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possibly can.”
    “That’s very nice. I’m glad things are moving. I hadn’t heard anything from the lawyer.”
    “Why should you? I give him orders what to do.” Now she sounded a little high.
    “Well, thanks very much for telling me.”
    “The bill will be sent you in due time. Fifty-fifty, O.K.?”
    “O.K., certainly.”
    “How’s your mind these days? Lose it yet?”
    “I don’t think so.” How he regretted ever saying anything about his “sanity” to Nickie. He’d said it carelessly once during one of their conversations about his depressions, said that depressions were such a torture they could make a person lose his sanity, or something like that, and Nickie had been sympathetic, had said he ought to go to a psychotherapist, so he had gone to one. And then, in a matter of days, she had begun to throw up his words to him, saying he admitted being insane, so naturally he was, and she was afraid to be in the same house with him, and how could anybody love or trust someone insane?
    “Still burying your head in that little hole down there?” she went on, and he heard the click of her cigarette lighter as she closed it.
    “It’s not a bad town at all. Not that I expect to live here the rest of my life.”
    “I’m not interested in your plans.”
    “O.K., Nickie.”
    “Meet any interesting girls?”
    “Veronica, how about sticking to Ralph and your painting and letting me alone?”
    “I’ll let you alone. You can be sure of that. You’re a creep and I’m sick of creeps. And as for my painting, I did two and a half canvasestoday. How’s that? Ralph inspires me, you see? He’s not like you, moping around—”
    “Yes, I know. I understand.”
    She gave a contemptuous laugh. In the seconds she took to think of something else to say, he said:
    “Thanks again, Nickie, for calling me up to tell me.”
    “Good
bye!
” She slammed the telephone down.
    Robert took off his tie, went into the bathroom, and washed his face. Why was she always so angry, he wondered, so flippant, so eager to hurt? He was sick of asking himself that, yet it was a perfectly natural thing to ask, he thought. Even Peter Campbell—or had it been Vic McBain?—had asked him the same thing when Robert had told him about one of his quarrels with Nickie. It had been a funny quarrel over the misunderstanding of a sofa-cover color, which was why he had told it. But the end of it had not been so funny, because Nickie had hung onto the incident all day and the night and the next day, a whole weekend, Robert remembered. He had told it to Peter, and now he remembered Peter’s smile fading and Peter asking, “But why was she so angry about it?” Robert could come up with some answers for himself, such as, Nickie didn’t like him because he was often depressed, rather inarticulately melancholic, and he couldn’t blame her for that. Or Nickie was very ambitious about her painting, and a man in her life represented a threat, against her time or whatever, a threat of being dominated, perhaps (witness her choice of Ralph Jurgen to marry, a pretty weak character, Robert thought, someone Nickie could easily dominate). Or, Nickie’s ego was so weak or so sensitive, she couldn’t bear the least criticism, and toward the last she’d begun to accuse him of saying things he had not said,and when he denied them, she had told him he was losing his mind. Robert could go over these things, but they still did not explain her furious anger against him, didn’t explain it to his satisfaction. There was a missing link somewhere, and he doubted if he would ever find it, if it would ever pop into his head so that he could say, “Ah, now I understand, now it all makes sense.”
    He stood looking out his window at the two-story white house across the street, with its window on the top floor full of plants. Sometimes an elderly man sat reading a newspaper in the armchair just beyond the plants, but tonight the chair was empty. He could see a