Free The Cost of Lunch, Etc. by Marge Piercy Page A

before.”
    He is afraid, but of what? Her leaving? “But I do love you!” He breaks from his chair, snatches the suitcase from her. “I do love you. I want us to stay together.” The words slam like a door he is finally through. He feels weak with relief. He has done the right thing. He too will have a wife. He will have a wife and children with his name.
    “Then I’ll stay.” She stands quite still. That blue future gathers itself in a wave and goes crashing over her. I’ve won! she tells herself. Now I’ll be safe. Now I’ll belong. And I’ll be ever so good to him. I’ll never take another bus. I’ll never sleep on somebody else’s couch again.
    But her spine is water and her hands curl up remembering that vertical house, his parents with their expectant eyes, his ivory bedroom with its air of sickroom. His thin arms fold around her in a tight but formal embrace like an up-ended box.

The Retreat
    Circa 1970
    Always the bedroom is dark. Oh, there are windows, two, onto a canyon echoing neighbors’ sorrows and appliances. The crash of a bottle. A husband and wife tearing at each other. Children disemboweling a cat. The pelvic throb of mating cries, falsetto yowls over electric guitars reverberating like a permanent hangover. Noises pulse from other boxes.
    Afternoon. Heat packed like grime into the sockets of her body, she lies prone. Let out early today because the air conditioning broke in the false moon of fluorescence and files, she came home and did not pause at the refuge of coffee shop where students sit in swirls of talk and where she sometimes sits pretending she is a student still. If you are a student people talk with you, they ask questions. If you are a working wife they look through you. She came home to clean the apartment thoroughly. Today she would set everything right.
    She entered the dark, the summer sun fading into her skin. Their rooms felt packed with stale breath. On the cot that served as couch, the coverlet frowned wrinkles. On his desk her husband’s work crouched waiting for him. Posters tacked to the walls look faded, outdated. Who cared aboutthat band any longer? Not her. Then she wanted only to be swallowed into sleep. Fingers sunk into the pillow now she runs through clotted thickets hung with huge red flowers. The pursuing male, naked anyface, runs close behind. She stumbles. He overtakes and takes her. Memory of orgasm, the overtones from silence. She rises into shame. Kneels in her sweat scrubbing the roach-stained floor. When he comes home, it will be nice for him.
    He wakes in the dark. Though the bedroom is always dark, night thickens it. Coming from a late seminar, he saw the white wafer of October moon, but it cannot enter here. Straightening his knife-blade back, he heaves the chilly air into his lungs. Peers into the dark. Hears only the wind scraping drifts of fallen leaves and discarded papers in the canyon between the apartments. Why should sweat slime him as if an army of frogs had crawled over his skin? Her hot body swamps his flank. The walls lean inward. He thrust free of the coil of sheets, gathering his pillow and the spread from the foot of the bed. As if he stood in a cave and looked out, at the corridor’s end white moonlight pierces the bay window of the living room to freeze on the rug. She wakes, rolls on one round elbow to see him, pillow clasped to his shoulder, dragging the spread behind like a broken tail of a peacock.
    “Where are you going?”
    “The couch.”
    “Why?”
    With the wincing shrub she knows too well, he ducks away. “I can’t sleep.” He stalks toward the white field that waits at tunnel’s end. His side of the bed cools under her searching hand. In some unconscious way she has failed or offended him. She calls his name. The word fades.
    Light comes down the corridor from the living room where he studies. One o’clock. She must get up at seven for work. The wind will freeze her as she waits for her bus, icewill enter her