Free The Group by Mary McCarthy

coffee ring from the bakery; no fruit or fruit juice. While they ate, he had hardly spoken; he had passed her the first section of the paper and then sat there, with his coffee, reading the sports news and the classified ads. When she had tried to give him the news section, he had impatiently pushed it back to her. Yet up to this very moment she had been telling herself that he might have just got up “on the wrong side of the bed,” as Mother said; Daddy was cross too, sometimes, in the morning. Now she saw, though, that there was no use pretending any more; she had lost him. In his dressing gown, with his hair disordered and his cruel biting smile and bitter taunts, he reminded her of someone. Hamlet—of course—putting Ophelia away from him. “Get thee to a nunnery.” “I loved you not.” But she could not say, like Ophelia, “I was the more deceived” (which was the most pathetic moment in the whole play, the class had decided), because Dick had not deceived her; it was she who had been fooling herself. She stared at him, swallowing hard; a tear slid out of one eye. “A female contraceptive, a plug,” Dick threw out impatiently. “You get it from a lady doctor. Ask your friend Kay.”
    Understanding dawned; her heart did a handspring. In a person like Dick, her feminine instinct caroled, this was surely the language of love. But it was a mistake to show a man that you had been unsure of him even for a second. “Yes, Dick,” she whispered, her hand twisting the doorknob, while she let her eyes tell him softly what a deep, reverent moment this was, a sort of pledge between them. Luckily, he could never imagine the thing she had been thinking about the peccary! The happiness in her face caused him to raise an eyebrow and frown. “I don’t love you, you know, Boston,” he said warningly. “Yes, Dick,” she replied. “And you must promise me you won’t fall in love with me.” “Yes, Dick,” she repeated, more faintly. “My wife says I’m a bastard, but she still likes me in the hay. You’ll have to accept that. If you want that, you can have it.” “I want it, Dick,” said Dottie in a feeble but staunch voice. Dick shrugged. “I don’t believe you, Boston. But we can give it a try.” A meditative smile appeared on his lips. “Most women don’t take me seriously when I state my terms. Then they get hurt. In the back of their heads, they have a plan to make me fall in love with them. I don’t fall in love.” Dottie’s warm eyes were teasing. “What about Betty?” He cocked his head at the photograph. “You think I love her?” Dottie nodded. He looked very serious. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I like Betty better than I’ve liked any woman. I’ve still got hot pants for her, if you want to call that love.” Dottie lowered her eyes and shook her head. “But I won’t change my life for her, and so Betty lit out. I don’t blame her; I’d have done the same if I were made like Betty. Betty is all woman. She likes money, change, excitement, things, clothes, possessions.” He rubbed his strong jaw line with a thumb, as though he were studying a puzzle. “I hate possessions. It’s a funny thing, because you’d think I hated them because they meant stability, wouldn’t you?” Dottie nodded. “But I like stability; that’s just the rub!” He had become quite tense and excited; his hands flexed nervously as he spoke. To Dottie’s eyes, he suddenly appeared boyish, like the worried young lifeguards in their drifting boats at Cape Ann who sometimes dropped in at the cottage to discuss their futures with Mother. But of course that was what he must have been, once, growing up in Marblehead in the middle of the summer people; he was built like a swimmer, and she could picture him, brooding, in the lifesaving boat in one of those red jackets they wore—Mother said those boys were often marked for life by the experience of being betwixt and between, with the summer people but not