Free A Charmed Life by Mary McCarthy

word. Now that he was older, he knew enough to leave them alone. He had organized his life sensibly, and the proof was that he was writing again, after fifteen years. But he had bouts of dissatisfaction, when he resented the choice that had been made for him. That was how he felt about it on his glum days, as if an authority had chosen for him, though the authority had been no other than Miles Murphy: he had prescribed for himself, as his own therapist, studying his character structure and deducing from it the qualities he required in a mate. He had given a woman friend his specifications—a girl approaching middle life but not too old for childbearing, not previously married, unencumbered by family, possessing an independent income and an open mind, with a sense of her own dignity, submissive, pleasant-spoken, and moderately pleasing to the eye. And his friend had produced Helen the first crack out of the box.
    Helen was all woman, and he was damn lucky to have got her. They did not make them like her any more. Her father was a Greek wholesaler in Chicago, with a big import trade; Helen had stayed home to nurse her mother when the old man died and the older brother married. She had helped run the family business for a time, done her bit for war relief, and studied ceramics at the Art Institute. The family was cultivated; she had an uncle who was a Metropolitan. When the old lady passed on, finally, she was practically alone in the world, except for a raft of suitors—Penelope waiting for Odysseus. And she had had the patience to hold out till crafty old Odysseus came. She was not stupid, though stupid people thought so, but she had learned how to efface herself, in the European way. For the first time in his life (his mother had never favored him), he discovered that he came first. She could take his abrupt dictation and decipher his manuscript notes and hold the dinner till midnight if he did not feel like eating. She could keep the child quiet in the morning when he had been sleeping a binge off. When they read Aeschylus together in the evenings, as they were doing this fall, she looked up the hard words in the dictionary and put them down on a list for him. She kept the household accounts and never bothered him about money. If he felt like talking, she listened and asked intelligent questions. If he was nervous and morose, she left him alone. She never turned on the waterworks, like Martha; a little bird must have told her that he could not stand women’s tears.
    She did not stimulate him—that was her only drawback. He did not notice this, he found, unless he had been drinking. Then, in a disgruntled frame of mind, after he had sent her off to bed, he would open the desk drawer, stare at Martha’s little gloves, and set himself to recalling her clever remarks. Martha always hated this habit of his—the desk drawer, she said, and everything it contained of him. She hated his remembering things she said. “You turn everything into the past,” she would tell him sharply. And she also used to complain that he remembered her worst mots, accidentally-on-purpose. “That isn’t funny,” she used to say coldly, when he was chuckling over one of her satirical strokes. “Please, Miles, don’t quote me.” It was all part of her general pattern of rejection and self-hatred. She could not stand to hear anything said twice. One habitual phrase of his used to drive her crazy: “I’m inordinately fond of pickles,” “I’m inordinately fond of potatoes.” “You’re inordinately fond of saying that!” she had cried out once. “I know you like potatoes. Don’t dwell on it.” Today, whenever he used the expression, it tickled him to think of Martha.
    She was awfully good on people. He had to hand it to her, even when he was the target. And every time he saw the Coes, nowadays, he remembered the night when everybody was saying that Warren was too intellectual in his approach to painting and Martha had retorted that he