Some Faces in the Crowd by Budd Schulberg

I want to go to the bullfights; no, he just holds up two tickets—“They soaked me two hundred pesos apiece for these but I’ve got ‘em!” And then, at the bullfights, there was always that business of the horses … Oh, she knew her Hemingway; she knew that the business of the horses is neither good nor bad, is not important, is merely a necessary, momentary unpleasantness that should not distract one from the real issue—the integrity with Which the torero is preparing his bull for death. But Brad there, laughing at the jerky movements of that skinny horse’s leg after the bull had refused to take the point of the pica for his answer, laughing and telling her to take her hands away from her face. My God, how close are sympathy and selfishness, she thought. When I cry for the horse, the innocent bystander crushed to earth, I cry for myself, trembling against the impact of the dark beast.
    Once, after a particularly cruel bullfight, she had refused to speak to him for the rest of the afternoon. And up in the hotel room before dressing for dinner, the time he always liked, she would not give herself to him—not so soon after the business of the horse.
    He had tossed his head then, with a bull’s rage and a bull’s stubbornness, and had roared out into the hall, on his way to the bar, with a familiar threat that disgusted her, that made her want to remove herself forever from the path of his charge. She had stood at the window looking down into the great avenue, her mind already hurrying ahead to her suitcase, her clothes, the note she would leave … but when he came in several hours later, listing slightly with his overload of tequila, and threw himself down on the bed and began to snore, she was still there, trapped like a bird that has come in through an opening it can no longer find.
    As she watched and listened to him sleep that other evening she had wanted to blame her failure to leave him on the rigidity of her Boston family tradition, a background that shrank from scandal and the public charge-and-countercharge that delighted tabloid readers. But she knew herself too well to accept this as any more than the hard outer shell of the frailty of flesh and spirit that would not let her act. It was almost an illness, this passivity. The symptoms went back at least twenty years, for she could still remember coming home from first grade and saying, “Mummy, the girl across the aisle from me holds my hand all the time. The whole recess she holds my hand and I don’t want her to.” “But, darling, don’t give her your hand if you don’t like to,” Mummy had said. But of course it was never as simple as that, for Martha didn’t know how to tell the girl—and so that stronger girl had gone on holding Martha’s hand throughout the rest of the term.
    It was the same with Brad. She could not get her hand away from his. “Just tell him you’ve had enough,” Martha’s one close friend would tell her. But it was always easier to put off the final break, to wait until the trip was over, to make sure she wasn’t pregnant … and sometimes when she was sure she was ready, Brad would tap some hidden spring of intuition, and, then for a while he would soften to the man she thought she had married. He would bring her the special flowers she liked and be gentle with her—the way only the very cruel know how to be gentle—and so, for a short time she would forget, wanting so much to forget. And by the time his bogus little courtship had worn thin, her determination, fragile as spun glass, would have shattered.
    If only he would perform one final act that could set her off, she thought. Yes, she was like the rusty trigger of a gun he had forgotten was loaded. It would take all his strength to bring the hammer down on the striking point. But even as she feared it, she waited for it.
    Next morning they reached the docks at eight instead of seven-thirty because Martha had taken too long in the bathroom. Brad had been