"I smell your farting."
He cracked a smile bashfully despite himself. "Betty's cooking."
She wanted to say, "True she likes frijoles, jalape-os and the like, and the boys like Mexican food too" but her pain trod into the breath of the utterance like children kicking puddles. She was doing her best to put on an agreeable facade—that appealing facade of the bantering bourgeois in the levity, the amusement park, that was supposed to be the world— but it was hard. It was too hard.
"Why are you just lying around?" he asked critically.
"Just resting," she lied. She frowned. His repudiation of her sickness, as not all that different than the attempts at malingering by former pupils whom he had beaten with his board, irritated her; and yet she doubted herself. How did she know what he thought? How did she know that he believed that her malingering was synonymous to theirs and had disdain for both? She did not know anything. It was speculation. It was discerning a mood and then devising fiction around it. But then, how did she know that she didn't know what he thought he knew? "I'll paint later. I am just thinking what to paint on" she lied again to test his reaction toward her proposed return to herself.
"You should wash that dog—both of them."
"What time is it now?"
"3:30"
"You hardly ever get back here until eight."
He went into the bathroom where he began to brush his teeth. The toothbrush muddled the cohesion of his words. "I'm in between meetings. While I was driving I spilled some coffee and then some ketchup from my hamburger. I need to change jackets so can you take the one I have on to the cleaners?" Water came down the faucet but it was a parsimonious dribble. She thought to herself that rich people were so stingy about the damnedest of things. She could not hear any water but she did hear him spit into the basin. With a toothbrush still in his mouth he glanced into the bedroom. "Are you unhappy with something?"