The Christmas Kid

He turned on the light, and lay in the damp bed listening to the steady drumming of the rain. And then he rose, pulled on a terry-cloth robe, and went out to the guttering fire to read the letter. He held it for a brief moment, jingling coins in the pocket of the robe, then opened it with a forefinger. There was a date on the upper-right-hand corner of the page, and the letter was addressed simply: “Darling.” The word itself made Levin hurt.

He read the words:

This is no doubt too late. I’ve caused you so much pain, I suppose, that it will be a long time before you can think of me without anger. I don’t blame you. This has been a hard and difficult time. In some ways, leaving you was the hardest thing I ever had to do. The pain was not all yours.

But I think now that I’ve been a fool. I have no excuses, but I owe you, at least, an explanation. It would be nicer if I could say that there was no other man, that I’d made an abstract decision to be free, in the best feminist way. It’s true that I often felt smothered by you, oppressed by your love. If you’d love me less, I sometimes thought, maybe I could love you more. And in too many ways, I was depending upon you. You decided so many things. You controlled the money, too, which meant that in some ways you controlled me. So be it. That is the way it was.

But I didn’t leave you for those reasons. I left you for a man. And now the man is gone. I’m not sure even now how it all happened, how a woman who was happily married for almost twenty years could suddenly behave like a silly girl. But it did happen. I was swept away.

But this man turned out to be a stranger. I suppose I was more impressed by the idea of him, by what I thought he was, than with the man he actually was. I’m not the first human being who has made that mistake; I won’t be the last; but a mistake it was, and I made it.

Anyway, I am here. I want to see you. More than that, I want to go back to you. Perhaps all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can never put Humpty together again. But don’t you think it’s worth a try? You and I cannot wander the world without each other. Please call me.

She signed it with love, and Levin stared at the words for a while as if they were abstract forms — squiggles and circles and lines made by an inhabitant of some lost city. Then he put the letter back in the envelope and placed it on the couch beside him. His fingers rubbed the coins in the pocket of his robe. And then the fear rose in him again, as if some coat of armor had been abruptly removed. He saw her leaving him, again and again and again. He saw her with other men, always laughing. And then anger displaced fear; he cursed her, he snarled, he said terrible things.

The rain spattered the windows, and he peered through them into the darkness. He opened the front door and stepped outside. The rain lashed him, whining through the trees, drowning the lawn, soaking his robe. Levin shouted her name at the sky. Once. Twice. The wind and rain tore the words from him. He wrapped his arms around a maple tree, its wet bulk solid against his body. He cursed her again, his voice now a strangled sob.

And then he started to walk across open lawn, heading for the dark, drowned village. There was a telephone there, beside the bank. And he had coins in his pocket, to pay the price of love.