Dancing Aztecs by Donald E. Westlake

Finast, which was less expensive. Before that , back half an hour or so, it had been about his refusal to learn to drive a car, and just before that it had been about whose fault it was they were living in New York. They’d traveled a long corkscrew path from the beginning of the fight, back at the Open Sports Committee lunch, during the ice cream and Oscar’s speech. It was always the same; they tried to have an argument about whether or not Chuck minded Bobbi sleeping with a lot of black men, but since they couldn’t even agree on the postulates—Bobbi refusing to admit, for instance, that she had been to bed with Oscar or any of the others—they could never manage to stick to the point. The fight swelled and roiled within them, unresolved, while they futilely tried to ease the pressure by yelling about other things.
    If only they could go to California, where people didn’t congregate in such heterogeneous (not to say motley) groups. Chuck had been offered several wonderful posts in different elements of the State University dotted like Monopoly hotels through the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles, but he’d turned them all down. “I can’t drive,” he always said. “You can’t get around Los Angeles if you can’t drive.”
    â€œLearn!” she would scream. “Learn, you narrow-minded, pig-headed bastard! Learn, you nineteenth-century louse! Learn, you smug asshole!” She was pretty good when she set her mind to it.
    But it never had any effect. Chuck, getting calmer and calmer, would do his pipe number and say, “I am learning about man. I’ll leave machines to others.” Which was enough to make you gnash your teeth for a week.
    Or he would turn the whole argument back on her, with some crack about the orchestra. “Would you really be willing to give up music?” She would try to point out that she wasn’t giving up music, that even in Los Angeles there were orchestras, that all he had to do was tell her where they were moving and when and she would take care of her own career adjustments. And he would nod, nursing on his pipe, and say, “But I don’t believe you’ve given your notice to the orchestra, have you? Have you?”
    Argue with a man like that, go ahead and try.
    But she did try, she’d been trying for most of the six years they’d been married, and it was her private belief that the constant wear and tear was beginning to have an effect on her looks. She was only twenty-nine, tall and slender, with ash blonde hair and the kind of long-torsoed body that looks terrific in a bikini, but should she have those crows’-feet about her eyes? Should she have that tense set to her shoulders, should her nose be so thin?
    It was the constant battling that was getting to her, she was sure of it. Affecting her looks, even affecting her music; recently she was making the harp sound almost harsh.
    And now she was throwing things. This was new, a new development in their war, and Chuck was too stupid and too complacent even to notice. He merely ducked, as though Bobbi had been throwing things at him all along, and then he proceeded calmly to claim as his her Dancing Aztec Priest. Standing there with his pipe in his face and both hands in the pockets of his robe—he had showered earlier, in the middle of one of her fury-peaks, to display even further his indifference—he maundered on and didn’t even notice that things had changed.
    Well, Bobbi noticed. Clutching the Dancing Aztec Priest to her bosom, glaring at his calm face, hearing them both arguing now about ownership of this statue , all at once Bobbi knew she couldn’t go on with it. Like Russia and the United States, there would always be some other limited war to fight, some other Berlin Airlift or Vietnam War, some dispute about driving or statues rather than the central war that neither side would ever be quite bold enough or