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Show •189 "O.K." "O.K. then." We stopped talking; both of us felt resentful. The building shivered to the sound of a jet flying low and slow down into New York. "What was he like?" I said. "Your husband." "He was a lot older than me. Thirty-one, A good-looking man. He worked construction and made a lot of money. He liked to get drunk and fight all the time, but he always picked out the biggest man in the bar. Now I think what he liked best of all was coming home all beat up and having me fuss and be sorry for him." "What else did he do?" "Nothing I want to talk about." It didn't take me long to find that this girl was a true crazy-maker, loving and warm one second and cold and cutting as the winter wind off the East River the next. "Trust me, help me, love me," she'd say in her little-girl voice, then often as not, when I did all of those things she struck at me like a snake or just danced off and left me hugging thin air and feeling a draft all the way through to my heart. Who besides me would have been dumb enough to stay with such a woman? But dumb isn't the right word; intelligence has very little to do with it. I told myself I didn't drop her because there was nothing to drop-I wasn't serious, I |