“Put like that, given her background, you paint a terrible picture, Desdemona.”
“Think of her in California! She wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t hankered for a better life, and California was the time she saw the pattern of her life unfolded beyond a shadow of a doubt. John Hall could not have appeared at a moment better suited for his purposes than sheer accident dictated — a very sad and disillusioned Millie, ripe for his attentions. Did she know the pearls were real, the rhinestones diamonds? It hardly matters. The important thing was that this personable, charming man noticed her, gave his gifts to her. Millie is terribly clever, but the biochemistry was a way to hew to Jim, a guarantee that they’d always have table and pillow talk when prosperity arrived. She had thought it would well before he earned his doctorate. In California she finally understood that it never would arrive at all.”
Carmine stopped stroking Winston’s head. “I’m getting out of my depth,” he said, brow wrinkling.
“Jim puts their money into his work,” Desdemona said, on her way to the kitchen.
Carmine tipped an outraged Winston on to the floor and followed her with a detour to the sink to wash his hands before he slid into the booth. “He can’t do that,” he said.
“Whether he can or not, he does. Jim sees some new piece of apparatus he can’t afford, and fiddles the books to buy it with his living money, or for her lab with her living money. It never occurs to Jim that in stripping both their grants bare, he denies Millie the dignity of her position.” Desdemona busied herself at the stove. “When finally they became salaried faculty here at Chubb, Millie was thirty. Now here she is, pushing thirty-three, living out on State Street. Chubb faculty living out on State Street? Come, Carmine! Everyone knows the really great universities pay in prestige, but they’re not on subsistence money. I mean, how can a man who possesses a whole floor of the Burke Biology Tower be living on a pittance? M.M. knows he’s a potential Nobel laureate, so I’d be willing to bet that Jim’s pretty well paid. Paying off student loans? They should have done that some time ago — including the sinus reconstruction money from John Hall, which I gather John never honestly expected to see paid back. No, Jim ploughs it all into his work with blind compulsion. I’d feel more sympathy towards that sort of drive were it not for the fact that Jim plunders his wife’s salary and grant money as if they were his own.” Desdemona struck her hands together. “Grr!”
“How come you see all this when no one else seems to?”
The veal was in the pan, the ziti sauce was stirred, the pasta boiling: she blinked. “I ran a very large research unit, Carmine. I know all about researchers.”
“You make me want to despise Jim Hunter, and that’s a brand new feeling.”
The salad was picked over, the jar that held Desdemona’s home-made vinaigrette shaken vigorously. “You mustn’t despise Jim, honestly. The answer doesn’t lie with him — it never did, and it never will. Millie has to put a stop to it, that simple. She just has to say, ‘No, Jim, my money is mine, my equipment is mine, and I want a comfortable life. That means you give me some of your money for a change so I can make a nest and have my babies.’ She’s never said it because she thinks he’ll leave her — what a load of old codswallop! Jim Hunter could no more leave Millie than the Moon could abandon the Earth.”
Head spinning, Carmine laid out knives, forks, the French sauce spoons Desdemona insisted upon for scooping up the last liquid on a plate. “A shiraz?” he asked.
“That nice light Chilean one.” She was getting ready to serve. “Don’t dump on Jim, he’s a special case,” she said. “As a man, he has no idea what women are, or what they need. He’s only ever known one woman — Millie. Who turned herself into a doormat for him — at fifteen! How can he possibly know that she isn’t really a doormat? She’s given him no clues.”
The bowls of ziti and sauce had appeared, the salad bowl and two empty china bowls in which to place helpings; then came the plates beautifully arranged with the saltimbocca. Carmine picked up his knife and fork. “Well, all I can say, my most glorious Desdemona, is that there’s something radically wrong with a man who doesn’t let his wife make a nest — and learn to cook like a Cordon Bleu graduate. Even that fool cat is a part of the home you’ve made for me and our sons. And don’t think I haven’t tumbled to the fact that you think it does my blood pressure good to stroke twenty-two pounds of Winston.”