Read The Man Who Loved His Wife for Free Online

don’t want him getting the habit, first two, then three, and so on. Fletch pretends to be amused, but I wonder. Perhaps it’s all in my own mind; do you think I’m worrying uselessly?” As though the man were talking she answered herself hastily, “Of course it is. My own crazy imagination. There’s really no danger.” And finally like a prayer repeated as self-hypnosis, “I worry because I love him so much. I do, you know.”
    ONE NIGHT IN a dream, a sleep-dream rather than revery contrived as appeasement of an unborn wish, she walked with Ralph Julian on the deck of a ship. A band played, banners fluttered, her hand was locked in a firm warm palm. Suddenly, with the angular movement of nightmare, the mood changed. Shame chilled her like a sharp wind, and she knew she was not properly dressed for the journey. The chiffon nightgown did not half cover her breasts and the flimsy material whirled about her bare legs. Horrified strangers stared. She knew that dozens of lovely dresses, colored slippers, jackets, and sweaters had been packed in her mother’s old wardrobe trunk, which she could see clearly on the pier. The ship moved off, faster and faster. She trembled and perspired in the cold wind, cried out, and woke to find herself locked in shivering tension. At once, in another fruitless fantasy conversation, she asked Ralph Julian if the dream had significance. Was there evil in her unconscious mind? “Do I want to be free? Do I, down deep in me, want Fletcher to die?” The question was as shocking as the nightmare.
    At once she forced herself out of bed and walked on bare feet to Fletcher’s room, saw that the man-made mouth at the base of his neck was uncovered, heard the click of his breathing. Like a criminal reprieved she hurried back to bed. As punishment she gave up the talks with Ralph Julian, vowed to forget him, andon Thursdays tried not to listen for his car. And from this time on, it became her habit to creep into Fletcher’s room once or twice a night to listen to his breathing.
    He noted in the diary:
    At night she visits my room to watch me sleep. What does she hope to find? How easy it would be to end it all with a man who breathes through a hole in his neck. Is she trying to work up the courage?
    And again he wrote:
    She is so dreamy nowadays that she does not always know I am in the room with her. When she comes out of it she will look at me in a sly way and wonder who the stranger is. Then she will suddenly smile and kiss me and get all girlish and flattering. I wish I did not enjoy it so much when she is sweet to me. Oh, my God, to love a woman who dreams about being rid of you. I live in hell.

3
    SEPTEMBER IS THE INTOLERABLE MONTH. GRAY mornings and cool nights of early summer become memories of the improbable; soothing fogs are burned out by relentless sunshine. Heat as solid as metal strikes like a blunt instrument. Nerves are unsteady, energy unthinkable, lethargy ill-tempered. In the Strode house the tensions were aggravated by the presence of visitors.
    Fletcher’s daughter and son-in-law had come to spend their summer vacation. This is how they wrote of it when they announced their intentions, and the way they spoke of it when they arrived in the white Jaguar. “ My vacation,” said Cindy almost daily. Since nursery school she had been taught that special conditions— my graduation, my school, my holidays, my debut, our neighborhood, people of our sort, my engagement, my wedding, my vacation—deserved special privilege. Six years younger than Elaine she seemed, by contrast, a child, for she had never taken responsibility of any sort, never held a job, never even finished college. Before her engagement the greatevent of Cynthia Strode’s life had been a debut, along with fifty-nine other girls whose parents had contributed to a charity whose board of governors sponsored a dance at the Hotel Plaza in New York.
    In her