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

be patched up and I could endure it if the … bedroom department had not gone sour. Once I began to doubt the wisdom of this marriage, I found it more difficult to … respond to him. And, with Bucky, any slowing of response is fatal, because his technique is … pretty damn hasty. God, I shouldn’t have brought that up.”
    Her face was pink and she avoided his eyes.
    “When you talk, it ought to be the whole story.”
    “All right. This slowness of response has been turning into an actual physical revulsion. I try to conquer it, but it is getting worse. Carl, I don’t know what to do or where to go from here. He’s talking about our three weeks in August as a ‘second honeymoon.’ And he says I’ll come to my senses. I
have
come to my senses. It is my senses, or my sensibilities, that are being … violated. It’s a sour and sorry mess. I’m sorry to inflict it on you. But you see, it isn’t grand tragedy. It’s just a messy little marriage between people of no particular importance or interest to the reading public at large.”
    She said the last part lightly and tried to smile, but her mouth broke and she laid her forehead on her forearm on the top of the table in the booth. A few moments later he realized she was crying silently.
    He had an impulse to touch her hair, but he suppressed it. He knew he should say something, but he had no idea what to say to her. He had suspected that all was not well with them, but he had no idea that it was this bad, that it had gone this far. She had showed him the true flavor of their marriage, and he did not see how it could be retrieved, made sound again—if indeed there had ever been any soundness or validity in it.
    “Everybody has to make adjustments,” he said, and was immediately ashamed of the stock phrase, empty and inane. He went on quickly: “I’ve made adjustments to Joan, and she has to me. Joan isn’t the most … stimulating mental companion in the world.” He felt the guilt of disloyalty as soon as he said it, but he sensed that the easiest way to soothe her guilt at her own confession was to answer in kind. “I can often feel a sort of impatience with her. There are a lot of little social goals that I think are pretty damn dubious. But Joan accepts all the truisms without question. Sometimes I envy her because it makes life so damn simple. If you accepteverything you read and everything you’re told, then you can be at home in the world and you don’t waste time, as I do, trying to detect how society is kidding you. And trapping you into a lot of empty effort.”
    Cindy raised her head. Her eyes were reddened and slightly puffy. “But that isn’t the same, Carl. It isn’t the same.”
    “Why isn’t it?”
    “Joan accepts you. She’s perfectly content to have you as you are, and when she doesn’t understand you, she just says that Carl is kind of moody sometimes, and lets it go at that. But Bucky doesn’t accept me the way I am. He wants to force me down into … into the shiny little neoprene and plastic world where he lives. He’s so bloody damn sure he’s absolutely right about everything and that I’m the weird one who has to come to her senses. Joan loves you the way you are. Bucky only loves—if he has the capacity to love—his private image of me the way he thinks I should be. It’s as though I’m trying to live with another girl in the house, the one Bucky wishes he had married. That girl looks just like me. But she takes the ironing into the living room so she can watch the soap operas while she works. And the only things she reads are the fashion magazines and the home making magazines. And when he takes her to parties, she wears a pretty little simper and she never, never says anything that could possibly offend anybody.”
    “Conversely though, Cindy, I accept Joan. I don’t want to stick pins in her. I don’t resent her because there are certain stretches of back woods and jungle in my mind that she can’t