"You are constantly coming to my home!" he shouted. "You never think of calling first. Whatever I'm doing, suddenly you're there. And where the hell do you keep getting keys to my door?"
Alicia didn't answer. Her face, which in recent years had taken on a faint resemblance to a bulldog's, was set in infinite patience as she relaxed at the other end of the couch. She had been through this before, and she waited for Jeff to get it over with.
He saw this, and the dinner he had not quite finished settled like lead in his belly. "There's not a club I belong to that you aren't a member too. Whoever I'm with, you finagle me into introducing you. If it's a man, you try to make him, and if he isn't having any you get nasty. If it's a woman, there you are like the ghost at the feast. The discarded woman. It's a drag," he said. He wanted a more powerful word, but he couldn't think of one that wouldn't sound overdramatic, silly.
She said, "We've been divorced six years. What do you care who I sleep with?"
"I don't like looking like your pimp!"
She laughed.
The acid was rising in his throat. "Listen," he said, "why don't you give up one of the clubs? We, we belong to four. Give one up. Any of them." Give me a place of refuge, he prayed.
"They're my clubs too," she said with composure. "You change clubs."
He'd joined the Lucifer Club four years ago, for just that reason. She'd joined too. And now the words clogged in his throat, so that he gaped like a fish.
There were no words left. He hit her.
He'd never done that before. It was a full-arm swing but awkward because they were trying to face each other on the couch. She rode with the slap, then sat facing him, waiting.
It was as if he could read her mind. We've been through this before, and it never changes anything. But it's your tantrum. He remembered later that she'd said that to him once, those same words, and she'd looked just like that: patient, implacable.
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