MIDDLE

The sun was flooding the room when John Grandin awoke. He glanced at his watch and saw it was nine-­thirty. The lateness of the hour surprised him; ordinarily he was a poor sleeper and woke soon after daylight. He could not remember when he had slept so late or so well; he hadn’t opened his eyes once during the night. It must be the sea air. He reached for a cigarette and looked across at Ethel’s bed. She was not there.

He raised up on his elbow to see if she had left a note, but there was no message on the night table between their beds nor on her pillow. Perhaps she had stuck it in the bathroom mirror. She must have risen early, dressed quietly so as not to disturb him, and gone down to breakfast. If he hurried he would probably find her still at the table, or on the veranda enjoying the morning sun, knitting, working a crossword puzzle, or chatting with one or another of the guests; possibly in the creaking swing. At the thought of the swing, the full recollection of all that had happened last night came over him. He was suddenly in no mood to hurry.

Of course she had not left a note; not today. He lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes.

He could almost be ashamed of himself that he had slept so well. By rights, he should have tossed and turned the whole night through, wakeful and distressed. Instead he had slept as if he hadn’t a worry in his head. Perhaps the very violence of the quarrel had cleared the atmosphere more than he knew, and brought out into the open at last something which had been suppressed too long, ridding him momentarily of a tormenting guilt which had been keeping him awake far into every night. He was reminded of a colleague who, almost every time they conversed, spoke lingeringly, all but fondly, of his insomnia, complaining insistently that he was never able to sleep; and how he had thought: “Who is it you don’t want to sleep with?”—Was it possible to have an instinctive insight into the troubles of another, and so little about one’s own?

After he had slammed the door he had gone downstairs. As he strode through the small lobby, avoiding all eyes and looking neither to right nor to left, his own final words still rang in his ears—Then all right!—and he wondered what under the sun they were supposed to have meant. At the moment there had been no doubt; they were inevitable and right, flung out without premeditation. Now they struck him as meaningless except as they marked finis, a signing off, to the whole painful futile session. Without these words (or some others equally pointless and unprovocative, from which bitterer recriminations could not spring) it might have gone on till the last shred of decency had been stripped from them both and they were reduced to mere skeletons of hate, unable further to draw blood.

He had opened the screen door and bumped into a tight canvas frame stretched from the ceiling of the porch to the floor, serving as a blackout to the lighted lobby within. He stepped around this and found himself a chair somewhere along the veranda in the dark.

Through the windows at his back came the tinkling notes of the harp. They rippled to an abrupt high finish, which was immediately followed by a patting of fingertips and the buzz of released talk. A few feet from his chair a swing creaked slowly back and forth; he saw the glow of two cigarettes, going lighter and darker at intervals.

A couple was sitting nearby—young or old, he could not tell; but from the unbroken silence maintained between them, they were obviously in full understanding or rapport if not actually in embrace.

He was cold in his stomach. The ordeal had left him almost physically ill. It was no time to go over in his mind all that had been said, weigh the justice or injustice of Ethel’s grievances, or plan his defense should they arise again. All he wanted was to sit in the night air and allow this sickness of self (if it would) to pass away. Besides, in view of his long neglect, her complaints were not unjustified. He could almost be surprised they had not risen before. What did surprise him was that the attack had been voluble, articulate, and complete. For once she had not been at a loss for words. It was the first time in their married life that he had been left without a rag of self-respect.

There was a strong hint of fog in the dark, a dampness brushing his cheeks and forehead. Somewhere, but as if far off, he heard the sea—not the wash of it as it rose and fell, but only the intermittent dull pound as the breakers struck the beach.

He wondered what Ethel was doing upstairs, in the room just above his head; probably putting her things away, hanging her clothes in the closet, settling down for the holiday. He must be careful not to let anger get the better of him, as it had so often before, when he returned to the room and found her doing her nails at the dressing table or in bed reading a magazine as if nothing had happened. These outbursts always left him shaken and weak for hours after; but for her, they acted as a kind of purge. Almost immediately she was herself again; the more violent the quarrel, it seemed, the more quickly she recovered. Delivered of her burden, she had already begun to feel better before he left the room.

There was a stir in the swing, as if one of them had shifted to a more comfortable or possibly even a more advantageous position. He felt almost certain that some kind of love-­making was afoot; but in view of all that had just happened, it seemed vanity, vanity, all vanity. Then, except for the harp, there was silence again—a meaningful silence, but how could it seem anything but inane. . . . Whoever they were, they must certainly have heard the racket overhead.

He supposed the thing to do was to go upstairs, say he was sorry, say she was right, say he understood, and tell her the decisions he had come to on the train. Or say nothing at all: take her in his arms, hold her, lie with her in her bed. But he couldn’t have done it if his life had depended on it. Not now; not while this thing was fresh in both their minds. Ethel’s accusations had been too much of a demand that he prove her wrong. Aware that she would be questioning his every move, he’d be utterly unable to make love to her now.

The reasons for the completeness of the attack must have been because Ethel had had a week to think it over. Violent though they were, her vituperations sprang less from the emotion of the moment than from cold calculation or malice aforethought. She had had plenty of time to marshal her points in a fair semblance of order, and once started, had run through them rapidly to their shattering climax. Half a dozen times he might have stopped her by some facetious, ironic, or cruel remark; but after a moment or two of protest he had found himself spellbound, both repelled and fascinated by the naked way she was exposing them both, shouting details which normally she could not have been induced to mention. Unbidden, an advertising slogan slid into his mind: Nature in the raw is seldom mild.

Did women never tire? Did they want one man forever and ever, and him all the time? Why was it that love didn’t sift down to a comfortable level in their lives, as it did with men, one with work, play, sleep, and the other rewards of normal existence? Early or late, there was always the conflict. Men brought to marriage a full awakened appetite, to which in some cases their wives were passive for so long that the period when their separate natures corresponded was short indeed. This period had come about when his passion was at its peak and hers was beginning to awaken to a matching intensity. Looking back on this, he thought of it ruefully as the happiest time of his life, the completest, the best. But even the best loses something of its delight when it lasts too long. In any case, it hadn’t lasted. His passion had slackened while hers increased. What had it turned into, on his part? A love more real in its way than the other, though needing less expression? Or was less than the best, nothing?

But this was casuistry. In all honesty he felt the justice of what had happened and was completely undone by it, unable to see any possible way out of a dilemma which had been so plainly stated at last. He faced the inevitable and dreadful fact that whatever he did from now on would be wrong. His every move and motive would henceforth be suspect.

“Shall we go up, Mama?” a man’s voice asked with quiet urgency from the swing.

“Any time, darling,” answered a sleepy contented woman.

Appalled to discover who was sitting so near him in the dark, John Grandin was on his feet in an instant; a second or two later he had not only quitted the porch but traversed the little lighted lobby and gained the second floor.

He stood for a long moment outside the bedroom door, in the corridor, composing himself. The raffia-­like matting at his feet, scuffed up, spoke of his hasty exit half an hour ago. He straightened it with his foot. There was no sound from within. At length he opened the door. The room was dark.

He felt his way in, found the edge of the bed where he had sat before, and undressed, dropping his clothes noiselessly to the floor. He hadn’t unpacked his pajamas but to hell with that now. He pulled back the covers of his bed and got in. The sheets were cool and comforting to his body. He lay on his back, his palms under his head. The room was stuffy. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he saw that the shades had not been pulled up.

He stepped out of bed, tiptoed to the windows, and raised the shades. There was a real fog in the night air now; he felt it drift in through the screens. He came back and got into bed again. He listened for Ethel but there was no sound. Her breathing was quiet and she did not stir.

This was hardly the kind of first-­night they had been planning for their holiday. Perhaps it was just as well. Without their having realized it till now, their marriage had passed into a new phase. It was well that they think of what it meant—of what they were and what they had—before they made any attempt to reach one another again. With a constantly sinking heart he knew full well that the quarrel had not been a thing of the moment. Almost, the fact that he had not been coming to bed with her had little to do with it. He could only ask himself pointless unanswerable questions: Why did she want him so much? Did she think she was losing him? Or, since a man wants to be wanted, why didn’t this, if nothing else, bring him more often to her bed?

He wondered how many other husbands genuinely loved their wives, yet had grown tired of the marriage duties (how shameful to human dignity that the thing they could hardly wait to get married for had at last become a duty!), enjoyed them physically as much as ever when it occurred to them to seek their beds, yet looked forward to the day when passion would no longer be expected and they would be free to love their wives without reminding themselves—or being reminded by silences or reproach—that weeks had passed and it was “time to do something about it again . . .”

A small flare lit up the dark ceiling. Ethel was lighting a cigarette. The flare went out. He turned his head on the pillow. He could see the tip of her nose each time she took a puff. He watched the tiny pink-­yellow glow fading and fading.

He watched it to the end. He heard her stir on the pillow as she reached for the ash tray and put out the cigarette. He heard her settle back again.

After a moment or two more, he got up, crossed the small space that separated them, and sat down on her bed.

He put his hands on her shoulders. She stiffened.

“Ethel,” he said.

She stirred. He thought she was moving to make room. He got in beside her.

“No,” she said. “No.”

He waited there, neither in the bed nor out. He reached to find her hand. She pulled away.

“No.”

He lay down against her and was still. She did not move. He placed his arm across her body and drew her close to him. Without a sound she released herself from his embrace and got out of bed.

Against the dim squares of the open windows he saw her go to the wicker chair by the bureau and sit down. He stayed where he was, uncovered by the quilt she had thrown back, feeling chilly as the night breeze blew over him. In a moment she arose, came to the bed table to get her cigarettes, and returned to the chair. From time to time he heard the wicker creaking.

He went back to his bed. He did not know how long she had sat up. As far as he remembered, she was still sitting there when he fell asleep. . . .