The Progress of Love

eat meat?”
    “What?”
    “Will Catherine eat meat?”
    “She may not eat anything. She may be too spaced out.”
    “I’m making an apple-and-onion casserole. It’ll be quite substantial. Maybe she’ll eat that.”
    Last summer, he said, “She’s a hippie survivor, really. She doesn’t even know those times are gone. I don’t think she’s ever read a newspaper. She hasn’t the remotest idea of what’s going on in the world. Unless she’s heard it from a fortune-teller. That’s her idea of reality. I don’t think she can read a map. She’s all instinct. Do you know what she did? She went to Ireland to see the Book of Kells. She’d heard the Book of Kells was in Ireland. So she just got off the plane at Shannon Airport, and asked somebody the way to the Book of Kells. And you know what, she found it!”
    Stella asked how this fey creature earned the money for trips to Ireland.
    “Oh, she has a job,” David said. “Sort of a job. She teaches art, part time. God knows what she teaches them. To paint by their horoscopes, I think.”
    Now he says, “There’s somebody else. I haven’t told Catherine. Do you think she senses it? I think she does. I think she senses it.”
    He is leaning against the counter, watching Stella peel apples. He reaches quickly into his inside pocket, and before Stella can turn her head away he is holding a Polaroid snapshot in front of her eyes.
    “That’s my new girl,” he says.
    “It looks like lichen,” says Stella, her paring knife halting. “Except it’s rather dark. It looks to me like moss on a rock.”
    “Don’t be dumb, Stella. Don’t be cute. You can see her. See her legs?”
    Stella puts the paring knife down and squints obediently. Thereis a flattened-out breast far away on the horizon. And the legs spreading into the foreground. The legs are spread wide—smooth, golden, monumental: fallen columns. Between them is the dark blot she called moss, or lichen. But it’s really more like the dark pelt of an animal, with the head and tail and feet chopped off. Dark silky pelt of some unlucky rodent.
    “Well, I can see now,” she says, in a sensible voice.
    “Her name is Dina. Dina without an ‘h.’ She’s twenty-two years old.”
    Stella won’t ask him to put the picture away, or even to stop holding it in front of her face.
    “She’s a bad girl,” says David. “Oh, she’s a bad girl! She went to school to the nuns. There are no bad girls like those convent-school girls, once they decide to go wild! She was a student at the art college where Catherine teaches. She quit. Now she’s a cocktail waitress.”
    “That doesn’t sound so terribly depraved to me. Deirdre was a cocktail waitress for a while when she was at college.”
    “Dina’s not like Deirdre.”
    At last, the hand holding the picture drops, and Stella picks up her knife and resumes peeling the apples. But David doesn’t put the picture away. He starts to, then changes his mind.
    “The little witch,” he says. “She torments my soul.”
    His voice when he talks about this girl seems to Stella peculiarly artificial. But who is she to say, with David, what is artificial and what is not? This special voice of his is rather high-pitched, monotonous, insistent, with a deliberate, cruel sweetness. Whom does he want to be cruel to—Stella, Catherine, the girl, himself? Stella gives a sigh that is noisier and more exasperated than she meant it to be and puts down an apple half-peeled. She goes into the living room and looks out the window.
    Catherine is climbing off the wall. Or she’s trying to. Her dress is caught in the wire.
    “That pretty li’l old dress is giving her all sorts of trouble today,” Stella says, surprising herself with the bad accent and a certain viciousness of tone.
    “Stella. I wish you’d keep this picture for me.”
    “Me keep it?”
    “I’m afraid I’ll show it to Catherine. I keep wanting to. I’m afraid I will.”
    Catherine has disengaged herself, and has spotted them at the window. She waves, and Stella waves back.
    “I’m sure you have others,” says Stella. “Pictures.”
    “Not with me. It’s not that I want to hurt her.”
    “Then don’t.”
    “She makes me want to hurt her. She hangs on me with her weepy looks. She takes pills. Mood elevators. She drinks. Sometimes I think the best thing to do would be to give her the big chop. Coup de grâce. Coup de grâce, Catherine. Here you are. Big chop. But I worry about what she’ll