VIII
As he sat by Leora in a deck-chair, Martin studied her, really looked at her pale profile, after years when she had been a matter of course. He pondered on her as he pondered on phage; he weightily decided that he had neglected her, and weightily he started right in to be a good husband.
“Now I have a chance to be human, Lee, I realize how lonely you must have been in New York.”
“But I haven’t.”
“Don’t be foolish! Of course you’ve been lonely! Well, when we get back, I’ll take a little time off every day and we’ll—we’ll have walks and go to the movies and everything. And I’ll send you flowers, every morning. Isn’t it a relief to just sit here! But I do begin to think and realize how I’ve prob’ly neglected—Tell me, honey, has it been too terribly dull?”
“Hunka. Really.”
“No, but tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Now bang it, Leora, here when I do have the first chance in eleven thousand years to think about you, and I come right out frankly and admit how slack I’ve been—And planning to send you flowers—”
“You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith! Quit bullying me! You want the luxury of harrowing yourself by thinking what a poor, bawling, wretched, storybook wife I am. You’re working up to become perfectly miserable if you can’t enjoy being miserable … It would be terrible, when we got back to New York, if you did get on the job and devoted yourself to showing me a good time. You’d go at it like a bull. I’d have to be so dratted grateful for the flowers every day—the days you didn’t forget!—and the way you’d sling me off to the movies when I wanted to stay home and snooze—”
“Well, by thunder, of all the—”
“No, please! You’re dear and good, but you’re so bossy that I’ve always got to be whatever you want, even if it’s lonely. But—Maybe I’m lazy. I’d rather just snoop around than have to work at being well-dressed and popular and all those jobs. I fuss over the flat—hang it, wish I’d had the kitchen repainted while we’re away, it’s a nice little kitchen—and I make believe read my French books, and go out for a walk, and look in the windows, and eat an ice cream soda, and the day slides by. Sandy, I do love you awful much; if I could, I’d be as ill-treated as the dickens, so you could enjoy it, but I’m no good at educated lies, only at easy little ones like the one I told you last week—I said I hadn’t eaten any candy and didn’t have a stomachache, and I’d eaten half a pound and I was as sick as a pup … Gosh, I’m a good wife I am!”
They rolled from gray seas to purple and silver. By dusk they stood at the rail, and he felt the spaciousness of the sea, of life. Always he had lived in his imagination. As he had blundered through crowds, an inconspicuous young husband trotting out to buy cold roast beef for dinner, his brainpan had been wide as the domed sky. He had seen not the streets, but microorganisms large as jungle monsters, miles of flasks cloudy with bacteria, himself giving orders to his garçon, Max Gottlieb awesomely congratulating him. Always his dreams had clung about his work. Now, no less passionately, he awoke to the ship, the mysterious sea, the presence of Leora, and he cried to her, in the warm tropic winter dusk:
“Sweet, this is only the first of our big hikes! Pretty soon, if I’m successful in St. Hubert, I’ll begin to count in science, and we’ll go abroad, to your France and England and Italy and everywhere!”
“Can we, do you think? Oh, Sandy! Going places!”