For fifteen years after he died she had it out with him, night after night, between affairs.
When she was alone in bed she talked to him, and cried, and knew she loved him only, and was glad. Sometimes she repeated the furious things he had said when he had blamed her for everything. She would scream about him in her mind, and this seemed to settle all scores, and to make things square with her.
She thought of him kneeling with his head in her lap.
She thought of the time he had been sitting at the kitchen table and had put down his fork and put his head down on the kitchen table and said, ―Marry me,‖ and it had been too late.
It was too late for anything but her, she knew, and yet she felt that they could be reconciled.
One day she cried until she shrieked. After that it was better. It had stuck in her craw.
She thought of that afternoon in the Metropolitan, when they had been standing in front of Rembrandt‘s ―Woman Cutting her Nails‖, and he had said, ―Why is it so beautiful?‖
and she had said, from a place where no one could touch her, ―It‘s because he‘s painting something so ordinary.‖
―No,‖ he said, ―it‘s something about the light.‖
Now she painted and painted and she could only get color, not light.
10
One night she had had dream. He had jumped off that thing and he was naked and crying.
She put her arms around him for a moment. She couldn‘t think of what she wanted to say to him. She was bursting with it. Then she knew. ―It doesn‘t matter,‖ she said, ―it doesn‘t matter.‖