"You're here," he repeated.
"So I am," she said in her cold hubris.
He blew his smoke into her face. "Well, with the gender factor alone no man and woman are interested in the same things nor are they all that compatible. That's for sure." His voice drifted slowly on the stream of smoke flowing from his mouth and from the effluvia of his lackadaisical scorn. "But to make any type of relationship work — even the most pathetic — neither of them can just stare at the walls day-in and day-out. One has to be interested in something — business, rearing kids, teaching, arts and crafts stuff, something. I'd say it was me, that you didn't care to live with me, and that's what made you so moody and useless in a sense; but it wouldn't explain your unwillingness to paint, would it? — You who just sort of sit around claiming that you are an artist all hours. I guess you can sell some of that stuff — what little you do so I guess somebody likes it. It is a shame that you don't draw more still life. Your artsiness was really beginning to have something in it." He stopped for he knew that he had run over her with maximum efficacy since gratuitous plowing through flesh and blood would not make it any more contrite.
Knowing how a hurt, rejected, and emasculated ego sought to maim others in speech, wisps of air, like a diffident eunuch brandishing a butcher knife, she let him disgorge his acrimonious sound. What was it to her? It was an amusing psychological study and only this. The petty utterances he would try to use to inflict misery commensurate with a rejected proposal intrigued her. He was no more dangerous than a child running around in an Indian costume and brandishing his rubber blade.
"Go on. No need to be bashful. We can't work on problems if we are ignorant of them." She meant "Go on. No need to be civil, you hateful bastard." But this would be repressed to a dream and there it would be in the flames of enactment and reenactment until the combustion was complete.
He continued. "Anyhow, you just looked bored all the time toward everyone including your own son. We were your headaches; and I looked like I was wasting my time with you."
The trivial bits and pieces of a personal life projected in acrimonious speech were often expressions of anger toward that other one whom these intense shared pleasures were dependent and the whole thing disgusted her. Cast from the two parties, the personal life was not merely a mosaic of selfish inconsequentials of bad off-moments nor a heavy shadow of two lighter shadows but, together, were the adumbration of the entire scaffolding of a being: the contorted and disgusting skeleton of instinctual drives to gain pleasure, to hate those who might hinder pleasure, to hunt, to harm, to eat, and to possess. This was the personal domain and as disgusted as she was with it, her disgust was not as solid as she had wished it to be. It was weakened and attenuated by the pleasure of having a significant other know insignificant things about her like where she hung her bra. To have him know such things made her feel a little less cryptic. She had scoffed at his proposal so it was no wonder that his bitterness disgorged upon her. She understood male pride and excused his caustic utterances. "I think I put aside myself for everyone," she said. "It was all new to me, you know, and it took some adjusting. I've always been a rather independent being. Still the family that we were was the only family I and Nat have had besides each other. I even went to your church, you know. How supportive did you want me to be outside of becoming you? As you say, no two people are alike—not even if you were to meet some docile little Betty Crocker Helen homemaker type with her certificates in cooking and ductility."
"Ductility? No woman could ever come as well prepared in big word armament as you. You are one of a kind for sure."
She smiled. It was the first dubious compliment that he had extended to her for so long.
" As for Mass, it is is important to Italian American families and you only went when you were forced to go—those times that it was too apparent that there were none of these headaches of yours and that faking one at the last moment would have looked ridiculous." She tightened her lips in consternation. His ignorance was that of the droves of men who believed that migraines were feigned. Even if she were to enlighten him there would be myriad others yet to step out of themselves. She couldn't change them all. She told herself that society's reaction to those like herself was no different than how the government treated Gulf War veterans. But in fact there was a major difference: when it came to going to church, those headaches were really feigned unless all unpleasant situations were headaches, which they were in a sense. He went on: "I wouldn't know. Maybe you did go once in a while and maybe you did help me plant a tree or two. Still that doesn't exactly make or break a relationship, does it?" She would have reminded him of their bedroom intimacies but she knew that he, a man, was already thinking of that which he most revered; and by mentioning it she would be opening herself up to a comment that one couldn't expect anything else from a professional. She nearly reminded him of those intimacies anyway just to taunt a response from him and thus free the hubris that she was barely able to contain within her. "— You know, there is no point in going into any of this."