The Progress of Love

think of a dog,” Lee said. “You always make me think of one of those dogs that push up on people and paw them, with their big disgusting tongues hanging out. You’re so eager. All your friendliness and eagerness—that’s really aggression. I’m not the only one who thinks this about you. A lot of people avoid you. They can’t stand you. You’d be surprised. Youpush and paw in that eager pathetic way, but you have a calculating look. That’s why I don’t care if I hurt you.”
    “Maybe I should tell you one of the things I don’t like, then,” said Robert reasonably. “It’s the way you laugh. On the phone particularly. You laugh at the end of practically every sentence. I used to think it was a nervous tic, but it always really annoyed me. And I’ve figured out why. You’re always telling somebody about what a raw deal you’re getting somewhere or some unkind thing a person said to you—that’s about two-thirds of your horrendously boring self-centered conversation. And then you laugh. Ha-ha, you can take it, you don’t expect anything better. That laugh is sick.”
    After some more of this, they started to laugh themselves, Robert and Lee, but it was not the laughter of a breakthrough into reconciliation; they did not fall upon each other in relief, crying, “What rot, I didn’t mean it, did you mean it?” (“No, of course not, of course I didn’t mean it.”) They laughed in recognition of their extremity, just as they might have laughed at another time, in the middle of quite different, astoundingly tender declarations. They trembled with murderous pleasure, with the excitement of saying what could never be retracted; they exulted in wounds inflicted but also in wounds received, and one or the other said at some point, “This is the first time we’ve spoken the truth since we’ve known each other!” For even things that came to them more or less on the spur of the moment seemed the most urgent truths that had been hardening for a long time and pushing to get out.
    It wasn’t so far from laughing to making love, which they did, all with no retraction. Robert made barking noises, as a dog should, and nuzzled Lee in a bruising way, snapping with real appetite at her flesh. Afterward they were enormously and finally sick of each other but no longer disposed to blame.
    “There are things I just absolutely and eternally want to forget about,” Robert had told Peg. He talked to her about cutting his losses, abandoning old bad habits, old deceptions and self-deceptions, mistaken notions about life, and about himself. He said that he had been an emotional spendthrift, had thrown himself intohopeless and painful entanglements as a way of avoiding anything that had normal possibilities. That was all experiment and posturing, rejection of the ordinary, decent contracts of life. So he said to her. Errors of avoidance, when he had thought he was running risks and getting intense experiences.
    “Errors of avoidance that I mistook for errors of passion,” he said, then thought that he sounded pretentious when he was actually sweating with sincerity, with the effort and the relief.
    In return, Peg gave him facts.
    We lived with Dave’s parents. There was never enough hot water for the baby’s wash. Finally we got out and came to town and we lived beside the car wash. Dave was only with us weekends then. It was very noisy, especially at night. Then Dave got another job, he went up North, and I rented this place.
    Errors of avoidance, errors of passion. She didn’t say.
    Dave had a kidney problem when he was little and he was out of school a whole winter. He read a book about the Arctic. It was probably the only book he ever read that he didn’t have to. Anyway, he always dreamed about it; he wanted to go there. So finally he did.
    A man doesn’t just drive farther and farther away in his trucks until he disappears from his wife’s view. Not even if he has always dreamed of the Arctic. Things happen before he goes. Marriage knots aren’t going to slip apart painlessly, with the pull of distance. There’s got to be some wrenching and slashing. But she didn’t say, and he didn’t ask, or even think much about that, till now.
    He walked very quickly over the snow crust, and when he reached the diner he found that he didn’t want to go in yet. He would cross the highway and walk a little farther, then go into the diner to get warmed up on his way home.
    By the time he was on his way home,