Gwen, in Green

The hospital was old and small and crowded. There were no private rooms. The woman in the other bed in Gwen’s room was a perky senior citizen with a new scar to indicate the removal of a non-­malignant growth from her stomach. She was ambulatory and had quite an active tongue. She never slept. There was no opportunity for Gwen to talk. She had to tell a highly censored version of the event. Dr. Peter Braws, who had examined her in his office, was quite interested. He was a nice fellow, married to his office nurse, but with an eye which still appreciated femininity. Gwen told him and George that she’d been sun bathing, had come into the house to shower off the sun oil, and had been attacked without warning by the usually gentle pussycat. She felt guilty about slandering Satan. She knew why he had attacked, but with an audience she couldn’t explain it. She wasn’t even sure she could explain it to George.

During the first night she was under heavy sedation. It was into the next afternoon before Dr. Braws allowed her to come out of the drug haze long enough to think clearly. Then the full meaning of what had happened hit her anew and she wished, once again, for death. She could not bear to look into George’s cheerful face and think of what she’d done to him and to their love. To die was still the logical answer.

George guided her tenderly to the car, after two nights in the hospital. “I just don’t understand, honey,” he said, as he started the car. “Braws said you were highly wrought up, and that’s the question. What is it?” He didn’t tell her that the doctor had said Gwen was near the point of a complete breakdown. “Is it something I’ve done?”

His sincerity was a knife in her heart. “Oh, no,” she said. “No, no, no.”

“Well, you’re not to worry. I’m going to take good care of you.”

He did. At home, Sam, lonely with both Mandy and Satan gone, met them with happy barks and jumps and frantic, energetic runs around and around them as they went toward the house. Inside, George led her to bed and tucked her in. He set the timer on the clock radio for her pill time. She was on a rather powerful tranquilizer which made it easy to sleep and sleep. She lost track of time. The windows were open to the spring air and it was balmy and lovely. The tranquilizers allowed her to think, but killed the pain of thinking.

“Why was the shotgun in the living room, honey?” George asked. Had it been a day, two days? She didn’t answer. There was no simple answer. “You worry me, Gwen. Do you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Honey, we’ve got it made. We’ve got what most people struggle for all their lives, security, most anything we want, happiness. I haven’t taken a mistress or anything and I don’t beat you.”

There was no way of telling him.

“If anything ever happened to you, I think I’d walk into the pond and forget to come out,” George said.

It wasn’t fair. She was being asked to live with what she’d become. She was no better than her mother. She’d given her body gladly and wantonly. What she had always hated and condemned, she’d become. And he was telling her she had to accept it, and live with it. By forcing her to see how badly he’d be hurt, he was making it impossible for her to seek the easy way out.

She was dozing. It was another of those glorious May afternoons. She woke with a feeling of violation and found that George had joined her on her bed. He was dressed only in a bathing suit and his hands were on her. His hands pressed, through the thin pajama top, on her breasts, where the man, whose name she didn’t even know, had fondled her. “Don’t,” she said, without thinking.

He respected her wishes. But he was a sensuous man and he had no idea of her state of mind. That night he persisted. It was George, she told herself. Her husband. But when his hand went down to cover her feminine damp­ness, to press and explore, she could not hold back a near scream. She jerked away, trying not to sob aloud.

“Is that it?” George asked, not angry, just concerned. “Is it the same old gig?”

Why couldn’t she just die? He lay beside her, not touch­ing her. “Gwen?”

“You could find someone else,” she said. “You’re young.”

“Gwen, that’s crazy talk.” His voice was strained. “Dr. Braws thinks, well, maybe—” She did not help him. “Well, Gwen, it would be no disgrace. I mean, lots of people need help.”

She seized upon the suggestion, not because she wanted to talk to anyone, but because it would at least give her some more time to think. George drove her to the psychiatrist’s office the next day. The road from Ocean City to the upriver city passed through natural woodland. Dogwoods bloomed in white splendor. The world was renewing itself in pastel green and bright colors.