He nods.
“Well,” Joan says, and takes a half-step toward him, so that he flinches in anticipation of being hit, “do you want to know who I was sleeping with Wednesday?”
He nods again, but the two nods feel different, as if a continent had hurtled by between them, at this terrific unfelt speed.
She names a man he knows only slightly, an assistant director in the museum, who wears a collar pin and has his gray hair cut long and tucked back in the foppish English style. “It was fun,” Joan says, kicking at a shoe. “He thinks I’m beautiful. He cares for me in a way you just don’t.” She kicks away the other shoe. “You look pale to me too, buster.”
Stunned, he needs to laugh. “But we all think you’re beautiful.”
“Well, you don’t make me feel it.”
“I feel it,” he says.
“You make me feel like an ugly drudge.” As they grope to understand their new positions, they realize that she, like a chess player who has impulsively swept forward her queen, has nowhere to go but on the defensive. In a desperate attempt to keep the initiative, she says, “Divorce me. Beat me.”
He is calm, factual, admirable. “How often have you been with him?”
“I don’t know. Since April, off and on.” Her hands appear to embarrass her; she places them at her sides, against her cheeks, together on the bedpost, off. “I’ve been trying to get out of it, I’ve felt horribly guilty, but he’s never been at all pushy, so I could never really arrange a fight. He gets this hurt look.”
“Do you want to keep him?”
“With you knowing? Don’t be grotesque.”
“But he cares for you in a way I just don’t.”
“Any lover does that.”
“God help us. You’re an expert.”
“Hardly.”
“What about you and Mack?”
She is frightened. “Years ago. Not for very long.”
“And Freddy Vetter?”
“No, we agreed not. He knew about me and Mack.”
Love, a cloudy heavy ink, inundates him from within, suffuses his palms with tingling pressure as he steps close to her, her murky face held tense against the expectation of a blow. “You whore,” he breathes, enraptured. “My virgin bride.” He kisses her hands; they are corrupt and cold. “Who else?” he begs, as if each name is a burden of treasure she will lay upon his bowed shoulders. “Tell me all your men.”
“I’ve told you. It’s a pretty austere list. You know why I told you? So you wouldn’t feel guilty about this Vogel person.”
“But nothing happened. When you do it, it happens.”
“Sweetie, I’m a woman,” she explains, and they do seem, in this darkening room above the muted hubbub of television, to have reverted to the bases of their marriage, to the elemental constituents. Woman. Man. House.
“What does your psychiatrist say about all this?”
“Not much.” The triumphant swell of her confession has passed; her ebbed manner prepares for days, weeks of his questions. She retrieves the shoes she kicked away. “That’s one of the reasons I went to him, I kept having these affairs—”
“Kept having? You’re killing me.”
“Please don’t interr