Chapter 3: Domesticity

Bruce Walters had spent his adult life avoiding domesticity. Marriage, sobriety, 9-5, these were -- he’d been sure -- not for him. Marriage and sobriety turned out to have charms he’d not expected. Of course, marriage to Janet was far from a rut. She didn’t let a day go by without a crisis.

But, at least, he no longer had to worry about the university and her father finding out that he was sleeping with her. If she didn’t cook him the dinners he’d always thought of as part of marriage, at least their visits to restaurants brought no fear of discovery.

Even though he realized -- when he thought about it clearly -- that the brief ceremony couldn’t be expected to change Janet into a housewife, he was still a little disappointed that she did so little housework. His standards weren’t high, weren’t even as high as hers, but he did realize that the rugs weren’t going to be vacuumed unless one of them did it. Janet wasn’t in school; she wasn’t at work; what did she do with her days? She couldn’t spend all her time throwing up.

“You think,” she said, “that you are the only one with a life. When you’re at the University, I should be running around dusting and vacuuming. Well, running around is harder these days. So I spend a little time watching General Hospital. When I was your student, you expected me to read all that stuff. Now, I’m your wife, you expect me to make your meals and iron your shirts.

“I never asked you to iron my shirts. I don’t think we own an iron.”

“You would. Well, I’m carrying your child; that’s enough work for anybody. You should have thought of that before you got me pregnant.” That wasn’t the way he remembered it. Whether the pregnancy had been her carelessness or -- as he had often suspected -- her idea, he hadn’t been consulted.

The charms of sobriety were less surprising. He’d always cut out the booze when he was doing the final draft of his poetry. His previous dry times had lasted for as long as a week at a stretch. Now, realizing that alcohol was a threat to the fetus growing within Janet, he’d gone cold-turkey to set her a good example. (Besides, he was trying to put together another book.) Since she was too young to buy liquor legally, this made her supply harder to acquire. If Janet didn’t join in his sobriety, she drank less than she had when he was outdoing her.

Even 9-5 started to be attractive. He’d already learned that Janet was unwilling to share his attention with anyone -- even anything -- else. So, he left home every morning to go to his old office. He wasn’t teaching that summer, but the university didn’t reassign faculty offices for that reason. He put in a couple of hours polishing his verse, maybe turning one set of his old notes into a poem. He ate lunch on campus and visited the library. He either prepared for the advanced course he would teach in the autumn quarter, Cummings, or worked a Nation crossword he’d brought from home. Then he put in another couple of hours on his poetry. He got home in time to take Janet out to dinner. All right, it was closer to 11-5 than 9-5; it was still a solid block of work seven days a week.

And since he spent those hours alone, he could be attentive to Janet when he was with her. Aside from dinners, some campus events, and a few visits to her family, they spent their time at home. She didn’t fit in with his fellow faculty, and he didn’t fit in with her fellow students. For that matter, neither of them had socialized much previously -- searching for bedmates excepted. As he was neither drinking nor bringing a woman home, he had no reason to visit the cocktail lounges which had been his previous social milieu.

At home, they watched TV -- more than he ever had as an adult. This being summer, Janet complained about the number of reruns. Bruce couldn’t see the difference. Each series had only one plot, not that the different series had such different plots. If it was desirable to watch the same show when the villain was named Smith even though you’d seen it when he was named Jones, why complain that it was a rerun of the episode when he was named Jones? And when had Janet, who was supposed to have spent the previous year studying, seen those episodes anyway?

Their other recreation pleased them both more. Pregnancy hadn’t lessened Janet’s erotic interest. He worried about damaging the fetus, but that only led them to new positions. Neither him on top nor her on top looked safe. He persuaded her to stand bent over. The best piece of furniture for that was his old desk. He’d originally planned to keep his home office as a refuge, but most of the time he spent in it was with her.

This was something else which -- like versifying -- he could perform better while sober. Even so, he couldn’t perform every night. Janet, on the other hand, was nearly insatiable. On nights when they went to bed without visiting his home office first, he brought her to two -- sometimes three or four -- climaxes with his hand.

Even the pleasures she derived from a four-climax night didn’t seem to sweeten Janet’s mood for longer than it took to achieve it. When she wasn’t bitching about television reruns or some immediate problem, she was bitching about being pregnant and the prospect of looking after a baby.

Bruce suspected that bitching would be Janet’s major contribution to parenthood. He could ignore a messy house and a sink full of dishes. (A sink full of dirty dishes in a house which provided breakfast for two, lunch for one, and almost no dinners, was a wonder in itself.) He didn’t feel capable of ignoring a baby with a messy diaper.

But the prospect of parenthood wasn’t totally unpleasant. He got When We Were Very Young out of the University Library and put bookmarks at the Connie poems in his volumes of Steffano. “My little Connie, bathed and bare,” Steffano had written in The Towel. Bruce could see his own Connie bringing him a towel to dry her hair.

It would be a girl; the ultrasound technicians were positive. Of course, she would be named Janet rather than Connie. Still, the second Janet in the house would need a nickname.

As Janet’s pregnancy advanced, her behavior didn’t improve as he had hoped it would. If she’d been honest and logical, he could have reasoned with her that she couldn’t receive pain that might hurt the baby. They could seek out sorts of pain that didn’t. But she wasn’t logical and was anything but honest, especially with herself. She denied wanting pain, she merely misbehaved until she received some.

Among other problems, her passion for misbehavior meant that he couldn’t afford to tell her what was important to him. Rather than hearing that as areas where she should take care, she would hear that as areas which she could use to rouse his anger.

One night, when he got home, she was still in her bathrobe. Instead of apologizing or explaining her state of undress, she greeted him with, “Why do you get this Communist shit?” She shoved the latest copy of The Nation into his hands. Now, The Nation wasn’t quite Communist in editorial stance, though it had certainly been sympathetic to the CPUSA throughout its past. Still, that question demonstrated more awareness of the print in her environment than he’d come to expect from Janet.

“I told you; I get it mostly for the crossword in the back.”

“Fine story. Dad was here when the mail came, and he blew up.” Which explained where she had got her information.

“Well, this is our house. If your dad doesn’t approve of our subscriptions or our housekeeping, tough shit!”

“That’s awful uppity of you.” He’d intended for the inclusion of housekeeping to spread the immunity over her as well. He remembered, too late, that she didn’t consider housekeeping her responsibility. He wasn’t sure that she considered anything her responsibility.

He’d been working. He wanted dinner and some peace, followed by a nice bit of lovemaking. He wasn’t going to get any of that. He would certainly get nothing resembling peace until Janet got the pain she craved. The living room was the wrong place. He grabbed The Nation and headed up the stairs. “Motherfucker,” Janet said pounding his back all the way into his office. He could probably have moved fast enough to leave her behind, but he didn’t want her trying to run upstairs in her condition. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m putting the magazine,” he said, “where it belongs. I keep the undone crosswords in a pile by date.”

“Not until you’ve apologized for embarrassing me in front of Dad.” She’d apparently been wearing the bathrobe when her father came. The mail never came earlier than 3:00 in the afternoon. But not bothering to dress all day embarrassed Janet less than having her husband subscribe to a -- however left leaning -- clearly intellectual magazine. He tossed the magazine on a fairly short stack before turning to face her.

“Why aren’t you dressed?”

“Dad brought me a big bag of Fritos,” she said. It could hardly be called an answer. “I’m not ready for dinner yet.”

“Was your mouth as dirty when you were talking to your father?”

“My mouth? You should have seen him.”

“However dirty I would have thought his mouth had I heard him, you shouldn’t talk like a stevedore. And you shouldn’t entertain in your bathrobe either. You’re supposed to dress fully before breakfast; you didn’t put on one article of clothing before lunch.” Well, he cared about these points, but not deeply. And, since she would disobey the next time she wanted punishment, he wouldn’t mention anything which would threaten the baby.

“He didn’t call before he came, and it was just Dad, anyway. What are you doing to me?”

What he was doing was pulling her over to the desk. He grabbed her left wrist and her hair to force her to bend down with her face inches from the desktop. He held her in an arm lock with his left hand while he lifted the skirt of the robe with his right. He’d wronged her. She was wearing one article of clothing, panties. He tore them down before scrabbling in a drawer for the whip he’d made from an electric cord.

Biting blows on the outside of her legs and her hips would deliver a good deal of pain to Janet without harming the baby directly. What consequences would result from her struggles and any possible convulsions of the womb resulting from the pain -- that was a different question. Bruce paused in his beating to feel her cunt. It was as wet as he’d suspected. He rubbed the cunt lips together while she wiggled. When he reached up to check the hardness of her nipples, he found a bra. She’d managed to don two articles of clothing in the last seven hours. He had some trouble unsnapping the bra while keeping her in the arm lock, but he found a hard nipple when he had done so. He gave it a pinch through the cloth of the robe.

He switched hands on her wrist to reach up under the robe. He pinched her other nipple harder. “Oww!” Janet said, “Motherfucker.” She kicked his ankle.