Free Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates Page A

mind. Anybody’s marriage might benefit from an occasional embargo on talk. Besides, Rachel was a girl who depended on small, recurrent rituals—that was one of the things he’d come to know about her, and his very ability to identify so specific a trait made him proud of his own capacity for tenderness.
    One evening in April, after a laconic, final exchange of cowboy dialogue and a significant whinnying of horses, Rachel turned off the radio without waiting for the theme music to come up at the end and said “Well, that wasn’t exactly one of their better ones, was it.”
    She cleared away the dinner dishes, going about the job like an efficient young waitress, showing off a little to suggest how deft and graceful she could be. Then she brought her husband’s coffee over to the sofa, in a softer lamplight, and sat beside him there with a cup for herself and a lighted cigarette that looked a little funny in her fingers because she hadn’t yet quite learned to handle it. This was one of the hours Evan most looked forward to all day, every day, in the relentless drone and glare of the machine-tool factory.
    “Darling, there’s something I have to talk over with you,because I promised I would,” Rachel said. “But let’s put it this way: if you don’t care for the idea, we don’t have to discuss it any further. We’ll just forget it, okay?”
    “Well, okay, but wait.” He was looking at her with one of the long, fond, teasing smiles that were beginning to make her nervous. “You know what you do?” he asked her. “You say a lot of little things over and over, and always just the same.”
    “I do?” She looked troubled. “How do you mean?”
    “Well, you say ‘let’s put it this way,’ and you say ‘don’t care for the idea’—those are two examples, and I could probably come up with a whole lot of others.”
    “Oh,” she said. “Well, I suppose that must be very—boring for you, then, isn’t it.”
    “Oh, come on, sweetheart, I never said ‘boring.’ Whoever said ‘boring’?” And he was afraid she might be taking this much too seriously, so he reached out to stroke or tousle her hair, but that didn’t work because she’d just been to the hairdresser and didn’t want to get it messed up.
    “No, but still,” she said after ducking and taking his hand away, “isn’t that something everybody does? Develop certain habits of speech? You do it too.”
    “Nah, now wait a minute; that’s silly. You’re just—”
    “Well, but it’s true, Evan. You do. You always say ‘a decided advantage’—never a ‘distinct’ or a ‘definite’ or a ‘clear’ advantage—oh, yes you do, and you say ‘nah’ instead of ‘no’ a lot of the time, and you always, always say—”
    But by then it no longer mattered what either of them said, or was said to say, because any further talk was out of the question. With their cups and saucers safe on the coffee table and their cigarettes hastily stubbed out, the young Shepards of Amityville were in each other’s arms.
    At first the sofa seemed an adequate bed; then, with one foot, Evan shoved the coffee table far enough away to lethim help his writhing, gasping wife carefully down onto the rug.
    “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Evan, don’t stop.”
    “Oh, I won’t, dear,” he promised her, “you know that. I’ll never stop.”
    And it was clear to them both, in what little thought they gave it, that the privacy of this big peach-colored place would always be worth whatever it cost as long as it allowed them an occasional chance to get laid on the floor.
    It was an hour or more later, as they sat up in their bed with two bottles of beer, before Rachel opened the topic she’d said they would have to discuss. She told him there was a house available in Cold Spring Harbor where they’d have plenty of living space and even a separate room for the baby, and where the rent would be less than a third of what they were paying here; but there was a