“Is Clem here?”
“No,” she said.
“He’s—have you seen him?”
“I sent him back to Champaign.”
Now he looked at her. Her face was as red as ever, her hair no better, but there was something steely in her eyes.
“One of us needed to do something,” she said. “I gather you did less than nothing.”
“He’s going back to Champaign? Now?”
“There’s a midnight bus and apparently a girl he’s involved with. I don’t know if he’ll change his mind, but it’s a start.”
Russ looked away from her. “That’s unfortunate. I was hoping to talk to him again.”
“If only you hadn’t been detained…”
“I already apologized for being late. I didn’t realize—”
“That he was having a major crisis?”
“I tried to reason with him.”
“And how did that go?”
“I—not well.”
She laughed at him. Laughed and stood up and went to the coat hooks by the door, removed something from a coat pocket, and shook it. Though small, the white object she extracted with her lips was so alien, had such a powerful charge, that it was like a third presence in the room. The bacony smell, he realized, was coming from his wife.
“What in God’s name are you doing?”
“Smoking,” she said.
“Not in my house.”
“This isn’t your house, Russ. That’s a silly idea you need to let go of. The house is the church’s, and I’m the one who’s always in it. In what sense is it yours?”
The question took him aback. “It is part of my compensation as a minister.”
“Oh dear.” She laughed again. “You want to argue with me? I wouldn’t recommend it.”
He saw that she was angry, perhaps inordinately so, about his little lie. She lit a burner on the stove and leaned over it, holding her hair away from the flame.
“Put that out,” he said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but put that out.”
With mirth in her eyes, she blew smoke in his direction.
“Marion. What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing!”
“If you’re angry with me about missing the party—”
“Truth be told, I was hardly even thinking of you.”
“I had an accident in the city. I ended up going with Mrs. Cottrell, by the way. Kitty couldn’t, ah. Kitty couldn’t make it. She, ah…”
He could feel himself being dragged down, by the inertia of marriage, into a well-established pattern of evasion. As long as he stayed with Marion, he would never change.
“You and I have a lot to discuss,” he said threateningly. “It’s not just Clem. There’s also a problem with Perry you need to know about. And— I went to see Ambrose. I thought it was—”
“Russ, really. I’m just having a cigarette.”
The sight of her smoking, in the middle of the kitchen, was uncanny. If she’d stripped out of her clothes and shaken her breasts at him, it wouldn’t have been any stranger. There was something of sex in the gasp of her drag on the cigarette.
“Although I do wonder,” she said, exhaling, “how you think it would work. Even at the level of fantasy, how do you picture it working?”
“How what would work?”
“You’d still have four kids to support. You’d still be making seven thousand dollars a year. Is the idea that you’d go and live on her charity? Forgive me for wondering how well you’ve thought it through.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Again Marion laughed. “I hope she’s good at writing sermons,” she said. “I hope she likes cooking your meals and washing your underwear. I hope she’s ready to have the relationship with your kids that you’re too busy saving the world for. I hope she’s up for dealing with your insecurity every night of the week. And you know what else? I hope she keeps a close eye on you.”
For the second time in two hours, he was being taunted. Although, in strict point of morality, he deserved it, he had a physical urge, stronger even than he’d had with Clem, to strike his wife. He felt like batting the cigarette from her hand, slapping her in the face, knocking the smile off it, so angering was the contrast between his family’s disrespect and Frances’s ingratiations.
“I didn’t realize,” he said stiffly, “that you resented helping me with my sermons.”