CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LYING abed after the stout-hearted men’s evening at the Kroner’s, Doctor Paul Proteus, son of a successful man, himself rich with prospects of being richer, counted his material blessings. He found that he was in excellent shape to afford integrity. He was worth, without having to work another day in his life, almost three-quarters of a million dollars. For once, his dissatisfaction with his life was specific. He was reacting to an outrage that would be regarded as such by almost any man in any period in history. He had been told to turn informer on his friend, Ed Finnerty. This was about as basic as an attack on integrity could be, and Paul received it with the same sort of relief that was felt when the first shots of the last war were fired – after decades of tension. Now he could damn well lose his temper and quit. Anita slept – utterly satisfied, not so much by Paul as by the social orgasm of, after years of the system’s love play, being offered Pittsburgh. She had delivered a monologue on the way home from Albany – a recitation that might have come from Shepherd. She’d reviewed Paul’s career from the instant of their marriage onward, and Paul was surprised to learn that his path was strewn with bodies – men who had tried to best him, only to be chagrined and ruined. She made the carnage so vivid that he was obliged for a moment to abandon his own thoughts, to see if there was the slightest truth in what she was saying. He went over the scalps she was counting one by one – men who had competed with him for this job or that – and found that they all had done well for themselves and were quite unbroken either financially or in spirit. But to Anita they were dead men, shot squarely between the eyes, and good riddance of bad rubbish. Paul hadn’t told Anita the conditions he would have to meet before he could have Pittsburgh. And he didn’t intimate that he was going to do anything but take the job proudly, joyfully. Now, lying beside her, he congratulated himself on his calm, on his being wily for the first time in his life, really. He wasn’t going to tell Anita that he was quitting for a long time, not until she was ready. He would subtly re-educate her to a new set of values, and then quit. Otherwise the shock of being the wife of a nobody might do tragic things. The only grounds on which she met the world were those of her husband’s rank. If he were to lose the rank it was frighteningly possible that she would lose touch with the world altogether, or, worse for Paul, leave him. And Paul didn’t want either of those things to happen. She was what fate had given him to love, and he did his best to love her. He knew her too well for her conceits to be offensive most of the time, to be anything but pathetic. She was also more of a source of courage than he cared to admit. She also had a sexual genius that gave Paul his one unqualified enthusiasm in life. And Anita had also made possible, by her dogged attention to details, the luxury of his detached, variously amused or cynical outlook on life. She was also all he had. A vague panic welled up cold in his chest, driving away drowsiness when he would most have welcomed it. He began to see that he, too, would be in for a shock. He felt oddly disembodied, an insubstantial wisp, nothingness, a man who declined to be any more. Suddenly understanding that he, like Anita, was little more than his station in life, he threw his arms around his sleeping wife, and laid his head on the breast of his fellow wraith-to-be. “Mmmmm?” said Anita. “Mmmmmmm?” “Anita -” “Mmm?” “Anita, I love you.” The compulsion was upon him to tell her everything, to mingle his consciousness with hers. But as he momentarily raised his head from the drugging warmth and fragrance of her bosom, cool, fresh air from the Adirondacks bathed his face, and wisdom returned. He said nothing more to her. “I love you, Paul,” she murmured.