Lynn
will not get to know what his vice is. There will not be time for that. It
needs a marriage, a long one, to reveal it . . . I did not turn her into a
maidservant (I occasionally washed the dishes, carried out the trash cans, did
the shopping, etc.) and I have never struck the woman I love. Her complaint is
a different one, and it is deserved. It took me a year to see it. At first I
thought her verdict grotesque: it was that in ten years I had done nothing to
help her develop her potentialities. I lavished every attention on her: the
easiest way of treating a woman, and the worst. I can see that. Her reproach
strikes home, but not in the way she meant it. Obviously, I have been acting
from the very start as if I were God Almighty, or at least Adam, from whose rib
Woman was made: COME, FOLLOW, AND I WILL LEAD! This woman is not ungrateful,
but desperate. What I had imagined to be our years of happiness suddenly seem
like lost years. My vice: MALE CHAUVINISM. What else but my attitude,
maintained day after day from the very beginning, could have made a sensible
woman believe that the development of her potentialities was a matter for her
husband—for men at all?
*
He
begins to talk about Mykonos, the Greek island, with its white houses and white
windmills. About the little motorboat that took us to Delos and how it bounced
on the waves, how the water came splashing in, and so on. All that he tells.
But whom was it taking to Delos? Not a word about a woman who now lives
virtually alone. Not a word about six years without quarrels, without jealousy,
without attrition; they had never lived together. Mykonos—no, Lynn will not get
there this summer . . . Then for a while he talks about Rome, the city, and
what he saw and heard in Rome over five years. Lynn feels that Rome must be
beautiful. He does not talk about the most terrible of all ways of dying.
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