Above the fireplace, in a space plainly meant for some heavy old portrait or landscape, there hung instead a small painting on black velvet, in harshly bright colors, showing the face of a circus clown with a melancholy expression; the artist’s signature, so prominently written in white that it might have been the title, read “Starr of Hollywood.” It was the kind of picture you can find on the walls of third-rate bars and lunch counters all over the United States, and in the airless waiting rooms of failing doctors and dentists; it looked so foolishly out of place in this room as to suggest that someone had stuck it there as a joke—but then, so did The Giant Crossword Puzzle Solving Book, which now lay displayed alone on a coffee table that must have cost two thousand dollars.

On Monday morning, sore-eyed and jittery from lack of sleep as he drove her back to Edgar Todd’s office, he began to be afraid they would never have such a good time again. All future days and nights might wither under the strain of trying to recapture this first weekend. They would discover unpleasant, unattractive things in each other; they would seek and find small grievances; they would quarrel; they would get bored.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jill said in a light, teasing voice. “Maybe; maybe not. But don’t you think it’s a delightfully wicked idea?”

“I think you’re out of your mind,” Sally told her.

“Oh, I think so too,” she said with an attractive little wrinkling of her nose. “I think Cliff is too. Isn’t that what it means to be in love?”

Later that night, when Jack and Sally were alone, she said, “I don’t even want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it or think about it or anything, okay?”

“… And then today,” he said, “today everything on the set had to stop dead—cameras, sound, everything—while he took me off in a corner and sat me down to discuss what he called Dramatic Theory, and he asked me if I was familiar with the work of a playwright named George Bernard Shaw. You think anybody’d believe that? You think anybody in America’d believe how dumb the son of a bitch is? Christ’s sake, this year he’s discovered Shaw; three years from now he’ll discover the Communist Party.”

“My brother and me used to pull the bells every Sunday at home,” Murphy said. “When we was kids, I mean. Used to get half a dollar apiece for it. Son of a bitch, if that don’t sound just the same.”

Listening, they sat smiling shyly at each other. Church bells on misty mornings were things you forgot sometimes, like fragile china cups and women’s hands. When you remembered them you smiled shyly, mostly because you didn’t know what else to do.

The second year in Bronxville she began buying books of poetry all the time and wearing clothes that were thought a little strange for Westchester, and the third year they went through what he later thought of as their quarreling phase—a series of fights so frequent and bitter that when it ended, in the inevitability of mutual exhaustion, they decided they had reached a new maturity, had learned at last to live together as adults. And for the rest of the decade that changed them from nearly forty to nearly fifty they rarely quarreled at all. Perhaps they had not spent as much time together, perhaps they had fewer common interests, but at least they had not quarreled. And at least he had tried; he had always been gentle with her and tried to understand her. Once he had even bought and read, in private, one of those sensible books on menopause, feeling a little foolish about it afterwards, but reassured, because all the cases it described were real neurotic types and none of its clinical dogma could possibly have applied to Alice. And all along, right up until last night, he would have said they had a settled, well-adjusted marriage, imperfect as all marriages, but basically sound. And then quite suddenly it had all fallen away. She was standing in the middle of the living room when he came in, her face strangely white, and her suitcases were standing beside her. “George, I’m all packed. I wanted to be out before you came home because I wanted to avoid a scene. I was going to leave a note.” He sat down on the couch and looked at her, still wearing his hat and holding his briefcase. “Oh, George, you’re not shocked. Please don’t pretend you’re shocked. You know exactly what kind of a marriage we’ve had for the past five—my God, the past ten years.”

“Just a minute, Miss Hennessy, I—” She was almost to the door and he hurried to head her off, nearly colliding with a group of people coming in. “Look—” he began, and then he remembered about the hat and the little flourish he had planned, but it came off badly. “I’d like to buy you a drink, Miss Hennessy—Mary—but I suppose that’s against the rules.”

“Yes it is, Mr. Pollock. That’s very nice of you but I’m late and I’ve got to hurry.”

“Precisely,” he said, stepping around her to block the door and touching her sleeve. “I know you’re late and that’s why I thought perhaps you’d allow me to see you home.” She smiled and drew her sleeve away. “No, I’m sorry, Mr. Pollock, that’s against the rules too. Now, why don’t you go back and finish your—”

His hand slid around her arm and squeezed, tight, and his voice was nearly a shout: “What rules?”

Her eyebrows jumped and the smile was gone. He dropped his hand quickly and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just that I don’t see why you should object when I’m only trying to be pleasant.”

[...] Things like this had been happening nearly every day since he came home from the hospital. First there had been the discovery that he’d left his silver fountain pen behind, in the locker beside his hospital bed, and Jean had to make a special trip back to get it from the nurses. Then on the second or third day, when he’d insisted on helping with the housework, he had shaken the dust mop out the window so hard that the head of the thing fell off, five stories down into the courtyard, and left him absurdly shaking the naked stick over the windowsill. And there was the time he’d let the bathroom sink overflow, and the time he’d split the side of Mike’s wagon wide open trying to nail the wheel back in place, and the terrible morning when he’d not only cut his thumb on the unwinding strip of a coffee can but spilled the coffee all over the floor. At first Jean had laughed about it (“Poor darling, you’re just out of touch with things, aren’t you?”) but lately her reactions had alternated between elaborate kindliness and tight-lipped silence, and he didn’t know which was worse. How, exactly, could he tell her about this? A pleasant little apology was out of the question; he absolutely could not say “Sorry, darling, I broke one of the cups,” and expect to retain a shred of dignity. But what else was there to say?