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

ankles. Kneeling naked and winter pale on the bed, she sees herself in the wavery mirror over the dresser that came with the apartment. He grunts distantly. She calls louder.
    “What is it?” he says like a groan.
    What? Me. Your wife you see as demanding. “When are you coming to bed?”
    “When I finish. Go to sleep.”
    She weighs her breasts in her hands with a smile of derision. When I was a graduate student, I did finish. She had left after her masters to support him, as his family, as her family, as he himself expected. After all, a physicist is more important than an English doctoral student. And do I believe he will be different later? I feel disloyal judging him. I am not supposed to think this way. But he is never done and I am always waiting.
    She puts on her only nightgown, pre-wedding extravagance in blush silk and lace, brushes her hair crackling. In the wavery mirror, she seems to be dissolving in her flimsy nightgown. Why should she be more attractive dressed in this thin strip of silk than standing as herself? A pierced unicorn, image of a tapestry she saw at the Cloisters in Manhattan with another man years before, looks over her shoulder from the wall. Her husband tacked it there. She is not the unicorn, blood bubbling on the ice-white flank and deflowered by pike and dogs. Her face fixed in a smile, she goes barefoot into the living room.
    Afterward she sleeps curled toward him, relaxed, looking pleased. Afterward he sleeps too and dreams of a bleeding unicorn who stares at him with his mother’s eyes. He grinds his teeth and groans. His out-flung arm strikes her. She wakes and leans to see him in his struggle. Her eyes drip hot as candlewax down her cheeks. Winning is losing and losing is losing too. Even in sleep they are chained together and she is dragged like a broken tail through his nightmares.
    Whispering. Low sluttish whispers and a stench of fish. A cat scuttles past him with some live thing in its mouth. An old woman in black is watching him, and the beads of the portiere over her door click in her seeking hand. An open sewer dribbles down the winding stairs of street. Whispering again. Who? Awake at once, he sits up with a jagged hammering against his breastbone. No, not whispering. Just rain.
    She stirs, far on her side of the gullied sheet. Just spring rain slithering down the windows, rain with a queasy smell of upturned earth. Something that should have been done has been forgotten. Something owed is coming due. His anxiety feels almost comfortable, accustomed. He knows that she is holding her breath like a silenced alarm, listening. To the rain? To his breathing?
    He says, “You were out very late at your girlfriend’s. What time did you get in?”
    Pretending sleep, she imitates soft noises of coming to.
    More loudly he asks, “What time did you come home? What were you doing?”
    “Just talking. I didn’t notice the time. Oh, hours ago.”
    Two on the green-eyed clock. He is quite sure if he reached out his hand, her hair would be wet, freshly wet, with the rain.
    The window is open on the mild leafy night and the shade taps and taps in the small late spring wind. He rises, gathers his pillow, yanks the spread off. Awake beside him from his tossing and the churning of her own thoughts, she sits up on an elbow and watches him go dragging his bedding down the dark corridor toward the cot in the living room.
    Tonight he accused her of being unfaithful, and she laughed. Faithful, unfaithful to what, she wonders. He does not believe she has been with her friend, talking. He withdraws, withholds, makes himself scarce to punish her. She is already moving in another direction. She watches him go,then stretches out again. And says nothing. She imagines a bed that will be all her own in a place that will be tiny but light and hers alone.
    She has been making plans with her friend who knows a couple of available rentals. She made a list tonight. Saturday, the first day she doesn’t work,