He was lying awake one night, staring at nothing and thinking of too many things. He wanted a cigarette, but he didn’t want to wake Gene. He could feel the feverish warmth of her body next to his, and he lay perfectly still, searching the darkness with his eyes.
Now he could make out the dim forms in the room; the dresser below the black pool of the mirror, the lighter shapes of the windows, the darker shape of the door to the living room, the chair over which his workclothes hung, the luminous hands of the alarm clock on the bedside table. He concentrated on the slow, sleepy sound the clock made, the sound of time being destroyed.
He turned as he felt a movement beside him. He could see Gene’s head on the pillow, the short, dark hair, the pale face. He felt her hand on him and her voice was blurred with sleep. “Are you thinking about V, Jack?”
He didn’t say anything. He put his arm under her head so that her face was pressed against his chest.
“You are,” she said, but her voice did not sound concerned. He could see the soft luster of her eyes. “Jack,” she said. “Trust me, won’t you? Don’t worry.”
“Sure,” he said.
Her arm crept around his neck and she pressed her thin body against him. She was unhealthily hot under her cotton pajamas. She was not well, he knew, had not been well since the abortion. She had lost weight and her eyes seemed to have been pulled deep into her head. But she never complained and he knew it was because she didn’t want to worry him.
“Honey,” he said, “why don’t you go to a doc?”
“Oh, I’m all right,” she said sleepily. “I feel better every day,” and she giggled. “Don’t pretend you were worrying about me, darling.”
“I was.”
“Too?” She laughed again. “She can’t fight the both of us, Jack. I’m too strong now. Don’t worry about her. Don’t worry about either of us.”
“Sure,” he said. “Go on back to sleep, Gene.” She smiled and closed her eyes and he kissed the end of her nose, feeling false, completely false, knowing she believed she had arrived at an understanding of this thing, but knowing she had not, because there was too much she could never understand.
She seemed to have come to look upon V as a kind of evil witch, whom he hated but under whose spell he was. She was protecting him from that witch. She seemed to enjoy the prospect of sacrificing herself for him in some way, and he could not tell her she was wrong.
He could not tell her that he had never wanted her as he wanted V. He could not explain that when she pressed against him in the night, or touched him, it wasn’t her he wanted. There was no way to make her know she had never satisfied him. He couldn’t even try. It was not her fault and he could not hurt her by trying to explain.
Now he knew the problem. It was so basic and simple that it took his breath away, and he had been searching for the answer without even knowing what the problem was. It was that he loved V. He loved V too much ever to love Gene enough. Trying to love and live with Gene was like walking a tightrope to which he could cling with nothing but his will. He had no feet, no arms, no hands, because they belonged to V; he had only his will to hold on with, and it was neither strong enough to let him make his way nor weak enough to let him fall.
With Gene there was not enough. He had to keep striving for something else outside his life with her. She had talked him into sending for a brochure on a correspondence engineering course. He had wanted to send for it himself, but he knew he could not be an engineer. He knew what he was. He was a cat skinner who was smart enough, who could handle men well enough, to be a grade foreman. Yet he had the feeling that he should strive to be more, not merely because of Gene, but because he felt the need of something else. He must try to be what he could not be.
Even though he knew the problem, that did not give him the answer. He knew what he owed V, but now he owed Gene more. He had left the one debt unpaid to pay the other in counterfeit coin.
The cruelty of it made him groan aloud, for none of it was Gene’s fault. He could love her in a way, but never completely. He wanted her to be well so they could have a child and maybe then it would be all right—it was a straw he grasped at desperately, but he knew it was only a straw.
And she wasn’t well yet. They would have to wait. He couldn’t have her if he had wanted her. He lay awake, listening to the clock grinding the seconds into the past, and each second came to seem to him a terrible loss that should be caught and drained of everything it held before it was gone.