Long After Midnight (21 page)

 
          
She
lay and said nothing.

 
          
Finally,
after a long while, she heard him get up, sighing, and move off. He got into
his own bed and drew the covers up, silently. She moved at last, arranged
herself on her bed, and lay listening to her watch tick in the small hot
darkness. "My God," she whispered, finally, "if s only
eight-thirty."

 
          
"Go
to sleep," he said.

 
          
She
lay in the dark, perspiring, naked, on her own bed, and in the distance,
sweetly, faintly, so that it made her soul and heart ache to hear it, she heard
the band thumping and
brassing
out its melodies. She
wanted to walk among the dark moving people and sing with them and smell the
soft charcoal air of October in a small summery town deep in the tropics of
Mexico, a million miles lost from civilization, listening to the good music,
tapping her foot and humming. But now she lay with her eyes wide, in bed. In
the next hour, the band played
"La
Golondrina
," "Marimba," "Los Vie-
jitos
," "
Michoacan
la
Verde," "Barcarolle,"
and
"Luna
Lunera
."

 
          
At
three in the morning she awoke for no reason and lay, her sleep done and
finished with, feeling the coolness that came with deep night. She listened to
his breathing and she felt away and separate from the world. She thought of the
long trip from Los Angeles to Laredo, Texas, like a silver-white boiling
nightmare. And then the green
technicolor
, red and
yellow and blue and purple, dream of Mexico arising like a flood about them to
engulf their car with color and smell of rain forest and deserted town. She
thought of all the small towns, the shops, the walking people, the burros, and
all the arguments and near-fights. She thought of the five years she had been
married. A long, long time. There had been no day in all that time that they
had not seen each other; there had been no day when she had seen friends,
separately;
he
was always there to
see and criticize. There had been no day when she was allowed to be gone for
more than an hour or so without a full explanation. Sometimes, feeling
infinitely evil, she would sneak to a midnight show, telling no one, and sit,
feeling free, breathing deeply of the air of freedom, watching the people, far
realer than she, upon the screen, motioning and moving.

 
          
And
now here they were, after five years. She looked over at his sleeping form. One
thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days with you, she thought, my husband.
A few hours each day at my typewriter, and then all the rest of each day and
night with you. I feel quite like that man walled up in a vault in
The Cask of Amontillado.
I scream but no
one hears.

 
          
There
was a shift of footsteps outside, a knock on their door.
"Senora,"
called a soft voice, in Spanish. "It is
three o'clock."

 
          
Oh,
my God, thought the wife. "
Sh
!" she hissed,
leaping up to the door. But her husband was awake. "What
is
it?" he cried.

 
          
She
opened the door the slightest crack. "You've come at the wrong time,"
she said to the man in the darkness.

 
          
"Three
o'clock,
senora."

 
          
"No,
no," she hissed, her face wrenching with the agony of the moment. "I
meant tomorrow afternoon."

 
          
"What
is it?" demanded her husband, switching on a light. "Christ, it's
only three in the morning. What does the fool want?"

 
          
She
turned, shutting her eyes. "He's here to take us to
Paricutin
."

 
          
"My
God, you can't speak Spanish at all!"

 
          
"Go
away," she said to the guide.

 
          
"But
I arose for this hour," said the guide.

 
          
The
husband swore and got up. "I won't be able to sleep now, anyway. Tell the
idiot we'll be dressed in ten minutes and go with him and get it over, my
God!"

 
          
She
did this and the guide slipped away into the darkness and out into the street
where the cool moon burnished the fenders of his taxi.

 
          
"You
are
incompetent," snapped the
husband, pulling on two pairs of pants, two T-shirts, a sport shirt, and a wool
shirt over that. "Jesus, this'll fix my throat, all right. If I come down
with another strep infection—"

 
          
"Get
back into bed, damn you."

 
          
"I
couldn't sleep now, anyway."

 
          
"Well,
we've had six hours' sleep already, and you had at least three hours' this
afternoon; that should be enough."

 
          
"Spoiling
our trip," he said, putting on two sweaters and two pairs of socks.
"It's cold up there on the mountain; dress warm, hurry up." He put on
a jacket and a muffler and looked enormous in the heap of clothing he wore.
"Get me my pills. Where's some water?"

 
          
"Get
back to bed," she said. "I won't have you sick and whining." She
found his medicine and poured some water.

 
          
"The
least thing you could do was get the hour right."

 
          
"Shut
up!" She held the glass.

 
          
"Just
another of your thick-headed blunders."

 
          
She
threw the water in his face. "Let me alone, damn you, let me alone. I
didn't mean to do that!"

 
          
"You!"
he shouted, face dripping. He ripped off his jacket. "You'll chill me,
I'll catch cold!"

 
          
"I
don't give a damn, let me alone!" She raised her hands into fists, and her
face was terrible and red, and she looked like some animal in a maze who has
steadily sought exit from an impossible chaos and has been constantly fooled,
turned back, rerouted, led on, tempted, whispered to, lied to, led further, and
at last reached a blank wall.

 
          
"Put
your hands down!" he shouted.

 
          
"I'll
kill you, by God, I'll kill you!" she screamed, her face contorted and
ugly. "Leave me alone! I've tried my damnedest—beds, language, time, my
God, the mistakes, you think I don't
know
it? You think I'm not
sorry?"

 
          
"I'll
catch cold, I'll catch cold." He was staring at the wet floor. He sat down
with water on his face.

 
          
"Here.
Wipe your face off!" She flung him a towel.

 
          
He
began to shake violently. "I'm cold!"

 
          
"Get
a chill, damn it, and die, but leave me alone!"

 
          
"I'm
cold, I'm cold." His teeth chattered, he wiped his face with trembling
hands. "I'll have another infection."

 
          
"Take
off that coat! It's wet."

 
          
He
stopped shaking after a minute and stood up to take off the soggy coat. She
handed him a leather jacket. "Come on, he's waiting for us."

 
          
He
began to shiver again. "I'm not going anywhere, to hell with you," he
said, sitting down. "You owe me fifty dollars now."

 
          
"What
for?"

 
          
"You
remember, you promised."

 
          
And
she remembered. They had had a fight about some silly thing, in California, the
first day of the trip, yes, by God, the very first day out. And she for the
first time in her life had lifted her hand to slap him. Then, appalled, she had
dropped her hand, staring at her traitorous fingers. "You were going to
slap me!" he had cried. "Yes," she replied. "Well," he
said quietly, "the next time you do a thing like that, you'll hand over
fifty dollars of your money." That's how life was, full of little tributes
and ransoms and blackmails. She paid for all her errors, unmotivated or not. A
dollar here, a dollar there. If she spoiled an evening, she paid the dinner
bill from her clothing money. If she criticized a play they had just seen and
he had liked it, he flew into a rage, and, to quiet him, she paid for the
theater tickets. On and on it had gone, swifter and swifter over the years. If
they bought a book together and she didn't like it but he did and she dared
speak out, there was a fight, sometimes a small thing which grew for days, and
ended with her buying the book plus another and perhaps a set of cufflinks or
some other silly thing to calm the storm. Jesus!

 
          
"Fifty
dollars. You promised if you acted up again with these tantrums and
slappings
."

 
          
"It
was only water. I didn't hit you. All right, shut up, I'll pay the money, I'll
pay anything just to be let alone; it's worth it, and five hundred dollars
more, more than worth it. I'll pay."

 
          
She
turned away. When you're sick for a number of years, when you're an
only
child, the
only
boy, all of your life, you get the way he is, she thought.
Then you find yourself thirty-five years old and still undecided as to what
you're to be—a ceramist, a social worker, a businessman. And your wife has
always known what she would be—a writer. And it must be maddening to live with
a woman with a single knowledge of herself, so sure of what she would do with
her writing. And selling stories, at last, not many, no, but just enough to
cause the seams of the marriage to rip. And so how natural that he must
convince her that she was wrong and he was right, that she was an
uncontrollable child and must forfeit money. Money was to be the weapon he held
over her. When she had been a fool she would give up some of the precious gain—the
product of her writing.

 
          
"Do
you know," she said, suddenly, aloud, "since I made that big sale to
the magazine, you seem to pick more fights and I seem to pay more money?"

 
          
"What
do you mean by that?" he said.

 
          
It
seemed to her to be true. Since the big sale he had put his special logic to
work on situations, a logic of such a sort that she had no way to combat it.
Reasoning with him was impossible. You were finally cornered, your explanations
exhausted, your alibis depleted, your pride in tatters. So you struck out. You
slapped at him or broke something, and then, there you were again, paying off,
and he had won. And he was taking your success away from you, your single
purpose, or he thought he was, anyway. But strangely enough, though she had
never told him, she didn't care about forfeiting the money. If it made peace,
if it made him happy, if it made him think he was causing her to suffer, that
was all right. He had exaggerated ideas as to the value of money; it hurt him
to lose it or spend it, therefore he thought it would hurt her as much. But I'm
feeling no pain, she thought, I'd like to give him all of the money, for that's
not why I write at all, I write to say what I have to say, and he doesn't
understand that.

 
          
He
was quieted now. "You'll pay?"

 
          
"Yes."
She was dressing quickly now, in slacks and jacket. "In fact, I've been
meaning to bring this up for some time. I'm giving all the money to you from
now on. There's no need of my keeping my profits separate from yours, as it has
been. I'll turn it over to you tomorrow."

 
          
"I
don't ask that," he said, quickly.

 
          
"I
insist. It all goes to you."

 
          
What
I'm doing, of course, is unloading your gun, she thought. Taking your weapon
away from you. Now you won't be able to extract the money from me, piece by
piece, bit by painful bit. You'll have to find another way to bother me.