The Deceivers by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

happens all the time. But I didn’t expect it to happen to me. I’ve fallen out of love with Bucky, if I ever was in love with him. Believe me, I know how sappy that sounds. I have a certain amount of tolerant affection for him. I didn’t expect marriage to be magical forever, but I did expect to stay in love. Damn it, I wish it didn’t make me feel so creepy and disloyal to be spouting off about my marriage to a third party.”
    “Sometimes you have to talk. I’m glad you picked me.”
    “I was terribly sophisticated when I met Bucky, I’d just terminated my only affair. It was very intense and very dramatic and it had lasted nearly a year. I was a woman of twenty-one, by gad, and I’d lived, lived, lived. I had the sense to get out when the pink clouds parted and I found out I’d given my all to a very selfish and talented and neurotic man who didn’t give a ghost of a damn about me, just so long as I kept playing my part of Camille. After that somewhat humiliating revelation, our Bucky was as refreshing as an April sun. That good All-American grin of his and those lovely bulgy shoulder muscles and that restful conversation that didn’t require much of me but a nod in the right places.”
    She paused and poured beer into her glass. “I didn’t realize that it was a rebound situation. The affair had made me emotionally sick, and Bucky was my rest camp. Now I know full well that I am not the wife for him. I’m not what he wants. He wants blind and utter adoration and respect, and he needs to be told quite often how wonderful he is and how well he’s doing. I recognize that need, and I try to give him what he wants, but I can’t keep the act consistent. Every once in a while I come out with a tart little wise-guy comment that cuts him down to size. He resents the fact, and won’t admit it completely to himself, that I am more intelligent and more mature than he is. He would be happy with a ball of fluff who could keep his house, take care of his clothes, feed him well, grace his bed and bear all his kids. He wants six kids. We have had some mighty hassles about my reluctance to start the next one. I could have cheated him without his knowing it, but I thought it best to be frank.
    “You read about a man going up the ladder and the poor little woman unable to grow with him. This is the other side of the coin. I’m learning more as I grow older. Bucky is in complete mental stasis. What he believes now, he’ll believe when he’s sixty.
    “I’m not the right wife for him, and he’s not the right husband for me. God knows what I do want for a husband, but I don’t want someone who … is so oppressively stagnant. When he’s home I want to stick pins in him to see if he’ll jump. I keep thinking that if he says the same trite things over and over one more time, I’ll go screaming mad. And I can see his future all too clearly. Just as I can see the beginnings of what will be an impressive paunch. He’ll be sales manager of the firm some day. With a whisky voice and a bloated red face and a clap on the back and a locker room personality. And I am not going to be the little woman to another Al Washburn, I swear. But you can’t change him. The mold is set. He’s sublimely confident that he, by God, has his feet on the ground, and I am being neurotic and petulant and dreamy and impossible. I am being practically un-American, or something.”
    “Bucky is not a complicated human being.”
    “I think he was faithful up until a year ago. But I can’t blame him completely for the change. He wasn’t getting the respect from me that he needs. So there has been a succession of cheap little affairs. That hasn’t come out in the open yet. I’m afraid of what I’ll say when it does. But there havebeen all the little clues. Too many of them, because Bucky is not really bright enough to be a good conspirator. He’s sort of pathetic in the way he thinks I’m ignorant of his infidelities.
    “Maybe it could all