IT WAS THE CAMERA that circuitously started her first flare-up with Matthew. She had taken two pictures of him, showed him the ones Marshall had taken of her the night before, and repeated the jest about blackmail.
“What does in camera really mean?” she asked. “No pun. I know the adoption papers will be in camera and I thought I might put these pictures in camera with them, and all my checks signed ‘Grange’ and the false birth certificate and the hospital bill and everything.”
“You can’t use the courts like a safe-deposit box,” he said, amused. “If any case is heard in private, in a judge’s chambers instead of in open court, then the proceedings are in camera, and in your case, your lawyer—”
“Matthew, I should have told you—”
“Your case will be in camera,” he went on. “So all the documents become secret records for all time, not open to the public at any time, remaining always in the possession of the court.” He went on to elaborate. Nobody could ever see the papers, neither friend nor enemy, unless some court of law ordered them to be shown. That could not be done at anybody’s simple request, not even at her own. No lawyer could request them, no reporter could stumble on them, not even the adopted person himself could get at them. Only in the event that the adopted person were involved in some criminal trial would the process be set in motion whereby some future judge could rule that the inviolable secrecy of that in camera might be breached.
“Not in any civil action,” he ended, “no contract litigation, no divorce action, no libel or slander suit, nothing but a criminal prosecution could get at those private papers. See?”
She nodded. “Matthew, there’s something else. I should have told you this, but the right moment never seemed to come up. One day while we were apart, I asked Dr. Jesskin if he knew a good lawyer to handle the adoption for me.”
“A good lawyer?” he asked stiffly.
“This was while we weren’t seeing each other and I sort of panicked and I asked Gene and then Jesskin, and Dr. Jesskin did.”
“Did what?”
“Arranged it for me. It’s a man named Bob Cox, a friend of his.”
“Of Cox, Wheaton, Fair—?”
“Yes. It’s a good firm, isn’t it?”
“Very.”
“Do you know Mr. Cox?”
“I’ve met him. He’s good too.”
“Are you annoyed? I could cancel it. I’ve never met Mr. Cox or even talked to him by phone so far.”
“I’m not annoyed.”
“It was just that—well, I hadn’t heard one word from you and I had decided I never would, this was already April, and you had said you wouldn’t be handling it yourself in any case.”
“But I assumed you did want my firm to handle it.”
“I did. I would have. Only all that time, it was already April—” The old defensive feeling, rising, infuriated her. Here she was explaining, repeating herself, offering extenuating circumstances. “You needn’t look like that,” she cried angrily.
“Like what?”
“As if I’d done something dreadful.”
“I don’t exactly enjoy being told off.”
“You haven’t said one damn word about it since we’ve been back, either,” she said. “Not one word, about courts, or what the proceeding is or when it’s done or how long it takes, nothing.”
“I didn’t think it needed saying. When the time came—”
“You can’t really think I could just let it slide happily along forever.”
“Now, Dori, I never thought that at all.”
“It’s not the only thing you never thought at all. If I ever told you all the things you never think—” She turned fast, and slid both hands over her face. She saw again the slippery wet cheeks of the girl in the park and ground her fingertips into her eye sockets so that pain flashed. She felt his arm on her shoulder and angrily shook it free and sat there, huddled in on herself, hugging her bulk with her arms and elbows while her hands remained covering her face.
There was silence. He went to the kitchen and poured a drink of Scotch. She thought of that time in January when he had done that, not bothering with ice or soda, and the memory was sharp. Would he again go to the door and tell her he needed time to get it into some sort of shape? He had no overcoat to walk out with this time, maybe that would make it different.
“I’m sorry,” she heard herself saying into her tented hands, “I don’t know why I said all that.”
“To punish me.”
“For what?”
“Does it matter?” ‘
“Don’t take that injured tone.”
“I didn’t mean to.” Suddenly he was beside her, telling her it was natural enough that she had been angry, that it was quite true that he had been legal-minded, knowing there was enough time, forgetting her very human need to see ahead, to have everything prepared well in advance.
“I’m glad you blew,” he said. “It’s not an easy time for you, darling, and you have the right to blow your top once in a while.”
“It’s better if I don’t.”
“But you did, so forget it. I’ll start lining up the right man for the adoption at the office tomorrow morning.”
But the reluctance she had already felt came back. “Please don’t do it, Matthew.” It sounded regretful, as if she were about to ask something difficult of him. “Maybe since it’s all set in motion through Dr. Jesskin’s friend, it might be best to let it stay that way.”
“You mean not have me in the picture at all?”
“Not your firm.” She thought he might be angry but a wild need transfixed her so that if she had wanted to change what she had said, she could not have done it. This was right. This was somehow native to her; if he had delayed so long on this, it revealed a reluctance in him too, one that he wasn’t willing to see. It wasn’t even very important, unless it indicated vaster reluctances.
Not only in him, but in herself as well. Insight. Nobody could hand it to you all done up in festive papers and gleaming ribbon; you had it or you had to dig for it until you found it. There was something here, some clue, buried, in retreat as yet from reason, deep in her own character, and for the first time she knew that she did not dare to sidestep the search any longer.
Early next morning she unlocked her suitcase, drew out a sheet of her real stationery and wrote:
DEAR MR. COX,
This is just to thank you in advance for taking on the case Dr. Cornelius Jesskin asked you about. Knowing that you have agreed to do so gives me a peace of mind I’m grateful for.
If all goes according to plan, I should be phoning for an appointment early in August. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to it.
Sincerely, THEODORA V. GRAY.
She addressed and stamped the envelope and went out to mail it from the nearest postbox. This letter needed no San Francisco or London postmark, or Tokyo or Rio either. She stood with her hand on the lid of the postbox, staring at the slot which had taken her letter. Her own name on her own stationery with her own return address, talking of a face-to-face meeting in early August. It was like leaning into the future.
June was the only bad month. Graceless at best, horror-filled at worst, Dori continuously felt a malaise that had no precise name, that lay somewhere between the heights of euphoria and the depths of depression.
She ascribed it to the newest assassination, she ascribed it to the deepening fears of racism in the election, she ascribed it to the pure physical deprivation of not making love. For the first time, she felt clumsy and plodding; she felt the slowness of time; she felt that none of this was the full sum, and this single certainty intensified everything else.
Matthew was never absent except on the unvarying weekends, eager always to arrive, loath always to leave, openly grateful for her rage at the sentencing of Dr. Spock and the others to two years in a Federal prison, talking to her hungrily about the plans for appeal, about his own appeal for young Benting. She understood for the first time that he rarely spoke of his work to Joan. He was taking on a new case, similar to Benting’s but in New York, where he would not need to work through an associate lawyer as he did in Boston, this time without a fee, because this time his client was black and poor instead of white and well-to-do.
The argument about her own lawyer was all but forgotten. Neither of them ever spoke of it. When she did think of it she assured herself she was glad it had happened just that way, because she had been open and honest and free from the artifice that too often made a relationship pulpy and unreal.
And yet she also wished it had never happened. The slow elapsing days seemed to be a piling on and piling on of other things she wished had never happened. It was on the very night of the argument that she had been wakeful and restless after Matthew’s departure and listened in the dark to an all-night music station, falling asleep to a Beethoven quartet. Through the music, tearing through the first thin veil of her sleep, had come a sudden voice, the voice not of the music announcer but the voice of crisis. “We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin”—the news that out in California, on a night of triumph, Senator Robert Kennedy had been shot, perhaps fatally.
She was alone with it and stayed alone. It was three thirty in the morning here although half an hour past midnight out there; Matthew, Cele, Gene would all be asleep. That was good. She could not speak now to anyone, not again, not so soon again after April. If Matthew’s family had already left for Truro, she would probably have called him anyway, but she was obscurely glad that it was out of the question. She briefly considered waking Gene or Cele, but at once, in a kind of pre-audition, she heard the words that would follow and knew she could not stand hearing them on her own lips and in her own ears. To be mute, to say nothing for a few hours—that was what she needed now, a reversal from that other time when she had wanted so much not to be alone.
It was as if she had suddenly become a sister of silence, a nun in some holy order with vows to remain without speech. She listened to all the stations in turn, her eyes dry, her throat clamped in a collar of steel, unyielding and pitiless, like a collar within the column of her throat pressing outward. It was like a maniacal replay of nightmare, a confusion and yet a sameness.
When at last her night-black windows began to fog into gray, she dressed and made up the room and then had breakfast. It was too early for the Times; that came at seven. Seven would also bring the two-hour news and interview show she sometimes listened to; she would hear only the bulletins and turn off the interpreters, the philosophizers, the assayers and the theorizers. Not again, not this time; there were limits to what you could stand.
But they stood it, his mother, his wife, his children, Mrs. King, her children, the people getting the official telegrams from Vietnam, the wives, the mothers, the children—
The life force. Birth going ahead in the midst of horror and death—why had she limited herself to the two world wars and the atom bomb? Why had she not begun with the Civil War, why not with the French Revolution, the Inquisition, why not with Christians thrown to the lions in the arenas of Rome, why not with Jewish children born in the Nazi decades, with Negro children born today?
The paper finally came, the television screen began its special reports and she yielded briefly to both and wanted only to get out to the quiet park and walk. At eight she called Gene and Cele, to say she knew and was going out, and when she came back an hour later she heard the flatted muted ringing of the telephone as she was opening her door and talked to Matthew in the same truncated way. He came in for a little while on his way home from his office and then again after dinner. Both times she seemed numb, unable to explain that she felt huge with it as if it were within her, another pregnancy, all of it, that long-ago November and then that night in April and now this one in June, that she felt filled with all of it and unable to accommodate the pull and drag.
“Take a sleeping pill tonight, darling,” Matthew said. “You can’t do this, not now, only a couple of hours of sleep the whole twenty-four. Take it now and I’ll wait until you’re in bed and then I’ll go and know that you’ll get some rest.”
Obediently she went to the medicine cabinet, swallowed a yellow capsule, and in a moment was in bed. The latest bulletins still vacillated: there was a chance, there was little chance, there was the possibility that the body might live on without the functioning mind. She was riven by dilemma as if it were her responsibility, to decide, which would be more tolerable, that or the finality.
“Darling,” Matthew said, leaning over her from the edge of her bed, “I know this is a terrible time to think of us, but in a way, it’s the right time too. There are no easy solutions for us, not ever, but I love you more and more and if you’ll let me, I want to be part of your life from now on. And of the baby’s life.”
“Oh Matthew.”
“I don’t know that I’ve rung up any great success as the father of my own children,” he went on. “But they keep telling us that a father figure is vital in any child’s life, and if a father figure is all that important in this baby’s life, and if you’ll let me, I’ll be that father figure always.”
She wept, silently, not hiding her face, letting her cheeks glisten wetly as the girl in the park had done. She held tightly to his fingers, and when she fell asleep, he left her.
The crib arrived and was set in place, the carriage arrived and was given a corner of its own. And still it remained a bad month. Dori shortened her daily walk by half a mile and then lengthened it again whenever the mornings were cool. She resumed her work on her two pieces but then saw, with a slicing clarity, that she could not have these printed soon after her return without shouting to them all, Look, here are my new interests, illegitimate birth and adoption. There would have to be two or three other pieces first, another Martha Litton, another Dr. Spock, and then in a year or two, but no sooner, these two.
This must have been a hidden reason for her delay in finishing either one; she who never blocked up on unfinished work. A brief cheer permeated her at this clarity. Clarity always was an asset, clarity about anything. She remembered the upward leap of her spirits when she had first made a list of majors and minors, when she had fired Nellie and gone forth for her first maternity clothes. From that minute on there had been clarity.
If only she could see what it was that remained unclear about herself and Matthew. That night when Senator Kennedy died he had moved her to tears and yet as the days inched by she knew nothing basic was changed. As long as she was herself alone, Dori Gray alone, Matthew was what she wanted, was what made her happy: his nearness, his presence as often as possible, his love and his making love.
But there would come the time when she could no longer think of herself alone, Dori Gray alone. To give birth was not to restore herself to being “herself alone.” Wasn’t that a state to which there was, thank God, no returning?
She was changing, but was Matthew? That night when he had finally told her about Jack Henning he had blurted out, “That was the shutout, right there. Nothing’s going to change that.”
But she would be even happier with a child growing up. Would that be a shutout too? Perhaps he would be close enough to the actual living developing child to feel a part of its life, a part of the future, feel that it was his too, and no shutout at all.
To a point, yes. To a degree, surely. In a partial version, an approximation, better than nothing, lovely up to the limits that their circumstances would permit.
“Why isn’t he ever here on Saturday or Sunday?” An unknown little voice, high and unformed like all children’s voices, sounded clear in her mind. “Why can’t he ever be here on Christmas?”
Cut that, damn it, she ordered herself. Does it have to be all or nothing? Are you going to turn your back on what’s there and moon around for what isn’t there?
No, she wasn’t. Yet she suddenly remembered the night she had gone down Central Park West at one in the morning, remembered the night sky ablaze, remembered her excitement over Cele’s news that Matthew had called, and remembered too that on that threshold of their renewed life together she had wondered whether it would be the same Dori Gray that he would find.
“One more visit,” Dr. Jesskin said, “and then I do not see you until the delivery room. Is that welcome news?”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Of course not.” He began to put away his instruments but the austere brevity of his last visit was missing. His “good” and again “good” of last time was replaced this morning by “excellent” or “perfect,” and he had asked how many sleeping pills she had left and had she any questions to put to him. “I see by the crib and the carriage that you plan to return here.”
“Do you have a few minutes? Could I give you some coffee? I haven’t any questions, no, but if I could take a minute and tell you what I’m going to do after Harkness?”
To her astonishment he said coffee would be fine and sat down in the straight chair, leaving the armchair to her. As she told him her “postnatal timetable,” she saw him nod and thought how absurd it was that she should want his approval even on practical matters like these.
“That is a fine transition plan,” he said, “ingenious and very sound.”
“Then after the hospital, when I can start working again, I’ll get a maid who likes babies—”
“Nobody under seventy,” he said in a tone of sudden warning.
“Under seventy?”
“A reliable geriatric,” he said calmly. “That is my plan for your private nurses at the hospital.”
“Private nurses? Aren’t they awfully expensive?”
“Only for the first night and day while you’re coming out from the anesthesia.” She looked baffled and he added, “In case you babble.”
“Of course!”
“They will be seventy at least, still active, still in good health, but as much over seventy as possible. Eighty would be even better. Then even if you should hand them the whole truth, they wouldn’t have too long a time left, poor things, to be indiscreet about it.”
This was so deliberately spoken, and with such open self-approval, that she guffawed. He was pleased at her reaction and said slyly, “I would not wish old age on anyone, being already fifty-two myself, but an inescapable fact is that in certain circumstances a lack of longevity can be a great desideratum. Is that not so?”
“You think of everything. Oh, Dr. Jesskin, suppose I had never been sent to you, back in nineteen fifty-five?”
He finished his coffee and stood up. “Then I should have missed knowing a remarkable patient.”
Long after he was gone, she heard the phrase sounding. Like his three thinkings, like her good construction, this about a remarkable patient struck for itself at once an indelible outline in her memory.
A remarkable patient. Then I should have missed knowing a remarkable patient. But surely he had gone through this entire business before, of the unmarried pregnant woman. He must have; in all his years of practice he must have had other patients who were with child but without wedding ring or husband. She could not, by the law of probabilities, be the only patient he had ever had who was having an illegitimate baby. Had he then turned the others away? Impossible. He had been through it all before.
That was why he was so ready with solutions, his suggestion about Harkness and the two names on her door, his readiness about the false birth certificate, his cleverness about geriatric nurses, all of it. He had not said so, of course; in a doctor’s life everything was automatically in camera.
The knowledge that there had been others pacified her, mollified her, yet a few moments later she realized that it also robbed her. She did not know of what. Something. Something she valued, something she didn’t want to give up.
She suddenly laughed self-consciously. Why, I want to be the only one, she thought, a goddam unique character in his whole medical career. But I’m not, I couldn’t be. She could ask him someday, she supposed, ask in the most general terms, whether all gynecologists and obstetricians did not, in the course of a long practice, inevitably have a certain number of illegitimate births to cope with—but he would use the most general terms back at her and not tell her a thing. As for Miss Mack, asking her would be like asking the Great Stone Face.
Good old Miss Mack. Just yesterday she had telephoned to “remind” Dori of Dr. Jesskin’s visit this morning, and had added, “And I’m to give you Doctor’s telephone number in Huntington too, though the service always hops to it for anybody on the special list.”
“What list?” she had wanted to say. “The list of people in the eighth and ninth months?” But all she had said was “Huntington?”
“His summer place. He’s in town all week, but from June first on, he’s still out there weekends.”
“Thanks, I’d love to have it.” She had taken it down, read it back to Miss Mack, and then later had thought, What did she mean, ‘still out there weekends’? Anybody but Miss Mack would have said, “But from June first on, his family is out there and he goes out weekends.” Like Matthew’s family. Like all families. But Miss Mack would not commit herself to informing a soul that “Doctor” had a family, despite the photographs on his desk. If Dori herself asked her, Miss Mack would never admit that any Dori Gray had ever begun as a sterility patient and ended up having a baby. Miss Mack must have taken the Hippocratic oath all by herself.
Someday when all this was over, she would send Miss Mack a great big bunch of flowers with a card that told her some patients blessed their lucky stars for a doctor’s staff, too.
He’s still out there weekends. It sounded as if the place in Huntington had been there for a long time. It also sounded as if it were in the past tense except for him. Did the rest of the family not go out there weekends? What about those kids and that pretty woman she was sure was his wife?
Kids? They were about ten or twelve in the photographs, and she had visualized them that way. But when he first told her of Bob Cox, had he not said that his son was finishing Harvard Law this summer with Bob Cox’s son and that both of them were joining the firm as junior law clerks?
Then those photographs must be ten or twelve years old. Older. If you got out of any graduate school before twenty-five, you were an exception. A son of twenty-five and a daughter of twenty-three? Perhaps both married, and out at Huntington only for visits. That must be it. The inscrutable Miss Mack would never have mentioned it, any more than Dr. Jesskin himself.
But what about his wife? Why didn’t Miss Mack say, “They’re out there weekends?” And if that were the case, would she have inserted that enigmatic “still”? Wouldn’t any couple keep going out to their summer place? Need one specify that the man went out there still?
She had never wondered about Dr. Jesskin’s life, never visualized him as father, husband, brother, as anything but doctor and specialist. No, that wasn’t quite so. The day after Martin Luther King’s death when she had called him in agitation about lawyers, he had said, “I think many of us couldn’t sleep last night,” and like a streak of daylight she had had a flash of him as a political being, one who couldn’t sleep either because of a hideous murder of someone he admired. She had forgotten that until just now.
She thought, I wish I knew more about him. When this is all over, I’ll research the man! She wondered whether there were any medical articles written by him; that would be easy to find out at the Academy of Medicine. She wondered if the great big directory of physicians, which told all about a doctor’s or surgeon’s degrees and hospital connections, also told about his general life, as Who’s Who did. In Who’s Who the names of your children were listed, the name of your wife, the date of your marriage or divorce, and if there had been any death in the family, a lowercase dec. appeared.
Did the Medical Directory do the same—and would the lower-case dec. be there?
The embarrassment returned. More fantasy, more fairy tales for the pregnant. She really was beginning to show signs of the stress that lay in too much peace and quiet. What had started her on this remarkable train of thought?
Remarkable. The word in the context. Then I should have missed a remarkable patient. He had meant something by it. She was positive now that he had treated other unmarried pregnant women, so the “remarkable” did not have that sense. Nor was it another of his odd phrasings that betrayed his birth in Denmark or Sweden or wherever. She didn’t even know that much about him. Here was a man who had become as necessary to her as breath and she knew not even the first detail about him as a man.
How absurd we are, she thought, how trapped in good manners. Why had she never been able to sit there at his desk and glance openly at the photographs and openly say, “Is that your family? The children look like you.” What would have been intrusive or rude about it if she had? He could sit there above an open folder, and say, The last time you had intercourse was when? The period you skipped should have been when? Could sit there and tell her, You will want to know whether you may continue to have intercourse. Of course, you may. It is natural, normal, indeed, the stimulation of hormones during pregnancy—
But of course that was professional, every syllable was spoken by a professional about professional matters. He knew everything about her that mattered, knew of her having an affair that had produced this baby, knew that she would be wanting to have intercourse and was thus having an affair still.
Had she made it clear to Dr. Jesskin that the pregnancy was antecedent to this affair? She couldn’t remember. She thought that she had, at some point, said quite definitely that that affair had been coming to an end, and since he never missed anything, never forgot anything, he must have realized that her interest in whether you were permitted to have intercourse during pregnancy applied to somebody else and not the man who had helped her achieve it.
Quite suddenly it mattered to her that it should be clear in Dr. Jesskin’s mind. If she were still involved with the man who had, as they say, sired this baby about to be born, then Dr. Jesskin would know that it was a deep and abiding relationship, reaching backward in time, reaching forward, a relationship of dimension, important and enduring.
But it isn’t, she thought or at least I’m not sure. How could she be sure of that reaching forward? Oh, that was what was troubling, that not being able to be sure of its reaching forward when this summer, this year, next year were done.
Suddenly she was back again at the side of Dr. Jesskin’s desk in Dr. Jesskin’s office, before Christmas of last year, telling him she had done the three thinkings and was going ahead and would he help her. Again she felt the awkward touch of his fingers on her own, as if he were trying to shake hands. Again she heard his words, “I am proud of you,” and all at once they fused with these words today, “I should have missed a remarkable patient.”
He liked all this—that’s what it meant. He liked her in the context of it. She was not merely a patient but a human being also and he had touched her fingers in a human code. This, today, had been the code still, undiminished all these months later.
Undiminished. That word again, she thought. It keeps at me and I wish it would let me be.
As it neared its end, June stopped being the bad month. Dori grew more adept at managing her bulk, as if there were a technique one could ease into. The discomfort of her recumbent body was there still but somehow she could “sleep around it” as if she could redistribute her entire body in secret ways to get the better of the bulk and awkwardness. When she woke at night, she took aspirin and slept again. She began to take afternoon naps as well, drowsy with weight and immobility, and for the first time her ankles, which had always been as tight to the bone as skin could be, grew puffy late each day, the thongs of her sandals cutting into the rising flesh. All this she reported to Miss Mack, to add to the record. She did not want to call Dr. Jesskin unless there were some emergency. Miss Mack sent her a prescription for pills for the edematous ankles but week by week there was no emergency.
“What day do you think this is?” she asked Matthew one evening as he came in, and before he could answer, “The first day of the ninth month.”
“Hooray. Let’s drink the champagne to it.”
“You’ll have to put another bottle by though.”
“I guess I can manage another.”
“Look over there,” she said, pointing to the smaller of her suitcases, standing in the corner near the crib. “It’s all packed for the hospital.”
“Jumping the gun, that’s known as. Let’s drink to the gun too.”
He was impatient to have it all over, to have her as she was when he had found her, her body tight and slender and beautiful, swift in movement, swift in response to him, to have her in bed again where all their problems were forgotten, where they either were conquered or appeared to be conquerable.
“I’ve been packing suitcases too,” he said as he began to work on the cork of the bottle he drew from the icebox. “Metaphorical suitcases.”
“Such as?”
“I told the family yesterday I wouldn’t be up the weekend of the twentieth, that I couldn’t make it.” The cork popped and he rushed the bottle to the waiting glass. “Here, darling.”
She accepted the sparkling glass and waited for him to fill his. “You thought of that,” she said. “I’m glad. I had wondered, What if it should be early?”
He looked surprised. “Did you think I’d be off, that close to the official date?”
“I didn’t exactly think about it.” She raised her glass to him. “But I’m glad you won’t be.”
He raised his own glass. “Here’s to gun-jumping,” he said. “It would be most obliging of you not to be a stickler for the twenty-third.”
“But I gather it’s lots likelier to be late than early.”
“Then at least Mrs. Steffani will have the thrill of seeing Mr. Grange here for one weekend anyway.”
They laughed. Mrs. Steffani, after seeing him put his key to the door several times, had one evening addressed him as “Mr. Grange,” and he had accepted the title without demur. Behind him, in the door that stood ajar, Dori had said, “I meant to introduce you,” but Mrs. Steffani had given her a wary look that invited no further effort. They had tried to decide whether she knew he was no Mr. Grange and they had come down on the side of Mrs. Steffani’s hidden wisdoms. “Otherwise, why would you show only Monday through Friday?” Dori had demanded.
“Because I have to be in Vietnam the rest of the time.”
Now he added, “You mean, suppose you hang on till the following weekend? Then I’d have to say again that I couldn’t make it, but my God, Dori, you wouldn’t be that ornery, would you?”
“I’ll try not.”
She looked tranquil again and he became equally tranquil. The early part of the month, he thought, had been their worst time since they had been back together, and he was glad it was over at last. He now felt with Dori a blessed return of ease; she seemed to have resumed her early simplicity with him, the tangles smoothed away again.
“You’re never ornery,” he said with sudden warmth. “You are my lovely Dori and there’s nobody like you.”
“Matthew. You are a little drunk already.”
“Not drunk at all.” He kissed her. “Look, this damn rotten month is over and this is a good time again and there’ll be lots of them. There’ll be bad ones too, but we’re stuck with each other, no matter. If we fight we fight, if we can’t make love we can’t, if we have to be apart, we have to. But none of that changes us, does it?”
To her surprise she asked, “Do you just say ‘I can’t make it’ to Joan? Is that enough? Or ‘I won’t be in’ or something like that?”
He set down his champagne and stared at it. It was the kind of question he resented, the kind any man would resent. It was rare, this sort of thing from Dori, but it struck a bad chord, left him aquiver with dissonance and minor key. She knew every essential about himself and Joan; he had never dissembled to Dori, never glozed over, never indulged in the tinny clichés of the wife-blaming husband. Then why such a question at all?
“I shouldn’t have said that,” she said as if he had spoken aloud.
“I agree. I don’t think you should.”
“But why not? I can’t help thinking about it.”
“Then why did you just say you shouldn’t have?”
“I thought that too. I know it’s illogical, but people aren’t always all full of logic.” He stared at the wine and his silence vexed her. “It’s impossible not to wonder once in a while what I would do, Matthew, if you told me sometime, ‘I can’t make it’ and let it go at that. I’d probably just up and say, ‘Why can’t you?’ before I even thought not to.”
“Dori, let’s not get into this. There’s no sense to it.”
“I suppose there’s not.”
He returned to the champagne but the effervescence was gone. He was angry at her for flatting it out of existence and yet knew she had not done so purposely. She was troubled about many things ahead; he was also. Dori was not one of those mindless optimists who gabbled romantic nonsense about how glorious everything was going to be for them; she saw too intelligently the difficulties and crossed wires and crosscurrents—
Damn it, he thought, as long as it isn’t cross-purposes and crossed swords. I’m crossed up and screwed up with too much analyzing, when all I want is to carve the possible out of the impossible. That’s all Dori wants too. Then why can’t we have it and let everything else alone?
“Darling, listen.” He told her what he had been thinking and she kept nodding, phrase for phrase, though he felt that he was losing the point he wanted to make in the delicate task of transmission from mind to words. She had the look he had come to know, half of apology that she should have caused strain or tension, yet with it another half that maintained a point of view, her point of view, as if she were also saying, I’m tabling it for now, but not simply brushing it into the incinerator. It won’t burn up. It won’t just conveniently disappear in smoke and a nice crisp smell of burning.
“So I think we have to take it as it comes,” he ended. “We’ve solved it all so far. We’ll solve the rest of it too.”
“I know we will. Of course we will.”