PARTI'SAN REVIEW
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gave no sign of recognition. Only when he took a step forward did she
shake her head
nO'
-
no -
keep away.
It
was not possible.
When her husband returned she was staring at the place in the
aisle where her lover had been standing. Her husband leaned forward
to interrupt that stare.
"What's wrong?" he said. "Are you sick?"
Panic rose in her in long shuddering waves. She tried to get to
her feet, panicked at the thought of fainting here, and her husband
took hold of her. She stood like an aged woman, clutching the seat
before her.
At home he helped her up the stairs and she lay down. Her head
was like a large piece of crockery that had to be held still, it was so
heavy. She was still panicked. She felt it in the shallows of her face,
behind her knees, in the pit of her stomach. It sickened her, it made
her think of mucus, of something thick and gray congested inside her,
stuck to her, that was herself and yet not herself, a poison.
She lay with her knees drawn up toward her chest, her eyes hotly
open, while her husband spoke to her. She imagined that other man
saying,
Why did you run away from me?
Her husband was saying other
words. She tried to listen to them. He was going to call the doctor, he
said, and she tried
to
sit up. "No, I'm all right now," she said quickly.
The panic was like lead inside her, so thickly congested. How slow love
was to drain out of her, how fluid and sticky it was inside her head!
Her husband believed her. No doctor. No threat. Grateful, she
drew her husband down to her. They embraced, not comfortably. For
years
now they had not been comfortable together, in their intimacy
and at a distance, and now they struggled gently as if the paces of
this
dance were too rigorous for them. It was something they might have
known once, but had now outgrown. The panic in her thickened at this
double betrayal: she drew her husband to her, she caressed
him
wildly,
she shut her eyes to think about that other man.
A crowd of men and women parting, unexpectedly, and there he
stood - There he stood - She kept seeing
him,
and yet her vision
blotched at the memory. It had been finished between them, six months
before, but he had come out here . . . and she had escaped him, now
she was lying in her husband's arms, in his embrace, her face pressed
against his. It was a kind of sleep, this lovemaking. She felt herself fall–
ing asleep, her body falling from her. Her eyes shut.
"I love you," her husband said fiercely, angrily.
She shut her eyes and thought of that other man, as if betraying
him
would give her life a center.
"Did I hurt you? Are you -?" her husband whispered.
