The Divers

The key to Fred's success was simple ... he may not have had much of a mind, but it was all his, nobody else's!
He had forgotten the beer again. He remembered that he had forgotten only as he opened the apartment door. A wave of smoke and onions and hamburger flowed past him into the dingy corridor and he stumbled on the garbage pail, plunked right in the doorway for him to lug along the passage to the chute. The bed was not made in one of their two rooms and newspapers littered the other. Elsie was in the kitchen.
Fred! Fred, did you remember my beer?
He closed the door so that the neighbors would not hear the row to come, except through the walls.
Didja, Fred?
She stood akimbo in the kitchen doorway, a cigarette hanging from her lips, her dressing gown loose and spotted, her feet in old scuffs.
I forgot, he mumbled. I'll go now.
Oh, no, he wouldn't. Not until he had heard a full resumé of his lack of character, lack of enterprise, ambition, decency, thoughtfulness, manhood, semblance of virtue.
I said I was going, Elsie. I said I was going, didn't I?
Well, my day! You remembered my name!
It was true he rarely used her name or called her any husbandly term such as dear or darling instead, and rarely looked at her at all if he could avoid it inconspicuously. Ten years of marriage—ten years of legal proximity, rather, for nothing in him was married to anything in her any more.
I don't know why you married me, he said.