Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

bygone drudgery, women of my age are, we pity ourselves, but to tell the truth it was not always bad, it was sometimes comfortable—the ritual labors, small rewards of coffee and cigarettes, the desperate, humorous, formalized exchanges with other women, the luxurious dreams of sleep.
    We lived then in a community called The Huts, on the edge of the campus. They were in fact old army huts, used as married students’ quarters. I was reading
The Magic Mountain
, all one winter, I would fall asleep with it acrossmy stomach. Sometimes I would read aloud to Douglas, when he was too tired to work any more. When I finished
The Magic Mountain
I meant to get us through
Remembrance of Things Past
. We stumbled to bed with our arms around each other, united in our longing for sleep. But occasionally I would have to get out of bed, later, and go into the bathroom to put in my diaphragm. If I looked out the top half of the bathroom window, through the gap in the plastic curtains, I could see lights on in some of the other bathroom windows in the colony, and I would imagine other wives risen in the night on a similar errand. Creatures of daily use, inseparable from infants, stoves, and tubs, turned now to our nightly use, with its connotations—rapidly fading—of sin and splendor. I remembered from far back—from four or five years back, actually, that seemed a long time to me—how sex had seemed apocalyptic (we read Lawrence, many of us were virgins at twenty). Now it had shrunk to this brisk, unvarying, satisfactory, localized exchange, contained appropriately enough in these domestic quarters. I felt nothing so definite as dissatisfaction. I simply registered the change, as I would still register the diminished glamour of Christmas. I believed such changes had taken place because I had grown up and become at home in the world. I was young enough to think that, we all were. A word we often used was “mature.” We would meet somebody we had known a few years ago and we would report that this person had greatly matured. You know, everybody knows, the catalogue of delusions we subscribed to in the fifties; it is too easy to mock them, to announce that maturity was indicated by possession of automatic washers and a muting of political discontent, by addiction to childbearing and station wagons. Too easy and not the whole truth, because it leaves out something that was appealing, I think, in our heaviness and docility, our love of limits.
    There was no infidelity in The Huts, or none that I knew of. We lived so close together, we were poor and toobusy. Few flashes of lust at parties; perhaps we could not afford to drink enough. You say you were in love with me and I reply that I was in love with you, but the truth was surely different. More likely we got a glimpse of something, through each other, that we had not been thinking about—had put aside, in your case, or not yet discovered, in mine.
    I remembered the same day you remembered, when we met two years ago totally unexpectedly in a city where neither of us lived. We spoke of it after we had drunk a lot of wine at our spur-of-the-moment lunch.
    “One day we went for a walk. I had to lift that thing—”
    “Stroller. I had Jocelyn in it then.”
    “Over rocks and mud. I remember.”
    A sunny day, beautiful hot day, in spring, April or maybe even March. I had gone to the drugstore in the campus shopping center wearing my winter car coat, because I did not believe it could really be as warm a day as it looked. As soon as I saw you I wished I could go home and start over again, comb my hair more carefully and put on a brushed-wool, dark gray sweater I had. I could not take off my coat because I was wearing the T-shirt Jocelyn had spilled orange juice on.
    I did not know you well, you lived at the other end of The Huts. You were older than most of us, you had come back to university as a graduate student, from the real world of work and war (a mistake, you didn’t stay, you left and got a job with a magazine soon after that day we took the walk). Your wife drove off every morning to teach at a dancing school. She was little, dark, gypsyish, emphatically confident, in comparison to the blurred and sleepy, stay-at-home wives.
    We talked in front of the drugstore and you said it was too nice a day to go on working, we ought to go for a walk. We did not head for the campus, with its wide easy paths, but for that wild, partly wooded patch of land above the river, where