She tried, tried to be funny with him like before. “Hey, do you want to hear a joke?”
“Sure, tell me a joke.” They were walking up a Stonington hill behind a huffing Anthony.
“A man prayed for years to go to paradise. Once, going up a narrow path in the mountains he stumbled and fell into the precipice. By a miracle he grasped some sickly bush and started crying: ‘Anybody here? Please, help! Anybody here?’
“After some minutes of silence the voice answered: ‘I am here.’
“‘Who are you?’
“‘I am God.’
“‘If you are God, then do something!’
“‘Look, you asked me for so long to be brought to paradise. Just unclench your hands—and immediately you will find yourself in paradise.’
“After a small silence the man cried: ‘Anybody ELSE here? Please—help!’”
To say that Alexander didn’t laugh at that joke would have been to understate matters.
Tatiana’s hands trembled whenever she thought of him. She trembled all day long. She walked through Stonington as if she were sleepwalking, stiff, unnatural. She bent to her son, she straightened up, she adjusted her dress, she fixed her hair. The churning inside her stomach did not abate.
Tatiana tried to be bolder with him, less afraid of him.
He wouldn’t kiss her in front of Jimmy, or the other fishermen, or anybody. Sometimes in the evenings, as they walked down Main Street and looked inside the shops, he would buy her some chocolate, and she would turn up her face to thank him, and he would kiss her on the forehead. The forehead!
One evening Tatiana got tired of it and, jumping up on the bench, flung her arms around him. “Enough with the head,” she said, and kissed him full on his lips.
His one hand on the cigarette, the other on Anthony’s ice cream, he couldn’t do more than press against her. “Get down,” he said quietly, kissing her back without ardor. “What’s gotten into you?”
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I give you man o’ war!