All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [183]
“Yeah,” I said, “we did.”
“Aren’t you happy?” she asked, leaning.
“Sure,” I said, and was as happy, I suppose, as I deserved to be. But the thing was there all the time, breathing back there in the dark of my mind and waiting to pounce. Even though I forgot it was there. Then, the next night when she didn’t kiss me in the new way, I felt the thing stir. And the next night. Because she didn’t kiss that new way I was even angrier than I had been when she had. So I kissed her the way that man in Maine had done. She drew back from me immediately and said, quite quietly, “I know why you did that.”
“You liked it well enough up in Maine,” I said.
“Oh, Jackie,” she said, “there isn’t any place called Maine and never was, there just isn’t anything but you and you are all forty-eight states together and I loved you all the time. Now will you be good? And kiss me our way?”
So I did that, but the world is a great snowball rolling downhill and it never rolls uphill to unwind itself back to nothing at all and nonhappening.
Even though the summer just past had not been like the summer before, I went on to State again and got my job hashing and did some newspaper reporting and entered the Law School and loathed it. Meanwhile I wrote letters to Anne at the very refines female college in Virginia, and the capital on which those checks were drawn dwindled and dwindled. Till Christmas, when I came home and Anne came home. I told her I simply loathed the Law School, and expected (and, in a twisted way, wanted) hell to pop. But hell did not pop. She merely reached over and patted my hand. (We were sitting on the couch in the Stanton living room, where we had clutched and clung until we had finally fallen apart from each other, she in a kind of withdrawn melancholy, and I in the fatigue and irritation of desire too long protracted and frustrated.) She patted my hand, and said, “Well, don’t study law, then. You don’t have to study aw.”
“What do you want me to do then?”
“Jackie, I never wanted you to study law. It was your idea.”
“Oh, was it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, and patted my hand again. “Do what you want to, Jackie. I want you to do what you want. And I don’t care if you don’t make money. I told you long back I’d live on red beans with you.”
I got up from the couch. For one reason so she couldn’t pat my hand in that way which suddenly reminded me of the way a nurse pats the hand of a patient, a sort of impersonal pat intended to be soothing. I stood well back from her, and spoke firmly. “All right, you’ll eat red beans with me. Let’s get married. Tomorrow. Tonight. We’ve fooled around long enough. You say you love me. All right, I love you.”
She didn’t say anything, but sat there on the couch with her hands lying loose in her lap, and lifted her face, which suddenly was tired and drawn, and looked up at me from eyes which gradually brightened with unshed tears.
“You love me?” I demanded.
She nodded slowly.
“And you know I love you?” I demanded.
She nodded again.
“All right, then?”
“Jack,” she said, then stopped for a moment. “Jack, I do love you. I guess I feel sometimes that I might just kiss you and hold you tight and close my eyes and jump off a cliff with you. Or like that time when you dived down to me and we kissed in the water and it seemed like we’d never come up. Do you remember, Jack?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I loved you like that then, Jack.”
“Now?” I demanded, “what about now?