She slid from the bed. Let’s try and make it better, she thought. Let’s keep the face right. She looked in the mirror. Is there any way, she wondered, to paint a smile on?
He handed her a dust mop and a kiss after the instantaneous burnt breakfast.
“Onward, upward, excelsior!” he cried. “Do you realize that man’s preoccupation is not with love or sex or getting on or keeping up with the Joneses? It is not for fame or fortune! No, man’s longest battle, mistress, is with the element of dust. It comes in every joint and elbow of the house! Why, if we sat down and rocked in our rocking chairs for a year we’d be buried in dust, the cities would be lost, the gardens would be deserts, the living rooms dustbins! Christ, I wish we could pick the whole house up and shake it out!”
They worked.
But she tired. First it was her back and then it was, “My head aches.” He brought her aspirin. And then it was sheer exhaustion from the many many rooms. She had lost count of the rooms. And the particles of dust in the rooms? God, it ran into the billions! She went sneezing and running her small nose into a hankie, confused and bitter-red, all through the house.
“You’d better sit down,” he said.
“No, I’m all right,” she said.
“You’d better go rest.” He wasn’t smiling.
“I’ll be fine. It’s not lunchtime yet.”
That was the trouble. The first morning, and herself tired already. And she felt a rush of guilty color to her cheeks. Because it was a strange tiredness made of unnecessary strains and superfluous actions and tensions. You can only deceive yourself so far, no further. She was tired, yes, but not of the work, only of this place. Not twenty hours new in it, and already tired of it, sick of it. And he saw her sickness. One small part of her face showed it. Which part she could not tell. It was like a puncture in a tube, you couldn’t tell where the puncture was until you submerged the tube and then bubbles rose in the water. She didn’t want him to know her sickness. But every time she thought of her friends coming to see her and what they would say to one another at their private teas: “Whatever happened to Maggie Clinton?” “Oh, didn’t you hear? She married that writer fellow and they live on Bunker Hill. On Bunker Hill, can you imagine? In an old haunted house or some such!” “We must go up some time.” “Oh, yes, it’s priceless. The thing is toppling over, simply toppling. Poor Mag!”
“You used to be able to play I-don’t-know-how-many tennis sets every morning and afternoon, with a round of golf thrown in,” he said.
“I’ll be all right,” she said, knowing nothing else to say.
They were on the landing. The morning sun fell through the tinted rim glasses of the high window. There were little pink glasses and blue glasses and red and yellow and purple and orange glasses. The many colors glowed on her arms and on the banister.
He had been staring for some moments at the little colored windowpanes. Now he looked at her. “Pardon the melodramatics,” he said. “But I learned something when I was a kid, pretty young. My grandmother had a hall and at the top of the stairs was a window with little colored glass in it, just like this. I used to go up and look through the colored panes, and—” He tossed down the dust rag. “It’s no use. You wouldn’t understand.” He walked down the stairs away from her.
She stood looking after him. She looked at the colored panes. What had he been trying to say, some ridiculous, obvious thing he had decided finally not to say? She moved to the window.
Through the pink pa
ne the world was roseate below, and warm. The neighborhood, poised like a squalorous avalanche on the brink of a cliff, took on tones of the rose and a sunset.
She looked through a yellow pane. And the world was the sun, all bright and luminous and fresh.
She looked through a purple glass. The world was covered with cloud, the world was infected and sick, and people moving in that world were leprous, lost, and abandoned. The houses were black and monstrous. Everything seemed bruised.
She returned to the yellow pane. The sun was back. The smallest dog looked clever and bright. The dirtiest child looked washed. The rusty houses were seemingly painted afresh.
She looked down the stairs at where William was dialing the phone, quietly, no expression on his face. And then she looked at the colored panes again and knew what he meant. You had a choice of panes to look through. The dark one or the light one.
She felt quite lost. She felt it was too late. Even when it isn’t too late, sometimes you feel it is. To say something, to speak a word. One word. But she wasn’t ready. The whole idea was too new to her. She couldn’t speak now and fully mean it. It would have to seep into her. She could feel the first faint excitement, but then smothered with fear and hatred of herself. And then quick little thrusts of hate at the house and William, because they had made her hate herself. But finally it resolved into simple irritation, and only at her own blindness.
William was phoning below. His voice came up the bright stairwell. He was calling the real estate agent.
“Mr. Woolf? About that house you sold me last week. Look, do you think I could sell it? With maybe a little profit?”
There was a silence. She heard her heart beating swiftly.
William lay the phone down. He did not look up at her.
“He can sell it,” William said. “For a little profit.”
“For a little profit,” said the Listener at the top of the house.
THEY WERE HAVING A SILENT LUNCHEON when somebody banged on the front door. William, with a silence unusual to him, went to answer.
“The darn doorbell doesn’t work!” cried a woman’s voice in the hall.