The Wine of the Heart. Victor Jay
offered any objection, even at this late stage. Somehow he couldn’t seem to make himself care. Not that he didn’t care for Ann—they had been close, probably much closer before the wedding, but it had been the closeness of good friends rather than sweethearts, or man and wife.
It had seemed so logical, their getting married, the simplest thing to do. Perhaps, he consoled himself, if it hadn’t been for his impotence, the certain knowledge that had stayed with him all along, he might have cared more. There had been, though, no hope in him, and his lack of hope had proved itself in his failure to consummate the marriage. It had been doomed to failure, and it had failed, it was as simple as that.
“I do care for you,” he said impulsively, more as though he were arguing with his own failure than with her. It wasn’t, he thought, much of a comfort to offer a wife as justifiably disappointed as she must be.
“That’s the damnedest part of it,” she said quickly, almost seeming to have anticipated the remark. “I know you do, Glen. I think you love me as much as you’ve ever loved anyone, maybe more than I love you. Your mind loves, or your heart or whatever it is, but that’s as far as it goes. Your body loathes me, and my body doesn’t like being loathed.”
He stiffened again, the harshness of her statement wounding him more deeply than he would have revealed. She was wrong, of course, but there was no way for him to disprove what she said. He did love her, tenderly, affectionately. He wanted to love her physically as well. There was no loathing in his body for her—that was the agony of it all; he did desire her, wanted desperately to make a real marriage of their game. But it wasn’t there, whatever that mysterious flame was that brought two bodies together for a brief period of shared life.
Six months—six long months since their wedding, and for all he knew Ann might still be a virgin. If she wasn’t, he certainly couldn’t be held responsible for the fact.
“It isn’t just you,” he said, genuinely sorry for her, and for himself as well. “I never really—once or twice maybe, with some girl or other, but most of the time it was just like it is with us.”
“You’re forgetting Carol,” she reminded him. Her voice had gone harsh again, resentful and bitter.
“You don’t really know...,” he tried to argue.
“She looked it before she went away. And she did go away, and she came back a lot thinner, and downright sick looking.”
“All right,” he agreed wearily, sorry now that he had tried to comfort her. “Even if she were pregnant, and she might have been—she was one of them that I could do it with, but there’s still no saying it was mine. You know what she was, a cheap tramp.”
It was a moment before she answered. “Maybe that’s what you need.”
He said nothing again. He had said too much already, his mood of tenderness was dissipated. After a time Ann slid back down in the bed again, turning her back toward him.
“It will take me a day or two to get things together,” she said with an air of finality.
After a time her breathing deepened and he knew that she was asleep. Glen turned on his back, staring up at the whiteness of the ceiling. He wanted another cigarette, but he knew the light would waken her again, and provide the opportunity for more argument. Instead he swallowed several times, the stale taste of his previous cigarette still lingering in his mouth.
One hand went instinctively to his thighs, touching the warm softness with a hesitant caution, then clenching fiercely as though to vent his frustration on his unwilling flesh.
* * * *
She was up before him in the morning, an uncommon occurrence. He slipped into his robe, shivering as he always did at the cold touch of silk, and padded downstairs in his bare feet to the kitchen. He could smell the aroma of fresh coffee, evidence of the fact that she had been up for a while.
She glanced up at him as he came into the kitchen. “The coffee’s already made,” she told him, without any of the previous night’s bitterness.
“You’re up early,” he commented, taking a cup from the cupboard to fill it with steaming black coffee.
“I didn’t sleep well,” she said, then gave him a rueful smile. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound bitchy.”
He returned the smile, at least half of it; he was not as a rule communicative on first rising. He paused on his way out of the room. “You’re still planning on leaving?”
Ann nodded her head wordlessly without looking at him, pushing a strand of auburn hair back from her face. For a moment Glen found himself thinking how pretty she was, even like this, without make-up, her early-morning face smooth and childlike. Women, he thought fleetingly, were much prettier without make-up.
He left the kitchen for the bathroom, sipping the coffee from time to time while he shaved. His own face frowned back at him as it emerged from the lather smeared over it—a handsome face, thin and sharply featured. He had been, in his teens, a plain, almost unattractive boy. Age had given the face a puzzling combination of childishness and maturity, a promise that he would age well and grow eventually into spectacular good looks at a time when his contemporaries were looking old and wasted.
He nicked his chin with the razor, grimaced, and applied a scrap of wet tissue to the spot. A shock of light, almost blond hair fell across his forehead as he leaned toward the mirror.
Washing the shaving cream from his face, he stepped over the edge of the tub, pulled the curtain closed behind him, and turned on the shower. The water beat down upon him fiercely, starting as a wave of coldness and warming slowly, sweeping away the morning lethargy that still clung to him.
His coffee was almost cold by the time he stepped from the shower. He finished the cup in two long swallows, donned his robe again, and returned to the bedroom, closing the door behind him. Naked again, he stretched his arms high over his head, pulling his body taut. He liked the feeling that his body gave back to him, an awareness of physical health and certainty. It was a young body, sleek and vibrant, healthy—except...he thrust the thought angrily from his mind, opening the door of the closet to select a suit for the day.
Ann was still in the kitchen when he came downstairs again. He paused at the kitchen door, debating about a second cup of coffee. Ann looked up at him quizzically, and he wondered if he should kiss her good-bye. How should a husband act when his wife has decided to leave him? He decided, finally, against both the kiss and the coffee.
“I’m late,” he told her, nodding briskly. “See you tonight?”
“I think so,” she answered, returning the nod. She was plainly disappointed.
Outside, Mrs. Devraux was just backing her car out of the garage next door. She waved to him and indicated the seat beside her to ask if he wanted a lift. Glen shook his head no, smiled a “thanks,” and headed for his own garage and the convertible parked there. Funny, he and Mrs. Devraux working at the same school, living next door, and driving separate cars every day.
He had never even thought of offering her a ride to and from work. But then, he concluded, backing down the drive to the street, it was probably just as well. For all her polite charm, Mrs. Devraux was a busybody, the sort who lived for gossip she could learn about virtually anybody. It wouldn’t be a very pleasant way to start one’s day, he told himself.
He paused at the curb. Already a warm Midwestern sun was making its way upward into the spring sky. An occasional puff of white, like smoke issuing from unseen cannons, drifted across the blue overhead. He flicked the levers that fastened the convertible top to the windshield, and lowered the top, the sun rushing in upon him eagerly. He pulled away from the curb, heading the car into the morning traffic.
CHAPTER TWO
It occurred to Glen, as he drove into the parking lot at Morning Valley Junior College, that he had driven the entire way to work without any conscious awareness of what he was doing. His thoughts, as they were so often, had been directed to his problem—the problem.