The Love of a Good Woman

cordial, relationship with her father and her two much older sisters. She said that they had nothing in common. She knew Brian could not understand how that could be a reason. She saw what comfort it gave him, this year, to see things going so well. She had thought it was laziness or cowardice that kept him from breaking the arrangement, but now she saw that it was something far more positive. He needed to have his wife and his parents and his children bound together like this, he needed to involve Pauline in his life with his parents and to bring his parents to some recognition of her—though the recognition, from his father, would always be muffled and contrary, and from his mother too profuse, too easily come by, to mean much. Also he wanted Pauline to be connected, he wanted the children to be connected, to his own childhood—he wanted these holidays to be linked to holidays of his childhood with their lucky or unlucky weather, car troubles or driving records, boating scares, bee stings, marathon Monopoly games, to all the things that he told his mother he was bored to death hearing about. He wanted pictures from this summer to be taken, and fitted into his mother’s album, a continuation of all the other pictures that he groaned at the mention of.
    The only time they could talk to each other was in bed, late at night. But they did talk then, more than was usual with them at home, where Brian was so tired that often he fell immediately asleep. And in ordinary daylight it was often hard to talk to him because of his jokes. She could see the joke brightening his eyes (his coloring was very like hers—dark hair and pale skin and gray eyes, but her eyes were cloudy and his were light, like clear water over stones). She could see it pulling at the corners of his mouth, as he foraged among your words to catch a pun or the start of a rhyme—anything that could take the conversation away, into absurdity. His whole body, tall and loosely joined together and still almost as skinny as a teenager’s, twitched with comic propensity. Before she married him, Pauline had a friend named Gracie, a rather grumpy-looking girl, subversive about men. Brian had thought her a girl whose spirits needed a boost, and so he made even more than the usual effort. And Gracie said to Pauline, “How can you stand the nonstop show?”
    “That’s not the real Brian,” Pauline had said. “He’s differentwhen we’re alone.” But looking back, she wondered how true that had ever been. Had she said it simply to defend her choice, as you did when you had made up your mind to get married?
    So talking in the dark had something to do with the fact that she could not see his face. And that he knew she couldn’t see his face.
    But even with the window open on the unfamiliar darkness and stillness of the night, he teased a little. He had to speak of Jeffrey as Monsieur le Directeur, which made the play or the fact that it was a French play slightly ridiculous. Or perhaps it was Jeffrey himself, Jeffrey’s seriousness about the play, that had to be called in question.
    Pauline didn’t care. It was such a pleasure and a relief to her to mention Jeffrey’s name.
    Most of the time she didn’t mention him; she circled around that pleasure. She described all the others, instead. The hairdresser and the harbor pilot and the waiter and the old man who claimed to have once acted on the radio. He played Orphée’s father and gave Jeffrey the most trouble, because he had the stubbornest notions of his own, about acting.
    The middle-aged impresario Monsieur Dulac was played by a twenty-four-year-old travel agent. And Mathias, who was Eurydice’s former boyfriend, presumably around her own age, was played by the manager of a shoe store, who was married and a father of children.
    Brian wanted to know why Monsieur le Directeur hadn’t cast these two the other way round.
    “That’s the way he does things,” Pauline said. “What he sees in us is something only he can see.”
    For instance, she said, the waiter was a clumsy Orphee.
    “He’s only nineteen, he’s so shy Jeffrey has to keep at him. He tells him not to act like he’s making love to his grandmother. He has to tell him what to do.
Keep your arms around her a little longer,stroke her here a little.
I don’t know how it’s going to work—I just have to trust Jeffrey, that he knows what he’s doing.”
    “‘Stroke her here a little’?” said Brian. “Maybe I should come around