly made his face burn; he felt again the tingle of Mrs. Brossman’s hair as he pressed his cheek against hers and in this damp privacy inhaled the perfume behind her ear. “You’re right,” he said. “But I want to get you a man your own size; I’m very loyal that way.”
“Let’s not talk,” she said.
His hope, of turning the truth into a joke, was rebuked. Any implication of permission was blocked. “It’s that
smugness
,” he explained, speaking levelly, as if about a phenomenon of which they were both disinterested students. “It’s your smugness that is really intolerable. Your knee-jerk liberalism I don’t mind. Your sexlessness I’ve learned to live with. But that wonderfully smug, New England— I suppose we needed it to get the country founded, but in the Age of Anxiety it really does gall.”
He had been looking over at her, and unexpectedly she turned and looked at him, with a startled but uncannily crystalline expression, as if her face had been in an instant rendered in tinted porcelain, even to the eyelashes.
“I asked you not to talk,” Joan said. “Now you’ve said things that I’ll never forget.”
Plunged fathoms deep into the wrong, feeling suffocated by his guilt, he concentrated on the highway and sullenly steered. Though they were moving at sixty in the sparse Saturday traffic, Richard had travelled this road so often its distances were all translated into time, so that the car seemed to him to be moving as slowly as a minute hand from one digitto the next. It would have been strategic and dignified of him to keep the silence; but he could not resist believing that just one more pinch of syllables would restore the marital balance that with each wordless mile slipped increasingly awry. He asked, “How did Bean seem to you?” Bean was their baby. They had left her last night, to go to the party, with a fever of 102 ° .
Joan wrestled with her vow to say nothing, but maternal concern won out. She said, “Cooler. Her nose is a river.”
“Sweetie,” Richard blurted, “will they hurt me?” The curious fact was that he had never given blood before. Asthmatic and underweight, he had