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Show TH trembled, and for a moment she was afraid. But she knew, really, diat in a million years she would never consent to take this house, to give up their so clever litde apartment, and all she felt then was anger, anger as solid as rock. Never, never, never! Except, as it turned out, he had already bought it. He had withdrawn all their savings (of ten years), all their ready cash, and had bought it. He had also given up the lease on the clever little apartment, which had been snapped up by another party. She fainted. He caught her and, not knowing what to do widi her, lowered her to the dusty floor, and watched her with patient annoyance until she came to. Then he helped her up and started to dust her off. She looked about her and fainted again. Having seen into the abyss, she turned practically mute. She would not go near the house and so he hired an old woman and the two of them cleaned it up and decorated it with chintz curtains like a shop girl's dream. And he moved them in. But she would not go into the kitchen, she would not clean so much as a sink, she cried herself to sleep every night. He ignored her, kept the woman coming in once a week, ate eggs, and every evening and every weekend worked on his "sound machine," singing. When she used her paycheck to buy a bed and move into another room, he seemed relieved. At the bookstore she stood around like stagnant water. Everybody wanted to know what was wrong, Roland wanted to know what was wrong, but she would not say. He tried sympamy, guesses, jokes- nothing worked until one spring afternoon he got angry and told her she was wallowing in self-pity like a pig in mud. And beginning to stink of it. Which made her angry, and she rebelled. On the next payday she opened her own bank account and accepted a date with Roland. He took her out to dinner, got her drunk, and took her to his apartment. She was appalled at the age of the building and the messiness of his place, but she tried to smile cheerfully and got stinko and began to cry. Not hard, but she couldn't stop, there was no dam, and so they sat there conversing with tears running down her face. She told him all about the oh so clever little apartment they had had, and how Bill had bought the monstrous house, and how now he was tearing a wall out and had sold their pretty little sports car to pay for it oh, oh, she wailed, and before all that life had been so simple and beautiful! Before that the only thing wrong with Bill hi-fi 171 |