Fury on Sunday by Richard Matheson Read Free Book Online Page A

moved on the mattress and suddenly he froze, seeing that she was looking in at him. He lay there shivering while her eyes looked into the dark bedroom. He didn’t think she saw him because she didn’t say anything and, in a moment, she turned her head away. But for that moment, he had seen, in her eyes, how much she despised him. It had been no novelty. He saw it all day, too. But there was something faintly hideous about seeing it on her face when she didn’t even think he was looking. It showed how ingrained her hatred was, how burned into her mind.
    He lay there on his side looking with bleak, unhappy eyes at his wife sitting on the couch. He saw her finish the drink she’d picked up. Now she was staring into the glass, tilting it from side to side. What did she see in the glass? What was she thinking? Once he thought he had glimmers of her mind. Now she was more a stranger with each passing day. Once he could almost say they were in love. Now all he could say was that he paid the bills for the things she bought. And there were plenty of things.
    A shudder made his muscles jerk abruptly and he closed his eyes to shut away the sight of her. No, he couldn’t go in there anddemand her body as if it were some patronage. He couldn’t even talk to her.
    Like some silly robot he would host her parties, pouring drinks, laughing at bad jokes, trying to ignore the sight of her on the couch or on a chair with some man, her open mouth writhing under his, her fingers raking across the man’s back, that obvious dark flush filling her cheeks. Trying to ignore the moments when she would disappear and be gone from the living room. Then he knew that in the darkness of the bedroom, maybe on his own bed…
    And he was a jellyfish. He could no more have gone in the bedroom when she was there with some man and confront them than he could have broken into the bedroom of the White House and demanded,
What the hell are you doing, Mr. President!
    He would go on pouring drinks and laughing at bad jokes and, maybe, if the pain in his flesh and mind got too unbearable he would make a faltering pass at some woman that no one else would make a pass at.
    He started quickly to his elbow as Jane stood up and moved for the balcony.
    He pulled back the covers, his heart thudding with fear. Everything was forgotten in an instant; his hate, his frustration, his despair. He was, once again, the simple, uncomplicated man who could do nothing but adore. Quickly he ran across the living room rug, his heavy body rocking from side to side, feet thumping on the rug. “Please don’t, Jane. Darling, please don’t. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll try to be what you…”
    Jane turned from the railing and looked at him coldly.
    “What do you want?” she asked, her voice flat.
    The way she said “you.” It was a knife turning in him.
    “I—I thought maybe….”
    “Thought maybe I was going to jump?” she asked acidly.
    “No,” he said. “I mean, I just thought…”
    She didn’t say anything and they stood there looking at each other in silence in the early morning. She stood there on the terrace flagstones like Venus in Manhattan, like a debauched Aphrodite in a sheer Tiffany creation.
    “Don’t you—think you should come in?” he said falteringly, “It’s a little cold for just that.”
    “Just what?”
    “I—I—that gown. I mean it’s awfully thin.”
    Her eyes on him were like blue ice.
    “You’ll catch your death of cold,” he offered.
    “That would be wonderful,” she said in a deceptive calm.
    But, after a moment, she came in and went to the bar to make herself a drink.
    He closed the French doors and stood there awkwardly, watching her make a drink that was nine-tenths whiskey. He swallowed and then straightened out the wrinkled twists of his pajamas. They were silly looking pajamas. He knew that. He often thought she bought them for him because she knew he would look ridiculous in them, with their little pink elephants