“I don’t, Russ. The help is freely given.”
“In the future, I will write them all myself.”
She took another puff on the cigarette. “Whatever you like, dear.”
“As for the rest of it,” he said, “I won’t dignify it with an answer. I’ve had a very long day, and I’m going to bed. I would only thank you not to smoke in a house where the rest of us need to sleep.”
In response, she made an O with her lips and blew a smoke ring. Her mouth stayed open.
“God damn it, Marion.”
“Yes, dear?”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to prove—”
“I’m sure you don’t. You have some fine qualities, but imagination was never one of them.”
The insult was naked and it shocked him. Time and again, in the early years of their marriage, he’d sensed that she was angry about something small or large he’d done or failed to do. Each time, he’d expected an explosion of the sort he knew occurred in other marriages, and each time her anger had faded into soft-spoken reproach, at worst a sulking that she maintained for a day or two and then let go of, until finally he’d understood that they weren’t a couple who had fights. He remembered feeling proud of this. Now it seemed like another instance of her deadness to him as a wife.
“I shouldn’t have to imagine,” he said. “If something is bothering you, the responsible thing is to tell me what it is, instead of making insinuations.”
“Be careful what you ask for.”
“Do you think I can’t handle it? There’s nothing I can’t handle.”
“Tall words.”
“I mean it. If you have something to say to me, say it.”
“All right.” She brought the cigarette to her lips, her eyes crossing to focus on the coal. “It annoys me that you want to fuck her.”
The kitchen seemed to spin beneath his feet. He’d never heard that word from her.
“It’s really quite annoying, and if you think it’s because I’m jealous, that’s even more annoying. I mean, really—me? Jealous of that thing? Who do you think I am? Who do you think you married? I’ve seen the face of God.”
Russ stared at her. A schizophrenic parishioner had once said the same thing to him.
“You’ve got your liberal religion,” she said, “you’ve got your second-floor office, you’ve got your ladies on Tuesdays, but you have no idea what it means to know God. No idea what true belief is like. You think you’re God’s gift, you think you deserve better than what you’ve got, and, well, yes, I find that more than a little annoying. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your children are amazing—at least one of them is a flat-out genius. Where do you think that came from? Where do you think the brilliance in this family came from? Do you think it came from you? Ah—fuck!”
She shook her hand and dropped the cigarette, which had burned her. She picked it up and took it to the sink. She appeared to be having some kind of nervous breakdown, and it ought to have worried him, ought to have repelled him, but it didn’t. He remembered an intensity so deeply buried in the past it might have been a dream, the intensity she’d possessed at twenty-five, the intensity with which he’d wanted her. And she was still his wife. Still lawfully his. Provoked by her abandon, he approached her from behind and put his hands on her breasts. Beneath the wool of her dress and the folds of middle-aged flesh was the off-kilter girl who’d maddened him in Arizona. The smoke in her hair and something equally foreign, a smell of liquor, were further provocations. It was exciting to touch the breasts of a drunk stranger.
He tried to turn her around, but she ducked under his elbow and broke free. When he took a step toward her, she skittered away.
“Don’t you dare.”
“Marion—”
“You think I’m sloppy seconds?”
She never rejected him. In matters of the bedroom, he was the rejecter.
“Fine,” he said angrily. “I was simply trying to—”
“You and she deserve each other. Go ahead and see if I care. You have my permission.”
The contempt in her voice robbed him of any joy he might have taken in her permission. She really was smarter than he was. As crazy as she was acting, she was right about that, and it didn’t matter if she was squat and red-faced, it didn’t matter if he slew dragons. As long as they stayed married—even if they didn’t—she would always have that on him.