Snowbound

Seventeen

As she stood ladling thick vegetable soup from a tureen into two serving bowls, Rebecca heard Matt come downstairs and then call along the hallway, “Dinner ready yet?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Fine, I’m starved.”

He came into the kitchen, showered and shaved and cologned and wearing a clean shirt and slacks. But not for me, she thought; habit, personal hygiene-nothing more. He had been home for a little more than an hour, and the only other words he had spoken to her were “Hello, dear.”

He sat at the table, sighed gustily, and said as if to himself, “Soup smells good.”

She did not say anything. She placed one of the serving bowls in front of him, and another at her place directly opposite, and laid out a basket of bread and a plate of Cheddar cheese and took a bottle of Mosel from the refrigerator because Matt liked chilled white wine with soup. Then she sat and watched him uncork the bottle and pour their glasses full; and glance at her briefly, almost blankly; and pick up his spoon and begin to eat.

Rebecca despised that look. It was the way he always looked at her during one of his affairs: as if she were not a woman, not even a person, as if she were merely an inanimate object which he owned and could ignore at will. Zachary Cain had seemed to look at her yesterday with that same blank negation, when chance had taken her out of the house-she had been going into the village to visit with Ann Tribucci-at precisely the moment he was passing on the Drive. It might not have been so bad, seeing him again that soon after Tuesday night’s humiliation, if he had only paused and then kept on walking down the road, or if, in coming to a standstill, he had said something, anything, to her. But instead, he had looked at her that way, just stood there silently and looked at her.

She had wanted to scream at him, just as she sometimes wanted to scream at Matt, that she was a human being with feelings and rights and she deserved to be treated accordingly. I’m not a bitch, she had wanted to tell him; I went up to see you for nothing more than a little fellowship, a little kindness. It would have been pointless, however-exactly as it would have been and would be pointless to verbalize her emotions to Matt. And so she hadn’t spoken either, had simply turned and fled his gaze like a frightened sparrow.

Tuesday night’s misadventure and yesterday’s mute confrontation, while essentially immaterial in themselves, had combined with Matt’s affairs, his rejection, the emptiness, the emotional need-all of it-to compound and deepen her mental depression. She felt as though she were suffocating. Things could not continue as they had for so long; she could not allow them to continue this way.

Rebecca stared at her soup, at the tissuey pieces of green and yellow and white vegetables floating in it, at the thin sheen of fat-eyes which coated the surface. Her throat closed nauseatingly, and she pushed the plate aside and folded her hands around her wine goblet. Lifting it, holding it without drinking, she watched Matt eat his soup and two slices of bread and a wedge of cheese. He did not once raise his eyes to her.

She waited until he had begun helping himself to a second bowl of soup; then, slowly and deliberately, she said, “Matt, let’s go up to bed after supper.”

He looked at her then, frowning slightly, poising the ladle over the tureen. “Bed? he said. ”It’s only six thirty”.

“I want to make love,” she said. “It has been more than a month since we made love.”

Matt lowered his gaze immediately and went on ladling soup. “That’s hardly dinner-table conversation. There’s a time and a place, after all…”

“I want to make love tonight, Matt.”

“Rebecca, please. I’ve had a long, hard day, and I’m exhausted.”

“Which means you don’t want to have sex with me, not after supper and not later this evening.”

“I wish you’d stop talking like that,” he said. “It isn’t like you to be so forward.”

“Will you make love to me tonight?”

“Now that’s enough.”

“Don’t you understand what I’m saying? I want you, I need to feel a man inside me again. Damn you, I want to be fucked!”

Matt’s spoon clattered to the table; his eyes went wide, and his mouth dropped open in a tragicomic caricature of surprise and shock. “Rebecca!”

She stood up and went out of the kitchen, walking slowly. Upstairs in their bedroom, she took off her clothes and stood naked by the bed, listening, looking at the door. Matt did not come. When she was sure that he wouldn’t, she got into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin and lay there staring blindly at the ceiling, trying to think, trying to find the strength to make a positive decision because things could not, they could not, go on this way.