A Man to Conjure With

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Peter Becker stood at the top of the steps, shuffling his bulk, aimlessly knocking snow from the sides of his shoes. His feet were already wet. It was just a matter of not tracking dirt inside — the dirt already there its own responsibility. Waiting, he waited, though as he hadn’t pressed the buzzer (his index finger had hovered over it, had toured the air around it like a wary fly), it couldn’t be said that he was waiting for anyone other than himself. Peter Becker, meet Peter Becker — impatient but in no special hurry, waiting for himself. Now that he was home, now that he had traveled three thousand miles to return to New York, now that he had located Lois’s apartment in the Village and was, his feet cold, standing at the door, he saw no point in actually ringing the bell. What was there to say? If he stood in the cold long enough — the snow beginning to fall lightly again — he’d think of something or freeze his ass off in the process. Mostly he was afraid of discovering how the past thirteen years (almost fourteen since their last meeting) had changed them both. And after all — the reason for his coming to see her — what had they changed from? He wanted to know. In the afternoon from his squalid hot box of a hotel room he had rung Lois’s number but when she answered, an unfamiliar voice, he hung up without speaking. Without the benefit of being seen, he was unable to identify himself — a greater problem for Peter than for most. He had no memory of his own face; it surprised him each time he saw his youthful reflection in the mirror goggling out at him like an eavesdropper. In the wars of his life, he had been continuously and decisively defeated, while his face, through some private truce, continued to register the pride of indifference. He would be forty in March. What a lie his life had been!

Convinced that he had forgotten his own face, Peter had the illusion nevertheless that he remembered Lois perfectly, though when he willed her into memory she always showed up a little out of focus as though the camera had been jarred at the moment of record. The past a province of nostalgia, his recollections of her improved with age. Was it merely nostalgia? He was willing to believe that despite the violent failure of their marriage, he had loved her more intensely than any of the girls and women who wandered through the maze of his life after he had lost her. Standing at the door to her apartment now, almost fifteen years after their first meeting, he could not remember why (exactly) they had broken up except that he had a knack, a positive talent, for spoiling things. He wiped his eyes. A fool, a dull and mawkish clown, he had been a weeper all his life. These days when he went to the bathroom he suffered a sense of loss. He pushed the buzzer, then recoiled as if he had detonated a bomb. Perhaps he had.

“Is one ever a hero to himself?” he was saying, but no one was listening. On the other side of the room his wife and mother-in-law were chattering busily, their heads so close together that it was hard for him to tell where one began and the other left off. He leaned back in his lumpy armchair, and content for the moment with his world, bored into contentment, he closed his eyes. Even if they didn’t talk to him — actually seemed to ignore him when they got together — he was glad to have reconciled Lois with her mother. Family was important to him. His own mother had died when he was twelve, and his father, a traveling musician, a chronic wanderer, was never around for long. In marrying Lois, a further bonus for giving up the miseries of his freedom, he had inherited intact a second-hand family — almost like new. Fine. He liked the somber diffidence of Lois’s father, a quiet and gentle alcoholic. The problem was that he found it difficult — really impossible — to bear Lois’s mother, who was always around, always whispering malice in Lois’s ear, a soured woman who advertised her discontent as if everyone else were responsible for it. (Anyway, he was getting used to her.) “Peter, how do you like it?” one of them said. “Mildred and I decided to swap heads for a week.” And when he looked up, he saw Mildred’s head on Lois’s body. He covered his eyes.

“Peter, for God’s sake …”

“What?” Startled, not yet awake, he had the curious sensation that she had seen into his dream.

“You shouldn’t sleep so much during the day.”

“Who’s sleeping?” He opened his eyes as though it were a great feat of strength, looked around sightlessly, yawned. “What time is it?” he asked, as though it mattered.

“It’s time to wake up,” she said, tickling him. “It’s okay, old Peter — my mother’s gone.”

“Where did she go?” he wondered, his eyes closing again.

“Where should she go? She went home. Peter …” She shook him. “Mildred thought you were very ill-mannered, falling asleep while she was here as your guest.”

“Guest?” His eyes sprung open, a sallow-green wall stared back at him. “Your mother’s here more than I am.” A chronic loser, he didn’t want to start a fight. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Lois was laughing. “And you were snoring, Peter. You were really noisy. It upset Mildred. No one’s allowed to snore in Mildred’s house.”

He held her damp face in his hands, in love with her, his wife of three weeks, his beauty.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said, pulling away, “or something. I can’t bear looking at this place any more.”

He agreed sullenly, feeling somehow rejected, a weight of depression on his chest.

Outside, the snow was falling lightly, the sidewalk already encrusted with the snow and sleet remnants of a week of almost unrelieved bad weather. He held her blue-mittened hand as they walked.

At the corner, as they were waiting to cross, Lois said matter-of-factly, “Why did you marry me, Peter?”

When he didn’t answer, she took her hand away, no longer his gift, and put it in her pocket. “I really want to know,” she said.

“I think the sun was in my eyes,” he said. His chest hurt.

“What does that mean?” she said.

“I was kidding,” he said.

“Everything’s a joke, isn’t it?”

Were they both out of their minds? he wondered. They walked apart, the tension of their grief separating them like a third person.

“I’m cold,” she complained, the break in the silence a gesture of truce.

“Should we go back?” He took her arm. The snow, apparently suspended in the air, phosphorescent in the early dark. Watching her — a whitened green scarf covering her black hair, grayed by the snow, her eyes mourners at some unattended funeral — he was touched with love for her, his face burning in the cold.

“Let’s go back now,” he said.

She glanced at him, smiling queerly. “I‘m just beginning to enjoy walking,” she said. “Really, I’m not cold any more, old Peter.” She pressed his hand against her side.

When they passed a grocery store, Lois stopped him. “We’re out of coffee,” she said. “Do you have any money?”

He searched his pockets as a matter of course. “I left my wallet on the dresser,” he admitted. “Why didn’t you tell me before we left the house?”

She shrugged, bemused. “Do you mind having tea with dinner?”

“I don’t care.”

“That’s too bad, because I don’t think we have any. There’s some milk in the refrigerator, but it’s about four days old.” She squeezed his arm affectionately. “Do you know, we’re two of a kind.”

“Lois,” he said, a moment’s hesitation, “why did you ask why I married you?”

She shook her head. “Because you’re a man to conjure with.”

“Is that why you married me?” he said, his voice breaking.

“I married you to get away from my mother,” she said. “Isn’t that what you think?”

They had a way of joking with each other that pained them both.

“Peter,” she said — they had turned to go back, “the truth: why did you marry me?”

As an answer, as a question in return, his feet cold (heart warm), he put his arms around her.

When he tried to kiss her, she turned her head away. “Not here,” she said, as though afraid that someone who mattered might see them. He looked around to see who his rival was. A middle-aged man passed them. “You don’t take me seriously, do you?” she said in a harsh whisper.

What could he say? They were standing in front of a two-floor orange brick house, drifts of snow like ghosts covering most of it, a leftover red-and-white plastic Santa Claus glowing in the front window, flickering. “Let’s go,” he said, jiggling his toes to restore circulation. Lois walked on ahead of him. When he wiped the snow from his face, he realized that he was crying. His shame was unbearable.

“What would you do,” Lois said as he caught up with her, “if I were unfaithful to you, Peter? Would you hate me very much?”

She knew how to get at him. Something gripped him at the back of the neck. In a rage, his tears blinding him, he took her by the shoulders and shook her until her scarf came loose. Then, embarrassed, he let her go.

She had a coughing fit, unable to catch her breath. “You bastard,” she said, her eyes dilated with fear.

Bearlike, he hovered over her, choked with the sour taste of regrets.

The next thing he knew, she was running away from him, small steps to keep from falling, almost skating on the slick snow, slipping, retaining her balance apparently as an act of will. He watched numbly — what else was there to do? — then went home to an empty apartment; Lois had not been back.

She stayed with her parents for the next three days. He called twice on the first day — his apologies written out on a 3 × 5 card so that he wouldn’t make a fool of himself (hard not to be what he already was) — but she refused to come to the phone.

He stayed home from work the next day so that in case she came for her things he would be there to talk to her, to unburden his guilt, to convince her of his remorse. It was a wasted day. Giving occasional side glances at the clock, he prowled about their basement apartment with the dull commotion of a trapped fly, picking up things that were out of place and putting them down again — God knows where — absent-mindedly. He made the bed but forgot the top sheet, lying a wad in a corner under the bed. A big man, he crowded the place with his misery, bumping his head against a low-hanging pipe, discovering the bump hours later. He swept one half of the room and left the dirt neatly piled in the other. The radio blared all day. Peter raged at the thoughtlessness of his neighbors and planned, against the scruples of a lifetime of cop hating, to call the police until he discovered that it was his own radio, which he had turned on in the morning, that was making all the noise.

In the evening he went to the grocery store — two blocks down and one over — and rushed back, leaving his purchases behind, afraid that Lois might come and go before he returned. On first sight he found his apartment more or less as he had left it, including the pile of dirt on the floor, which was beginning to erode, but it seemed to his practiced eye that the place had undergone some subtle change in his absence. Keeping his back to the door, a man of method, Peter glanced around the green-walled room, turning his head resourcefully in an attempt (had it ever been done before?) to keep the whole room under surveillance at once. It couldn’t be done. As soon as he took his eyes off them, large areas of the room managed through the desperate cunning of the in animate to get away from him. How his memory played tricks with him! There had been something on the desk, something of Lois’s, that wasn’t there now. Yet for the life of him he couldn’t recall what it was, except that he was certain (more or less) that it was a textbook for one of her courses or conceivably one of her handbags or something. Something was gone. Agonized, he forced open the top drawer of the imitation-maple dresser, breaking off one of the knobs in his haste, to see what else was missing, what else she had taken in his absence. In his grief, in his outrage at having been pillaged invisibly, he took her things from the drawer — scarfs, slips, blouses, stockings, sweaters — and flung them in a fury of energy, scattering Lois’s remains to the four walls of the room. When he ran out of things to throw, he sat down on the floor among the debris and had a heart-to-heart talk with himself. “Peter,” he said to himself, “you’re out of your mind,” which calmed him and left him exhausted. He fell asleep on the floor, tangled in her clothes, as close to her as he had ever been. He dreamed of love and awoke with a stiff neck.

In the morning, having overslept (forgetting to set the alarm), he decided to go to work anyway, even put on his only and best suit (a gray flannel he had bought at Klein’s out of season); but riding to the city on the IRT, airless and mobbed, something whistling at high pitch in the top of his head, he reneged on his decision. His eyes ached, among other things, and the prospect of a full day of proofreading economics reports was more than he could bear. He plunged through the doors at the next stop, then stood numbly on the platform, watching the train that had delivered him rush away from the station, nostalgic at its leaving without him. What could he do all day? Where could he go at eight-thirty in the morning? It struck him how regimented his life had become, how inflexible he had become. The subway soot, ancient and ineradicable, clogged his pores, infected his breathing. His head throbbed as though there were a huge crack in his forehead, getting larger by the minute.

“Buddy, watch it.” Somebody was touching his arm. “Don’t stand so close. What’s a matter — you got something against life?”

“Who me?” When he looked down he was surprised, scared to death, to find himself at the very edge of the platform. “I wasn’t looking,” he said, teetering nervously, backing up. “Sorry. Thanks.” He turned around to offer his appreciation — not many people in New York cared whether you fell onto the tracks or not — but the man who warned him had already disappeared into the crowd.

At nine o’clock Peter was sitting in the Fifth Avenue Cafeteria on Eighth Street, nursing a cup of coffee and a sweet roll — the economy of having something in your mouth to pass the time. He reveried about Lois (what else was there to think about?), blaming himself for her loss, hating her for his self-contempt. He had wanted her too much, and all his life he had never got what he really wanted, or if he did get it he didn’t keep it long. He knew he was anxious — everyone said to him, “Peter, you’re anxious”—but what could be done about it? You are what you are, he philosophized, and if you’re not, then you’re nothing. He was the exception: he was who he was, and he was nothing for all the pains of being himself. Someone sat down at his table, but in no mood to talk with a stranger, Peter kept his eyes on his coffee; tiny gems of grease floated by, winking at him.

For two days of absence without leave he would lose his job. He didn’t care, but cared that he didn’t. He was not a proofreader, not in the italics of his spirit he wasn’t, but then what was he if he wasn’t? Measured by what he had done in his lifetime — twenty-five going on forty — he just wasn’t. He was working himself into the anesthetic comfort of depression when he got the uncanny feeling that the man across the table was staring at him. Maybe not. Wiping the crumbs from his mouth, he looked up to see a familiar nose (broken and healed in two places), a nose like his own though even bigger and more assertive — his brother’s nose.

“Herbie, what the hell …?”

“I wondered when you were going to notice me. So what are you doing not working?”

Peter shrugged. “I didn’t feel like going in. I’d better call and say I’m sick, huh?” He got up; Herbie restrained him.

“Plenty of time, kid. Don’t be anxious. I haven’t seen you in weeks, not since the wedding. How’s the bride?” He had forgotten her name. Herbie, who was eight years older, had never married; he disbelieved in marriage, he insisted, though insofar as Peter could tell, spent most of his time living with one woman or another in his own uncommitted, freewheeling version of domesticity.

Peter sighed an involuntary wheeze, his spirit mourning for itself. “Okay,” he said.

“Yeah?” Herbie squinted analytically. “What’s the matter? You look bugged.”

“Nothing’s the matter.” He sighed again.

“If you say so.” Herbie went on line for some more coffee and a toasted bagel, taking Peter’s ticket instead of his own, because he had no use for money himself. When Herbie returned, Peter told him about the disrepair of his marriage. Why not? He had to tell someone and Herbie, this stranger, was his brother. At times when they were kids, Herbie had been like a second father to him — sometimes, beating him for his transgressions, like a first father.

“What do you need her for?” was Herbie’s advice.

Peter withheld a sigh. He needed her because he needed her. “I like her,” he said apologetically. “I mean, I married her.”

“So?” Herbie judged all lives by his own, which seemed to him, in the flower of its chaos, without a flaw. You either knew how to live or you didn’t. He knew; the rest — pheh! “There are more where she came from,” he said. “Take my word for it. Come on. I have just the thing for you.”

“What? I don’t want any of your girls.”

“Don’t bug me. Come on.” Herbie took a few swipes at his hair with a pocket comb, a man of habitual, unselfconscious vanity; then he grabbed Peter’s ticket from the table and was off. At the register he substituted an unused ticket and paid both bills, which totaled ten cents. In honor of his triumph, he winked at the cashier.

Peter went along under silent protest. He didn’t want to go; he went. Since it was not his decision, it had nothing to do with him, which was fine; he had enough problems of his own. And at the same time, if something good came from it — some pleasure — it was something for nothing, a bargain. A man who didn’t gamble, Peter couldn’t help but like the odds.

On the way to Herbie’s apartment (a shift in the odds), he borrowed ten dollars from Peter, to be repaid as soon as he laid his hands on a little cash. Peter consoled himself that it was only money he had given away and that brothers were flesh of the same flesh, and how could he deny his own flesh? But he worried anyway about the loss, because it was his nature to worry.

Surprise? There were two blowzy women at home in Herbie’s living room, sitting apart on the Goodwill couch as though they were strangers at a bus terminal, both puffing earnestly on cigarettes, the ashtrays running over.

“Well,” Herbie announced, “look what I found. My brother Pete. Huh?”

“lo,” the girls said in one nasal voice. They scanned him briefly, then went about their business; they were serious smokers. Peter recognized one of them, the heavier of the two, as the girl Herbie had been with at his wedding. The other, a small-town Betty Grable, was more conventionally pretty, but neither, in Peter’s opinion, was in Lois’s league.

Herbie introduced them. The one at the wedding was Gloria, the other Doreen. “They’re both modern dancers,” he said and laughed out loud at a joke no one else seemed to get. Doreen snickered as an afterthought. Gloria scowled.

Peter thought to run, but said hello. He made up his mind not to stay very long.

“Is he really your brother?” Doreen said. “You don’t look like brothers.”

Gloria sulked. “They’re brothers,” she said. “God, I’ve never been so bored in my life.”

Herbie ignored her and addressed his remarks to Doreen. “Sure,” he said, “we’re brothers just like you two are sisters.” He winked at Peter, through him, over him, at no one.

“Oh,” Doreen said, pouting, “you’re a tease. You know I’m Gloria’s cousin. I really am,” she said to Peter in case he thought she was also teasing; she was, but not about that.

“C’mon, Glory,” Herbie said, “get off your butt, honey, and make us something to drink. Hey, sit down, Pete, huh?” Herbie collapsed into an oversized red velvet armchair and closed his eyes. Relaxed, his gnarled face softened into momentary anguish as if a plaster cast had just been removed. “God,” he said, inhaling the stale room, “this is death.”

Doreen smiled brightly. If sulks could kill, Gloria would have been a mass murderer. A hostess despite her mood, she prepared and served Bloody Marys, spiked mostly with the quick-lime of her smile. “We’re out of gin,” she announced. Herbie and Doreen were dancing in a corner, his hand on her ass, to “Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night of the Week.” It was Tuesday morning, Peter kept thinking, keeping his hold on reality.

Gloria guzzled between puffs. “We don’t usually drink this early,” she said to no one in particular, “but today’s some kind of occasion. Isn’t that right?” Peter nodded. No one else answered. “Today,” she continued, glaring at the couple, dancing now to unheard music, “is the four-day anniversary of Cousin Doreen’s arrival in the city. Up Doreen! Up us all!” She finished her drink with a vengeance, then stared blearily through the mist of smoke surrounding her face like a torn veil. “You dance?” she said to Peter.

“Yeah,” Herbie said, “dance with her, Pete.”

“Thanks, but I’m not in the mood,” Gloria said.

Peter stood up, sat down.

“We need some more gin, Herbie,” Gloria said, acting the hostess again.

Herbie, holding Doreen, swaying to the music, held out Peter’s ten dollars behind his back with magnanimous contempt. “Get two quarts of Fleischmann’s,” he said. “Okay?”

Gloria wasn’t having any. She sat down, her arms crossed in front of her. “I don’t want to go alone,” she said.

“Pete will go with you. Will you go with her, Pete?”

Peter, dozing, grinned foggily. Where?

“Why don’t you go?” Gloria said. “This is your party.” Some party.

Herbie agreed that it was his party and left for the gin, taking Doreen with him.

“I don’t have to take this from him,” Gloria said as soon as they were out of earshot.

Peter nodded uneasily. Gloria scowled balefully, held him responsible in his brother’s absence. “He’ll be back,” she said doubtfully, picking up cigarette butts from the rug. “Anyhow, I’ve had it,” she said. “I mean it.”

Yawning, Peter got out of his chair, stretched, his arms almost brushing the low ceiling. It struck him — a pang of nostalgia, a betrayal of the demands of grief — that for the past hour he hadn’t been worrying about Lois. “Herbie’ll be back,” he assured her.

“Who needs him?” she said ruefully. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” replaced “Route 66” on the phonograph.

“Would you like to dance?” he asked.

Gloria half smiled, shrugged, sat down, not to be bought off by kindness.

Peter wandered the room, lost. He was reminded of the times at dance halls where girls, like Gloria, had refused his overpolite, anxious advances. Worse-looking men had less trouble. Was it the uncertainty in him, the nervous desire not to fail, that repelled them? Whatever it was, he had gotten over it, had learned through Herbie’s training to cover up his feelings, yet the recollection of his humiliation still haunted him. Thinking about it, a compromise with the past, his hands sweated.

“What a dump!” Gloria was saying. She put a stack of records on the changer. A big girl, Gloria wore her age in the generosity of her size. She had expanded begrudgingly, as a kindness to her nature. Peter could well imagine that at twenty-five she was a cold-eyed, huge-breasted beauty, admired by men on street corners, unapproachable at least to him. But at thirty, more likely thirty-five, she was blowzy; the stays of her will had split, and everything had come loose. Fading? She was all but out of the picture. Her brownish shoulder-length hair, from having been too many colors in its lifetime, had lost all sense of its own. A revision of his first opinion, Peter found himself liking her. “What do you do?” he asked.

Out of his world, Gloria was tapping her foot to the music, snapping her fingers, swaying to the singer’s love words, loved. She glanced at him shrewdly, scowled, no answer.

He tried again.

“You don’t have to talk,” she said. “Listen to the music, huh?”

He listened a moment — it was “Stardust”—then put on his coat. “Tell Herbie I had to leave,” he said.

“Herbie’s coming back,” she said as though part of the song.

“I have things to do,” he said. In his imagination, priming himself, he was talking to Lois on the phone, asking for her forgiveness; but she was adamant, unmoved by the generosity of his appeal. “I can’t trust myself to you,” she said, to which he had no answer.

“Don’t go, huh?” Gloria said, coming to life, no longer possessed by the song.

It was the nicest thing anyone had said to him in days.

“Well …” He investigated other alternatives. What other alternatives? He could think of a Forty-second Street movie, a White Rose Bar, the Automat, the park, several parks. Why not? Killing time, he remembered, was death itself.

“Come on. We’ll dance awhile if you want.” She held her arms out. He came on.

She talked about herself while they danced; Peter listened studiously, but her words — what a barrage of blanks! — kept getting in the way of her meaning. It was like True Confessions with the sex left out; she had a gift for exotic complaint.

Still, he enjoyed holding her, embarrassed at his pleasure — small pleasure! At the same time, he couldn’t help wondering what Lois was doing at the same time.

“I may have lost a lot of things,” Gloria said, “but I still have my pride.”

“You’re also a good dancer,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said. “I mean, I used to dance a little. Professionally.”

“I’m impressed. Would I have seen you anywhere?”

“I don’t know. How should I know? Come on. Are you kidding me?” She stopped dancing to look at him, a sly child’s look, her mouth like a skirt hiked up at the corner. Under her microscope, he smiled amoebically.

They continued dancing. She clutched him tighter now, as though he might be valuable. He knew better of course, but he admired her opinion of him — a generous girl. Mistreated by his brother.

“You’re a lot like Herbie,” she said, “you know?”

If he didn’t know, hadn’t known before she had pointed it out, he knew now. It hardly mattered to him that it wasn’t true.

To old favorites, songs of love lost and yearned for, paper moons, animated dolls, they danced dreamily, dream sharers, in the languid sweetness of nostalgia. When the music stopped they were still together, dreaming of loss. Nothing else to do: he kissed the down on her neck. “Damn Herbie!” she muttered. Damn Lois! he thought.

They kissed briefly; she seemed distracted, tolerant, as though he would do for the time until something better — something really valuable — came along. It was an old story with him, but what could he do? Ashamed, his balls in business for themselves, he wanted her. “The music’s stopped,” he said, still holding her.

“Don’t get all hot and bothered,” she said. “Herbie’ll be back soon.”

In a fool’s rage, Peter retreated to the iodine-colored sofa, stumbling in his haste on a bulge in the rug; he sat before he meant to.

Gloria howled. “You’re funny,” she said. He was.

Peter tried to smile, but, his feelings wounded, a victim of self-outrage, he couldn’t quite bring it off; he sulked. Gloria approached, formidable as a lion, her canny half-smile promising … what?

Herbie and Doreen burst in the door. “Back from the front — two casualties.” Ha ha! Peter grabbed his coat and left.

He called home just in case Lois had returned, letting the phone ring twenty, twenty-five times — maybe she was asleep — before he gave up. What to do at eleven o’clock in the morning? He went to a movie on Forty-second Street — The Best Years of Our Lives — and fell asleep during the coming attractions. “National Security Files presents the Shocking Truth behind Yesterday’s Headlines. Shocking Secrets Bared.” Gloria, the star of the film, was beckoning to him coyly from behind a tree. As he came closer, she seemed to move backward, away from him, still smiling, still beckoning to him. He followed her, out of breath, enchanted by his prospects. His chest sobbed with pain but he kept going, kept after her. Finally they arrived at a small enclosure, apparently cut off from the rest of the park. The grass thick and green, the weather like spring. She was swaying in place to the music — the song, “Stardust,” coming from somewhere. He came toward her, his erection like a divining rod.

“Wait,” she said. And he waited. Then in one graceful unbroken gesture she pulled her orange dress up over her head, spreading it like a blanket on the grass at her feet. He nearly cried at her nakedness; so magnificent a gift it was that he looked behind him to see if it was meant for someone else. For him. He approached cautiously, then (what the hell!) flung himself headlong at her. Smiling, she eluded his grasp. “No,” she said. “I don’t want that.”

A sigh escaped. “What’s the matter?” he cried. “I mean, you took off all your clothes. You beckoned to me, didn’t you? Don’t be mean, huh?”

“You’re not the kind of man I thought you were.”

“What do you mean?” He was sweating. “I’m only human.”

“You don’t respect me.”

“What do you mean? Sure I do.” He inched toward her, hoping to take her by surprise.

“I want to be loved,” she said softly.

“Sure. Sure.” Another step forward. “Love is something I’ve got plenty of,” he said.

“Unh unh.” She wagged her finger at him. “I know your type,” she said. “You’re only interested in your own pleasure — a quick lay, then you run home to your wife and tell her about it.”

“You got me wrong,” he said, withholding his rage. “It’s not pleasure I want but …” He grabbed her, tumbling her to the ground. A cracking sound. Her body weightless under him, he kissed her veined eyelids as fragile as petals. “You see,” he whispered, “I only wanted to give you love, honey. I’m not like my brother Herbie.”

There was no indication that she heard him. Panic broke loose in his head, sweat bursting from his eyes. Her luxuriant breasts shriveled, froze. “Love you,” he whispered, hoping to wake her. Her body freezing, adamant. He was up on his feet, suffocated, backing away. She was still there, impassive, an old woman now, the orange dress in repose at her feet. He could see now that it was another girl, not Gloria, but someone familiar, someone he knew …

You!

“Quiet!” An old crone nudged him with her umbrella.

He awoke with a cry and rushed from the theater without his coat.

When he got back to his place, he took a hot bath — the place stank enough without his smell added to it — had a double Scotch for luck, and called Lois. Her mother answered. Lois didn’t ever want to speak to him again, she said. “Fuck you,” he bellowed, smashing the phone against the wall. Afterward he had regrets.

The next day, in the evening, when it hardly mattered to him any more — who needed her? he kept telling himself — Lois came back.

Standing in the shadow of the doorway, her straight black hair hanging loose to her waist, her sallow face without makeup, she looked like a little girl, a child of twelve.

“My mother will never forgive you,” she said, grinning, her head half turned away from him. “Will you take me back?” she asked softly.

He said yes.

She approached tentatively. They embraced like strangers, the thickness of her coat between them.

“Did you miss me?” she said, surveying the room, the bed unmade, swollen by sleepless dreams. He was glad that he had at least picked her clothes up from the floor.

He nodded.

She took off her coat, pirouetted. “It’s good to be back,” she said. “My mother was really a pain in the ass, Peter, nagging at me as if I was ten years old. ‘Tell me what he did to you,’ she asked me every day, smacking her lips in anticipation. ‘Tell me, Lois, what did that brute do to you? I promise I won’t tell your father if you tell me.’ Babble, babble, babble. What a pain in the ass she is.”

Peter sat down on the bed (like a tooth with the root dead, the pain from somewhere else), numb, unloving.

She sat next to him, shy of his strangeness. “Did you really miss me?” she said.

He did. He was sorry she had returned.

She took possession of his hand, intruded her head against his arm. “I’m hungry,” she said. “Is there anything to eat?”

He couldn’t recall. He shook his head.

“Why don’t we go out to eat?” she said, coiling her arms around his neck. “As a celebration, let’s go to the Village and, like, have a drink and a good meal for a change.” She hugged him. “Would you like that?”

The room stank from the death of having been unlived in alone too long, the sallow-green walls stale with the sweat of terror. She held him, suffocated, a patient in a sickroom, deconvalescing.

“I don’t care,” he said. He removed her arms and got up.

“What’s the matter?”

“Where do you want to go?” he said, panicked. “I have no money.”

“Is that your problem?” she said playfully, taking some money from her wallet, holding it out to him. “I can let you have twenty dollars, on account of we’re married.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“I robbed a bank,” she said.

“Your father gave it to you, didn’t he?”

“What difference does it make? You never have any money, anyway … I’m sorry, Peter. I don’t want to fight with you. Let’s not fight. Okay?”

He shrugged. “How long do you plan to stay?” he said.

“Oh, Peter!” She glared at him, for a moment exasperated beyond speech, her fists clenched, her eyes clouded over, burning. “I’m sorry,” she said grudgingly — her hands raised in a gesture of frustration. “I really am. Is it so hard to forgive me?”

He wanted to forgive her — who was he not to? — but something in his chest, heavy and murderous, was unrelenting. “Do you see any point in continuing?” he asked, an old question.

“I came back, didn’t I? Do you want me to go away? I will if you want me to.”

He thought about it, unable to answer.

“All right,” she said. “You won’t see me again.” She started toward the closet for her coat, then turned back, bent as if something had broken in her, and, her dignity a matter of withholding tears, walked by him into the kitchen, closing the door between them.

“Lois,” he called. “I’m sorry.” When she didn’t answer he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, exhausted by the confusion of his feelings. He could hear her crying in the kitchen, softly, choking on her sobs. Numb, he was unmoved by her grief. Love was dead; pity was expensive; Peter was tired. He had spent most of the past two days in bed and had gotten out of the habit of being awake.

It was always a problem to comprehend after the fact how he had gotten — across what tightrope of impossibility? — from one point in his life to another. Without the prospect of a career — after six years in college he still had no clear idea of what it was he wanted to do — Peter had to be aware that marriage was an insanity for him. Yet he had married Lois in the teeth of that awareness. Frank with himself, aware of his own shortcomings (who better aware?), he had been confident at the time that Lois had no real interest in him; she was also — an insurance policy — engaged to someone else. So he pursued her without a sense of danger and paid the price for his courage: unexpected victory. About this, at least, he had no large regrets. If he thought he knew why he had married Lois — a failure of restraint, he had wanted her too much — he found it difficult to understand why she had married him. For what? Love? It was not impossible, nothing’s impossible, but he knew himself too well to believe it for more than a few minutes at a time. Security? A joke. He had nothing, would likely never have anything. Illusion? It was as good an answer as any. But what was it she had seen in him that he had not seen in himself? That was her secret, she would get over it.

| 2 |

In one of Peter Becker’s painting classes — he was taking a beginners’ and an advanced course at the same time — there was an undernourished, dark-haired girl who generally worked at the easel in front of him when he was able to arrange it that way. He thought she was beautiful, too thin perhaps, her ankles thick; yet the whole effect gripped his chest with longing. Her name was Lois Black — she followed Keith Battlecarp on the roll; Peter came last because he had registered late — and her painting had a kind of ingenuous charm, he liked to believe, which more than made up for its innocence of skill. They became friends before he had a chance to worry about it. He worried anyway.

At nineteen, Lois Black had retired from the world, but had consented to live in it as a token of her exile. She was now in her third year of college, majoring in education for her mother’s sake, drinking coffee in the cafeteria for her own when she met Peter Becker. Something about him amused her. He was in a painting class she took at night — another excuse to get out of her mother’s house — though it was in the college cafeteria that she first became aware of him. Carrying a cup of coffee, holding it out in front of her like a shield, she was looking for a place to sit when she noticed Peter, only barely familiar then, alone at a last-row table. She remembered him from her class — a big fellow who always looked as if he was angry about something. He had a good face; he almost never smiled. In a mood to talk, she sat down across from him, unnoticed, Peter musing, looking out the window. Strewn across the long orange table, the day’s debris — balls of wax paper, empty cigarette packs, coffee-sopped napkins, the twisted core of an apple — chaperoned them. Lois sipped her coffee, smiling to herself. She envied him his capacity for detachment, a necessary grace.

“Hello,” she said tentatively. No response. Two gumchewing girls at the other end of the table turned to look at her, smiled. She glowered at them for their presumption, turned away, gulped her coffee, searing the roof of her mouth. Why should he acknowledge her existence? She hardly believed in it herself.

When finally he noticed her he seemed embarrassed by her presence, as if she had caught him in a moment of terrible privacy. His dark face opened up, yielded an awkward smile which left him strangely naked. How vulnerable he was!

Now that he was facing her, grinning foolishly, she had nothing to say. She nodded, smiling. He nodded back, his smile like an ache.

“What …?” he started to say.

“How do you …?” She stopped herself. “Go ahead.”

“You …”

She waited for him to continue; he waited for her, his smile cracking under the strain.

“This is insane,” she said, hardly able to hear herself above the din. “Do you …?” She had forgotten her question.

He was his old grim self. “We’re in the same class,” he said solemnly.

“I know,” she said. “Do you think it’s a significant coincidence?”

He looked puzzled. People were getting up around them, though she hadn’t heard the bell ring. Could she have missed it? She glanced reflexively at the clock.

“You ought to use a wider range of colors,” he said irrelevantly.

“Okay,” she said, amused, annoyed. “It’s getting late,” she said, getting up.

He hesitated. “You go ahead. I don’t think I’ll go to class tonight.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I’m not making enough progress,” he said, looking down at the table as if he were angry at something.

“Maybe I don’t know anything,” she said, “but it seems to me you’re one of the best in the class. Really, I think your work’s very interesting, though I think it would improve if you used a smaller range of colors.”

He acknowledged her joke with a sad smile, then went on with his lament. “I’ve been painting for over a year,” he said, “and I should be much better by this time than I am.”

“You will be better,” she said. “You will. I have faith.”

He shook his head, but when she started to leave, he went along with her to class.

The next night she found him at the same table, a half-hour earlier, apparently waiting for her. He waved as she approached.

“Do you have another home besides the cafeteria?” she asked him. His answer was a shrug. Yet he seemed almost foolishly happy to see her, his feelings naked in his eyes; overvalued, she thought better of herself.

After a while she began to anticipate their regular meetings in the cafeteria, but guileful, withheld her joy, surprised and frightened of it. (Curiously, they almost never spoke in class.)

Questioning him, she learned that he worked during the day as a clerk in a shoe store (only for the money), and that he attended classes at night, some for credit, some not. He was twenty-five, among other things. He had been in the Army. He lived alone. An older brother was his closest relative, his mother dead, his father in the city only a few months out of the year. After three weeks she knew almost everything about him there was to know, except who he was. She made games of his questions — she had more to hide — but with all her evasions managed to tell him more about herself than she had ever given away before. They were old friends in three weeks, domesticated before they had even so much as kissed. Their bodies brushed occasionally, though it remained unacknowledged.

After class he would walk with her to the bus, waiting on the corner with her, dawdling like a lovesick schoolboy, until the bus stole her away; each parting brought an ache of loss as though she were leaving his life never to return. Once she was out of sight, he despaired of ever seeing her again. Still, their friendship did not go beyond their ostensibly casual meetings in the cafeteria. Both were afraid of disenchantment. Lois wondered why he didn’t ask her out, jealous of his time without her, though it would only have made things more difficult for her. She had a boy friend, Stanley, whom she was going to marry eventually — her concession to an otherwise anonymous future. Every Saturday night for over a year she had been seeing Stanley — it gave form to her life — her life needed form. They had an arrangement, a semblance of an engagement; she wore his pin. They were lovers. On occasion, mostly out of boredom, she accepted other dates without telling Stanley, feeling guilty afterward, then telling him. Poor Stanley, she thought; her dreams were unfaithful to him. Poor Lois! Poor Peter! She began to wonder if she hadn’t misinterpreted Peter’s interest in her.

When Peter finally asked for a date, she accepted before he could finish his invitation. “I was really afraid you would say no,” he said. She was astonished. “Why?”

He shrugged, self-deprecating. “Because I wanted it too badly.”

“Don’t give yourself away so much,” she said. He turned away in pain. God, she hated herself sometimes!

Immediately afterward, during class, she regretted her decision. Her friendship with Peter was fine the way it was. Why create new difficulties? If she could conceive of a future with him, it might be worth the risks involved (involvement a risk in itself), but otherwise she stood to lose what she had and gain nothing in its place. She needed the security of Stanley. And Peter — Peter, like a huge stuffed Teddy bear — made her happy; he was a luxury. She loved him in a way, but it was not to be confused with adult love. And clearly, Peter had no future — he was so obviously vulnerable. As soon as she decided to break the date she worried about how she would tell him, the lies of explanation like sores on her tongue.

And then, leaving the classroom with him, she lost her nerve.

“Can we go somewhere and talk?” she started clumsily — the start always the hardest.

“I have my brother’s car,” he said, in a buoyant mood. “I’ll drive you home if you like.”

“Look, Peter, about Friday night …”

“What?” His face seemed held together by paste, on the verge of splitting into a thousand fragments. “I’ll tell you later,” she said, pitying him, frightened.

“What?”

They were attracting attention. “I’ll tell you in the car,” she said softly.

They were at the top of a stairwell. He glanced at her darkly, then rushed down the steps as if he had just recalled another appointment. She had to run to catch up with him.

Seated in his car — an indefinably old gray Plymouth — she didn’t know where to begin. “I’m engaged to be married” was all she could think of to say.

Murmuring something unintelligible, he drove off.

“We can still continue being friends,” she said as he exploded through a red light. “Nothing is changed.”

Peter’s head jerked slightly, as if he were about to say something, his silence an act of will.

She hated the melodrama of his hurt, sorry she had been its agent.

He drove fiercely, cutting in and out of traffic, speeding, slamming on his brakes, starting abruptly, the car the voice of his discontent. More resigned than frightened, she put her hands over her eyes. If she was going to die in an auto crash, there was nothing to be gained by watching it happen.

When she looked up they were two blocks past her apartment building; she let him go on.

Finally he parked the car under a street lamp in front of a candy store (Sol’s Luncheonette) which was just closing for the night, Sol or one of his henchmen locking the newspaper stand in front. “Where do you live?” Peter muttered, staring ahead of him. “I think I passed it.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“I’ll turn around,” he said wearily. “You’ll have to direct me.”

She watched him (bent and exhausted, he was almost ashen in the yellow light), touched by something about him: his almost comic despair, his lostness — something. A quirk of instinct, she reached down and took his hand, and pressed it to her mouth. The lights in the candy store went out. Peter turned abruptly, surprised as though a flash bulb had gone off in his face. It was too much to bear: there were tears in his eyes. Embarrassed for him, she wished herself out of the car, their relationship over, eradicated irrevocably from the nerve ends of memory. What was he crying about? she wondered. A sympathetic bystander, the sensations of his grief pricking her throat, she could almost believe that she was crying herself.

“You’re crying,” he said, his face glistening. Who? She laughed, but it came out like a moan. Then he kissed her mouth, gently, barely touching her lips; surprised, aware of him, her bystander self looking on amused, she couldn’t stop crying. She couldn’t stop. “Who’s crying?” she said, fragments of Peter refracted through the prism of her tears, his broken face in flight like an enormous bird. She wanted him to leave her alone — the tears his fault — but when he moved away she missed him (felt it as a loss). She shivered, wiped her eyes with her scarf, remembering curiously the first time she made love with Stanley; the apartment they got to use, a terrible yellow-walled place smelling of after-shave lotion. The really bad part was that afterward, believing she ought to, she had been unable to feel remorse, unable to cry. Caught in the light of memory, she turned and was gratefully surprised that it was Peter, not Stanley, who was next to her.

The street lamp seemed to be getting brighter, an electric sun, growing, breaking through the clouds; it blinded her. Even when she closed her eyes the light intruded; it had her number. Oh, Peter. Oh, Peter, you … what? She didn’t know. What was he thinking?

“I can’t see you,” he said. “The light’s in my eyes.”

She laughed, still crying.

“It’s in my eyes too,” she said. “Why don’t you turn it off?”

“All right,” he said, climbing out of the car, walking slowly along the side of the curb. Was he out of his mind? she wondered, as if it mattered. She saw him pick something up — crumpled paper or a large stone (it was difficult to tell) and then, turning — casually, it seemed — pitch it at the lamp. A bang like the popping of a champagne cork. And suddenly it was dark, fragments of glass shining on the sidewalk. He returned to the car, a shadow. Though she couldn’t see his face, she imagined he was smiling.

“My hero,” she said with nervous irony, impressed and upset at the same time.

He didn’t say anything — his expression impossible to determine in the dark — then he put his arm around her shoulders.

“Peter, I really have to go up now,” she said. “My mother will think I’m being raped.”

“Okay,” he said glumly.

“Okay,” she mimicked.

He grabbed her, nearly lifting her out of the seat, and held her fiercely against him. Crushed, about to cry out in pain, she decided not to. There would be plenty of time for retribution. Besides, in a crazy way, she was in love with him.

| 3 |

Had he actually rung the bell? It was hard to know, hard to distinguish between what he had done and his dream of himself doing it. He was about to ring again — for the first time? — when the door opened. For a moment he didn’t recognize her, her face distorted from having lived too long outside the knowledge of his recollection.

“Yes?” she inquired. A dreamer, she guarded the half-opened entrance to the apartment, looked at him blankly, a crease in her forehead the only sign of interest.

He waited for her to discover him. Still gaunt, she seemed, if somewhat changed, to have gotten younger; her hair, un-grayed, cut short in the fashion, the blue veins in her eyelids more pronounced. A lovely woman, she looked at him without recognition, without interest.

“Lois,” he said softly, aware that in his ragged gray overcoat he must have looked like some sort of beggar.

“Uhhh!” The sound, a half-sob, escaped involuntarily and she stood stunned with disbelief — remembering — the process painful, like awakening from an anesthetic. “Peter? My God, it’s Peter. I’m going out of my mind.” She turned to look behind her and he realized that there was someone else in the apartment, another man.

“I’ll come back later,” he said.

She looked behind her again. “No, come in. Please come in.” She took his hand, led him into the apartment; spare and immaculate, it reminded him curiously, for all its dissimilarities, of her parents’ place of fifteen years ago. “It’s Peter,” she announced to the room. “I can’t get over it. Peter. It’s been how many years? Twelve. Thirteen. I haven’t seen Peter in thirteen years, Oscar. Isn’t that amazing?” She continued to hold on to his hand.

Oscar, standing, nodded, a thick-set man in his fifties with a magnificent mane of white hair, his manner cautious and professionally benevolent. Peter was introduced as a former husband, the first (of how many? he wondered); the other, a Dr. Patton, was merely a friend. They shook hands; Peter embarrassed that his nails were dirty. Lois took his coat from him, over his insistence that he wasn’t staying, and hung it in the closet. He felt exposed in his old suit; he hadn’t counted on company.

He looked around him: the furniture modern, unobtrusive — the camouflage of studied taste. Lois, in an expensive black wool dress, was smiling at him affectionately, or was it the indulgence of pity? (He wished Patton would leave.) In recollection, he had always conceived of Lois as a kind of willful bohemian, a rebel against the triviality of fashion, and he wondered if the apartment’s tasteful respectability reflected some quality in her that he had failed to comprehend. Or was it the passage of time that made the difference? The failure of memory. His own historian, he wanted to know.

“What kind of work do you do?” Patton asked — a break in the silence.

Peter shrugged. “I’m writing a book,” he said.

“That’s interesting,” Patton said. “What — ”

Lois interrupted. “What do you drink?” she asked, fluttering nervously, her hands like birds. “I’ve forgotten. I’m sorry.”

They were drinking Manhattans at a bar on Eighth Avenue when he asked her to break off with Stanley. She had cried, and had made him promise that no matter what happened between them, he would never leave her. Never. He had to swear to it several times before she would believe him. Who had made a liar out of whom?

“I’ll have whatever you’re drinking,” he said.

“As a matter of fact,” Patton said solemnly, “at the moment we weren’t drinking anything.”

Peter flushed. “Then don’t bother,” he said. “I don’t really want anything,” but Lois had already made the drink and was bringing it over.

“You don’t want me to throw it out, do you?” she said, her smile patronizing him.

He accepted the drink regretfully, in the interest of conversation; also, his toes were cold. When he had drained the glass — it was good Scotch, much better than he was used to — he felt less like an outsider and sat down, without being asked, on a chair next to the sofa. Patton, sitting stiff-backed in the center of the black sofa, seemed himself like a part of the furnishings, his white mane the final touch of grace. He couldn’t imagine the apartment without him.

Lois sat between them. “Tell me,” she said to Peter, pulling her chair nearer to his, “what have you been doing? What have you been doing all these years?”

“Not much,” he said, glancing at Patton. “Trying to keep track of things.” What else could he say? “And you?”

“I’ve been fine,” she said sadly. “I have good and bad weeks. This is a good week.”

“You look fine,” he said.

“You do too. You really do.”

Patton glanced at his watch, a gold cuff link winking its secret eye; he smiled benignly.

“Well…” Peter said.

“I’ve been painting again,” Lois said. “I’d show you something, but it’s not very good. It’s just something to do. Like, it makes me happy.”

There were lines in her face, signs of wear he hadn’t noticed before — the change in the light, his proximity exposing them. “I’d like to see your paintings,” he said.

“They’re not very good.” She was being coy. “So what have you been doing? Tell me. You’ve been very evasive.”

Clowning, he hung his head. “I’ve been bumming around mostly,” he said, as if they couldn’t tell, “still looking for something I want to do.” He laughed, though it came out like a moan.

Patton was standing. “It’s time for us to go, I’m afraid,” he said. “We have tickets for the theater,” he explained to Peter.

Lois glanced at Peter, shrugged, made a child’s sour face.

“I have to go anyway,” Peter said, getting up, his legs cramped. “I have some work to do.”

While Patton was getting the coats, Lois motioned Peter to the other side of the room. “Would you come to dinner tomorrow night?” she whispered to him. “Please. It would make me happy.”

He nodded, his voice choked.

“Sevenish,” she said.

As they filed out of the apartment, Peter glanced at Patton; their eyes brushed momentarily. In the mild gray, Peter saw something darker: reptilian wisdom flickering blandly, cold as a winter wind. Were they adversaries already? It hardly mattered.

A chilled silence hung over them as they waited in the street for an empty cab. Unwilling to separate, Peter hung on, dawdled, aware that he was an intruder. He was still there, looking on, as Patton maneuvered Lois into the back seat of a cab; he waved good-bye effusively to cover his pain, a mawkish uncle, as if anyone cared. They waved back behind their window, a blur of faces; the taxi splashed him as it bolted from the curb; when they were out of sight he walked to the subway, his feet cold. It rankled that neither had asked him if he wanted a lift.

That night in his four-dollars-a-day hotel room, lying awake, the passing cars spattering bones of light on his wall, Peter reviewed the pleasures of his life — small ghosts. A family of nomads, they had all wandered in different directions. He hadn’t seen his father in years, hardly knew where he was — somewhere in the Southwest, he thought, retired, perhaps no longer alive. Six years before, he had visited the old man, prosperous, ageless, in an air-conditioned imitationadobe ranch house in Tucson, Arizona. For the two weeks Peter stayed with him they even managed not to fight, lived together with the curious tenderness of neighbors in an old-age home. Peter thought of staying — his father asked him to (the small charity of old age), but at last he decided to move on. There was nothing for him in Tucson, an artificial Eden with orange trees growing out of the sidewalk, a hot, dry tourists’ paradise where the dying came to settle for their health. Since then there had been one post card from his father, mailed from some suburb of Los Angeles, on which the old man wrote of getting married “before he died.” A woman with three grown children, he wrote (and four or five grandchildren), who also raised cats for a living. He felt the need of a family, he said. That was two years ago.

So much depended on Lois — aside from his son she was the only one who really mattered to him — that he thought it would be best to leave without seeing her again. The problem was: Where to go? He was tired. He had been to too many places already, had used them up, had used himself up; in his time he had lived away from home (New York his home) in twenty-four states plus Canada and Mexico. After a while all places were alike. The trick was to get away from himself, an ultimate vacation, more expensive than he knew. While dragons of light clashed on his wall, he thought about it. (It was always there as something else to do, an untapped possibility, another place to visit.) In his whole life, he told himself, he had wanted not much: a family, something to do, love, accomplishment, talent, heroism; instead, at forty, he was alone with nothing. Why was that? Why? He wanted to know. A citizen, he had his rights. Dear God, what’s the matter with me? It was his only prayer.

Dozing, he saw himself falling from the window, arms outstretched like a diver, somersaulting now onto his back, floating — what peace! — landing on the sidewalk like a feather, without a scratch. It struck him suddenly — why hadn’t he seen it before? — that he was indestructible. His secret. He lifted his head from the pillow, amazed at himself. A horn honked, thunder cracked in the cave of his skull. Rain fell at the entrance; it washed his face, cooled his heat. Lying on the sidewalk, he remembered voices from the past, old faces (his mother and father, Herbie, Rachel, his son Phil), a familiar world. They hugged and kissed one another and he told them what he had discovered about himself, that he was indestructible. No one seemed surprised. Then, in a buzz of voices, in a circle of attention, his eyes closed, and he fell asleep and forgot.

At first glance the kitchen seemed to be empty, and Peter wondered if he hadn’t in a moment of madness hallucinated Lois’s return. But then he saw her, huddled on one of the gray metal kitchen chairs, her head tilted forward as if she were praying. Bent, she was staring at some glistening object in her lap, which, reflecting the overhead glare, looked as though it were on fire. The melodrama of preconception is inevitably inadequate to the facts. There was no fire. There was only, quite simply, a long stainless-steel carving knife across her lap, a red-knuckled hand clutching the handle. Absorbed in whatever it was she saw in the mirror of the blade, she gave no indication that she was even aware of his presence.

“What are you doing?” he said, hovering over her now.

A shiver went through her. There was no other answer.

“Let me have it, please,” he said, holding out his hand. “Lois.”

She crouched forward, shielding the knife with her body.

“Please give me the knife, Lois.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She shook her head.

“Then put the knife on the table.”

“No.”

To argue with her, he knew from experience, would only make her more resistant, but what could he do?

“Lois …” For no reason, out of some pang of tenderness, he bent to kiss the top of her head.

She jerked her head angrily, outraged, fending him off with her arm, the knife an extension of her hand. “Don’t!” Almost a scream.

He thought at first that she had hurt herself, a patch of blood staining his shirt. “What happened?” he asked her, (what?) and then he realized that it was him, that he was bleeding, the wound without pain, his shirt damp. Suffocating. Panicked, he held the arm up with his other hand, a sick, muttering noise in his throat. Still holding the arm, his dignity a matter of caution, he walked bravely to the bathroom, ashamed that he was leaking so much of himself.

The arm ached dully, his face a plastic white in the mirror.

Sick to his stomach, he was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, his balance shaky, waiting in a daze of shock for the blood to stop, when Lois floated in. A part of his delirium? In his sickness — his face pimpled with sweat — he had the feeling that she was smiling at his expense, though not her mouth really — the rest of her face.

“What can I do for you?” he said.

Without a word, with nurselike efficiency she took care of his arm, stopped the bleeding, washed the blood away, bandaged the wound, using a light silk scarf she often wore, to hold the dressing in place. Through all this neither of them spoke.

When she had finished, she asked him if it was too tight. He shrugged. “You’ll be okay,” she said. He planned to say something to her, but in the next moment, though he hadn’t seen her leave, she was gone.

It took him a while to find the energy of will necessary to get up, to leave. Clearly, he was tired. He was numb.

She was curled up on the bed when he came in, her back to him, maybe sleeping, though he thought not.

He lay down on his side of the bed, aware momentarily of the pulsing in his arm; then, with a sensed sigh of regret, fell asleep.

He woke up — minutes later it seemed — to Lois’s kiss. She was leaning over him.

“I like you when you sleep,” she said.

He had been having a dream in which he was dying, but now it was gone. When he closed his eyes in search of the dream, he saw Lois, her black hair down to her waist, running through a red field, disappearing into the horizon, the memory of her flight like a shadow on the landscape. He was perpetually losing her.

She was there. “I didn’t mean it, Peter,” she was saying. “I’m sorry. Believe — ” but he kissed her, not wanting to hear any more, and she kissed him back, her face wet against his.

She surmounted him, warm, demanding. Cunning. Her tears irresistible. As in a dream, his numbness unwintered. Revived, in a field of flowers, he fell in love with her — mouth, throat, nipples, breasts — but she was running away from him, slipping away into that endless red field; he held on for his life so as not to lose her, conscious at the same time of the weakness in his arm, forgetting even that at last, forgetting, losing himself, his life quickening. His life lost. Sacrificed. His eyes closed, he saw the blood pouring from his arm again. He held on for a while, though she was gone. It was over when it was.

Afterward, lying next to him, her head on his arm, she told him that the reason for her bitchiness, for the blackness of her mood, was that she was having a child which she didn’t want — the responsibility a death to their freedom — but now that it seemed they loved each other, it didn’t seem as tragic as it had before. What did he think? she asked. He didn’t mind, he said. What does that mean? she wanted to know. She waited for an answer, but he was asleep, snoring contentedly, as if it didn’t matter one way or another. And it was a matter of life and death. It was.

The next morning she was still in bed when he left for work. He thought to wake her — only the back of her head visible from beneath the covers — but decided to leave her a note instead.

He tiptoed out in the dark, the linoleum floor squeaking, his knee bumping against a chair; he felt like a thief. But what had he taken? More important: what had he left behind?

When he arrived at the Bureau of Economic Research, he found that he had not so much been fired, as he had expected, as somehow forgotten.

“What are you doing here?” the secretary at the front desk asked as he went by. She raised her penciled eyebrows.

Philip S. Cappello, his boss — a fortyish, lapsed bohemian who wrote children’s books in his private life — seemed happy to see him, though for a moment there, between the smile and the wink, he couldn’t seem to remember Peter’s name. “Well … uh … I thought you’d given us up, Pete. What have you been doing, fella?” He leaned back expansively in his elastic chair. “I envy you, getting out of this jungle, I certainly do. You getting any writing done? What can I do you for, fella?”

Apologizing, Peter explained that he had been through a domestic crisis but hoped he could keep his job, a matter of life or death. What else could he say without getting personal?

Philip nodded understandingly, his smile like an arm around the shoulder, as Peter squeezed out his explanation. “Pete, old buddy,” he said, “this is no job for a guy like you. Your future, your whole life is ahead of you. You want to write — now’s the time, old buddy. Write. I wish to Christ I had your opportunity. I envy you, Pete.” He turned to the small window behind him, looked out at the street as if there were something there he wanted to see. “The fact is,” he said, “you’d been gone so long, we advertised for someone else.” When he turned back to face Peter he looked aggrieved, almost angry.

“I’ve only missed three days,” Peter said. “Look, Phil — Mr. Cappello — I give you my word it won’t happen again. Besides, I need the job.” The more he had to give of himself to get it, humiliated at having to plead, the less he wanted the lousy job, but he hung on in deference to Cappello, who was ashamed of being a boss.

Cappello raised his hands, fending off an imaginary blow; he smiled engagingly, wanting not only to be liked but also to be pitied — his entire life an accommodation to the eases of survival. “What can I say?” he said, his eyes averted. “You always talked about … you know … quitting to devote yourself to writing — which I respect, as you know — so that I thought you had finally done what you had been threatening to do. You see? I said to myself …” Then he stopped as if something had clicked off in his head, looked at Peter, scowled. “All right. You might as well work today while you’re here. Sit down.”

Peter took his usual chair at the side of the desk. Cappello, glowering, handed him a copy of the manuscript they had been working on — “Cyclical Correspondences in German Banking 1905–1907 with Particular Reference to Munich and Hamburg.” “I’ll read first,” Cappello said, cleaning his horn-rimmed glasses, adjusting them on the swollen bridge of his nose. Then he took them off, his eyes naked, diffident.

“Peter,” he wheezed faintly. “They blame me, fella, if you’re not here to work. Everyone’s in one big helluva hurry in this place and they just as soon put my ass in a sling as anyone’s. So, old buddy”—when he struck a match to light his cigar, his hand was shaking — “if you want to take off — I know how it is — just let me know in advance so I can get someone else. Please. Fact is, the guy who was supposed to come in to take your place didn’t show up.” He laughed, a broken sound. Peter liked Cappello, who always looked as if someone close to him had just died. “If you leave me in the lurch again, I’m going to have to let you go.” He put the glasses back on, squeezed out a smile, incapable of sustaining anger. “A word to the wise. Where were we? Another thing, no gabbing this morning, I’m afraid. No coffee break. We’re going to have to go at it extra hard”—he turned in his chair, and without getting up opened the window a few inches — “we have to make up, as you know, for all the time we’ve lost.” He looked at his watch as though he had recorded the loss to the minute.

“I understand,” Peter said, studying the first sentence, yawning.

“Right,” Cappello said, rubbing his hands together, a gesture of purpose. Then he called one of the secretaries and asked if she would bring them their morning coffee in the office, as they wouldn’t have the time — overloaded with work as they were — to pick it up from the cart themselves. “To work,” he said, starting in abruptly, taking Peter by surprise.

“I’m sorry. I missed the first three words,” Peter said.

Cappello started over. They read for twenty minutes without interruption, then spent the rest of the morning gabbing, trading anecdotes. Cappello did most of the talking. It passed the time.

Cappello was reminiscing about his days at Bread Loaf — his writer days — when Herbie called. Peter was embarrassed, Cappello distraught; he stared compulsively at his watch while Peter talked, the minutes fleeing madly before his eyes, never to be recalled. The loss brought sweat to his forehead. Herbie, a big spender over the telephone, was inviting Peter to lunch to celebrate something or other — some deal he had negotiated. Peter looked at Cappello, sweated for his friend’s sweat, reluctantly accepted. Who was he to refuse a brother? What a question!

“Don’t let it run on too long,” Cappello advised him, releasing Peter for lunch a few minutes early — at five to twelve. “We have a lot to do this afternoon, old buddy.”

“I’ll be back in an hour,” Peter promised, shaking Cappello’s hand before he left, sorry that they wasted so much time between them.

After the fanfare of his invitation, Herbie was uncommunicative during lunch; he chawed his steak, sipped his beer, basked (a vacationist) in the sun of some secret knowledge, his gnarled eagle face made stolid by the burdens of wisdom.

Confronted by his brother’s silence, Peter felt constrained to talk between bites of hamburger, above the noise of other conversations. “Lois and I are together again,” he said.

Herbie just grunted. “Why’d you run off like that the other day?” he said, shaking his head ruefully. “Huh? What’s the matter with you?”

Peter loaded his mouth with French fries. “I didn’t run off,” he muttered. “I just saw no point in staying.”

“Come on. You ran off like a nervous turtle with a rocket up his ass. What were you afraid of, for God’s sake? What?”

Peter choked on his food, trying to get out an answer. Herbie had no right to lecture him as though he were still a kid. He coughed until flames came to his eyes. “Look …” he said finally.

“Ah, forget it,” Herbie said, waving his fork magnanimously. “I don’t care, but I feel responsible for you. Kid, I’d like to know — what’s your opinion of Gloria?”

“She’s okay,” he said, slugging down his lukewarm coffee, but when he thought about it, the question struck a nerve, pained him unexpectedly; he remembered the look on her face as she came toward him, that dour smile of promise. “She’s okay,” he said again, meaning it hopefully.

“Okay? She’s a great girl,” Herbie said, his mind on something else. “Yeah. And she likes you.” Herbie nervously turned in his chair, looking for something, squirming, counting the house — a man with a near-sighted eye out, a prospective investor in all concerns. “I have a kind of proposition for you,” Herbie said, craning his neck to see what might be seen. “An exchange of favors.”

Peter finished his coffee, was ready to leave. Curious — his brother’s guest — he followed Herbie’s glance on a tour of the restaurant, table-hopping: nothing to see, not many attractive women, anyway; a few — a nice solid old girl of about forty sitting by herself — nice. She returned his stare, smirked; he retreated. What was it all about?

“Peter, listen hard,” Herbie said, half rising, “any time you need something — money, advice — you can come to me. You know that. When I’m in on a good thing, a deal, you can count on a piece of it for yourself — it goes without saying. This time I need a favor, nothing I wouldn’t do for you if our positions were reversed.” In one motion, he turned to look at the door and bolted from his chair. “There she is. Take care of her for me, huh? I got to run, Pete, before she sees me. Be a good guy”—slipping a bill under Peter’s plate, a ten — “I’ll call …” In the middle of a word he was off, twisting through the crowd toward the back of the restaurant.

“Herbie …” Peter leaped up to follow, hesitated, picked up the ten and turned, which proved to be a mistake; Gloria was bearing down on him. Run, he told himself, run for your life, his spirit following Herbie out the back door, the rest of him standing still. The wall clock showed five to one. Even if he left immediately, and ran the whole distance back, he would be a few minutes late. Run. He turned to look again, the vanity of knowing. Smiling grimly, she waved; trapped, he waited. Why not? Though anxious to get back to work for Cappello’s sake (for his job’s sake), he was glad to see Gloria again — a twinge of lust under the collar.

The eloquence of her discontent! Dressed to kill, her breasts prodding her tight orange coat like concealed weapons, she moved irresistibly in a straight line, waiters bending out of her way like trampled flowers. Peter waited as though in front of a tank, resolute, fascinated, scared to death. And Cappello was waiting for him, his face on the wall the face of a clock.

“So he’s left you to pay the check,” she said, looking through him.

He shrugged. “I’d like to talk to you, Gloria, but I have to get back to work.”

“Good-bye,” she barked, turning her back, her hair — surprise — a new season. Winter-black. He liked it better before: mouse-brown, but her own.

Outside the restaurant, lingering, he wondered out loud — an afterthought — if Gloria had had lunch.

Lunch? She had only contempt for lunch. Outraged, she told him about Herbie and Doreen sneaking out of the apartment behind her back, taking all their stuff, leaving her there alone with the Goodwill furniture, for the crows.

Peter listened, nodded, unable to care. In a hurry to get away, he babbled his concern, ashamed of not caring.

She walked along with him, spilling out her grievances, puffing fiercely on a cigarette, a sullen witch.

They passed Cardinal Ties, his reflection on sale, Gloria among the dust of last year’s faded styles.

“This is it,” he said. “I’d better go up before they fire me. See ya.” He waved good-bye.

She buzzed on, oblivious. He stayed, not listening; as she raged, grievance begetting grievance, her voice got louder. “It’ll be all right,” he consoled her. She kept on. He suffered the notice — the superior smiles — of passers-by, his face protesting his innocence as if anyone cared. When he looked at his watch, usually five minutes slow, he saw that he was a half-hour late.

“I really hate to be such a bother,” she was saying, tapping her foot, “but you’re his brother, you know what he’s like. All I want is what’s coming to me, which is to be treated like a person, a human being.”

Peter glanced at his watch again, trying to hold time back with his will, the minutes spilling away as she talked. She was holding his arm, the raven hair a wig of grief.

It was too late to go to work: they went to Herbie’s (now Gloria’s) place to have a drink, to continue their talk without the pressure of interruption.

Uninterrupted — “September Song” on the phonograph, a few beers under the belt — there was nothing to talk about; they spent the afternoon in consultation on a lopsided, broken-springed double bed, a dying moth their audience. Her love a kind of vengeance, his a matter of course. Small pleasure, small regret! What had he expected? He remembered nostalgically the vague half-smile of his dream, but even though he searched, he didn’t see it again. It was a loss, that dour smile — that cracked, open bud. If he missed anything — and how could he know at the time? — he missed that.

When he thought it time to go, he climbed off the bed to find his pants. Gloria asleep.

“You can stay awhile,” she crooned from a corner of the bed, her eyes still closed, her tangled raven hair glistening dully like fresh paint.

“I have to go,” Peter said, having trouble finding the leg holes in his pants. The small squarish room, quaint with flowered wallpaper and peeling basket chairs, had the sweet, rubbery smell of rotting fruit.

“You don’t have to go,” she said in her movie-siren voice, “if you don’t want to go.” She sprawled across the bed, lazy and heavy — a big cat playing possum in the sun, the inner nerves tense, ready for the kill.

Pants and shirt on, he searched under the bed for his socks and shoes among worms of dust, entrails of old magazines. “I really have to get home,” he said, recalling Lois in a shock of guilt. “My wife will — ”

“What wife? You told me … What do you mean? … You said you were split up.” She sat up, sullen, a benighted raven, deceived again.

“She came home yesterday,” he said apologetically.

“Good for her. Let me be the first to tell you: you’re no great catch, lover.”

“I guess not.”

She glared balefully, a sphinx of accusation; he hesitated, straightened his tie, impaled by the wrath of her grief.

“Well,” he said, his hand on the doorknob. “See ya.”

“If you’re going,” she said, looking at her fingernails, “go. Buzz off.”

He moved a few inches. “I’m sorry,” he said stupidly. “If you need any money …”

“Get lost, will you?” She turned her head fiercely, shaking her inky hair — a contemptuous porcupine, full of injured dignity.

“If you want to know something, lover,” she whispered as though they were love words, “you’re no match for your big brother.” She forced a laugh. “Do you know what you are?”

Though it was a question that interested him, he decided not to wait to find out. Dragging his raincoat, he rushed out the door and down the four flights of stairs like a man in need of air, into the dusk-glowing rush-hour streets. As he fled, he thought he heard her saying, Stay, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean what I said, stay, but he couldn’t be sure; there were echoes in the hall, other voices.

He rode home on the subway, cramped against the door, sweating his guilt, his face in the window’s mirror smeared with regret. Why had he done it? For Herbie, he answered himself. How could he deny his own flesh?

| 4 |

Peter never went back to the Bureau of Economic Research. What for? He wrote a letter explaining his absence, tore it up, wrote another, sent nothing. Ashamed, guilty at his pleasure in not working, he left the house every morning in suit and tie (his uniform of responsibility) as though he had a job — which was almost the truth, a temporary lie. Provided for, or so she thought, Lois went to school while Peter earned their living, or so he pretended. He meant to tell her — a lie was more pain than he could bear — planned the telling of it so often that he thought he had. It was his own joke; he hadn’t, couldn’t — having kept it from her — until he found a job to replace the one he didn’t have. Only a matter of time. Lois found out without being told; in its dull way one of the worst shocks of her life. If she couldn’t trust Peter, who had no guile, who in the world could she trust? It was then that she decided not to have the child. She kept her decision, her knowledge, secret from Peter, who had forfeited his right to her confidence. In justice to herself — a sense of balance her life’s work — she would pay him back for his deceit. A housewife and a student, she kept accounts.

Looking for a job is part-time work, more or less, though depleting in other ways, tiring in all ways. Peter bought the Times each morning, circled the half-dozen or so want ads that seemed possible for him — disheartening possibilities — then tracked them down, a man of prospects. At about eleven he was through, unhired, a free man, the day ahead of him. His routine was to read the paper in the park for a start, writing notes to himself in the margins, until he got too cold and had to walk around to warm himself. So he walked around, a daydreamer, the past and future of the world like the ends of an unbuilt bridge in his dreams. The February wind, nervous and obscene, heckled him, clawed at his genitals. Unable, unwilling to afford lunch, he had coffee with lots of cream and sugar to keep the machinery going. Also, an occasional doughnut. Nature was provident: in his wanderings he found an Automat in which one of the apple-pie windows didn’t lock, but refilled itself in good faith automatically (the magic of automation: the broken fingers are out of view). Five pies were all he could take in one sitting; he came back later in the afternoon for a snack. “I’ve had my eye on you,” a flower-hatted old lady said, standing over him as he forced down the pie. “You’re not honest.” She pointed her umbrella at him to let him know that she was armed, and sat down at a neighboring table, keeping him under surveillance. He pretended to ignore her, then fled, reminded as he ran of his days of running from the police as a kid. He thought he heard her yell something after him — thief, you — but he didn’t look back.

The next day he phoned Gloria to get Herbie’s new address, hoping, nervous about calling, that she was no longer angry at him. Herbie answered. He was home alone, he said, Gloria out working for a change, no mention of Doreen at all, no mention of Peter’s favor to him. Some favor!

“Why don’t you come over?” Herbie said. “I’m not doing anything this morning; it‘ll be a chance for us to have a talk. Huh?”

“I have to look for a job,” Peter told him — an alibi of conscience.

“Who’re you kidding?” he said. “You want a job? I’ll get you a job. Come on over. We’ll talk about it.”

“All right,” Peter said, easier to go than to argue, “but I can’t stay long. For other reasons, it’s important …”

“Hey, how’s your wife? She treating you okay? You know what the trouble is — it’s the reason you’ve always screwed up — you’re afraid to lose her and you let her know it, so she takes advantage. If you want my advice …”

“I’ll be right over,” he said.

Herbie was the same: he dispensed wisdom, a five-dollar loan, and promised Peter that in a couple of days he would have a job for him. “Have I ever lied to you, kid?” he said.

“Once or twice,” Peter admitted.

“Never,” Herbie insisted, his honor at stake. “When?”

Peter was sorry he had mentioned it.

“You can’t think of a time, can you?” Herbie said. “Can you?”

Peter shrugged.

“Don’t make accusations you can’t back up,” he grumbled.

“I’m sorry,” Peter said, amused.

“One of these days,” Herbie said, stretched out on the Goodwill couch, his clasped hands a pillow for his head, “I’m going to make it. I’m really going to make it.”

“How are you going to do that?” Peter wanted to know. Herbie’s dealings, though apparently illegal (maybe not), seemed to pay less for greater expenditure of hope and energy than most “honest” work.

“When it happens, you’ll find out,” was Herbie’s answer, his huge stocking feet hanging over the arm of the sofa, a cavernous rip at the summit of the big toe. When the doorbell rang, Herbie, who had seemed incapable of motion, leaped to his feet, Peter following his example. “Don’t be so jumpy,” he said to Peter, putting on his shoes, tearing one of the laces. “That’s your problem — you’re jumpy.”

Peter put on his coat, ready to leave, ready to confront Gloria. Herbie admitted a small, nattily dressed man with a large ratlike head. “Come on in, Ira,” he said warmly. “Make yourself at home. My brother’s just leaving.”

“Your brother?” Ira looked him over, nodded, sniffed the air distastefully, his eyes impartial assassins. “He’s got an honest face,” he said softly, his mouth opening only slightly at the corner. “Herbie, never trust a man with an honest face.”

Herbie laughed enthusiastically, his eyes unamused. Peter left. It struck him as he walked across town, traveled west from the Lower East Side to the Fifth Avenue Cafeteria for a real lunch for a change — a knockwurst sandwich and a beer, coffee and cheese cake — that he hadn’t told Herbie about the business with Gloria, which was probably just as well, though as a matter of course it ruined his appetite.

Lois had just finished washing her hair, and was about to start in on her homework when Herbie called.

“Let me speak to your husband,” he said in his usual peremptory manner, not bothering to identify himself. She knew who it was.

“Peter’s not in,” she said.

“Where is he?”

“He’s at work. Where do you think he is?”

“How should I know? Look, Laura — this is Herbie, Peter’s brother. Will you tell him when he gets in that I’ve got a job for him, and if he wants it, to call me back. Even if he doesn’t want it. Okay?”

“Peter’s got a job,” she said, irritated at Herbie’s officiousness.

“Is that right? That’s not what he tells me. Okay. Just give him my message, please, will you? How are you, Lila? What’s new? We’ll have to get together one of these days and have a brother-to-sister talk. What do you say?” She had the odd feeling that Herbie was winking at her on the other end. The hell with him, she thought afterward, looking at herself in the mirror, combing her hair; her face was breaking out — the damn pregnancy! — she was getting uglier by the minute. She combed her hair, the act a comfort in itself, washed her face with soap, then studied herself in the mirror again. Her skin seemed to be turning yellow. How any man could bear to look at her — her face, once beautiful, a ruin of itself — was more than she could comprehend. (Her breasts were beginning to swell; that, at least, was an improvement.)

Unable to do anything else, made lonely by betrayal, she called home.

“Mildred,” she said, when her mother answered, “I just discovered that Peter’s been lying to me.” She picked at a stain on her brown skirt.

A sigh on the other end. “I don’t want you to say I didn’t warn you.”

“Let’s not go into that again.”

“You know any time you feel you’ve had enough, your father will come right over there and bring you home. I don’t want to interfere, Lois, but any man who would say what he said to your mother …”

“Please!”

“All right. Not another word about it, though I think you’re crazy for putting up with him. Lois, what kind of lies has he been telling you? Tell me the truth. Is he in trouble with the police?”

Her mother was too much. Lois smiled, the image of her amusement in the mirror of her mind, made a comic face for Peter’s sake as though he were there in the kitchen to appreciate the joke. “He pretends to go to work every morning,” she said, glad of someone to complain to, “but according to his brother he doesn’t have a job. Where can he possibly go?”

“Is that all? I expected something worse.” Her mother sounded disappointed. “You know if you need any money, Lois, Dad and I will give it to you. We won’t let you starve.”

It was beginning to rain, the odor of damp wool permeating the kitchen. “It’s not only that,” Lois said, called on to justify her grief. “There are other complications.”

“Like what? Tell me.”

I’m having a baby that will kill me, that is eating up my insides. For a moment she was going to tell her mother, in need of sympathy, but then — a complicated decision — she decided not to. “Like I still think I’m in love with Stanley,” she said.

“Oh!”

“Mildred, Peter will be home soon. I’d better get some dinner on the stove. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Stanley was over yesterday to get some things he left over here.” Mildred lowered her voice as though it were a secret. “He’d take you back in a minute, Lois. I know what I’m saying.”

“Okay. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. So long, Mildred.”

“Good-bye. And another thing, don’t go out if you still have a cold. Your voice is very hoarse. And don’t tell me that it isn’t, because I can hear that it is. Remember to call.” Lois hung up.

When Peter came home Lois embraced him, behaved as if nothing was wrong. It made him suspicious, though he pretended to be pleased — a nervous pleasure in willful pretense. Sensitive to the tremors of distrust, neither said much during dinner, chary of what was unsaid.

“Is the meat loaf too rare for you?” Lois asked, reverent of the silence, watchful.

“Good,” Peter mumbled, his mouth full.

“Your brother called,” she said casually, as if it was the next thing to come to mind, watching him like a spy. Peter flinched but didn’t know it, went on eating.

“What did he want?” He took a drink of water, coughed, another drink, choking.

Lois turned her head, a pang of satisfaction, a bitter victory.

“He didn’t tell me. He wants you to call him back.”

“You don’t have any idea why he called?”

Her chin poised on her palm, she played at being thoughtful, thought of other things. “No idea,” she said.

He went on eating. “I like your hair that way,” he said, enjoying his meal again.

She had a moment of hating him. “It’s not any way,” she said, withholding her irritation. “I just washed it, it’s just hanging straight.”

“I like it that way,” he said.

She smiled wanly. He reached across the table for her hand; it wasn’t there.

After dinner: Peter was reading a book, was trying to read, while Lois knocked about in the kitchen, clearing up, dropping an occasional dish — the disconcerting music of her mood.

He was out of touch. The tension buzzing at the back of his ears his only sense of things, his knowledge of the world. He wondered, worried — looking for explanations — if Lois had found out about Gloria. Whether she knew or not, he regretted it, that long day in bed, wished it undone; yet thinking about it, succeeded in recalling only the profits of pleasure, the languor, the act of love. He got up, paced the room, tweaked by shame and desire, the ghosts of unrest.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said as she came into the room.

“Why don’t you?” she said softly, without bitterness, a martyr’s frail irony. “I think that’s a good idea.”

“I’ll be right back,” he said, not moving.

“Good-bye.”

He took a cautious step.

“See you,” she said, her hand at her throat, a curious gesture of despair. “If you leave now, I won’t be here when you get back.” She went by him into the bathroom at the other end of the long room, locked the door.

He grabbed his lumber jacket, rushed to the door, stopped, turned back, a shriek inside him unspoken. He didn’t want to go. He had to. He plunged out, slamming the door — always problems — walked quickly around the block and came back.

She was still in the bathroom. “Lois,” he called, thinking she was gone.

“What do you want?” She stuck her head, turbanned in a violet bath towel, through the opening in the door. “I’ve been washing my hair.” A tender smile for him, faintly pitying.

Were they both mad? “I’ve come back,” he said foolishly. And added, “It’s pretty raw out,” as though it explained something.

Later she was sitting on the bed in her slip, a weed of a girl, her chest undernourished — a wistful, hard-nosed little girl. She puffed on her cigarette with secret pleasure, as though it were against the law. He was back at his book again, his spirit restive, wandering.

“I don’t want to have a child,” she said.

That again. It was their most abundant, most fruitless topic of conversation. He closed the book, impatient with his life, losing his place mark, his place. “I‘m sorry,” he said. “You know that I’m sorry to death that you don’t want it, but it’s done. It can’t be undone.”

“You know it can.”

He stood up abruptly, a reflex gesture of protest.

“Peter, the truth: apart from the fact it’s a fait accompli, you don’t really want the kid, do you? Do you? If it were wholly a matter of choice, would you want a kid now?”

“Why not?” He was sitting again, the bile-green-walled squalor of their basement apartment moving in and around him — no life for a kid. For whom then? For no one. “It’s not such a tragedy,” he said. “We’re married.”

That gave her a laugh. “What happens if we split up? What happens to the kid then? Oh shit, I’m out of cigarettes. Do you have any?” She knew he didn’t.

He shook his head, standing again, though he hardly remembered getting up. “It’s unreasonable to predicate everything on the worst happening. Why should we split up?”

She shrugged, blew the hair out of her eyes. “You know.”

He did and he didn’t.

“Lois …”

“I’ve made up my mind. I’m not going to have it.” She was up and past him. “I’m going out for cigarettes because I can’t depend on you to …”

He grabbed her arm as she went by. “You know I love you,” he said.

A faint smile, sad-eyed. “It doesn’t make any difference, Peter. We don’t have any money — not enough — and we can’t take any more from my parents, not after what you said to my mother. You could at least have apologized, but you wouldn’t, would you?” She glared at him, goading her irritation into anger: ‘For God’s sake,” she said, “don’t make me say everything.”

What could he say without making things worse; he had a knack for stepping over the weeds and trampling the roses. “I’ll call your mother and apologize.” It hurt him to say it. He added for his self-respect, “but she won’t accept an apology from me. Do you think she will? Do you want me to call? I’ll call if you want me to.”

“That’s not the only thing, Peter-rat. There are other reasons.” In a great hurry, she got her coat from the closet.

He only watched. “What other reasons?” he said.

“Oh …” She threw her arms up in a gesture of helplessness, her glance coy, knowing. “I’ll tell you when I get back. Don’t crowd me, Peter. Please!” Her hand on the door.

He turned away, turned back. The door was swinging shut. “Fuck you,” he muttered to himself. He didn’t care if she had heard, though a few minutes later, when she still hadn’t returned, he began to worry about her absence, blaming his rage, regretting it. He stewed and worried, wandering the room, cursing himself, calling Herbie, who said, What do you need her for? He could depend on Herbie for the right question. Just when he had given her up, she came back. It was always like that.

Peter started work the next day, through Herbie’s influence, at the Sun-Spot cab company. His photograph (his mug shot) managed to look like all the photos he had ever seen from the back seats of other cabs, which permitted him, in a limited way, a sense of belonging. While he was trying on his chauffeur’s cap, a wizened, white-haired little man who resembled his paternal grandfather gave him some friendly advice. “Kiddo,” he introduced himself, “you want some friendly advice? Listen to old Barker.” He cocked his head as he talked. “I’ll tell you something. These other drivers”—he made a deprecating face, an all-inclusive gesture — “if you was a blind man, they wouldn’t give you honest change. They’d steal from you on your deathbed. That’s the honest-to-God truth. If you want to get along, boychick — listen to me — you gotta screw ‘em first.” He made the appropriate gesture with his finger. “You got to stick it to ‘em before they stick it to you.” He glanced around the locker room to see if anyone was listening; when he turned back he winked. “Trust nothing and no one,” he said.

“Don’t believe a word Barker says,” a voice warned from the other side of the lockers. “He’s a dirty old man who plays with his clutch.”

“What’s a matter, Sclaratti,” the old man shrilled, nudging Peter with his elbow, “pee your pants again, boychick?” To Peter: “When he gets excited Sclaratti pees his pants. Dope!”

A grunt from the other side. “Keep it up, Barker, and I’ll call the zoo and have them take you away.” He snorted and stuck his head out — bald, squat, fiftyish, his face pocked, gentle under the scars, a man who would kill you only if it was absolutely necessary. He shook hands with Peter. “Watch out for Barker, he’ll steal your hub caps if you let him.”

Barker turned his head, nodding ironically, contemptuous of slander. “I’m a crook, huh? Sure. What then? And you’re a member of the Mafia. Yah! If I was one-third the thief you are, I’d turn myself in for the reward.”

Sclaratti snorted, poked Peter. “Do you hear that? In the old country, a man talked to you like that was as good as dead. It’s a lucky thing for Barker I’m civilized. Hey, Barker, drop dead.” He laughed. “Look at him. You ever see anyone uglier in your life?”

They were still at it when Peter left. Depressed, nostalgic, he remembered, as a kid, listening to arguments just like this one — the love and hate almost indistinguishable — where Herbie and his father raged at each other, at the world in general, a running battle for weeks on end. Just like home. Who needed it? He was continually being brought back to things he wanted to forget, which was a dirty trick, but whom could he complain of and whom to?

He cruised around the city for a while, getting the feel of the cab, reticent about picking up someone he’d never met before, a total stranger. What would they talk about?

Finally, tired of fleeing from passengers, he stopped for a middle-aged, tweedy woman on Broadway and Ninety-seventh Street, a woman with a sympathetic face, who looked to be in a hurry to get somewhere.

“Twenty-six Sutton Place,” she said in an imperious whisper, “and take the shortest route. I was supposed to be home ten minutes ago. You people are never around when you’re needed.”

Unsure of the address, he asked her to repeat it, embarrassed at having let it slide out of memory. She whispered it again, slowly this time, with the martyred patience of a woman who was used to talking to imbeciles. “And hurry, please.”

He got caught by the first light, and could hear his passenger muttering to herself — he knew the feeling — but after that he made pretty good time, made only one wrong turn. Trying to cut his way diagonally through Central Park, watching the scenery (a lovely day), he got lost and came out again on the West Side. Abashed, he glanced in the rear-view mirror, awaiting reproof, but the lady didn’t seem to have noticed. Her eyes closed, her face whitish, she looked to be dozing. Or was she sick? Whatever it was, he worried; she was his passenger, his first, a personal responsibility. To make up for getting lost, he gunned the cab across the park at Seventy-second Street, passing a Cadillac on the way — a score for his side. At the next light he glanced in the mirror again.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded impatiently, her eyes opening, closing, a crease of pain across her forehead.

“Are you sure?” Another taxi cut in front of him and he was forced to slam on the brakes. She fell forward, nearly off the seat. “If you feel sick,” he said, “I can stop at a drug store. Do you want me to stop?”

“No, no, go on, please. Please. And look where you’re going.”

He hurried, the lights against him, glancing nervously at his passenger in the rear-view mirror, her mouth trembling, fretful — his responsibility. Waiting impatiently for a light to change, he saw the lady, as in a movie he had once seen, turn old before his eyes, wither in a flash of time into dust. It was just his luck. What could he do with the remains, heaped like ashes in the back seat of his cab? Though he knew he was hallucinating, he turned around to get a look at his passenger without the intercession of reflection. She seemed all right, her eyes meeting his, staring as if she knew him, as if she expected something from him. A horn honked. He drove off in a rush.

“This is it,” he said, finding a place next to the curb in front of her house. He got out, not sure whether he should or not, and opened the door for her — a personal service for first customers only. “Are you all right?” he asked when she made no move to get out. She looked up, smiled, looked at her watch. “So we are,” she said. “That was fast.”

Fussing with her hair, she slowly, tremulously, made her way out of the cab.

“That will be one eighty-five,” he said, trying to strike the right professional tone, holding the door, embarrassed.

She fiddled with the clasp on her purse, stumbled, clutched his arm. “A little faint,” she said. “The fumes.”

“Do you want me to help you to the door?”

“No. Thank you. I’m all right.” She took a step, turned, and in a convulsion fell back against him, muttering, the words unintelligible.

“Don’t worry,” he said, worried. His arm around her shoulders, he clumsily led her to the house, a modernized brownstone, the door black, a brass knocker set on its chest like a jewel.

“Let me go, please,” she said, struggling as if he were holding her against her will. When he took his arm away he was afraid she would fall down, the full weight of her body balanced against his chest. She remained in precarious suspension against him for minutes, then without a word rushed into the house. Peter stood outside awhile, a well-wisher, hovering about awaiting reports, appreciation, the small change of acknowledgment. After five minutes of lonely vigil he climbed back into his cab, curiously dissatisfied, and drove away. It struck him, as he was approaching the park, that he had not collected his fare.

Reluctantly, he went back. All he wanted, he told himself, was what was due him, which had nothing to do with the woman being sick, which wasn’t his fault anyway, and besides, he had a wife and unborn child to think of — also to feed.

Knocking with his fist on the door, unable to find the bell, Peter waited, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, strangely uneasy, as if he were doing something indefinably criminal. When no one answered he knocked again, using the ornamental brass handle, which made a delicate, hollow clack like the clearing of a throat.

“Yes?” A slight, delicately pretty girl, a child of a girl, her blond hair in a plaited rope down her back, peered whimsically at him from the doorway. “Are you looking for someone?” He was. “I’m a cab driver,” he said — a matter of introduction.

“I guessed that you were,” she said, keeping a straight face, amused. “Do you want to come in? We’re having a party.”

“Thank you,” he said, “but as you can see I’m on duty.” He turned to look at the cab, to see that it was still there; it was, two little boys sitting on the bumper to keep it from floating away. “I delivered a lady here about fifteen minutes ago,” he explained. “She wasn’t feeling well and forgot to pay her fare.”

“Now, who could that be?” the girl said, balancing her chin on the forefinger of her right hand.

‘Well, she was wearing a kind of brown …”

“Delilah,” a voice trilled from inside, “who are you talking to out there?” The woman appeared, looking much better, imperious as ever, the death of a smile on her face.

“Hello,” Peter started to say, relieved that she was no longer sick. “You forgot …”

When she saw him the woman blanched, fiercely pulled the girl behind her and with a look of unmistakable contempt slammed the door in the face of his explanation.

Defeated, numb with the invisible possibilities of guilt, he retreated to his cab, chased the kids off his bumper and then, feeling the injustice of his position, went back to the house, fired with rage. Kid hater, they called after him. Mean man.

A man answered the door. “What do you want?” he asked, belligerent, nervous. “Are you looking for some kind of trouble?”

Fighting with customers discouraged by the company, Peter presented his case, his sense of injustice making him incoherent.

“Why don’t you just go away,” the man said, his well-fed face animated by nervous indifference. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but you’re not getting any more money. Now go away.”

“I want my fare,” Peter said. “I’m not going until I get a dollar eighty-five, which is what the lady owes me.”

“The lady doesn’t owe you a thing, buddy. Mrs. Townley paid you for the taxi; she told me so herself.”

“She may think she did, but she didn’t.” He explained again that the lady had fainted and had to be helped to the door.

“That’s not the story I heard,” the man said, looking behind him for support. “Wait here. I’ll find out if you’re lying or not. Everyone thinks I’m made of money,” he muttered as he disappeared inside.

Peter hung on, resurrecting his dignity, thinking of the things he should have said, like “who’s a liar, you sunnava-bitch.” “A buck eighty-five is not going to break you, you bastard.” It was just as well he hadn’t said anything.

“Hello, cab driver.” The girl, looking older, looking like Alice in Wonderland, had reappeared in the doorway. “I’m sorry that you’re having so much trouble,” she said. “Really.”

Peter grunted, in no mood to be charmed, charmed in spite of himself. “All I want is my fare,” he said. “What’s the matter with everyone here?”

“Everyone’s crazy in this house,” she said blandly. “Haven’t you noticed that yet? My name’s Delilah, if you must know.”

“You don’t look like Delilah,” he said, passing the time.

Delilah pouted in mock anger. “Please don’t be witty. It’s unbecoming in a cab driver. Really, it’s gauche.” She stuck her head inside. “They’re still arguing about you.” Then out again, appraising his face. “What’s it like, being a witty cab driver?” she said, leaning casually against the door frame, her hand on her hip.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“What do you think?” A challenge.

“I think about fifty,” he said.

She didn’t smile. “That’s about right,” she said, listening inside again.

“Are they going to pay me?” he asked.

“I would,” she said, “if it were up to me. However, my mother says that she distinctly remembers having given you your fare, and that it’s not money you’re after, anyway.”

“What does she think I’m after?” He was almost afraid to ask.

“Don’t you know?” She winked at him, a parody of insinuation.

His face burned. “No,” he said, “I don’t know.”

“I think you know what I mean,” she said. “My mother says that you touched her with lewd intent, that you wanted to rav-age her. It’s probably not true at all, though you look like the type. If you want my opinion, I think my mother has delusions of grandeur. She thinks that every man who sees her wants to rav-age her. Did you … want to?”

Sweat leaked from his forehead. “I didn’t do anything like that,” he said. “She was sick. I tried to help her into the house. I didn’t …”

“Well, don’t look so sick about it if you’re innocent.”

It was true; he felt guilty, as if in his worst imaginings he could conceive of making a pass at a middle-aged woman. “She’s crazy,” he said.

“Didn’t I say so? Do you want to know my secret, whatever-your-name-is? My secret is, I always look innocent even if I’ve just rav-aged an old lady.” She blushed.

The man was back, imposing himself between Peter and the girl. “Lila, your guests are looking for you,” he said.

“Oh damn!” She smiled specially for Peter. “I’m always losing people before I get to know them.”

“Lila, go on inside,” he ordered. “Your mother’ll have a fit if she finds you’re out here.”

“Yes, Uncle Alex,” she said, wide-eyed, mocking. “I certainly don’t want Mother to have a fit.”

When he was sure that Delilah was inside, Alex slipped two bills into Peter’s hand as though he were bribing a cop. “There’s no reason for you to hang around now, is there?”

Peter dug in his pocket, offered the man fifteen cents’ change.

“That’s your tip,” Alex said, a delayed smile on his thick face. “You’ve earned it — one way or another.”

Peter threw the fifteen cents at him and walked off, curiously tired. He had the feeling, without knowing why, that he had been defeated in the exchange.

Two of his tires were mysteriously low when he got back to the cab, the kids nowhere in sight, though he thought he heard laughing from the next house. He shook his fist at the street, secretly amused. For hours, through most of his benighted, unsuccessful day, Delilah’s ageless child face haunted him. Love? He was in love with Lois. (And Gloria.) He had enough troubles.

That night he told Lois about his new job, about having been out of work, a wholesale clearance of conscience.

“Do you think that makes any difference?” she said wearily.

His answer was to call her mother and begrudgingly apologize, which she grudgingly accepted, changing nothing.

“Is there anything I can do to change your mind?” he asked Lois, who was sweeping the kitchen.

“Nothing,” she said.

So he said nothing. He bided his time with the nervous patience of urgency.

An hour passed without an argument. Reading the afternoon paper, Peter fell asleep in his chair.

He was necking with an older woman (it seemed) in the back seat of another cab. Then all of a sudden Lois was there looking on.

“So that’s what you are,” Lois said. “I should have known.”

He freed himself from the woman’s hold. “It’s not what you think, Lois. You see, she was sick and I was trying …”

“He took me unawares, the dear,” the woman said.

“You revolt me,” Lois said to him, her voice like an icy wind. “God, what a fool you are! So, you married me to get at my mother. You deserve each other.” She opened a door, the cab stuttering to a stop.

“Your mother?” He was innocent of that at least. “That’s not your mother, Lois. Look at her.” The woman, wearing a black veil, laughed unpleasantly.

“I promise you’ll never see me again,” Lois said. She bolted from the car, running toward an enormous building at the end of the street. In love, he ran after her. A cab turning the corner — Peter yelled for it to stop — knocked her down. When he got to her she was already decomposing, her ashes floating away in the wind.

“Lois …”

He awoke with a shock. “Lois?” She wasn’t in the room. He looked in the kitchen, the bathroom, calling, tired as hell, “Lois, where are you, honey? Lois. Lois. Lois.” (Her coat was gone from the closet.)

He sighed and sat down on the bed. A man who would have such dreams, he decided, deserved the worst.

Before he had time to worry about her absence, she was back, humming to herself. “It’s not bad out, old Peter. It’s very warm,” she said, kissing him on the cheek, sitting down next to him. “And how are you?”

“I had a bad dream,” he said. He put his head in her lap, her tweed skirt smelling of cold streets.

“I have an idea,” she said, stroking his face, “that maybe it will abort by itself. Miscarriages, you know, are very common in the early months of pregnancy. And if I help it along … Anyway, I’ve been feeling much better about it.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Do you love me?” she asked wistfully.

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you mind my asking?” she said, as if he had a choice. “It’s important for me to know. Not that I always believe you tell me the truth, but I can tell when you’re lying.” She stroked his hair. “My problem is that sometimes I think I love you and sometimes I think I don’t. Is that how it is with you?”

His mouth was dry. “I said I loved you.”

“All the time?” she wanted to know, an important distinction. He could feel the springs of her nerves wind tight, her spirit on guard against him.

“I love you only when you love me,” he said, half a joke, more truth than he meant.

She thought about it. “That’s why I think we shouldn’t have this child,” she said. “We don’t love each other enough.”

As though it were an enormous weight, he lifted his head from her lap. “Do you really think that there are people in this world who love each other all the time?”

“Now you’re twisting my words. I think that people who love each other — really love each other — love each other all the time, more or less.”

As he watched her, she seemed to be moving farther and farther away from him, though in fact they were only a few inches apart on the bed, her eyes lost in the darkness of some obscure interior voyage. “Well,” he said, “don’t you think that we’re in that category, more or less?”

Her eyes returned, angry, strange. “I don’t love you when you’re like that.”

“Like what?” He thought of putting his arm around her but didn’t, wary of her mood.

“I hate you when you mock me,” she said. She was lying on her back now, her hands cradling her head, staring at the ceiling. “People who are in love don’t always argue,” she said.

He didn’t want to argue the point. “Okay,” he said, admiring her, flat-chested, bony, her face scarred with shadows — his enemy — in love with her.

“Okay what?”

“I was agreeing with you.”

She shaded her eyes to look at him. “You’re a clown,” she said, not without affection.

Always ready to oblige, he made a clownish face, which she pretended to ignore — some part of her, some distant part, amused.

Watching her, he tried to recall what his life had been like before Lois, in the days of his youth, the happiest days of his life; he could hardly remember. A few girls came to mind, a few faces without names, a few names without faces. In his memory, all were gentle, beautiful, in love with him. What had he given up? What he had never had he had lost. He remembered hawking ice cream at Coney Island with Herbie, running from the cops, just barely getting away, once he had been caught. All his memories were of flight. Still, he was his own man (or boy) then, without all this emotional touching which he couldn’t bear, which he couldn’t do without.

“Should I tell you what you were thinking?” she said, a face reader, a child’s canny smile lighting her sallow face.

“I wasn’t thinking of anything,” he said, pushing back his hair as though he were about to have his picture taken.

“You were thinking,” she said, staring at the bilious walls, “that you had trapped yourself by marrying me.” She glanced up at him slyly, testing his response.

He couldn’t deny it, though it wasn’t the whole truth. “What would I do without you?” he protested.

A laugh. “What would you do with me?” she asked.

She had him there. His answer: he kissed the back of her neck, the wisp-ridden down of hair that guarded the dark hollow of her back. She tolerated him. “I have to write a paper for school,” she said. “Don’t you have anything to do?”

He sulked.

She kissed him. “You’re so vulnerable,” she said, “that’s why I like you.”

He looked at Lois, her childish face, through the dark prism of his vision, just out of focus, and was reminded suddenly of Delilah, unable at the moment to distinguish one from the other. Was it in some way the same face, or the obscure and deliberate deception of his memory? He took Lois’s hand, which fitted into his fingers like a glove, a size too small.

“Poor Peter,” she said, “stuck with me.”

The room seemed airless, unbearably hot. “Is it all right if I open a window?” he asked, anticipating her answer.

“It’s freezing in here,” she said, extricating her hand to embrace herself. He was sweating from the heat.

While Lois typed — the tremors of her back marking her progress — Peter remained on the bed, sweating, trying to think of something to say that might ease the tension between them. Before long, as a matter of course, he was asleep. He lurched from the curb, the cab under him, starting in a rush, swerving, slamming to an abrupt stop, people flooding the streets, blocking his way. Impatient, he knocked over an old man and a boy who had crossed against the light. No one noticed except his passenger, who said, “What are you going to make of yourself, boob?”

They were always asking him that or some other unanswerable question. “Never ask an author about his own work,” he said, pleased with the answer. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

“Move over,” she said. “You’re hogging the bed.”

It didn’t make any sense, but since it was a policy of the company that the passenger was generally right, he moved under protest, an inaudible grumble.

“You sleep more than you’re awake,” she said.

“It’s a tiring job,” he said, and went back to work.

| 5 |

“This is the kind of job,” Herbie had advised him, “where you can make as much money as you want. A hundred, a hundred fifty a week with no sweat.”

Peter made forty dollars his first week.

“I swear to God,” Herbie was saying, “in my whole life I’ve never met anyone who was as incompetent at everything. I worry about you.”

They were in Herbie’s apartment, Peter’s cab parked in a one-hour zone down the street. Nostalgic about Gloria, Peter had drifted into the habit of visiting his brother in the morning. A coffee break — one of the benefits of industrial enlightenment — it broke up the day, though actually he rarely started work now until after his visit with Herbie.

“Next week I’ll make a hundred fifty,” Peter boasted — a matter of pride.

“Yeah?” Herbie said. “Do it! Then I’ll believe you. I tell you what: I’ll give you twenty to fifteen you don’t make over a hundred ten. What do you say?”

“It’s a bet,” Peter said, lumbering off the Goodwill sofa which, broken-springed, helped him along. “I’d better get going,” he said, putting on his cap with professional grace. The hat, two sizes too large, had a way of descending over his ears.

“What’s your rush?” Herbie complained. “Have another cup of coffee, for God’s sake. You don’t make any money anyway.”

“I’ve had three cups of coffee already,” he said, lethargic after his initial burst of energy. “And I’ll get a ticket if I don’t move the cab. You don’t want me to lose my bet, do you?”

“So who’s keeping you?” Herbie said. “Sucker, if I lose that bet, I’ll give up gambling.”

Peter was halfway out the door when Herbie called him back. “Did you call the doctor’s number I gave you?” he said, pointing a finger of accusation.

“I don’t have time to talk now,” Peter said. “Can’t make any money standing around talking, can I?”

“Good-bye,” Herbie barked. “See you some time. Jerk! You need a kid now like you need a second dick. Listen to me. Call Dr. Henderson. Where are you running to? You’re always running off somewhere.”

Going down the stairs in a hurry, he ran into Gloria coming up, a look of fierce determination on her face. She passed him, brushing against his shoulder, with barely a nod.

“Gloria …”

“Peter?” She came back down the stairs. “You look different for some reason.”

“How have you been?” he wanted to know.

She looked over her shoulder, impatient to be off, squeezed his arm, smiled wanly, and was off. “Can’t talk. See ya.”

He waved to the shadows of her moving form, her ass the last to leave the bedroom of his vision. Her heavy perfume lingered, her touch on his arm fanned the full-blown bellows of his desire, an erection for his troubles. He hoped no one was watching.

It struck him as he started up the cab that as far as he understood his own desires, he was at the moment infatuated with three women. And horny, ascetic, deprived, your workaday cab driver with a map of the city in his back pocket, and expectant which is to say hopelessly (hopefully) anxious, which was the worst of it.

After a while, as Peter became more or less adept at his job, rarely getting lost any more, he began to wonder if it was worth it. Working four full days and two nights, all day Saturday, he hardly saw his wife (and the implications of his child). And worst of all, Lois acted as if she didn’t mind, seemed actually to like the idea of his being away. Had Lois missed him more, or appeared to miss him more, he could have afforded to miss her less. An economist’s paradox: he was almost never around, yet in greater supply than demand. He tried not to worry about it, which was a joke on himself. It was not in him not to worry. Ever since his long day in bed with Gloria, his secretive (innocent?) meetings with Delilah, he had become morbidly suspicious of Lois. He knew, on the evidence of his instincts, that she had a lover. One, maybe two. At the same time he knew of course that his suspicions were madness, but though he refused to believe in them, they preyed on him, took advantage of his good nature. On occasion, driving through midtown Manhattan, he actually saw, thought he saw, in the shadowy windows of a fashionable restaurant, Lois and a man (older, fairer, richer) having cocktails together, though of course there were many girls with long black hair in New York having drinks with other men — Peter being tied down to his cab. Ahhh! A recurrent preoccupation, an inspired obsession, it helped pass the time.

So, among other things, over all things, he worried about Lois. He also longed, lusted, to see Gloria again, which he sublimated in erotic fantasies. The cab driver-lover! It helped pass the time. And he did see Delilah. Every day in fact (except Friday, his day off) he saw Delilah, a business arrangement which offered more guilt than pleasure. He would pick her up in front of the High School of Performing Arts at about two-thirty, and circuitously, sometimes touring Central Park at her request, drive her home, parking around the corner from her house, the transaction apparently a secret between them. And she paid for the ride, including a 25-cent tip, which somehow continued to surprise him. His sense of loss the measure of his feelings, he discovered himself in love with Delilah the one day she didn’t show up for their appointment. He had waited an hour, cruising around the block, searching other faces for signs of her before he gave up. And leaving without her, he was heavy-hearted, convinced that he would never see her again — all his losses in the mourning of possibility, it seemed, one endless loss. The next day, of course, she was there as before.

“Where were you yesterday?” she asked as soon as they had taken off.

“Where was I? Where were you?”

“Don’t try to worm your way out of it,” she said, heckling him with her solemnity. “The undeniable fact remains that you didn’t pick me up yesterday.”

“Okay,” he said, concentrating on ignoring her. He had to slam on his brakes to keep from hitting two women who were crossing against the light.

“Well, where were you?” she said.

He maneuvered his way brilliantly through the narrow space between two sedentary trucks which, in the moment of his triumph, like crocodiles posing as logs suddenly came to life, flanking him. Caught helplessly in the middle, Peter waited for the trucks to ease past him, sweating his fear, honking his horn in frustrated protest.

“You’re not only the most dangerous cab driver I know,” Delilah said in her elocution-class voice, “you’re also the most impolite. As your employer, I think I have a right to know where you were. Well?”

“I was at your school at two-thirty, as you well know.”

“How do I know that?” she said. “I didn’t see you there.”

“That’s because you weren’t there,” he said. “I waited — ”

“The fact remains,” she interrupted, “that I waited for you and waited for you and you didn’t show up.”

“It won’t happen again,” he said, making a wrong turn. The persistence of her kidding, if that’s what it was, had a way of disconcerting him, as though something real were at stake.

“It doesn’t matter whether it does or not,” she said. “You’re already a disappointment.” Catching his eye in the mirror, she stuck out her tongue, pointing it at him like a weapon.

Absorbed in watching her, he barely avoided smashing into another cab.

A savage head leaned out the window. “What’s a matter, you some kind of nut? Schmuck!” It was Sclaratti. Peter averted his face, drove on without acknowledgment.

“What’s a matter, you some kind of nut?” Delilah said — a perfect imitation — and laughed furiously.

“You see what happens when you distract the driver,” he said pompously, running a red light.

“What you think, I also some kind of nut?” she said, and she laughed convulsively, hiccupping after a while, as if it was the funniest thing she had ever heard.

“Take me to the park,” she ordered. “I want to see how the other half lives.” He drove her directly home, parking, turning off the meter.

Furious, she remained in the back seat, her hands crossed in front of her, refusing to move.

“Last stop,” he said.

She pursed her mouth as though she had eaten something disagreeable. “I thought you were my friend,” she said piteously.

“Your friend has brought you home,” he said. “I’m not going.”

“What’s a matter, you some kind of nut?” he said.

She honored him with a bored smile. “You’re all right for a cab driver,” she said, paying him his fare, not quite looking at him.

Languid, taking her time, she emerged a perfect butterfly from the sanctuary of the cab, collected, full of herself. “See you tomorrow,” he said.

He was ready to leave, the best part of his day over, when her face appeared at his window. “Hello,” he said a bit foolishly, unrolling the glass. “What have we here?”

“Driver,” she said solemnly, “don’t ever not show up again.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Or I’ll lose my faith in you.”

She was gone before he could think of anything to say. What did it all mean? asked an anxious voice in his skull. The answer begging the question came from his chest: It means. What then? Ah, but Peter Becker, dreamer and hack driver, had secrets, self-surprises, he kept hidden even from himself.

In the evening, sweat-ridden, his dust-stained white shirt now flesh of his flesh, Peter returned home, guilty of unknown sins, to a wife he suspected of betraying him. A jealous man looks for signs and finds substantiations. In the day’s collected dust of their apartment, among the puffed-up worms of shadow, the hastily made bed, Peter saw too much; he regretted his knowledge.

They had dinner in the kitchen. His warmed-over hamburgers looked as if they had had a hard day; they bore up remarkably. Peter ate with little appetite, suspicious of everything, including the canned peas which deflated at the touch of his fork. Across the table Lois sipped her coffee.

“What have you been doing all day?” he asked. Though he meant it to be a casual remark, it came out like an accusation.

Lois looked up as if to make sure he was talking to her. “I haven’t been doing anything,” she said. “What have you been doing all day?”

He told her, leaving out a little, making up some for the sake of the story, not mentioning Delilah, saving Sclaratti’s remark for another occasion.

“Did you give rides to any beautiful girls?” she asked, pouring his coffee for him.

“Only beautiful girls,” he said.

Her arm jerked as if he had pushed her, the coffee spilling, trickling across the table. He made no effort to get out of its way.

“I would have finished my homework,” she said, watching him change his pants, “but my mother kept me on the phone for hours and then your brother called. Peter, I didn’t mean to spill coffee on you.”

“There was none as beautiful as you,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “Do you like my hair this way?”

He nodded, not looking. “What did Herbie want?”

“You didn’t even notice that it was done a new way.”

“I noticed,” he said, noticing for the first time an elaborate cabbage, withholding his disapproval. “Did Herbie want me to call him back?”

“No.” Her fingers like bird beaks, she began impatiently to undo her hair. “You like it better when it’s hanging loose, don’t you?”

It was always a problem for him whether to answer her honestly and risk the tense silence of her enmity, or to tell her what she wanted to hear, assuming (an impossible assumption) that he knew what it was. Anyway, he couldn’t win. And everything she did made him, who suspected her of all manner of betrayal, even more suspicious. But of what? And of whom? That he had no answers only testified further to the complexity of her deceit.

So, he came up behind her and kissed the back of her head. Leaning against him, she pretended that he wasn’t there. “My mother invited us for dinner Friday night,” she said, moving away, picking hairpins from the floor. “I think she means it as a gesture of reconciliation.”

“That’s very nice of her,” he said with invisible irony.

“You don’t mean it,” she said, “but I’ve already accepted for us.”

She had a predilection, a gift of instinct for irritating him. “You can go without me,” he said. He didn’t mean that either.

She came back to him, her head at half-mast. “If you don’t want to go,” she said piteously, her eyes mysteriously wet, “I’ll call Mildred back and say we’re not coming.”

“I don’t mind going,” he said, victimized by her tears. “It’s just that I wish you’d consult me before you … accept — you know.”

“I won’t do it again, Peter.” She put her hand gently against his cheek. “I don’t want us to fight. You don’t think I do, do you?” She smiled love, tears washing her face.

He resisted her, he tried.

“You’re still angry,” she said.

Exasperated, he insisted he wasn’t.

She started to say something, then shrugged woefully with the grace of resignation, turning her head in a gesture of inexpressible hopelessness. “We don’t know how not to fight any more,” she said.

What did she want from him? He reached out, put his arms around her, and overwhelmed, blazing with pity for her sorrow, kissed her eyes, her damp eyes, wanting only to make things right (everything wrong), pressing her to him, dissolved, mindless in the violence of his feelings.

“You’re suffocating me,” she said at last.

He released her, embarrassed, studying the long room of their apartment, which seemed strange to him, as if he had awakened into it after months of dreaming it.

“Be gentle with me, Peter,” she said. She kissed him gently on the mouth, her salty tongue making an unexpected visit.

“Be gentle,” she said again, searching for him with her body, then leading him to the bed as though he were taking her. “Do you love me very much?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, suddenly exhausted.

On the bed, a white chenille spread covering it, in and out of their clothes (his argyle socks still on), they played with deadly seriousness, a child’s game. His heart wasn’t in it.

“Poor old Peter,” she said, climbing on top of him, pinching, biting, pulhng hair. “You give up?”

Didn’t he always? And he was suspicious. More than ever he was suspicious. The proof — how subtle! — was in the apparent absence of proof.

Suspicion roused him. When she rolled away for a breather he came on.

Her eyes pleaded for something. What?

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, convalescing (the disease of private terror), her eyes the shutters of a haunted house.

He hesitated. Nothing came of nothing.

“I’m afraid of pain,” she said, which didn’t help his cause.

He retreated; then, with the courage of anxiety, returned to the attack (not to be outdone by his betrayer), kissed her breasts, her mouth, in love with her, his wife, his child-bride of twenty-one — suspicious. She did her best.

Their devils made love, their angels in private terror. Was this what it was all about? And yet there was pleasure, he worried, one inner eye watchful. And was she there at all?

He listened for her song, and heard it, and didn’t hear it — and was it even meant for him? — his own song, his one note of song rising finally to its occasion, running its gamut amid cheers, plummeting, dying its life as if no one cared. (And she cared, she said.)

Their love words were sung in silence, a more tenuous music. A more exacting silence.

As he was falling asleep she asked, her mouth to his ear, “Will you still love me when I’m not a child any more?” He thought to answer, thought he had, and dreamed it instead: Yes. And what was the question?

Sleepless in his dreams, he awoke in the dark, heavy and dull with sweat; her head, a stranger, weighted on his shoulder.

When he freed his arm she mumbled something unintelligible from the dark pools of her sleep, and shivering, wrapped the blankets around her, curling up into them, an intimacy of need which excluded him.

Lonely, he prowled the dreamlike room, a maze of shadows, feeling about on chairs and tables for his watch. It was always good to know the time, especially at night when you couldn’t sleep. After a while he found the watch on an end table, curled up against the belly of Lois’s purse. As nearly as he could make out, it was either five after three or one-fifteen, though he had no confidence that he was even looking at the right side of the watch. And then he lost interest in the time. There were other things. Lois’s black purse, for instance.

The more he looked at it, tight-mouthed as it was, the more secrets it seemed to contain. And Lois, who had no right to secrets, was asleep.

He carried the purse to the bathroom, holding it in his arms as though it were breakable, and alone in his sanctuary, bolted the door. He waited a while before he switched on the light, a painful brilliance, the tile shining at him like monstrous teeth.

When he snapped it open, it yawned at him. A good spy, though inexperienced, newly obsessive, he looked around him, listened carefully for counterspies. The bed creaked. An all-night radio blared across the street. Fastidious, thick-fingered, Peter washed his hands, the purse resting open on the closed seat, awaiting surgery.

What does a woman keep in her pocketbook? If she was Lois, she kept everything she couldn’t bear to throw away — souvenirs from old cracker jacks boxes, a broken sea shell, two empty lipsticks, a ball of silver, the cellophane from an old cigarette pack — everything. And a poem which he had to unfold to read. Only four lines long, it was neatly printed on a half-sheet of loose-leaf paper, which had been folded over several times into a small square packet. This was more like it; the secret agent in him exulted, though he couldn’t get over the feeling that he was dreaming it all, or someone else was. He read:

Underneath, she had written: Remind Peter to buy coffee. He put everything back (in its place, he hoped) and closed the purse. Then on impulse, remembering something he had forgotten — the wallet at the bottom of things — he opened it again. It was there, in her red wallet, that he found, surprised at finding it, what he had been searching for.

And what did he find? Like most explorers, he wasn’t sure (an undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns). He held it up to the light, a photo of Lois and some boy Peter had never seen before, a handsome couple in bathing suits, familiar with each other, her arm about his waist, his on her shoulder, the ocean in the background. Lovers? How could there be any doubt? It was an old picture — from last summer perhaps — but the fact that she still kept it in her wallet was evidence, more evidence than he wanted, of betrayal. He glowered at the boy, younger and handsomer than himself, his wife’s lover. Then. And now? The photo was its own testimony. That he had been wronged was as clear as his own reflection, which stared blearily, raw-eyed at him from the medicine-cabinet mirror — a mild, ugly face incapable of outrage. Who could blame Lois for preferring the boy in the picture? Peter could. And he did. Who else could he blame?

He was putting the picture back into its laminated case, in a sleepwalker’s calm, when someone knocked on the door, startling him.

“What are you doing in there, Peter?” Lois said.

What was he doing? He pulled the chain, stuffed the wallet into the purse, snapped the purse closed, and worried that she knew what he was doing. “I’ll be right out,” he called, pulling the chain again absent-mindedly.

“Are you sick or something?” she said. “Peter?”

“What?”

“You’ve been in there for hours, honey. Are you all right?”

“I’ll be out in a few minutes,” he said, trying to think of some reasonable explanation for his behavior, which had none. He had no idea what to do with Lois’s pocketbook, which loomed menacingly on the toilet seat as though there were a bomb inside.

When he listened closely he could almost hear the bag ticking, or was it the kitchen clock he heard? Some other bomb? If the roar in his head was any indication, something was going to explode. He had been in worse predicaments — especially in the Army — but he had never, or so it always seemed at the present, been so thoroughly in the wrong. An absurd predicament for a grown man, still growing.

He washed his hands again, the same bleak face glaring at him owlishly in the mirror.

In a few minutes he evacuated the bathroom, carrying the handbag behind his back. A shadow, Lois was standing there, waiting for him.

“Peter, what’s the matter? What are you holding behind your back?”

With a sigh, he gave up the purse.

She took it from him with barely a sound — a sharp, sudden groan of breath — and went in a great hurry to her dresser, putting the bag away noisily in the bottom drawer.

On her way back to the bathroom she muttered in a strange voice, not looking at him, “You just can’t be trusted, can you?” And then she was in the bathroom, the door locked against him.

He hovered outside the door a few minutes, his head crowded with explanations, but when she gave no sign of coming out, he straggled hopelessly to the bed, bumping his knee against some provident chair in the dark.

Unable to sleep, he waited for her in the hollow center of their double bed, sobs coming from the bathroom, rising and falling. Her cries — Peter listened fitfully — seemed to go on for an endless time, choking, drowning sounds. He felt their tremors as if they were his own, which, for all he knew, maybe they were. He awoke in the morning, convinced that he hadn’t slept at all, surprised to find Lois curled under the covers next to him as if nothing had happened. There was no mention of the bag during breakfast, and Peter was almost willing to believe that he had dreamed what he had dreamed. Then, ready for school, Lois took her purse from the bottom drawer and said good-bye.

Sclaratti had warned Peter never to let a passenger out of his sight. But Peter was trusting, and though he took Sclaratti seriously, liked first of all to keep his eye on the road. And second of all: he worried; that is, he anticipated the possibilities of disaster. In the dark eye of his imagination, he saw Lois and the boy in the photo betraying him in a variety of postures, to pay him back for his suspicions, and finally, inevitably — he could imagine nothing worse — he saw Lois leaving him, his failure, his loss. And when he thought of it, pushing his way through New York City traffic, water rushed to his eyes, and though he wouldn’t cry — refused on manful principle to cry — his windshield seemed to cloud over despite him, and he had the sensation of staring out at the world from within a fish bowl. Sometimes he even had to purse his lips to breathe. And still he coveted, in his lust’s eye, Gloria, and looked forward to his daily meetings with the fair Delilah, his only nymph, his most regular passenger.

Delilah, in her way, became more and more demanding.

“Driver,” she said in her mock-imperious voice, “take me for a ride in the country and don’t spare the horses. And don’t spare the pedestrians.” (This was the day after Peter’s discovery of the photo.)

“This taxi only goes to Sutton Place, lady,” he said, too full of Lois, thinking perhaps he should call her, perhaps he shouldn’t, to pay much attention to Delilah.

“Who’s paying for this ride?” she wanted to know. “Please,” she cajoled. “Take me to the park, Peter. I’ll be a good girl, I promise. Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease …”

“No,” he grumbled, unable to shake his depression, and drove absently toward the park. Forsythia were in bloom. And so, he noticed, looking golden in his mirror, was Delilah.

“Can we stop?” she asked as they entered the park. “You can leave the meter running if you like.” “What for?”

“What for?” she mimicked him. “For the love of it. That’s what for.” She sulked at his insensitivity.

“Where do you get all your money?” he asked.

“Where do you get all your money?”

“From you,” he said, and she giggled.

“If I tell you,” she said, leaning over the seat to whisper it in his ear, “will you stop and park?”

He was thinking about it when he noticed a cop car coming up behind him, closing the distance between them. Guilty as always — but what had he been caught doing? — he resentfully awaited the justice of his punishment.

“My father gives me a handsome allowance,” she said. “It’s called child support, if you must know.”

The police car pulled up alongside and then, as Peter alerted his foot to the brake, sped by him, spewing exhaust fumes through his unrolled window. He marveled at his luck.

“I can afford it,” she said, “if that’s what’s worrying you.”

He kept going, wondering why the cop had passed him and why, in passing, he had looked at him in that jaundiced way.

“My father’s a very nice man,” she said contentiously, as if she expected an argument. “He is. Though he won’t tell this to anyone, he’s not even sure that he’s my father, if you know what I mean, because my mother, you certainly know who she is, she’s a woman of questionable moral character. A who-er. He loves me anyway, and gives me lots and lots of money because, as you can see, I’m a great prize. A great bee-you-ty!” She crossed her eyes in illustration. “Don’t you think so? You don’t have to, because it’s a livid fact, a livid, livid fact. … Do you think I’m pretty?”

“Pretty noisy,” he said. On sudden impulse he pulled off the road, parking the cab under a tree.

From inside his fish bowl, he watched leafless trees, birth-ridden, recoiling in the wind, and beyond the trees he could see to a semicircle of benches, old men with Daily Newses also swaying in the breeze, and still beyond them, surrounded by clover and winter weeds, a boy and girl were embracing in the grass, inextricably entangled, oblivious of being watched. He painted them in his mind on a beach of white sand, no longer seeing them.

“What are you, Mr. Cabdriver, some kind of nut or something?” she said. When he looked up, Delilah was in the seat next to him, the sun in her hair, the sun itself.

“What are you looking at?” she said softly, as if aware of his mood.

He shrugged. When he looked again beyond the flight of trees, it was gone. They — the couple in the picture — had moved on.

“Do you know,” she said, “that next to my father you’re the saddest-looking man I’ve ever seen?”

He forced a smile and choked on it.

“The absolutely saddest-looking man,” she crooned. “Absolutely saddest I ever saw.”

“Cut it out,” he said, a sob escaping from his throat.

“Maybe we’d better go,” she said, sucking on a strand of hair, her mouth disappointed at the taste.

For some reason he remembered his father taking him to the movies, and his surprise when during a sentimental scene — he had been too young to understand its implications — he realized that his father was crying. They had to leave before the end.

Feeling pasted together — the trees moving off as in a dream — he climbed out of the cab with exceeding care.

He ran, heavy-legged, too tired to walk …

The current against him, turning him back. Swimming, unable to swim. Too much grief. Too much … Tide washing over him, leaving its debris of dead fish and sea shells, hair nets and algae on white sand. Face down in the grass, he cried out his grief. A grown man, he cried. The wind soughed among the trees. And somewhere: somewhere …

When timeless minutes later he returned to his cab, Delilah was gone. He looked around, not knowing where to look, exhausted, calling to her: Delilah, Delilah, for God’s sake, his voice boomeranging in the wind. On the trails of instinct, a dreamwalker, he wandered off to look for her among the benches of studious old men.

“Did you see a girl in a greenish coat, with long straight blond hair, go by?” he asked one of the men who, though he had a mustache and was mostly bald, faintly resembled Peter’s father.

“A girl? What kind of girlie?” the man said in a heavy Yiddish accent.

Peter described Delilah again. The old man scratched his head with the New York Post. “I can’t say I have,” he said, winking, “but I wouldn’t mind, ha ha.”

“I seen a little girl,” a man on the next bench said, “a sweet little thing — ten, eleven years old. Blond as an angel.”

Peter was interested.

“She was walking with a lady, her mother,” the man added.

Peter walked back to his cab in time to see a cop, the one who had passed him on the road, hang a ticket like a necklace on his windshield wiper.

“Hey …”

“It’s already written out,” the cop explained half apologetically. “You should a caught me before I started writing, huh?” He waited for an argument, but finding none, got into his car and drove off, leaving behind a few parting words of advice: “Be more careful next time, buddy.”

Assuming that a ticket on the windshield was as good as a parking permit, Peter continued his search. Running, his eyes filmed with sweat, he covered as much of the park as he could, as anyone could in an hour’s time; he looked everywhere. He could have sworn that several times he heard Delilah calling his name, though each time he stopped to listen there was only the wind and the troubled noise of his breathing.

When he returned to the cab, defeated by exhaustion, Delilah was awaiting him in the back seat as though she had never been gone. Peter drove off without a word, the ticket still on his windshield: it had his number, it clapped in the breeze. Any applause was better than none.

Delilah yawned, played with her golden hair. “Take me home,” she said in her mother’s voice.

He did, though it took a while, the traffic being much heavier at four-thirty, at times almost impassable.

Delilah hummed to herself in back; Peter banged on his horn whenever the traffic bogged down altogether. Occasionally, while humming, Delilah would tap her foot to another music — the dull buzz of impatience. For the duration of the trip it was their only communication (whose fault was it?). Enraged, he worried.

She left the cab without paying him, without offering to pay. And curiously, he didn’t mind: that was the kind of day it was. After another fare — two middle-aged men celebrating “our fifteenth wedding anniversary,” they told him — he called Dr. Henderson. And got his answering service.

“Do you want to leave a message for the doctor?” a woman’s musical voice asked. He wasn’t sure whether it was recorded or not. It was that kind of voice.

“I have no message for the doctor at this time,” he said, his own recording, and hung up, sweating with relief. Afterward he wondered why he had called. Why had he called? It was simple: he had, because … because … No answer admitted itself. After another fare he tried to call Lois and let the phone ring fifteen times before he gave up. At dinnertime he saw Lois in every fashionable restaurant he could look into, and even in some — especially those — he couldn’t. That was why, he told himself, his chest aching. Still, he wanted to believe, it was better knowing the worst than living forever in the chaos of doubt.

After two more fares, breaking even on the day (including the ticket), Peter turned in his cab and went home for dinner, himself precooked, ready to be eaten in his own sauce. And his in-laws, Mildred and Will, were there for the white meat.

On Friday; on Peter’s day off, they went together, Lois and Peter (and Herbie), to see Dr. Henderson. Herbie and Peter sat in the waiting room among Esquires, AMA Journals and Saturday Evening Posts while Lois was being examined inside.

“Take it easy,” Herbie kept saying, swatting his lap intermittently with a rolled-up Esquire, as Peter paced about the waiting room. “It’s only an examination she’s getting, kid.” To cheer his brother up, Herbie wore a huge smile, like a striped college tie. “Take it easy, huh?”

“I’m taking it easy,” Peter growled. “What the hell are you smiling about?”

Dr. Henderson came in, a large youngish man with thick horn-rimmed glasses, bearing a striking resemblance, so it seemed to Peter, to Clark Kent, Superman’s alter ego.

They followed the doctor in single file, Peter last, into a large office room with an extraordinary number of modern-looking machines, and beyond it to an even larger office which, though adequately equipped, seemed makeshift by comparison.

“Well,” the doctor said, rubbing his hands together, turning to Herbie. “You’re the prospective father, I presume?” Lois, who was sitting like a rag doll on the side of the examination table, continued to stare at the floor.

“No, I am,” Peter said in a loud voice, pushing his way in front of Herbie, startling the doctor, who stepped back as if Peter was about to attack him. Lois looked up, a smile at the corner of her mouth; she loved her husband at his worst.

Dr. Henderson nodded, readjusting his thick glasses. “Then may I ask who you are?” he said to Herbie, an edge of suspicion in his toneless voice.

“You ought to know,” Herbie said.

The doctor squinted behind his glasses. “Why is that?”

“Because,” Herbie said, smiling at Peter, nodding to Lois, “I was here before. Don’t you remember, Henderson? About ten months ago I brought a girl to see you.” He gave a pitilessly accurate description of Gloria, Peter hating him.

The doctor showed no sign of recognition. “What was her complaint?” he said, chewing on his lip as though it were edible.

Peter exchanged a sour glance with Lois, regret gnawing at him. They would have the child, he decided, a sudden lover of children; a brave man in his best dreams, he would bear it himself if necessary.

Herbie’s smile melted out of shape. “I think we better go,” he said to Lois, meaning Peter too. No one moved.

“Wait a minute,” the doctor said, his eyes like distant points of light behind the thick lens of his glasses. “It’s possible that I remember you.” Then, turning to Peter: “This girl is a little run-down,” he said in the resonance of his professional voice. “Not much, a little. Otherwise, to the best of my knowledge, everything is normal.”

“She’s my wife,” Peter said.

“Yes, that’s my understanding,” Dr. Henderson said in a voice so remote from the face that represented it that it seemed to be coming from a recording mechanism not quite synchronized. He glanced again at Herbie, scowled, then back at Peter. “Your wife’s almost three months along and she seems, aside from a vitamin deficiency, as I said, perfectly all right. You have no reason not to expect a normal baby.”

“Thank you,” Peter said, prepared to leave, glancing at Lois, who was staring at the floor again. “Lois …” Their relationship had become so fragile, he found it unnerving to talk to her, as if the slightest pressure of tension could cause an explosion between them.

“But Dr. Henderson,” Lois said in an unnaturally calm voice, which had the effect of startling them all, “we don’t want this normal child. That’s why we’re here.” She glared fiercely at Peter, who, as though he were driving his taxi, swerved out of her way.

As if to see more clearly, Dr. Henderson took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and put them back on. Sniffed. Then the doorbell rang, and with a ceremonious nod of apology he went out to answer it.

“It’ll be okay, don’t worry,” Herbie said. “He’s got to be careful, you understand. The jails are filled with guys like him.”

“Let’s go,” Peter whispered to Lois.

“No,” she hissed back.

“Don’t worry,” Herbie said, a reassuring smile for both of them.

“Keep out of it,” Peter said to Herbie. “Please let’s go,” he said to Lois. “We can talk about it when we get home.”

Lois shook her head.

“I said we’re going,” Peter said through his teeth, in a murderous mood.

Before Lois could answer, Dr. Henderson returned, glancing again at Herbie as he passed him. “Are you the friend of Ira Whimple?” he said.

Herbie nodded. “Ira was the one who suggested I come to see you the other time,” he said. “He doesn’t know anything about this.”

“I see,” the doctor said, permitting himself a small, private smile. Then to Peter, to the wall behind Peter’s head: “If you want to abort the fetus,” he said, “if that’s your intention, the third month is an apt time for it. The longer you wait, you understand, the more dangerous it becomes.” He removed his glasses. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“We understand,” Herbie answered for Peter.

“I’d like to talk it over with my wife,” Peter said.

“Of course,” the doctor said; then, turning to Herbie, he whispered confidentially, in a voice just loud enough for Peter and Lois to overhear, “You know better than to bring someone here who hasn’t made his mind up yet.”

“Don’t panic,” Herbie said.

Facing Lois, Peter could only shake his head, as though he were mute, the words nailed to the cross of his spirit. The doctor was sitting now at a small metal desk in a corner of the room, browsing through a medical journal. “The fee,” he said, his large fish mouth the only part of his face that moved, “which is a special one for you, will be four hundred dollars, payable in cash before the operation.” He wrote some figures on a prescription pad, reminding Peter of a used-car salesman who had sold him an Austin that ran nervously for a week and then died irrevocably. “As a matter of fact,” he added, “I usually charge more.”

Herbie looked like a proud father; he had predicted beforehand, almost to the word, what Henderson would say. “Is it possible,” Lois said, confronting Henderson at his desk, “to make the fetus abort without an operation — you know, by exercising a great deal — or are there some kind of injections …?”

The doctor considered the matter, pressing his hands together, the tips of his fingers resting under his nose. “Possible,” he said, “but not advisable. Too dangerous.”

Lois looked as though she were about to disappear through the floor. “What about injections?” she repeated hopefully, in a dying voice. “I heard …”

“Any practitioner of medicine,” the doctor said, adjusting his glasses in a finicky, oddly feminine way, “who tells you he can abort a three-month-old fetus with injections is a quack, pure and simple.”

“Doc, what about earlier?” Herbie was curious.

“There are always accidents,” the doctor said, coming slowly to his feet. “Whatever you decide,” he said to Peter, “I hope you understand that our conversation is not to go beyond these walls.”

Peter grunted.

“Don’t worry,” Herbie said, his solace including them all.

Suffocating, Peter steered Lois to the door. “We’ll let you know if we decide to …” he said.

“What about setting up an appointment now?” Herbie said, an entrepreneur, representing the best interests of all.

As soon as they got outside, Peter promised himself, he would knock Herbie down.

“Let’s see.” The doctor took off his glasses. “Monday or Wednesday would be out of the question.”

“We’ll call,” Peter said, frantically turning the handle of the door, unable to open it.

“What about next Friday?” Lois said. “Is that possible?”

“As a matter of fact, I can take you at five o’clock on Friday,” the doctor said blandly, slightly bored, as if their decision made no difference to him. “Do you want me to set up an appointment?” The question was addressed to Peter.

“Answer the doc,” Herbie instructed him. “Is Friday a good time? You’ll have to come with her, you know.”

“All right,” Peter said reluctantly, and the door, which had resisted him, came open as if released by his acquiescence.

“Well, that’s it,” Herbie said when they were outside again, clapping an arm around Peter’s shoulders. “That wasn’t so bad, now was it?” Lois walked on ahead.

“Ahh, cut it out, Herbie” was all Peter could say. “Cut it out, for God’s sake.” There were knives in his throat. He was crying.

“I know what you’re going through, kid,” Herbie said. “I’ve been there myself once or twice.”

“Ahhhh!” Peter said.

When they got to Herbie’s car — a black 1936 Cadillac, formerly a hearse — Lois was already inside, passionately alone in a corner of the front seat, as if she had been discarded there. And looking out the window, her face against the glass. And: smiling. At what?

Like children (like lovers), Peter and Lois held hands below the level of the seat — a secret even from themselves — while Herbie jabbered. “Henderson knows his business,” Herbie was saying. “The one thing about him that I respect is that whatever else you say about him, he’s a professional. In his own way, he’s a man of principle.”

And then they were home, all the lights on inside as though someone were there. From outside, the walls seemed to pulse with light, almost as if the old building they lived in were on fire. “We have to be more careful about lights,” Peter said. Lois nodded, afraid of the dark.

| 6 |

“Let’s not do it,” Lois said the next morning. They were still in bed, though the alarm had gone off.

“Do you mean it?” he said.

“I don’t know.” She pressed her face against his shoulder. “If we love each other, Peter, maybe we ought to have the child. It won’t be so bad.”

“You know where I stand,” he said, a bit pompously, not quite awake.

“Tell me again. I want to be convinced.”

“Whatever you want,” he said.

‘What do you want?”

He didn’t know any more. “You,” he said.

His reward: she nibbled his ear. “I’m afraid,” she whispered as though it were also a secret from herself. “That doctor of Herbie’s can’t see a foot in front of him, Peter. And he said there would be no anesthetic, none at all. I’m afraid of pain.”

It had all been said — why say it again? — why not? They rehearsed their roles by improvising.

“Don’t worry,” he said, aware as he said it that he was unconsciously parodying Herbie.

She looked amused, uncannily aware, it seemed, of what he was thinking, but in a moment she was disconsolate again.

“If I got a job,” she said matter-of-factly, studying his face, “would you go back to school?”

“All right,” he said.

“What bothers me,” she said, “is that you don’t do anything and that you don’t want to do anything.”

Her intensity frightened him into laughter. “I want to do everything,” he said.

She shook her head. “You ought to have some kind of career, Peter,” she said. “Something. I don’t care what it is, though I have an idea that you’d make a good lawyer.” Smiling. “You do a lot of things well, but nothing well enough. The trouble is you have no ambition to do anything.”

“Did your mother say that?”

“Take gas.”

“Okay.”

“Even so, it’s true. My mother’s been wrong about things for so long, she was overdue. Peter, promise me that you’ll go back to school. If you promise …” She didn’t finish.

“What?”

“You want to do everything,” she said, kicking him, “and so what you do, you do nothing.”

He kissed the top of her head.

“And you can’t keep anything to yourself,” she said, her grievances spilling over. “You blurt everything out. And Peter, you never take offense when you should, only when you shouldn’t.”

“I’m an awful shit,” he said.

“And you’re uncouth,” she said. “You have no manners. You make terrible noises when you eat. Even Mildred noticed …”

“And you have no breasts,” he said, kissing them through her nightgown.

“Peter! What are you doing? You never know when to be serious.” She giggled. “You’re always serious at the wrong times.” Giggling, she couldn’t stop. Her amusement transfigured her — her mouth torn in a grimace of anguish; her tearful face, as she laughed with pain, unbearably beautiful.

“You don’t want me to be perfect, do you?” he said. It was an old joke between them, but better than some, better than none.

Then, pursing her lips, she was serious again. “What are we going to do?” she said.

He tried to kiss her, but she turned her head away.

‘That’s no answer,” she whispered. (It was the only one he had.)

“I’ll become a lawyer if you like, even two lawyers.”

“That’s not very funny,” she said, a remnant of a laugh escaping despite herself. “Be serious, Peter. For God’s sake, don’t kid about everything.”

“You’ll be late for school …”

She was crying, the tears falling like leaves. “What’s going to become of us?”

“We’ll both become lawyers,” he said, “we’ll form a corporation.”

It wasn’t funny. She cried.

He got out of bed, turned on the radiator, came back, freezing. Tiny explosions went off in the radiator, a clash of pots and pans. It got colder.

“Let me have a piece of the covers, honey.”

She was on her side, facing the wall, sobbing, blankets wrapped about her like a cocoon.

“Why weren’t you more careful?”

“What?”

“I’m only a child myself,” she sobbed. “That’s all: a little girl.” She laughed, still crying.

“Lois, let me have some of the covers.”

“No. You’re a bastard,” she said. “If you weren’t only concerned with your own pleasure, we wouldn’t be in this fix, damn you. Damn you.”

“I’m cold,” he said.

“I hope you freeze your things off.” She laughed, more like a shriek than a laugh.

He pulled the blankets away from her and wrapped himself in them.

“I hate you,” she whispered. She had to climb over him to get off the bed.

He grabbed her, a thickness of blankets between them, held her.

“Let me go, Peter.”

And kissed her.

“Why do you love me?” she said, sitting on his chest, studying his face. “The truth, tell me the truth.”

At that moment it seemed to him she looked more like Delilah than … “I love you,” he said, “because you remind me of someone.”

“What do you mean?” she said. “Who do I remind you of?” Her eyes turned angry, then, withdrawing into themselves, suspicious. “Do you have another girl somewhere?”

The radiator was hissing madly, spitting its venom. A toilet flushed upstairs, and again — an encore by popular request. Lois was waiting, studying his face, for an answer. “You remind me,” he said, “of our child.”

“What?” she said. Then, as if hearing his remark in the echo of her memory, she shook her head. The next moment she was in the kitchen. Peter remained in bed, wondering to himself. What did he mean by what he had said?

He reasoned that Lois was suspicious of him mainly because she had something of her own to hide. The boy in the photograph. Or someone else? Who? When he thought of it, he was jealous of everyone — even of Dr. Henderson who, in the course of his examination, had in his medical way been intimate with her. Knew all her parts by their first name. And was it even his child — this fetus, this thing? When he shook his head to change his thoughts, his wife’s lovers, their ghosts, tumbled from his ear. A rustling sound like leaves. It was the radiator. It was the teakettle. It was raining outside.

Lois called something from the kitchen which sounded like I sat in the hay.

“I can’t hear you.”

“It’s Saturday,” she said, coming into the room tentatively, not to stay. “Why are you sending me off to school?”

He didn’t know. She looked lovely in her pregnant blue bathrobe, her hair like a jungle. The lovelier she looked, the more jealous he got. He was.

She came over and kissed him, tasting of salt and orange juice and mouth. “Do you have to work today, fat Peter?”

He pulled in his gut. “Yah. But I don’t really have to go in until about three.”

“Oh!” A lament of disappointment. At what? Did she think he wanted to go? Or was it that she was sorry he wasn’t going sooner? Her face drifted away from him as if a wind had blown across it. He closed his eyes and smelled from somewhere the smell of damp wool burning slightly. Was something on fire? he wondered. He sniffed again and it was gone.

“Anyway, you’re much better than your brother,” she said unexpectedly.

He opened one eye. “What’s the matter with Herbie?” “What isn’t?”

He tested her: “Maybe I won’t go to work today,” he said.

“We’ll do something.”

“What will we do?” She sounded dubious.

Something. He lolled in bed, a sleeping dog, while with cat pleasure she brushed her straight black hair, which extended, he noticed, he watched, to the edge of her butt.

“Lois,” he called softly, the sound against his throat like the brush against her hair.

Absorbed, her face like a ghost in the mirror, she continued to stroke her hair, dreamily, the rhythm quickening, the brush climbing down her hair, with pleasure, with great pleasure.

“Lois.”

“What?” She continued to brush — the voice, the acknowledgment, from somewhere else.

“Lois.”

“What do you want?” She stopped brushing.

“You,” he said.

“What for?” She smiled cannily. “I’ll make you breakfast as soon as I finish with my hair.”

Her hair became leaves, became trees. He was walking in the country, Delilah with him, leading him by the hand to a secret place in the woods, a grove enclosed by trees. “I wait for you here,” she said, “but you never, never come, you never come for me.” Lying in the grass now, he next to her, she said love. “But you’re my child,” he said. “Listen,” she said, her mouth to his ear. He listened. Remembered. Love. Her kiss. Remembered it. And all the time, without his knowing, without anyone knowing, they had been lovers. He opened his eyes, and she … It had never happened.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Lois said, her voice strangely charged. “But you look so beautiful when you sleep.”

He put his hands over his face. “Come to bed,” he said.

She shook her head, watching him with curious detachment, as though he were on exhibit under glass.

He took her arm. Pulled. “You look beautiful,” he said.

“You’re hurting me, Peter.”

He let go.

“You were dreaming of another girl,” she said, moving away from him, “and I woke you.” She was in the kitchen again, the familiar sounds of her activity coming through like a novelty record he had heard once too often.

“Lois,” he called in a loud voice, “come back here.”

He was surprised that she returned (an armistice in the war of wills?), disturbed at his inability to understand her. “I’m making you breakfast, like a dutiful wife,” she said.

“Are you in love with someone else?” he said, the question unintended, surprising him, as though someone else had asked it. He didn’t want to know.

Lois shrugged, started several times to say something, shook her head.

“Forget it,” he said.

“I’ve always been in love with Stanley,” she said, a faint smile somewhere in the tight line of her mouth.

So. He listened to the voice, unlistened to it, incredulous, as if he hadn’t already known. And he discovered — a murderous insight — that for all his suspicions (all of them: millions), he hadn’t known anything until this minute. He refused to believe it. Only in his dreams were they lovers.

“Since we were children,” she added as if talking to herself, musing, sipping her fingers.

And without looking, Peter could see them, a ten-year-old couple, a born dance team, Lois and Stanley going at it like monkeys in Lois’s mother’s kitchen, the crowd cheering them on. The youngest of their kind, someone said. It’s a world record. He turned to the wall and they were there.

“Do you hate me?” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“You told me,” he said, “when you told me about him the first time, that you no longer loved him.” Anguish, rage, love, like fish bones in his throat, choked him.

“I love you both,” she said sadly. “You don’t want me to lie to you, do you?”

“No,” he muttered, and got up and turned off the heat.

“I love you too,” she said.

He paced the room, caged, furious, knocking over a chair, two chairs; a table hit him back. “God damn you!” he yelled, but no sound came out. Lois was on her back, staring at the ceiling, which, according to the landlord, was newly painted colorless.

“Peter …”

“What?”

“Will you love me, will you make love to me?”

“Why don’t you get Stanley?”

“I can’t. He hates me for marrying you.”

“Well, I hate you more than he does.”

“Dear God, I know, I know.” And she began to cry. “I know.”

“I didn’t mean it, Lois,” he said, coming over to the bed. “I’m sorry.”

Watching her cry, he drowned.

“Go away,” she said, meaning I can’t stop crying: love me. They kissed under water, under salt, slipping. Sticking. Without desire, with their clothes on (he in torn pajamas), Peter loved his wife and other ghosts. Under water.

“You hate me,” she whispered, a bubble.

“I don’t.”

You do. Don’t. Do.

Dont hateyoudonthateyou.

And leaves, dead lovers, Stanley, Gloria, Delilah, others, children, strange ghosts, sea monsters, movie stars, name bands, vocalists, swimmers: they went at it. All of them. Under water. Impersonal as fish, as husbandandwife, as fish.

Too many strangers, strange ghosts at once, is exhausting.

Among them, someone — Lois — said, “We’re so much alike, it’s like incest.”

Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t. “I love you,” he wanted to say, but he couldn’t — out of breath, drowning. Lost, he went deeper, as far as he could go, to an apparently bottomless place, a den of dragons, where he found her, his wife, his sister, himself, hiding, alone, without skin, found himself there, tourist and voyeur. Lover.

“God, I love you,” it said, himself said, loving her. At the moment he loved them all, loved all the others too. And Lois. She murmured something unintelligible. What? He heard what he heard. He loved her.

Afterward, in his dreams, he felt a sense of loss.

| 7 |

Lois was in the shower, washing off the day’s dirt, when someone rang the bell. Peter Becker? Who else could it be? He had a knack, a life history of showing up at the wrong time.

“Just a minute,” she called in a voice just loud enough to discharge her of the obligation of answering. One regrets the intrusions of the past.

The longer Peter waited the more panicked he became. What presumption it had been to show up unannounced after all these years, seedy, tattered, the sour look of failure. It was out of pity — how else explain it? — that she had invited him to dinner, charity from the soup kitchen of nostalgia; he couldn’t afford it. Still, there were questions he had to ask her …

He was already down the street when the door opened.

“Peter … Peter. Where are you going?”

He turned around reluctantly. “I just remembered,” he said, waving. “I have another appointment.”

“Jesus,” she said. “Come on in. You have an appointment here.” She stood in front of the house, shivering, frail in a black silk dress, her hair blowing loose.

“All right,” he muttered. His feet were cold. He trudged back across the matted snow, his footprints immortalized coming and going.

“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” she said, fluttering, nervous about him, “but I had just taken a shower, I wasn’t dressed.”

He nodded, following her inside, afraid that Patton would be there, curiously disappointed that he wasn’t.

There was no one else in the apartment. Lois excused herself, to finish whatever it was, in the disguise of getting dressed, that she had left undone. Alone, his coat still on, Peter toured the living room, an aimless search, mostly to warm his feet. A swollen African madonna hung on the lip of the fireplace, ready to give birth. He prodded the navel with his finger and had the curious sensation, the belly warm from the fire, that there was something moving inside. In an odd way it disturbed him.

He inspected the apartment as though it were a museum. He felt somehow that he ought to take notes on what he saw, but it would look foolish if Lois came in, and he hadn’t a pencil anyway. There were some prints on the wall — he recognized the Klee and the Picasso — and an original painting (a portrait of a girl in black), book shelves filled with new books, fiction in dust jackets, some paperbacks (also new), a few expensive-looking art books, a few books left over from the days of their marriage. In his browsing he discovered a copy of Ulysses he had once given her as a gift. A terrible nostalgia overwhelmed him. He took the book off the shelf, just to hold it in his hands, a dusty book, as if it were the past itself. He vaguely remembered having written something in it: an inscription. What was it? He closed his eyes and tried to recall it — the book burning his hands — but all he could remember was “. … for the season of memory. Love always, Peter,” which was something else, from some other occasion. His memory its own season, burning without light. Still, it was enough to hold the book in his hands — too much. Tears hung fire at the back of his eyes. In holding the book, he seemed to unlive the years, dead and wasted, that separated him from it. If only it were possible for him to begin again, to start over at the starting point — with Lois, with himself. He blew his nose. (Nostalgia warmed him like a sun lamp.) With a lover’s delicacy, he opened the book as though it might crumble in his hands and found no inscription inside, no word to indicate that it had been a gift from him. Could the past erase itself of its own volition? Spooked, he shuffled the pages, looking for evidence of his memory and found, stumbling on it — a curiously painful discovery — that the front page had been neatly clipped out, the scar barely visible. He was sorry he had looked. Reminded of the time he had searched her purse in the bathroom, he suffered the memory of his humiliation — a man perpetually embarrassed at himself. Hearing Lois, he hurriedly slipped the book back into its place. As he turned to her he realized — a delayed image — that the book had been put away upside down; she would know that he had looked at it, that he knew. What difference did it make?

Lois was solicitous, polite, treated Peter with conscientious kindness, as though he were an old friend of an old friend — buried him with charity.

In turn, he withdrew, answered when spoken to, accepted whatever was offered him. It was terrible. All through the meal — a fine dinner of steak, baked potato, red wine — he wanted to break something. An accident, he succeeded in knocking over his half-filled glass, spilling wine on the brocaded white linen tablecloth, the stain purple, swelling.

“Damn!” she said softly, staring at the stain with horror, as though it were something she had lost of herself. “Don’t worry about it. It’s all right.” She looked up, smiling, a crease of pain in her eyes.

“It was an accident,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “What else could it have been?”

“Look,” he said, not looking at her, “why did you walk out on me?”

He could almost feel her wince. “What?” she said. “Excuse me, I didn’t hear you.”

He shook his head. “I want to understand my life,” he said. “I want …” There was no point in continuing.

She refilled his wine glass, the amoebic stain like a huge hand between them. “Be nice, Peter,” she said. “Please.”

The steak tasted to him like his own flesh, but he continued to chew it vengefully, without appetite, unable to swallow. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

He looked up, met her eyes — pinched, unloving — his whole life a mistake. “What’s the use?” he said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“It doesn’t matter …” She covered her face with her hands.

“Lois,” he said. The table was between them; the stain continued to swell. “My life has been a series of mistakes and I seem to make the same ones over and over, whatever I do is wrong.”

She looked up, shrugged, besieged by some dim memory of her own.

“What went wrong?” he said, barely a whisper.

She turned her head as if she had been struck, and was too proud, too much in pain to acknowledge that it had happened. “What do you want, Peter?” The question an accusation.

You. The past. He couldn’t answer.

“I don’t mean to be a bitch,” she said, “but you can’t show up after fifteen years and make claims on my life. Don’t demand so much.”

“What am I demanding?”

“You know very well … I’d better start the coffee. Eat your steak, it’s getting cold.” She took her own plate, half finished, into the kitchen.

“Lois, I don’t want anything,” he said; she closed the door behind her, between them.

His food was cold.

She came back in a few minutes, smiling tremulously, the resolve of a new face. “The coffee will be ready in a few minutes,” she said. “Are you through?”

He nodded. “Very good, the food,” he said.

She laughed strangely. “You haven’t eaten very much.” She laughed again — a tense, sad gaiety that touched him.

“I liked it too well to eat it,” he said. “I’m joking,” he added solemnly.

She shrugged, a smile frozen across her face as though it were a wound. “Excuse me, the coffee should be ready.” She buzzed out, smiling, then back, grabbing his plate, smiling, and out again. And back.

“Where would you like your coffee?” she said. “We can have it in the living room, if you prefer. Or doesn’t it make any difference?”

“I don’t care …” She served him his coffee at the table and was off into the kitchen again for something else.

Her strangeness made him shy of her. “Lois,” he said softly, more to himself than to her, “what are you doing?”

She returned. “Did you say something, Peter?”

“No,” he said. “No.”

The longer they faced each other the harder it was to talk, to say anything that wasn’t only talk.

“You used to take milk and coffee in your sugar,” Lois said. “Sugar in your coffee, I mean.” Her laughter like a cough. “Both of us have changed,” she said.

“How have you changed?”

She started to say something, thought about it, pursed her lips, shrugged. “I don’t want as much as I used to … Would you like some brandy, Peter?”

He shrugged. It was impossible to talk. What had he expected? he asked himself. Sitting in the room’s one comfortable chair, a glass of brandy in his hand, Peter had the impatiently determined look of a man who knows that if he waits long enough, the weather will change. And nothing happened. There was no weather. Lois talked to avoid the silence, but the silence remained like a ghost in the room, denying her words.

There was nothing but talk, punctuated by paralytic grins, as if in a nightmare of hell they were doomed to rehash commonplaces over and over until madness.

“Are you happy?” he asked, interrupting her in the middle of an anecdote.

“I’m happy,” she said, holding on to a smile that seemed to bend her mouth under its weight. “As much as anyone is. Yes, I’m happy. Why did you ask?” She glanced at her watch.

“I suppose I should go,” he said, lethargic, enveloped in the chair’s comfort.

“Do you think I look unhappy?” she said, her voice anxiously casual.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking at her, his eyes evading the implications of their knowledge. She was still a lovely woman, but a vague sense of disappointment tortured her face, as if her life had promised wonderful possibilities and for no accountable reason had failed to make good on them. He might have been looking in the mirror.

“I don’t think I’m unhappy,” she said. “As I told you, my work — Let’s talk about something else. Why did you come back to New York?”

“To begin again.”

“To begin what again?”

He stood up to explain, realizing suddenly that the painting on the wall — the childlike girl in black — resembled Lois, a much younger Lois, though not as he remembered her. “Do you ever think about the past?” he said, musing, the question asking itself.

In a moment, Lois was standing. “You never give up, do you?” she said, nervously lighting a cigarette, discarding it, walking across the room as if she were late for an appointment. “Do you want to know what I remember most about our marriage?” she challenged him.

What could he say? Yes, but not that answer. He nodded, closing his eyes, aware of what was coming as surely (as painfully) as if he had been through it before.

“I don’t blame you for it really,” she said, her voice tightly controlled, “but I don’t want to be continually reminded. I have the feeling sometimes of being so dirty, beyond hope of ever being clean again.” She turned, smiling. Her face tilted, collapsed.

He approached her, his right leg half asleep. “It was a mistake, Lois,” he said. “I shouldn’t have permitted it.”

She sighed. “Why did you?” Tense. Reproachful.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I was afraid you’d do something to yourself if I tried to stop you.”

“You damn fool!” Her face blank, as if the words had come from somewhere else. “God, don’t you ever understand anything?”

He wagged his head, dumb.

“You knew,” she said. “It’s inconceivable to me that you didn’t know.” Her voice soft, her hysteria like a hum in the air.

“What should I have known?”

She tossed her head in a paroxysm of irritation. “If you had said, ‘Don’t,’ if you had taken a stand … You fool! You fool!” The room grew smaller, the ceiling plunged downward. She continued to rail at him.

And the worst of it was, he had no other place to go. There was no place to go.

| 8 |

“Don’t be afraid to talk to your passengers,” Sclaratti had advised him. “They expect it, compa. They think we’re all a bunch of goddamn characters.”

Thursday, when he lost her in the park, was the last time Peter saw Delilah. He missed her on Monday, late himself — he had taken a fare to Long Island, unable to refuse, had gotten lost coming back — it ruined the day for him.

That night he fought with Lois for no reason, because she wanted him to be a lawyer instead of a cab driver. And all the time defending himself like a lawyer.

On Tuesday, Peter was at Delilah’s school at two-fifteen, eager to see her, full of explanations. Hundreds of students poured out at once from several exits, and when Delilah didn’t show — had he missed her again? — he stopped a boy and girl and asked about her.

“Does she play the flute?” the boy asked, impatient to leave. Peter didn’t know — the cello, he thought, though he wasn’t sure.

He asked others.

“Oh, you mean Delli,” a pale blond boy said. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“Was she in school today?” Peter asked, looking around him at other girls, distracted. “I’m supposed to … it’s my job to drive her home.” Someone laughed.

“She hasn’t been in school since Wednesday or Thursday, if I’m not mistaken,” the pale boy said officiously, his delicate face sustained by the pleasure of self-acknowledged superiority. A small group, mostly girls, had assembled around Peter.

“She was in on Thursday,” a girl’s voice reported, “but she’s been out since then.”

“Where has she been?” said Peter, the question hurled at the group like an accusation, as if Delilah’s absence were the result of their conspiracy against him.

“If you’ve been hired to drive her, as you say, you ought to know,” the pale boy said.

“Delli is sick,” someone said, a short girl behind a taller one.

“We all know that.” The pale boy tittered.

“Shut up, you creep. I mean, she’s really ill. Delli is …”

“Don’t be so maudlin,” the boy said, winking at Peter. “You’ll make us all cry.”

“What’s the matter with her?” Peter spoke to his informant, an unbreasted robin with freckles and glasses. They walked down the steps together.

“I’m not sure,” the girl said in a confidentially reverent voice, as if they were standing at the sickroom door. “I spoke to Delli’s mother on the phone yesterday. They’re all very worried about her.”

“I see,” he said, worrying not seeing, haunted by premonitions of possibility.

“Delli told me all about you. My name’s Nancy, by the way.”

“My name’s Peter, Nancy,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

“What did Delilah tell you about me?”.

“Just that she knows you … that you drive her home. I really have to go now. I have a ballet lesson.” She extended her hand.

Peter shook the hand, returned it, offered Nancy a ride home, on the house — an opportunity to find out about Delilah — which she promptly refused.

“I couldn’t,” she said, looking away.

“Why not?”

“You know.” Her face reddening.

“What do you mean?”

“Delli’s my best friend. Good-bye, Peter.” A coy smile.

“What do you think’s the matter with Delilah?” he called after her — prettier from behind, he noticed — but Nancy went on, sighed, turned the corner without looking back.

For hours afterward, for the rest of the day Peter worried about Delilah’s illness (like, what does really ill really mean?), worried that it had been brought on by something he had done, or something he hadn’t done. He was vulnerable either way. And anxious.

So in the evening, concerned about Delilah, Peter decided to call her home to say that he was a friend from school, and inquire, as a friend might, about how she was, but once inside the phone booth he lost his nerve. Afterward, driving around aimlessly, he tried to make sense of his behavior. What was he afraid of? he wanted to know. The only answer that came to mind was Nancy’s insinuation: You know. But of course he didn’t. And he did. A woman he had never seen before waved at him. He smiled back at her. “Taxi, taxi,” she called as he passed her, and Peter looked around, surprised that there was no cab in sight. For a moment, abstracted, he had forgotten that he was driving one. He was sometimes haunted, sometimes forgetful.

Lois, coming up from the quicksand of a dream, had wakened abruptly during the night, caught in the grip of some dim terror, alone — Peter asleep, unavailable. And the dream, which remained only a shadow, returned to taunt her, repeating itself in her mind, against the knowledge of her will. A small girl again (almost, it seemed, a dwarf), she was walking on the boardwalk at Coney Island; a faceless boy, who reminded her of Stanley, was holding her hand. Carnival music blaring from a loudspeaker somewhere overhead. And fireworks in the sky like waves of light, like bomb bursts, like acrobatic clouds. “Is it the Fourth of July?” she asked her companion, who didn’t know. “It’s somebody’s birthday, I think,” he said. Then, among the explosions of firecrackers there was a louder noise; a real explosion, it seemed, shaking everything, water and sand spilling over onto the boardwalk, drenching her ballet slippers. Her companion said not to worry; it was part of the display. She wanted to believe him, but in front of them the boardwalk came to a sudden, jagged end, falling off like a cliff into nothing, into unending black space. And people, other couples, were walking blithely over the edge, some were even singing. Her companion began to sing, “Allons enfants de la patrie, vive la guerre, vive la guerre, vive la guerre,” which wasn’t the way it went. People around them cheered. What worried her most was that because of the explosion, there wouldn’t be any way of getting off the boardwalk. “Follow me,” her companion said, an older man now — and soon, without much difficulty, they were on the beach. It was lovely: the sand bone-white and gleaming, as though it were made of glass. And everyone there seemed to be in love with someone else, as if it were impossible to be there and not be in love. Her mother and father were embracing on a blanket at the water’s edge when a wave went over them. When the water receded they were gone. “Don’t panic,” her companion said, “people drown at the beach every day. It’s an ordinary occurrence.”

The next moment she saw her mother, waves buoying her up, floating like a log toward the shore. The man put his hand over her eyes.

“I want to see,” she said. “Please.”

“It’s better that you don’t know,” he said, leading her to another part of the beach. She tried to free herself of his hold, but he was so much stronger than she that there was nothing she could do; it was pointless to struggle — her fate, such as it was, in his hands.

He was stroking her hair, consoling her.

“I didn’t hate her,” she said, crying. “I didn’t.”

“No one’s blaming you, dear,” he said gently. He was holding her down, one of his hands inadvertently touching the inside of her thigh. He, her guardian, seemed to be undressing her — for what purpose? she wondered — when it struck her that she was being raped, by a man old enough to be her father. She tried to scream but no sound would come out, the sound of her terror knotted in her throat; she kicked him to free herself, hitting him in the neck with the side of her shoe. Afraid that he would attack her again if she gave him the chance, she continued to kick him until it was clear that he was helpless. Someone was coming. She ran. The water getting deeper as she went, impeding her progress. A voice calling to her, several voices, a police siren. She decided to turn around, to face what she had done — the enormity of it gripping her — when she awoke.

The more she thought about the dream — the dream haunting her against her will — the more frightened she became. She felt terribly alone, as if everyone she knew (or had ever loved) had suddenly died.

“Peter,” she said, leaning over him, “are you awake? Peter?” Shaking him. “Talk to me.”

He grunted, moved imperceptibly.

“Peter, help me. Talk to me. Please,” she begged him.

“Impossible to stop at every traffic light,” he moaned.

“Peter … please!” She knew, though she continued to shake him, that it was no use, that when he was like this, he was impossible to wake up. “I’m alone,” she said to his ear.

He rolled from his back to his side. “The traffic,” he mumbled.

“Peter, I need to talk.” He wasn’t there.

“You’re a bastard,” she said, kicking him. “Peter … you …”

He mumbled something wordless, the crumpled sounds of indifference, then began to snore as if he didn’t know that she was there and needed him. She climbed over him onto the cold linoleum floor. “You don’t love me,” she said to the bed, to her husband who was there and wasn’t there. He moaned. She couldn’t find her slippers.

The room — the living and bed room of their marriage — was, she discovered, full of monsters. Shivering, she wended her way across the room, awful wings careening above her; but as she was brave, afraid only of the future, no monster dared to touch a hair of her. She went into the bathroom and put on the light.

When Peter stirred — the alarm waking him — he was alone in bed.

“Lois …” A light spilling from under the bathroom door, a liquid running out, freezing yellow. He followed it, holding its tail as he went, arriving, finally, at the sun, which originated in fact — why hadn’t he noticed before? — from the seat of the toilet. And the sun, he discovered — its brightness dazzling him at first — was in reality made of piss. The sun was made of piss. He was the first man to know. As he was about to tell Lois of his discovery, he came awake, amazed to find himself still in bed. He felt the beginnings of a headache over his right eye.

Where the hell was she? Remembering the light and something else — the fragment of a dream … something … what? — he pounded, rubber-legged, to the bathroom and found it empty.

“Hey, Lois,” he called, maddened by the absurdity of continually misplacing his wife. “Answer me, Lois, for God’s sake. Where are you?”

He found her sitting in a corner of the kitchen, staring at the stove, sipping her fingers.

“Why didn’t you answer when I called?”

She continued to stare at the stove as though she were catatonic. “I don’t know,” she said.

He made an effort to control his rage, knocking a cup off the table with his elbow. Barely raising her head, she looked up at him mournfully, then turned away.

“What’s the matter?” he said softly.

She mouthed the words without speaking them. “You are.”

He turned on his heels and went out, without a word, the bile of his rage choking him.

When he felt in control of himself he returned to the kitchen. Lois, baleful in her grief, waited for him. And again, as before, they rehearsed their grievances.

“Now I know why I don’t want your child,” she said at the peak of her anger.

“Are you sure it’s my child?” he yelled back.

And when she didn’t answer, he grew wild. “Who have you been screwing?” he bellowed, kicking a chair across the room.

“Fuck you,” she said contemptuously, her face ashen with a mixture of hate and fear. He raged, wanted to kill her.

“If you so much as touch me,” she said, challenging him with her contempt, “I’ll scream for the police.”

“I’ll never touch you again,” he growled, retreating to a chair in the far corner of the room.

And then suddenly: the dull pressure of silence, as if it was over, as if there was nothing more to be said. Not really a truce between them, but a point in which their war seemed beside the point, both sides conceding death.

I’m sorry, he thought of saying to her as she was putting on her coat, getting ready to leave for school, but since it was untrue, he couldn’t. So he let her go without saying it, sorry as soon as she was gone that it remained unsaid. Saying nothing was worse than nothing.

Enraged, he smashed whatever dishes remained in the sink, then had a good cry, in love with his wife, whom he hated (whom he loved).

That evening, his eye on his troubles, Peter got robbed and mugged in Queens — of all places — by a well-dressed, rather gentle-looking middle-aged man. Before he knew what had happened, he was being shaken awake by a policeman, a spotlight moving in and out of his face as if it was searching for something. “What’s a matter, Jack, you have one too many?” The voice from behind the flashlight.

“My head …” Peter explained.

“You’ll have to sleep it off somewhere else,” the cop said, pointing his flashlight at Peter’s neck.

“Sleep what off?” Peter wanted to know.

“You’re in a No Parking zone, Jack, and I’m doing you a favor by warning you, so don’t get wise with me. I’m giving you a minute to get your cab moving. You have fifty seconds now.”

Fuck you, he didn’t say, withheld it like a belch. It choked him.

The cop stood at the door of the cab, holding his watch up to the eye of the flashlight, as though he were studying the time, trying to make sense of it. “You have thirty seconds,” he said. “Twenty-five … twenty …”

Peter drove off, cursing under his breath — his head, a tubular balloon, miles away from the rest of him. When he turned his cab in he discovered that he was missing fifty-five dollars. And his head, what was left of it, hurt like hell. What had the bastard hit him with?

And when he came home he almost thought he was in the wrong apartment, Herbie and Gloria sitting in his living room, his only room, finishing off his only bottle of bourbon, talking to his only wife. He couldn’t believe it. Yet it was too much like a bad dream, actually to be one. Peter closed and opened his eyes several times, but Gloria and Herbie remained sitting in his living room like relatives. And Lois, apparently still angry at him from the morning, refused to look at him.

While Herbie was lighting a cigar, Gloria whispered something to Lois and they went off together, like club women or conspirators, into the kitchen. And what was it about? It made Peter sweat, his head beginning to ache again.

“How’s business?” Herbie asked, squinting at one of Peter’s paintings, hanging lopsided in an unlighted corner. Herbie straightened it. “Nice,” he said dubiously.

“Why did they go in the kitchen?” Peter said, suspicious of Herbie, of everyone, his head itself plotting against him.

Herbie shrugged modestly. “Gloria’s telling her what to expect.”

“What to expect?”

‘You know …”

Peter was horrified. “Look, Herbie, I don’t want ….

“Forget it,” he said, his arm on Peter’s shoulder. “Don’t worry so much about everything.”

It was too much to bear. Rage burning his chest, Peter swung his arm, heavier than he remembered, at Herbie’s thick mouth, the object of his animus. He missed — Herbie had stepped back — and tumbled through fires of pain onto the red linoleum floor, asprawl, face down, half conscious, aware of too much.

“Never telegraph your punches like that, kid. If you’re going to throw a surprise punch, look the other way …”

Peter sighed, didn’t move.

“Hey, Pete, you’re all right, kid. Take a deep breath.” Herbie bent over him. “I’m not sore at you. For God’s sake, the back of your head’s bleeding. Glory, come here, will you? How did it happen, kid? That didn’t happen when you fell, did it?”

“I was robbed,” Peter mumbled.

Herbie, with Gloria’s help, lifted him onto the white bedspread. “I would have let him hit me if I had known,” Herbie said.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“It looks like someone hit him on the head. Let Glory look at it; she used to be a nurse or something.” “I was a dental receptionist, not a nurse.” “Look at it and shut up.”

“I can’t see anything, Herbie, he’s got too much hair. His hair is in the way.”

“Here, let me look, will you?”

“Maybe we ought to call a doctor or — ”

“No, no. What is a doctor going to do? You have to stop the bleeding first, anyway, before you can do anything.”

“I once had a first-aid course. There are seven known pressure points. In the back of the neck — ”

“Quiet. It’s too late for first aid. We’ll have to — ”

“Ask him where it hurts!”

“Stupid, he’s out cold. Does anyone have a knife? The thing to do is cut it off at the roots.”

“I’m awake,” Peter yelled, “don’t cut anything.” But when he opened his eyes, the lids coming apart like petals, he saw nothing, only shades of blackness like patches one on top of another drawn tight. He blinked his eyes to no purpose, meteors circling his head; a red one with a striped tail had gotten inside and was trying — chopping at his brain — to get out.

He bumped into Lois, who was next to him, curled up in a kind of fetal position — her behind on his side of the bed. She’s asleep, he thought, it’s the middle of the night.

But then she wasn’t sleeping. “Are you all right, Peter?” she said, in a voice tremulous with concern.

“I can’t see,” he said, but he saw Lois, who was in a white flannel nightgown, her hair done up in braids; he saw her perfectly. With absolute, incredibly absolute clarity.

“Oh, my poor Peter.” She touched his eyes with generous fingers.

“I can see now,” he said. “Where’s Herbie and Gloria?”

“They left a long time ago, baby. I think you have a temperature. Your head is terribly warm.” Her mouth’s cool touch burned.

“I’m all right,” he boasted.

“I think I ought to call a doctor, Peter. I think so. Your head’s burning up.”

“I’m fine,” he insisted. “You see … what it is, there’s this flame in my head that goes on and off. When you touched me just now it went on.”

She laughed. “You’re out of your mind,” she said as though it were a grace. She kissed his forehead again, tasted his fever, lingered.

“If you don’t watch out,” he said, “you’re going to burn the house down.”

“Do you know,” she said, turned away from him, “sometimes, like now, I love you so much it frightens me.”

He closed his eyes and let it pass over him like a cool breeze, like a dream. “Would you repeat that, please?”

She touched his forehead with her hand, an official gesture of care. “You’re much cooler now, Peter,” she said. “You really are. I think your fever is completely gone.”

It was. It was gone. And, of all things, he missed it.

Lois had turned over onto her side, was trying to sleep.

“Who invited Herbie and Gloria, anyway?” he said, and waited and waited for no answer.

He reached his foot under the covers so that it touched her. She shivered in her sleep, moved away from him. “What are we going to do?” she muttered.

In the morning, in a dull bright glow, Peter’s fever was back, flickering in his eyes like a snake’s tongue.

With a kind of terrible tenderness, as if he were on the edge of death or breaking, Lois served him breakfast in bed — an enormous breakfast of juice, bagels and cream cheese, bacon and eggs, toast and jam, and coffee, which he wolfed down ravenously, still hungry when he finished.

“What day is today?” he said; he had the feeling he had been in bed convalescing for weeks, months.

“Yesterday was Wednesday,” she said, “today is Thursday, and tomorrow …” She smiled queerly, shrugged, looked at the wall behind his head.

“What’s tomorrow?” he said, realizing with a shock what it was in the moment of asking.

Having assembled the dirty dishes on a tray, Lois carted them into the kitchen, dropping a cup, the handle snapping off like dry wood.

She returned from the kitchen, unaccountably cheerful, smiling, carrying a cup of black coffee, her breakfast, a half-smoked cigarette floating face down in the saucer.

She sat on the edge of the bed, facing away from him. “What do you think?” she said in an abstracted, childlike voice.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” he said.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. He shrugged.

Lois started to get dressed; Peter dozing, daydreaming. “Maybe I won’t go to school today,” she announced. “Will you stay home if I stay home?”

“Okay,” he said, not sure that the conversation wasn’t a part of his dream, and his answer made merely to the ghosts of his mind’s will.

“It will be nice,” she mused. “Like it was before we were married.”

Something bothered him. “Why do you say like before we were married’?”

“I don’t know. We didn’t have to be in love then.”

“Yeah?”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” He was suddenly, the fever leaving him, terribly depressed, his head throbbing somewhere.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, still in her slip, studied him as if he were under glass, as if he were glass. “Do you think you’d feel better if you went to work?”

“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t.” He couldn’t explain.

“It was better before we were married,” she said, her face mournful, her mouth twisted as if she just remembered having eaten something distasteful.

He was too depressed to talk — something, some hand of pressure hugging his throat.

“Why was it better before?” she said. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.” She got up, concerned with the necessity of getting dressed. “Even if you stay home, I think I better go to school. I’ve been missing too many classes as it is, Peter. And then I may have to miss a few days …” She looked at him, waited for him to say something, but he stared at the wall, pretended not to know that she was looking at him. They both knew he was pretending.

“I think it was better before,” she said, “because it seemed impermanent then, doomed to end sooner or later.” She finished dressing in a nervous hurry, glancing around as if something was out of place or missing. He remained in bed, lonely, convalescing.

“Have you seen my wallet anywhere?” she asked him, her coat on, ready to leave.

He was innocent this time (that is, he hadn’t seen it), though also suspicious of himself, a known liar and voyeur. He didn’t answer.

“I know you’re not sleeping, Peter, so you can stop pretending. Have you seen my wallet? I want to know. Did you take it?”

No, he muttered, the word soundless, trapped in his throat, burning.

“I’m going to be late,” she said, frantic, tearing about the apartment from kitchen to bathroom as though her frenzy could shame the wallet into making an appearance; in desperation — a protest against the duplicity of things — she poured the contents of two handbags onto the floor. “I’m late,” she kept saying. “I’m late. And my blue bag is also missing.”

Her last words at the door: “I hope you feel better.” The irony like poison gas.

As soon as she was gone, he was out of bed and dressed, weak on his feet but willing — willing for what, he didn’t know. Before he left for work, Peter pulled out the bottom drawer of the dresser and was rewarded for his curiosity: Lois’s blue bag was there, her wallet inside the bag. How could she not have known? he wondered. It was something else to worry about.

His mistake was to report the robbery. He had had only two fares in an hour — one a ten-cent tip — when he was called to a police station in Flushing to make an identification.

The man they were holding, he was told by a knife-faced detective who bore a curious resemblance to Dick Tracy, had been picked up the night before in the vicinity of the robbery for — in the detective’s words — making improper advances to a sailor. (What were proper advances? Peter wanted to ask, didn’t.) “We found on his person,” the detective went on grimly, “fifty-four dollars and sixty-eight cents, of which more than ten dollars was in change. Which made us, as you can understand, suspicious. But then, to the best of our knowledge, no robbery had been committed last night which could be pinned to our man.” The detective paused, stabbed Peter with a look.

“I was in no condition …”

The detective cut him off. “This man we picked up, Peter — this Franklin Hart Windsor — had a toy pistol in the pocket of his coat. A kid’s cap pistol. Harmless, except that it is heavy enough to break a man’s head in.”

Peter was thinking, distracted — chronically at his unease with the police — that it would be nice, almost worth the day’s loss, to recover the money that had been stolen from him, but in his heart he anticipated only more trouble than he already had.

“We didn’t really know what we had, Peter, until the lab report came in this morning. Our men found particles of blood on the barrel and handle of Windsor’s toy pistol. What do you think of that, Peter?”

Reflexively, Peter felt the back of his head, which was still raw, soft-scabbed.

The detective smiled for the first time, his closed mouth like an iron rod bent up at the ends, an economy of gesture. “Caught you looking the wrong way, didn’t he?”

“I guess he did.” Ha ha. He wondered what they would do to him if he punched the detective in the mouth, though as a matter of tact he decided against it.

Sitting behind his desk, the detective looked busy, browsed through a pile of official-looking reports; separating one from the others, he pored over it with solemn deliberation, nodding to himself as he read, making notations with a red pencil, Peter growing increasingly impatient.

“Is that all?”

“What?” The detective looked up as if surprised to see Peter standing in front of his desk.

“Damn paper work,” he grumbled. ‘You can’t blow your nose without filling it out in triplicate.” His glance seemed to hold Peter responsible. “Pete, this description you gave us of your assailant jibes more or less perfectly with our old queer, Franklin Hart Windsor, who was picked up about two or three blocks away from where you say you were robbed. It looks to me like we have your man, Peter. How does it look to you?”

“I’d have to see him first.”

“It sounds like the man, though, doesn’t it?”

Peter shrugged, admitted grudgingly — giving nothing away — that it did.

“So as not to take up any more of your valuable time,” the detective said, with just the trace of irony in his toneless voice, “we’ll have him in here for you to identify in a very few minutes. Okay?”

As if on cue, a side door opened — a door Peter hadn’t noticed before — and a distinguished-looking middle-aged man swaggered in as though he were on a guided tour, an armed policeman his escort.

“Persecution is as old as sin,” Franklin Windsor said to the detective. He smiled at Peter as if they were old friends.

“What do you think?” The detective nudged Peter. “Take a good look at him.”

Arms out, Franklin Windsor turned himself around as if he was modeling the crumpled gray suit he had slept in.

“Ain’t he a beauty?” the guard said.

“What’s the verdict?” the detective said to Peter, winking at him.

At first Peter was sure that Windsor had been the man in his cab, but the more he looked at the suspect, the more it seemed possible that it might not have been Windsor. This man, this Franklin Windsor, standing clown-eyed between guard and detective, seemed more bloated than the man Peter remembered, though probably the night in prison explained the discrepancy — or the light, or the failure of Peter’s memory.

“Can you have him say something?” Peter asked, embarrassed at discussing Windsor as if he weren’t there.

“You have to wind me up first before I talk,” Windsor said.

“Mr. Windsor,” the detective said gently, with the soft pleasure of malice, “disrespect for the law is not going to help your case. Co-operate with us, and we’ll do our best to make it easier on you. Peter,” he continued, talking into Windsor’s face, “this man fits the description you gave us of your assailant. Take a good look at him. I want you to be absolutely sure before you make an identification.”

“Whatever you think I’ve done,” Windsor said, regaining his composure, “I assure you it was done by someone else.”

Peter knew what he meant.

“I suppose it was done by your girl friend,” the detective said, a close-mouthed smile for his audience.

“It is altogether possible,” Windsor said to the detective, “that this crime, whatever it was, was committed by you.”

The detective laughed like a man with feathers in his mouth.

“That’s not going to help you, mister,” the guard said to Windsor.

The detective laughed, a man who saw humor on all sides. “Well?” he said to Peter. “Is he or isn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I’m not absolutely sure.”

“Come on, Peter, don’t give us a hard time. You described this man to us. It’s in the report on my desk, in your own words, signed by you.” The detective smiled like knives. (Windsor, looking pleased and sad, farted.)

Peter felt the threat, the intention of threat, like the point of a weapon at the back of his neck. He had been indoctrinated in the Army to “Know Your Enemy,” and if as a matter of will he had unlearned everything else they had taught him, his knowledge of the enemy seemed ineradicable. This nerve of instinct was so well developed in him that he knew even more enemies than he had.

“It is possible that this is the man,” Peter said, the detective so close to him that he could smell the stale mint on his breath, “but since I’m not absolutely sure, I don’t think I ought to make an identification. The man who was in my cab was different in certain ways.”

The detective shook his head remorsefully, as though he were reprimanding a child. “All right,” he said to the guard, “take him away.” Windsor clicked his heels, made a Nazi salute. The guard prodded him in the back with the butt of his rifle. Windsor mock-grimaced. “I don’t mind pain,” he said to Peter as he left.

“To tell you the truth,” the detective said, sitting on the edge of his desk, “I think you’re either afraid of that man, Peter, or in conspiracy with him.” He turned his sharp face away, then back again, his eyes an assault. “Don’t you believe in law and order, Peter?”

“I believe in it,” Peter said. His hands were sweating.

“Without law and order,” the detective said, baring the teeth of a smile, “you people would go around all day beating each other over the head, stealing whatever you could get your greedy hands on.”

Peter nodded, looking at his watch, anxious to be on his way.

“You have contempt for the law, Peter, don’t you?”

“No.” It came out a whisper. “Lieutenant, I have to get back to work.”

“There’s no rush,” the detective said, going behind his desk. “Have a seat.”

Peter glanced behind him at the door, which was ajar. “Are you going to stop me from leaving?”

‘You surprise me, Peter,” the detective said, drumming his fingers on the desk. “I’m not ordering you to stay here, I’m asking you to give me a few more minutes of your time. Please sit down,” he ordered.

Peter remained standing, leaning over the detective’s desk, towering over it.

“If I let this man Windsor go,” the detective said, “the likelihood is — there are statistics that prove this — the likelihood is that he will commit the same kind of crime all over again, and the next cabbie he hits may not be as lucky as you. Do you want something like that on your head, Peter?”

“That’s not — ”

The detective cut him off. “Answer my question, Peter.”

“Of course I don’t,” he said — a forced concession.

“So what are you afraid of? A big guy like you. I don’t get it. A guy slugs me, I’d want to see his ass in a sling. I want to see him punished. All I’m asking, Peter, is that you help us enforce a law which is for your protection. Is that too much to ask of a guy like you?”

Peter suffered the question. “I don’t know,” he said, meaning “go to hell.”

“Don’t you understand what I’m saying, Peter? In this country, the law is you. You are the law.”

Peter looked at the detective for a moment as though he were looking in the mirror. “If it is me,” he said, “then I think it’s possible that I’m afraid of myself.”

The detective laughed gratefully. It was as if, without knowing it, starting from opposite positions, they arrived at the same truth. And whose terror was the greater?

Peter picked up a glass ashtray from the corner of the desk and began to play with it, tossing it from one hand to the other.

The detective’s eyes peering through private keyholes followed the flight of the ashtray. Be careful, the eyes said, I hate death. In his own voice, the detective said, “Then you’ll make an identification? All you have to do is sign your name on a sheet of paper. That’s all.”

“I told you before, Lieutenant — the man you brought in was not the one who hit me.”

“What kind of fool do you take me for?” The detective stood up abruptly and Peter had a vision of himself being shot while trying to escape from the police station. He took a tentative step backward.

Two policemen came in with an unkempt, weasel-faced man who looked like Ira Whimple. “Attempted rape,” one of them said.

“Do you want to make a statement?” the detective asked the rapist. (They looked enough like each other to be brothers.)

“She gave me the evil eye,” the man said, directing his remarks to Peter. “I couldn’t do but what I did.” “I see.” Peter nodded.

“The girl was no more than ten years old,” the other policeman said. ‘This guy’s some kind of nut, Lieutenant.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” the detective said solemnly, smiling a wink at the older of the two policemen. “Have him fingerprinted and mugged, Frank, and get a statement — he looks like a talker to me. Find out if he’s ever been booked before.”

“Sure thing, Lieutenant.”

“I’m innocent,” the man protested to Peter. “What’s your crime?”

He was out of the office before Peter could explain that he also was innocent.

“Well, I’m through fooling with you, Peter,” the detective said, looking in his desk drawer for something (a gun?). “We both know that Auntie Windsor was the one who slugged and robbed you. Are you going to make an identification or not? You know, you can be jailed for withholding evidence.”

Peter hesitated, considered the alternatives, liked neither. Sweated.

‘Well? Get off the pot.”

Peter planned to say, All right, I’ll sign it (better Windsor’s death than his own) but when he opened his mouth, “No” flew out like a dying bird.

“I’m sorry you said that, Peter.” A tear of sorrow at the corner of his mouth.

Peter walked to the door, his back to the detective, expecting to be shot down at any minute. …

“Come back here with my ashtray, Peter.”

“Sorry.” He returned the ashtray to its place.

The detective smiled balefully. “Well, Peter, I must say you’re a disappointment to me.” He blew his nose, a call to battle.

“My name to you, Lieutenant, is Mister Becker.”

The detective honked his nose again. “As I say, Peter, you’re a disappointment to me.”

Peter, bumping into a chair as he left, escaped with his life; Mister Becker, barely.

| 9 |

Afterward he was sorry, but not about that — about other things.

Fired from his job, Peter returned home early for dinner, came home at two twenty-five (a little late for lunch) and besides, there was no one there to have lunch with.

And besides: where was she?

Lois’s classes, he knew (like the back of his hand, like the underside of his tongue), were over at twelve; even if she had gone to the cafeteria for lunch and afterward to the library to get some books, she should have been back by two. He gave her a half-hour’s grace; then, benevolent, though out of work, he gave her another fifteen minutes free of charge, but somewhere inside his head the meter was running, ticking off the fare: a nickel of blood every quarter of an hour.

He found himself, for all his irritation (though perhaps because of it), desperately in love with her — his desire for her an ache extending from chest to groin. He was reminded of a Sunday they had gone for a drive to Bear Mountain, and had in an open field, under a tree, come together in a fever of love. He could almost taste the memory. They had remained in the field, holding each other all afternoon and into the night, not wanting to leave. “Let’s never go back,” Lois said. “Okay,” he agreed, “we’ll stay here forever.”

Where was she? At a quarter to four — Lois still not home — Peter stopped hallucinating long enough to call Herbie.

Gloria answered. “I’m sorry, there’s no one by that name here,” she said.

“By what name? This is Peter, Gloria. Herbie’s brother,” he added in case she had forgotten.

“Oh!” Silence. “How do I know it’s you?”

How? “Who else would claim to be me?” he said. “Also, you can recognize me by my body odor.”

Silence. “You don’t have body odor, Peter. I mean, I’ve met men who are really offensive to be in the same room with.”

“Yeah?” What could he say? “As a matter of fact, Gloria, I like your smell too.”

“It’s French perfume. Herbie gets it from some importer friend of his.”

“What’s Herbie doing?”

Gloria sighed. “He’s out of town for a while, Peter. On business.”

“When do you expect him back?”

“I’m not supposed to say anything, but really, I don’t know. Really I don’t.”

He didn’t know what to believe; Gloria had an absolute incapacity both, it seemed, for telling the truth and for lying credibly. “Is Herbie in some kind of trouble?” he asked.

“Isn’t he always?” Then, as if she hadn’t already given it away: “He went west, somewhere in the West, Peter, on some kind of business trip. That’s all I know. Word of honor.”

“Where in the West?”

She didn’t know. Somewhere in the West.

Peter added up his information: “You don’t know where Herbie is, or what he’s doing, or when he’ll be back. Do you know anything?”

“I know I’m all by my lonesome,” she said dolefully.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Love burned in his groin, the song of his sorrows. “Do you need anything?”

He thought he heard her shrug — the phone in its way a marvelous instrument — envisioned her collapsing into Herbie’s Goodwill sofa, “Stardust” crooning to her, serenading them both in the background.

“Well,” he said, tired of talk, listening.

He heard her nod.

“Can you hear the music?” she asked after a while. He nodded.

“I can’t hear you, Peter … Peter? Hey, have we been cut off?”

“Yes.”

“You! You had me worried about you. I thought maybe you’d fainted again, like last night when you tried to hit Herbie. How are you, by the way? Hold on. I’m going to turn the record over, or would you like to hear it again?”

By popular request, “Stardust” was held over for a second performance. “I made it louder so you could hear it on your end too.”

The frivolousness of their enterprise began to bother him. “Gloria, when did Herbie leave? He didn’t say anything about it last night; I don’t remember him saying anything.” He felt oddly responsible for Herbie’s flight, as if through some secret malice — his itch for Gloria — he had willed Herbie out of the way.

“Listen to the music, will you?”

He listened. He could hear her breathe; the other music, “Stardust,” seemed out of tune.

Lois came in, softly, as if she wasn’t sure she belonged. “How are you feeling?” she asked, mouthing the question.

He shrugged, “Stardust” wheezing the deadening heart cries of nostalgia in his ear.

“Tell Herbie to call me when he gets in,” he said into the phone, nagged by a disproportionate sense of deceit.

“Is your wife there?”

He nodded.

Lois, changing her clothes, watched the silence with amused curiosity. “Who are you talking to, Peter? Is there someone at the other end?”

“Gloria,” he said. “Herbie’s Gloria,” he felt constrained to add.

“Don’t make a stranger of yourself,” Gloria whispered into his ear and with that, without a good-bye, she hung up.

“Good-bye,” he said to an empty phone and felt, without knowing why, as if he had lost something he needed.

Lois, in ass-tight tan slacks and her father’s white shirt, was sweeping the linoleum floor with a pushbroom in a fury of purposeful activity — the dust dancing in the air like pollen. Peter identified with the dust, felt displaced.

She raged silently at the linoleum, which seemed, as always, to resist all efforts to change its indefinably soiled face. Without a word — too much to say to be said — they were enemies. When the floor was suitably beaten, she began on the green walls with a discolored dust rag as if they were an ancient and implacable foe. What was her rush? he wondered. And tired — her fury exhausting him — he lay down on the bed to rest. Not to sleep, just to rest, to shut his eyes for five or ten minutes.

Lois woke him five hours later.

“You’ll sleep your life away,” she said sadly.

“Am I too late?” he asked, his head bobbing up as though it had been under water. Someone had been dying in his dream, or was already dead for all he knew, the face covered with leaves, and he had been looking desperately for help — the face of the earth deserted.

‘You’re always too late,” she said, and for some private reason kissed him on the forehead. “Let’s be friends, Peter. Please, baby.”

He agreed. They shook hands on it. Then, wanting what wasn’t offered, he kissed her; she seemed merely tolerant — an ache of regret in the deepest hollow of his chest. “For how long?” he asked.

“Don’t spoil it, Peter.”

Truces, he discovered, were even harder to fight than wars.

“I was fired today,” he confessed, to show his good faith, to test hers. Then, since they were friends, he told her of his interview at the Queens police station and in telling it had the sensation of having been hit anew on the back of the head.

Lois commiserated, sitting next to him, her arm around his shoulders. “And then what happened?” she asked with a child’s detached curiosity, as though the story he was telling had nothing to do with their lives.

His stomach yawned. “When I got back to the garage, Mr. Palace, the man who hired me, said that it looked to him that I didn’t have my mind on my work, and wasn’t there something else that I would be happier doing. I said no. ‘Let’s face the bitter facts, Becker’—Peter mimicking Palace’s fast-talking officiousness — ’you just weren’t cut out to be a hack driver. Some is. Some isn’t. In another line of work, you may be another Einstein or something — how do I know? — but you’re like tits on a boar hog as a cab driver, I hate to tell ya.’ “When he had finished, wilfully amused at the recollection, Peter looked as if he wanted to cry.

“That’s a laugh,” Lois said. “I bet you were the best cab driver they had.”

He thought so too. “Only second best,” he said modestly, though in getting lost, in getting into difficulties, there was no one better — Peter a master of screwing up.

For no apparent reason — nothing he had done at the moment — Lois moved away from him, her eyes raw with the memory of some real or imaginary hurt. Her silence, indelibly fragile, seemed to accuse him of some irreparable failing — accused him, judged him and found him guilty. And what had he done?

What’s the matter? he wanted to ask her, but was afraid of what her answer might be.

“Lois …” he said gently, his voice walking over a surface of eggs.

She shook her head. “You could have identified him,” she said, “if he was the one who robbed you. There’s nothing wrong in that.”

He climbed wearily off the bed. “I did what I did.”

“But why did you …? God, I don’t understand you!” Her voice almost a scream.

“My father used to say the same thing.”

“I should have married your father,” she said quickly, choking on it. “What bothers me, Peter,” she said in the voice of sweet reasonableness, “is that this man robbed you and almost killed you, and you act as if it was nothing. And what’s worse — and this is unforgivable — you throw away your job when we need the money most, to protect this man, this pervert, from a punishment he’s earned. Do you think he’s even grateful to you, you jerk? I think he probably wanted to be punished.”

He closed his eyes, trying not to hear, the words pouring through like beads of acid, poisoning his spirit.

His refusal to defend himself gave her the feeling, against all reason, of being in the wrong. “There’s no excuse for what you did, Peter,” she nagged compulsively. “By condoning his crime — don’t you see that? — you become as guilty as he is. You assume his guilt.” She was done, smiling bitterly at some odd reminiscence.

“Let’s not fight,” he said, barely in control of his rage.

“You started it.”

“The hell who started it, let’s stop it.” He shook her to make his point.

With a cry she sprang from the bed, her eyes large with terror, as if his shaking her had dislodged the anesthetic scab from some half-healed wound.

Peter stared blindly at the wall, his rage riding in him like too much of a heavy liquid, when a shoe came crashing against the back of his head. He stumbled to his feet, red coming off the walls like waves of heat. He had the peculiar sensation of being injured somehow beyond the reality of pain.

“Stay away from me,” she said.

He located the voice at the other side of the room. “I won’t hurt you,” he muttered, feeling his head, almost surprised at finding it still there.

“When you lose your temper I’m afraid of you,” the voice said.

The room was mostly dark; a puddle of light coming from a deserted reading lamp gave him the sense of a spotlight on an empty stage — the performer, for whom it was intended, forgotten or lost. The unused light touched him with inexplicable regret.

He discovered himself absently holding on to the shoe that had hit him, as though he had intended in the first heat of his rage (embarrassed now at the realization) to throw it back. Relaxing his grip, he let it slip out of his hand to the floor, the sound of its fall much louder than he had anticipated, the noise reverberating inside his head. His throat was chalk-dry.

“You win,” he said hoarsely and went into the kitchen for a glass of water.

He let the cold faucet run for a while, testing it with a nervous finger; Lois was on the phone in the living room, talking too low for him to overhear. When he finished his drink, which for all his pains was not cold enough to satisfy his thirst, Lois had already hung up.

“Who were you speaking to?” he said, a man who was suspicious even of the water tap.

“I’m borrowing my father’s car for tomorrow.”

He nodded. It was a fact.

After Lois’s announcement there was no longer anything to argue about, so husband and wife — Peter and Lois — became friends again, compromised into peace by the irreversibility of fact. Peter thought that even in slacks and her father’s shapeless white shirt, Lois looked beautiful. And she was willing to believe that — his hair a monument to disorder, a hole in his head — he looked better than usual.

They spent the night as friends.

It was one of their best nights. In the morning she said, “I understand now why you let Windsor go.”

“Why did I?” he wanted to know.

“Because you’re a good guy; you don’t like to hurt people. Isn’t that right?”

“No,” he said.

“Why then?”

He kissed her — his wife, his child, the mother of his hopes, his Lois.

“You did it,” she said — the soft cry of a languid bird, “because you had to. Am I right?”

“I did it because you have big breasts,” he said, kissing one nipple, then the other.

“They’re tender,” she cried, “but I don’t mind.”

Then he kissed her belly, which trembled like a pulse.

“I understand,” she said. “You did it because …”

Then her mouth. Her mouth.

“I love you terribly, Peter,” she said when she could breathe again. “Do you believe that?”

(And Stanley.)

“Do you love me?” she asked.

It was like that. In the morning. In the afternoon, at three-thirty, they drove in Lois’s father’s black Ford to Dr. Henderson’s office; in the evening Peter returned the car himself, a son-in-law, a member of the family. And Lois … his wife — she bled …

| 10 |

Lying on Dr. Cantor’s couch, Peter would study the ceiling, its cracks and panels, its clouds of shadow, as though he were looking at the secrets of the universe. On his second visit he asked the doctor, who was sitting somewhere, invisibly, behind him, “Why do you think Lois walked out on me, Doctor?”

“What do you think?” the voice — kindly, soft, slightly bored — asked him back.

Peter shook his head, his mind an ultimate blank, thousands of miles of desolation from ear to ear. “I told you what I thought yesterday,” he heard himself saying.

He heard the shuffling of pages, the breath of movement. Briefly. “You said something about sexual difficulties.”

Peter didn’t want to talk about sex with someone he couldn’t see. He found a cunt on the ceiling, a cosmic box, cradled in the shadow of two enormous breasts.

It became a battle of silences. The doctor waited for Peter to talk, but Peter, studying the erotic pleasures of the ceiling, was wary of giving anything away. Peter was interested in answers. The doctor, insofar as Peter could tell, was interested in questions, also in his notebook. Also in his watch.

When the silence began to oppress him, Peter turned around, twisting his neck, to see if the doctor was still there. Dr. Cantor looked bored. Who could blame him?

“Do you think I need this?” Peter asked, sorry to be wasting the doctor’s time.

“Relax,” Dr. Cantor said gently. “It’s better if you forget that I’m here. Just say whatever comes into your head.”

He nodded. Of their own perverse will, tears pierced the skin of his eyes. “I miss Lois,” he said hoarsely.

“That’s understandable. I’m afraid …”

“I miss her, Dr. Cantor, and I don’t know why.” The words like pinpricks in his throat.

“Peter, I’m afraid our time is up for today. We’ll talk again on Friday.”

Between appointments — a charity case, he went twice a week — Peter worried about having nothing to say to the doctor, worried about boring the guy who seemed in his secretive way to be an all-right guy for a middle-aged psychiatrist. On the subway Peter had his best ideas. Riding the IRT to school, Peter could think of hundreds of things to tell the doctor — dreams, secret longings, fears, imaginary conversations, insights — but in Dr. Cantor’s office he choked; silence possessed him like an interminable dream.

“Where were we at the end of last session?” the doctor had the habit of asking. “Do you remember?” The sound of notebook pages, of falling leaves.

Nowhere. (They were two of a kind.)

Embarrassed about their failure to communicate, worried that the doctor was losing confidence in himself, Peter made conversation — a terrifying effort — with the painful self-approval of a man giving his last dime to charity. “My dreams,” he said one Tuesday, no longer interested in the ceiling, “would you like to hear about them, Doctor? I have a dream in which a woman is dying and I feel for some reason that it’s my job to save her.” He waited for the doctor to engage himself.

“Do you know who this woman is?”

“No, who is she?”

The doctor cleared his throat, a cough of a laugh, a sound like the cracking of dry twigs. “It’s your dream, Peter, not mine. I was asking if you recognized this woman as someone in particular, someone you know.”

“It could have been anyone.”

“Go on.”

“I want to save her. I know that much in the dream … It isn’t always the same.”

“Uh huh.”

“Should I tell it to you from the beginning?”

“Go ahead.” The voice full of the pumped-up cheer of boredom, weary to death of other men’s sick and sour dreams.

“Would you rather I talked about something else?”

“Don’t worry about what I want to hear. Tell me about the dream if you want to talk about it.”

Peter noticed that there was a hole in the big toe of his right sock. He wiggled the toe and watched it with bemused detachment, as if it were being moved by a will outside his own. “My ambition,” he announced — a joke on himself, “is to do something better than anyone else can do it.”

“To do what better?”

“Something,” he said, choking on a laugh.

“Surely you can be more specific than that. What are you most interested in?”

“I’m interested in being a painter, a writer, a philosopher, a historian, an architect, a lawyer, a lover …” He laughed self-deprecatingly, a nervous noise rattling in his chest and throat — the doctor judging him somewhere, invisibly. “Sometimes I think I’d like to get on a horse and ride off into the country and not come back.” He listened to himself, his voice coming back at him from some distant wall like an echo. “The thing is I can’t … Maybe I’d better tell you about the dream. Okay?” He waited for the doctor’s approval.

“If you want to.”

“The dream …” he started. He felt like a little kid on an auditorium stage reciting his piece. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. “It usually starts with my hearing a woman’s voice calling for help,” he said. “At first I don’t know where I am or where the voice is coming from. Then I discover that I’m in some kind of enormous building, an apartment house or a hospital, with hundreds of rooms, and the woman is calling to me from one of them. All she says in this desperate voice is ‘Help me, Peter. Help me.’ She repeats it over and over again, until listening to it becomes painful. I wanted to help her, Doctor, but I couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from.” When he closed his eyes he was there, running frantically from room to room, the voice — the woman of the voice — always somewhere else.

“Go on.”

Peter opened his eyes — a wonder to see the ceiling where he left it, darker now, tilted. “I had to knock down the door with my shoulder to get into several of the rooms. It was always the wrong room.”

The doctor was writing furiously. “Go on.”

Peter raised his head. Where?

“The woman was calling you,” the doctor suggested.

“The voice always seemed to be coming from just beyond the next wall.” As he went on, Peter became less and less certain as to what he was making up for the sake of the story and what actually took place in the shadow reaches of his dream. “I kept going from room to room,” he said, caught up in the pursuit, “and I had the impression — don’t ask me why — that the building I was in was a kind of funeral parlor. The place smelled of death. I had the feeling that the woman who was calling me was the only one in the building still alive.”

“And you awake before you reach her? Is that how it happens?”

No. His eyes closed, Peter crashed through the last wall, a double thickness of brick, which gave way, like some heavy liquid, at the impact of his shoulder. There were no more rooms after that. He was outside, in a garden, among roses. The woman was there, waiting impassively (for him?) in a long feathery white nightgown, fragile as a ghost. So that she would recognize him, he flew to her, the ground going down as he went up. It was suddenly dark, the exquisite white figure of the woman as if imprinted on the shadowy outline of the garden. He approached her like the floating lover in a Chagall painting, kissed her cold mouth, then fell, landing on her pedestal. She was a statue. Had she always been?

“I asked you …” the doctor started to say but stopped himself. Peter was weeping. “Anyway, our time is up for today.”

“Tell me some more about your parents,” the doctor asked him on another occasion, after a prolonged silence.

“There’s nothing to tell. What I mean is, Dr. Cantor, we weren’t much of a family.”

“How so?”

“Well, as I told you, my father played in a band that traveled a lot, so he wasn’t home very much of the time. My mother died at fifteen — when I was fifteen,” he corrected himself. “She died in childbirth.”

“I see.” Sound of pencil scratching on paper. “What was your mother like?”

He hardly remembered. “She did her best,” he said in mitigation of her failure. “Herbie and I were wild kids and Papa was home less than six months out of the year.”

“What were your feelings about your father being away so much? Did it upset you?”

Peter discovered that his foot was asleep. “A little, I guess,” he said, shaking the foot, which seemed only circumstantially a part of him. “Most of the time I got along pretty well with him, he wasn’t a bad man — he could be very nice — though he was always a little distant, as if we were just another one of his audiences to be warmed up for his performance. I got along all right with him, but Herbie fought with Papa all the time they were together. They loved each other. They fought constantly.”

“Do you know what you just said?”

Peter sat up. “What?”

“You tell me,” he said in his bored, gentle voice — his middle-aged, professional voice. “It’ll be better if you lie down, however.”

“I told you that my father was never home,” Peter guessed, adjusting his head to the pillow, unable to find a comfortable spot.

“No, something after that. About your father and Herbie.”

“That they fought?”

“Yes. And what else?”

“They used to bait each other for no reason except it was the only way they knew how to talk. Is that what you mean? For example, Papa used to call Herbie the world’s biggest bum, and Herbie would say that everything he was he owed to his father.”

“But these fights between them were a means of communication, a means of affection? Isn’t that right?” “Did I say that?”

“You said they loved each other.” The doctor was writing again.

“In a way they did.”

“Do you think your father loved Herbie more than he loved you?”

The question embarrassed him. Peter looked at the ceiling, didn’t answer.

“You don’t want to talk about it, do you? Do you understand why?”

“I think Papa loved us all when we weren’t around,” Peter whispered. “When he didn’t have to be with us, he loved us.” It hurt him to say so.

“Then you did resent him somewhat, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t resent him,” he insisted in a loud, childlike voice, remotely recognizable as his own. “It wasn’t his fault he was out of town when my mother died. He couldn’t know she was going to die, could he? Anyway, I think our time is up, Dr. Cantor.” He laughed foolishly.

“That’s all right. Go on.”

“What should I say? Herbie was bothered about it more than I was. He really hated Papa for not being there. They …”

“What about you? Did you hate him?”

Peter leaped to his feet as though awakened from a dream. He confronted the doctor face to face, an owl-glassed middle-aged man. “I didn’t hate him,” he said. “It wouldn’t have mattered to Papa if I hated him or not.”

After a month of saying nothing — nothing coming of nothing — Peter told the doctor about Gloria and Delilah, changing their names (Gloria was Doris, and Delilah, Lila) to protect them from the violation of Cantor’s knowledge.

“I don’t know if this makes any sense to you,” Peter said, “but I felt that I was in love with Lila, Doris and Lois at the same time. In different ways. Is that possible? What I mean is not that I loved Lois, Doris and Lila all at once, though sometimes I did, but I loved each one when I was with her or was thinking of her.” Lois, Doris, Lila, Peter: they seemed merely names now, pseudonyms in some wish-blown purgatory. When Lois left him they all died.

“When you say ‘love,’ do you mean you wanted to have intercourse with these girls? I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

“What do I have to do, define love for you?”

The doctor cleared his throat. “Not for me,” he said gently.

Looking at the ceiling, Peter found the cunt again, a deformity of its former self, an obscene grin like a scar on its face.

“I really had rocks for Gloria,” he confessed.

“Gloria?”

“I mean Doris. I used to get a hard-on just thinking about her.”

The doctor was writing again. “I don’t understand. Who’s Gloria?”

Peter couldn’t explain without admitting his deception; his guilt sweated his palms. “When I said Gloria I meant Doris,” he said — a deathbed confession.

The doctor found a laugh in his throat and gave it up. It was infectious. Peter began to laugh, though tensely unamused — the laughter tearing its way painfully out of him. He was unable to stop.

“Did your wife know about these other women?” the doctor asked, raising his voice sternly against the wail of sound coming from the couch.

Seizures of mirth continued to erupt in a painful rattle of sound, then stuttered to a death. Peter shook his head, withholding tears as a vanity of will. “I don’t think so,” he said; it was the first answer to come to mind. “If she did, she never mentioned it.”

“Did you have intercourse with these other girls? Doris, Gloria …?”

No answer.

“Was your wife a disappointment to you — you know what I mean — as a sexual partner? Is that why you looked elsewhere?”

Peter stared the ceiling blind. “I was in love with her,” he muttered — still, for all he knew (which was, God knows, little), in love with her.

“But you tell me you were also in love with Lila, Doris and Gloria, so what am I to make of your answer?” He cleared his throat, coughed.

“Doris and Gloria are the same person,” Peter said.

“You’re not responding to my question. What I’m asking is whether you and your former wife had sexual problems?”

Closing his eyes, a dizzying experience, he fell headlong through an opening in the floor, was in bed again with his wife, his former wife. She turned to him like a flower. “Be gentle, Peter,” she was saying. “Hurt me.” He flew out the window.

“I’m not asking you these things to pry,” the doctor said gently. “It’s important to know how you feel about certain things. Do you understand?”

“Yeah.”

“Go on please.”

“Where? What was I saying?”

The rustling of pages, labored breathing like the buzz of insects. A clock was ticking somewhere in the distance. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Lois was always afraid of becoming pregnant,” he lamented, “and I …”

“Go on.”

“It made it difficult.”

“I understand. Go on.”

“That’s all.”

“But you were married. Why should she be afraid of having a child?”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it?” He was tired of being prodded, tired of the perverse will of his memory, tired of everything.

“Not to me. I’d like you to tell me what you know.”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Talk about whatever you like.”

He imagined the doctor looking forlornly at his watch, sluggish minutes prodding the dull nerve of his patience. “It wasn’t too bad,” Peter said, “until after the abortion.” A concession to the hours of failure they shared together. “After that …”

“I can understand. You were …”

“She wouldn’t stop bleeding. She bled — it was supposed to stop — for a full day and a half; it wouldn’t stop. I called the doctor — the man who performed the abortion — but he didn’t answer his phone, no one answered. I was going to go down there and kill him, but I was afraid to leave her while she was bleeding, and the night before — right after the operation — I had left her alone.” His throat turned to sand, spilled into his chest.

“I’m afraid I lost you,” the doctor said, his tone weather-less as always. “Did you leave her while she was hemorrhaging?”

“I didn’t. I left …” He couldn’t talk. The bones of his chest stretched beyond endurance.

“Take your time. No one’s rushing you. What happened after you left her? Why did you leave her alone?”

“I left her …” It was difficult to talk. “I left her a few hours after the operation, after I put her to bed. She said then — I was tucking her in — that it was my fault, everything was my fault. I held her hand. I was suffocating. She said she wanted me to go away. She said she no longer loved me and wanted me to go away. I was suffocating. Her hate. I had to get out of there. I went to a movie. Then it struck me what I had done. I left in the middle. When I got home she was lying in a pool of sweat, white as a ghost.”

“You wanted to escape. It was a natural impulse. You see that, don’t you?”

“No. I shouldn’t have run out. If it could be undone, I’d do anything now to be able to undo it.” He thought he heard the doctor say something (the word “self-indulgence” remained in his mind), but when he turned around — the doctor’s face impassive — he saw that he had been mistaken.

“Do you want to add anything,” the doctor said, “or are you through for today?”

Peter looked at his watch. They had gone five minutes over the allotted time. It was a victory of sorts. When he got to his feet the room turned over, the desk spilled match-sticks, the yellow rug flying on its side caught fire. Peter had to hold on to keep from falling. He burned in one piece, upright.

“A profitable session,” the doctor said in his toneless voice.

That night Peter, who hadn’t talked to his wife in months, phoned her at her parents’ house where she had been living since their separation.

“Let’s try again,” he said.

“Who do you wish to speak to?” It was Lois’s mother. They had the same voice on the phone.

“I want to speak to Lois. Let me speak to Lois, please.”

“Who is this?” the voice full of wary terror. “Lois isn’t here at the moment.”

“Mildred, let me speak to Lois, please.”

There was a moment of hesitation. “I told you she isn’t here,” she said, the voice murderously cold. “Now stop bothering us, please. There’s nothing for you here.”

“I want — ” he started, but Mildred hung up before he could finish, the idiot silence haggling insanely in his ear.

Peter raged.

Doors opened somewhere, slammed of themselves, as though the place were haunted. It was to be expected. He was in a rooming house on 113th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, where he had been living for the past two weeks, the phone hanging black on the wall of a coffin-sized kitchen he shared with five other ghosts.

He called again.

“I want to speak to Lois,” he roared into the phone.

“I’m sorry, Peter,” her father said softly, “but Lois hasn’t been well and I don’t think she ought to talk to you.”

His face simmered with sweat. “What’s the matter with her, Will?” he asked gently, his voice hoarse, unnaturally solemn.

He could hear Mildred’s voice in the background. “Hang up, hang up, hang up — what’s the matter with you? Hang up.”

Will endured. “She’s been sick,” he said, a sigh in his voice — a man of perpetual grief. “She’s been … troubled.” The word delicately chosen.

“I’m sorry, Will,” he said, as though he were apologizing for something he had done. “Would you let me talk to her for a few minutes? It will be all right, Will, believe me. I wouldn’t say anything to hurt her.”

“I can’t, Peter.”

“It’s important to me, Will.”

“There’s nothing I can do, Peter, if she doesn’t want to speak to you. I’m sorry about it, but that’s the way it is.”

“She doesn’t want to speak to me? She said that?”

“Those are her orders, Peter. Sorry.” He lowered his voice. “The last time you called — about a month ago I think it was — Lois was sick afterward. We have the brunt of it; she gets these fits of depression, Peter, where she cries all the time and won’t eat anything. I think it’s better …” He trailed off, as though the effort of talking had exhausted him.

Peter looked around the kitchen. A girl, an undergraduate type, was boiling water. She smiled, showing thousands of perfect teeth. “The last time I called,” he said into the phone, “was over two months ago, Will. I don’t call often.”

“Is it that long? It seemed to me that I remember you calling about a month ago.”

“Let me speak to her, Will.”

“I can’t. I’m going to have to hang up now, Peter.” He sighed his regret. “One minute.”

Peter waited. He heard Lois’s voice arguing with her mother, Will also involved, apologizing about something; then suddenly, before he had a chance to steady himself, Lois was on the phone. “Is that you, Peter?” she said in a voice that seemed to be coming from the other side of the world. He could hardly hear her. “I can’t stop crying, baby.”

“Lois?” He couldn’t think of anything to say.

“What, Peter?”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m all right.” She laughed, sobbing. “It’s just that I don’t want to do anything.”

“Take care of yourself,” he said absently, becoming aware, despite himself, of an almost illegibly scrawled message on the wall next to the phone. No one is ever home when I call, it said.

“You too.” A whisper: a secret.

The girl, a young witch, watched her water lovingly, added salt and toad’s blood and stirred.

The floor pressed against his feet. “I want to see you, Lois,” he whispered, cupping his hand over his mouth to prevent the young witch at the stove from eavesdropping.

“I can’t hear you.”

“Can I see you some time?” he muttered. The kitchen was boiling.

There was no response at the other end — no sound of life — as if Lois were no longer there. He waited without faith, holding his breath.

The pug-nosed witch went by, carrying her potion in a coffee mug, winking her butt at him as she passed. He stared at the wall. No one is ever home when I call, it said.

“Lois, say something.”

“I can’t.” Her speech punctuated by sobs. “Every time I look in the mirror I start to cry. Something about the way I look — it’s funny — makes me cry … Leave me alone, Peter. It’s better if you leave me alone.”

“I can’t,” he said.

“Go away. Please.” Her voice rose almost to a scream. “Go away. All I want out of life is for you to leave me alone. That’s all. Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“All right,” he said in a tremulously brave voice. “All right. All right.”

“You don’t have to,” she said softly.

He laughed brokenly — a man reprieved after the execution.

“I think about you,” she whispered. “Yesterday, I remembered a time we went to the country together; it was on a Saturday, I think, and we were just friends at that time, not even lovers yet, just friends. It was in April or early May and it was a beautiful day — do you remember? — with no sun at all. We sat in the grass and just talked, sometimes in silences we talked — you know. Everything came back to me just as it was. You were chewing on a strand of grass. We hardly even touched that day. It was like the silence. Everything just happened.” Her voice wistful, strange.

He had no recollection of it. “Where in the country did we go?”

“Bear Mountain. Don’t you remember? You were wearing a blue shirt.” He tried but couldn’t remember the occasion she had described.

“I tell you what — why don’t we go to Bear Mountain next weekend?” he said, exhilarated, afraid — terrified — of being refused.

“Do you really want to? Really?”

The witch-girl had come back into the kitchen, smiling teeth and gums; it distracted him. “You must be fond of that phone,” she whispered. He nodded.

“Peter?” Lois said. “I don’t know.”

“Either Saturday or Sunday is all right with me,” he said, his sense of defeat quickening. “Whichever is better for you is better for me.”

“I can’t, Peter.”

“Some other time?” he suggested, compelled to lose everything.

“Peter,” she said gently, pitying him, “it wouldn’t be any good. It wouldn’t.”

“All right.”

“I just can’t,” she said, as if it were a physical impossibility. “You can’t live things over, once they’re over; it’s never the same — you know that. It’s less painful if we don’t see each other.”

“All right.”

“Don’t be hurt,” she said, a trace of malice in her concern.

“Who me?” he said savagely. “Nothing touches me.”

“I’m just trying to be strong,” she said piteously.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Let me have a number I can reach you at. It’s better that you don’t call me here. You understand.”

He read the number off the dial. “It’s a public phone.”

The witch laughed.

“Hold on,” Lois said.

He waited. The witch-girl was standing at the window, munching an apple, her back to him. The receiver pressed painfully against his ear; his arm ached from the effort of holding it up. Voices from somewhere within. Then Lois was back. “My mother doesn’t want me to talk to you,” she said. “She thinks it’s bad for me.” Starting as a laugh, a series of dry coughs racked her. “I’ve been smoking too much. It’s a form of compensation.”

“I’ve been sleeping too much,” he confided. “It’s impossible for me to stay awake. I fall asleep on subways and ride past my stop. The more I sleep, the tireder I feel.”

“I can’t seem to sleep,” she said mournfully. “Peter, why do you want to see me again? I have to know the reason.”

It wasn’t easy to explain. “Because I want to see you,” he said. “I miss you.”

“That’s no answer.”

“Because …” Could he tell her what he didn’t know himself? His reasons were his reasons. What else could he say?

“Why?”

“I want to make you whole,” he said. The words came by themselves; he merely spoke them.

Lois moaned softly, a painful yield, her strained breathing like a pulse in the phone. Then, as he waited for her, she was gone, the connection choking almost painlessly. He hung on, the dead receiver at his ear, waiting for the impossibility of her return. The witch-girl smiled and smiled.

“Why did I say that to Lois?” he asked the doctor at the start of their next session.

“What do you think?” Dr. Cantor said.

“I’d rather hear your explanation,” Peter said, suddenly suspicious of the doctor’s professional reticence. Perhaps the man had nothing to say.

“I think it would be better if you told me,” Cantor said gently. “Try to recall what you had in mind, what you were feeling when you made the remark.”

“How do I know you understand what I tell you, if you never tell me what you know?”

“Why should it matter to you what I understand?” the doctor said. “It’s what you understand about yourself that’s important. I explained this to you before.” The same weary benevolence.

“What if I don’t believe it?” he said, sitting up as an act of defiance, though looking at the floor and not at the doctor.

“It doesn’t matter to me whether you do or not. If you’re trying to hurt me, let me tell you that it’s having no effect. Are you ready to continue?” The doctor was writing in his notebook again.

When Peter didn’t answer, his mind somewhere else, the doctor repeated the question.

“I’d rather not,” he said. “I have no faith in it.” He had the feeling of being trapped in an airless place, suffocating, as in a dream, without hope of relief. “Nothing is happening,” he said. “Nothing happens.” He stood up cautiously and began walking, as though on a ledge outside a ten-story window, across the yellow rug toward the way out. During all this time, the doctor said nothing.

“I’m leaving,” Peter announced, in case Cantor hadn’t noticed.

“I can see that,” the doctor said. “If you want to continue with our talks sometime, Peter, feel free to call.”

“Am I making a mistake?” he asked.

“That’s for you to say,” Cantor said. “I don’t want to influence your decision. Whether you know it or not, you’ve made a good deal of progress since you started.”

“I hope I didn’t bore you too much.”

“Good luck.”

“You too.” He hung on, liking the doctor, regretting having to leave, wondering why it was that a few minutes before, he had been in such a panic to get out. “Good-bye,” he said. “I’ll certainly call you, Dr. Cantor, if I feel I need this again.”

“Remember,” the doctor said, “it’s the nature of human beings to be imperfect. To be imperfect is merely to be human.”

He came out into the air, aware of the legacy of his humanity, a free man, with no place he wanted to go, nothing he really wanted to do. He wandered the streets hungrily, as if he had just come into the world, oppressed after a while by the futility of his freedom; then he went home to his furnished room to sleep. He had a sense of being merely imperfect. He valued his loss.

That night he had a dream. Lois was being operated on in Cantor’s office by a team of doctors — he counted seven and the shadow of an eighth — all wearing grocer’s aprons.

“The more we learn,” Cantor was saying, “the more complicated this operation becomes. We know so much these days, sometimes it seems impossible to perform the most minute operation, the removal of a wart, for example, without the death of the patient. Besides, none of us is perfect.”

“I want you to stop the operation,” Peter said. “We’ve changed our minds.” Then, as he tried to get through to the operating table, two burly doctors planted themselves in his way.

“It’s too late to stop,” Cantor informed him. “We’ve already removed the head. You’ll be proud to know,” he said, beaming, “that the little creature bears a striking resemblance to its father. You’ll excuse me. These doctors can’t get anything right without my instructions. Good luck.” Cantor patted him on the back, and was gone.

Herbie came by. “Would you like a nurse while you’re waiting? It’ll help pass the time.”

Peter shook his head. “What’s taking so long?” he wanted to know.

“Who knows? Just don’t worry so much. Come on downstairs; I’ll get you a nurse.” Herbie was tugging at his arm.

He fought his way through the mob of doctors to the operating table. Henderson and Cantor seemed to be conducting, between them, some sort of class. “The three-month-old fetus is barely human,” Henderson was saying, holding up a plastic doll, “and in its atavistic way, resembles the New York City cab driver: note the low forehead and large ears.”

The operating table was empty except for some bloody mess in a black tin basin. “Where’s Lois?” he asked, interrupting the lecture.

No one seemed to know. “She slipped away during the operation,” the doctor next to him whispered. “They’ve lost her.”

“Hold him,” someone said. “He may be the one they’re looking for.” Crawling on his hands and knees — the floor slightly tilted — Peter got to the anteroom undiscovered. A three-legged cat bounded over to him, rubbed its head against his knee. He picked it up gingerly, hugged it to his face; it froze in his arms. Lois’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Peter, give yourself up. For my sake, please give yourself up. No one will hurt you.”

There was a police siren. He continued to crawl, the corpse o fthe deformed can still in his arms. Babies were crying. He begged them to be quiet. A crowd of doctors was pursuing him. One of the baby baskets was unoccupied; on his hands and knees, he crawled toward it. A woman called his name. He twisted himself around to look. Lois was standing there enormously pregnant. He awoke.

He loved her, he told himself in the grip of dark, which, as he knew — he had learned as a fact — was the nostalgia of fantasy. If you don’t love yourself, Cantor’s silence had taught him, you are incapable of loving anyone. So he wept for the death of his eternally unborn child, for the deaths of all of them: his mother, Delilah, Lois, his father, Herbie, Dr. Cantor, Dr. Henderson, for nameless others, for himself, for all he had ever wished dead, but mostly for himself. In his dreams, a man of fantasies, he loved them all.

| 11 |

Peter went to visit Gloria for an hour and stayed three weeks.

The first thing she said to him when he came through the door was, “Peter, I can’t stand being alone. I’m not used to it.”

What could he do but stay with her? (His brother’s mistress, they were practically related.)

So he stayed. But each day — his clothes, most of himself in the rooming house on 113th Street — he planned to leave the next day.

Gloria made no demands on him except that he listen to “Stardust” with her every once in a while. Though no one asked him to, Peter slept alone, had bad dreams, on the Goodwill couch in the living room.

Their evenings together were like wakes. Gloria talked about Herbie as though he had recently died — his tainted memory still fresh. Peter half listened, breathing old ghosts of his own. During the day Gloria worked (so she told him) at Bloomingdale’s, the sullen star of the flying squad, with plenty of room for advancement. But it was only for the money; in her heart of hearts, she was really a singer, among other things. Among other things, she was also something of a dancer. In the evenings, for Peter’s benefit, she practiced her dancing, tried out new and star-making routines, humming like a wounded bird in time to the heavy music of her feet. “I’m really more of an entertainer,” she confided to him one night. Peter applauded, shouted for more. The more Peter appreciated her, the darker was Gloria’s sulk. You could fool a singer maybe or a dancer, but not an entertainer. Entertainers know better. Entertainers know they can’t sing or dance; that’s their secret. What entertainers have is wisdom.

And Peter was numb. No matter what he did, it was as if it were happening to someone else. To whom? To the shadow he dragged alongside him under his feet, which gyrated when he walked as if it were trying to get away from him.

Peter was on the move so much (keep busy, everyone advised), he hardly noticed that he wasn’t there. That he wasn’t where he was. In the early morning he drove a school bus for the Collegiate School for Boys; in the afternoon from one to five he worked in a bookstore on Amsterdam Avenue. Two evenings a week, on Monday and Wednesday from seven to ten, he took classes at Brooklyn College. His latest major, his fifth in four years, was philosophy. He felt at home with epistemology. Unable to feel, he was content for the present merely to know. To know about knowing. In his spare time he juggled relationships, traveled subways (moving underground between two apartments), made deals, read books, forgot himself. And at night he didn’t sleep.

“You know, you look like one of those zombies,” Gloria said to him, turning off the phonograph — a rare moment. “You know what I think … I think you’re going to kill yourself if you don’t watch out.”

“Yeah,” he said.

The silence troubled her — she couldn’t hear it — and reflexively, as one might scratch an itch, she put a new stack of records on the changer. An album of Old Favorites. She snapped her fingers in anticipation.

“Music is the fruit of love or something,” she said, one zombie to another.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “How do you like that?”

She shook her head, pitying him. “You know,” she said, “I think you’re still carrying a torch for that girl.”

He laughed the notion out of court, showing bleeding gums, gray teeth, and other wounds. “I only have eyes for you,” he said, looking at the discolored rug — the stains, wherever they were distinguishable, an improvement on the original pattern.

Gloria studied him through veiled lids. “You’re a liar,” she summed him up, swaying in place to the music. “Dance with me.” She held out her arms.

He knew he had something to do, nagged by voiceless whispers of anticipation, but whatever it was — the ghosts of his nerves told him — it had long since ceased to matter. The flowering wallpaper bloomed and died in a moment’s vision. “I’ll just watch,” he said, getting up, changing his seat.

“You do that.” She shook, shaking everything, the music like wind in her sails. “We never do anything,” she said. “Never but never but never do anything, anything. Anything.”

Peter got up, heavy-footed, looking for something to do. There were mystery stories, women’s magazines, his own philosophy books: nothing to read. He went to the refrigerator for a beer, found none, settled with evil heart for a 7-Up.

“You’ll feel much better if you dance,” Gloria said, crossing his path. “Take my word, it takes your mind off things.”

“I should be doing something,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the couch. Standing up.

“Don’t you think I’d like to do something?” she said. “I never want to do anything, do I? You and Herbie think you’re the only ones …” Swaying in place to the music, she clutched the imaginary outline of a partner, her dreams remote, her eyes misted-over with roseate recollection.

And Peter felt the need to be doing, to be moving. He wanted to do something, though there was nothing he could think of he wanted to do. For a moment he thought of calling Dr. Cantor, whom, for no reason he could remember, he had stopped seeing. But when he thought of the details of the call itself — the painful impossibility of talk — he gave up the idea with a pang of relief. “Let’s go to Coney Island,” he said suddenly, excited at the discovery of his own suggestion, as though he had stumbled on a valued possession that had been lost and forgotten for years. “Huh? Do you like going on rides, Gloria?”

She grunted, shrugged. “If you really want to go. But Peter, it’ll take at least an hour or more by subway. And I’ve been standing on my feet all day.” She sighed her exhaustion, easing herself with ancient grace onto the sofa. “Why don’t you go yourself if you really want to go?”

“Maybe I will.” He sat down across from her, watched the flowered walls, dreamed the suffocation of their scent. “I have another idea, Gloria. How would you like to go for a ride on the Staten Island ferry?” He waited for no response. “It’s only a nickel,” he added persuasively.

Gloria was unimpressed. “What’s there?”

He didn’t know. “Staten Island,” he said with the sly confidence of an inspired guess. When he thought about it, riding back and forth on the ferry seemed a foolish waste of time. You ended, when it was over, only back where you began.

“What do you do when you get there?” she asked, tapping her foot absently. “I mean, what’s there?”

“When you get there,” he said, “generally what you do is come back. Sometimes you walk around Staten Island and take the next boat back.” He yawned, though he wasn’t sleepy. (He was hungry.)

“Big deal,” she said sadly, used to better things.

They argued other possibilities: “How about a movie?” “How about it?” “Let’s do anything, for God’s sake.” “Let’s do something.” “Whatever you want to do.” “I want to do anything, anything.” Anything? The conversation exhausted itself. They danced on nerve endings to the music of silence. There was nothing to say.

Peter went through the bones of the refrigerator like an excavator, found nothing of interest, ate everything in sight — mostly pretzels and American cheese. Gloria danced.

Then, choking on soft-stale pretzels, he dozed. And in Herbie’s tumorous red velvet armchair, he dreamed of Lois. She had returned to him, five months pregnant, lovely in a white maternity dress. “I’ll stay with you,” she said, “if you promise to wash your feet.” “Ask me anything else,” he pleaded. “I was born with that dirt. That dirt is me.”

Gloria woke him. “It’s time to go to sleep,” she said.

“What time?” He followed her into the bedroom to look at her clock.

“Where are you going?” she said, her thousand-year-old eyes amused at his presumption. “For your information, I’m going to bed now.”

“Sorry.” He retreated to his couch, horny as a church steeple (as the Empire State Building). He vowed to leave the next day, to move back into his own room, to do something.

Sleeping fitfully, he had the dreamlike awareness that Gloria was calling to him. “What do you want?” he yelled, his own voice waking him. “I’m sleeping.”

“What did you say?” she called, her voice indistinct, only the “say” coming through to him.

He climbed off the couch, irritated at being disturbed. The door to her room opened. They met, almost bumped, in the doorway, surprised to see each other.

“What do you want?” Gloria said — they both said — Peter half a word behind, Gloria laughing.

“What’s so funny?” he wanted to know, breathing her perfume; Gloria in a lacy black nightgown, a coy pink rose, a fallen flower, stationed between her legs like a guardian — the flower of her flower.

“Great minds run in the same track,” she said, patting his arm to make her point. They embraced to commemorate coincidence.

“Good night,” Gloria said, holding him genially at arm’s length.

His spirit offered only token resistance to the rages of the flesh. In heat, Peter thrust her into the bedroom, tumbling her onto the bed.

“No, Peter,” she said. “Behave. No! No! No! No!” She fought for her honor — her fury more than he had reckoned on, a reckoning in itself — scratching, biting, pulling his short hair. “Don’t mess with me,” she kept saying. “Who do you think you’re messing with?”

In pain from her assault he accounted his losses, deciding, against the vanity of his instincts, that she had meant her resistance. His spirit counseled retreat. But when he moved away and tried to climb out of bed, Gloria held on to him, her nails pinned to his back. “Don’t think you’re so tough,” she said.

He punched her in the mouth, just to get free, using his left hand so as not to hurt her any more than he had to. He landed with more force than he had intended — intending merely gesture — her face squashed momentarily, then settled back into shape. What had he done now?

“Oh,” she moaned, her tongue prodding the wound of her lip. “Oh.” Her shocked eyes wet, running. “Oh, my … lover,” she crooned.

“I’m sorry,” he said, kissing her wet face. “I didn’t mean it.”

“Brute,” she whispered, her blood between them, her salt.

Though he didn’t know why — desire its own knowledge — he found himself on the mountain of Gloria, lover and explorer, a little giddy from the height. It was less pleasure than he remembered, his feelings barely there. And afterward he felt used, taken advantage of, the gull of her whims, his mouth caked with regret.

And afterward she asked him about Lois. “What was your marriage like?”

“That’s none of your business,” he said.

“Louse.” She slapped him. “Dumb, ugly brute.”

“Go to sleep,” he said, seeking refuge in a corner of the bed.

She came after him. “You really are a brute,” she said, “a dumb brute,” punching him in the back. “You know, you’re a dumb brute.” He had to hold her hands down to protect himself.

“Cut it out,” he ordered.

She kicked him savagely in the chest, sparks of pain in the rage of his eyes. He swallowed a curse. They wrestled.

“Come on, tiger,” she said, her mouth breathing his.

What could he do? He came on, an old bird, flying. They were one tiger then, all flames and teeth. She bit his lip bloody, tore his back, devoured his tongue.

Reckless, he flew toward the sun, soaring through impenetrable terrain, through the fine scars of habit and nerve, the flames of deep wound, his wings catching fire, his chest burning. His chest. He flew higher, all of him aflame, his chest — the sun a dream out of reach. He burned to death.

“You brute,” she sang. “Oh, you …” She caught him as he fell, put out his fire, called him by name — Herbie, Peter, lover, bastard, brute — her finest, most winning, most sleep-making song. (He sang a little himself.)

He awoke in the morning, charred to an ember, in love with Gloria, in love with Lois again, in wonder at himself. And jealous of everyone. He decided he would stay a few more days if Gloria had no objections, and even if she had.

When over a breakfast of Nescafé he told her of his best intentions (love, marriage, children), Gloria sulked, explained the facts of sufferance to him. “Dontcha ever say anything to Herbie about this. I mean it.”

He had forgotten about Herbie. “When is he coming back?” he asked, hoping never (though he missed Herbie in away).

Gloria had a way of ignoring questions she didn’t want to answer. “And if Ira Whimple comes over — ”

“Ira Whimple?”

“You know him. He’s a business associate of Herbie’s. Why are you making that kind of face?”

“Ira Whimple is some kind of crook, isn’t he?”

“Well,” Gloria said, raising her penciled eyebrows, patting her mouth daintily with a napkin, “none of us is perfect.”

Peter snorted, spewing coffee from his nose. “I don’t like his face and I don’t want him around here.”

Gloria turned her head in a theatrical gesture of disdain. “Peter, you remember this is Herbie’s place and any friend of Herbie’s is welcome here. So don’t start giving orders here.”

Peter thought of punching her, but he had been through that already — no need of repeating the obvious. He collected his books and put a pair of dirty socks in his pocket.

“Where are you going?” she asked softly.

No friend of Herbie’s, only a brother (masquerading as a friend), Peter left.

Gloria called after him, “You didn’t finish your coffee. If you think I need you, you’re crazy.”

He went to his room on 113th Street to think things over, and thinking, on the precipice of an idea, fell boldly asleep. Gloria was leading him by the hand to her bedroom through a den of Ira Whimple-like rats — the rats biting his ankles, Gloria dancing seductively — when a knock on the door woke him.

“You have a phone call,” he was told by the small dark-haired witch, who had the room next to his, and who, against the rules of the house, kept a cat, a black cat.

She winked at him as he went by. Peter, aware to his embarrassment, his eyes averted, of having an erection — he pretended it had nothing to do with him.

“You might at least say thanks,” she whispered.

He rushed to the phone, expecting Gloria.

“Who is that girl who answers your phone?” A girl’s tremulous voice, unaccountably familiar to him. He had the feeling that if he moved his head just a little, he would suddenly see who it was, but he didn’t dare.

“Who is this?” He knew — ashamed of not knowing — the moment he asked.

“Don’t you know me, Peter?”

“Are you all right?” he said, afraid — a strange premonition — that something had happened to her. “Lois …”

“I want to talk to you,” she said softly. “I have to talk to you.”

They arranged to meet at noon at Riverside Drive and 110th. “Please don’t forget,” she said. Forget? Had he ever forgotten anything that had to do with her? It was the wrong question. A moment ago, he reminded himself, he had managed to forget, in the quirk of the moment, the very sound of her voice.

When he hung up he discovered his neighbor standing nosily in the doorway of the kitchen, smiling at him. “You look as if a sheep bit you,” she said.

“Yeah?” he said, full of repartee. He thought if he leered at her — grinding his mouth into what he thought was a leer — she would go away.

“You know, that’s the first time I’ve seen you actually smile,” she said. “You look less mean when you smile. My name’s Helena.” She puffed out her chest, in case he hadn’t noticed.

He went to his room in a great hurry. What did she mean, bit by a sheep? When he had the time he would ask her.

Peter awoke in a sweat at five after twelve, and unsure whether he had dreamed the phone call or not, ran heavy-footed from Broadway to Riverside Drive — nearly hit by a cab determined on its way — and down Riverside Drive to 110th Street, muttering to himself, “Wait, wait, wait,” as he ran. When he got to the place of their appointment, his chest in pain from running, Lois was nowhere in sight. Had he dreamed it? Was he dreaming now? He sat down on a cement bench overlooking the river. A toddler chased birds at his feet. Sweating, he waited. A warm breeze washed his face. A lovely day for July — the trees danced. The “There’s a Ford in Your Future” sign across the Hudson shone briefly, faded in the sun’s glare into the past. Had Lois already been and gone?

Anxious, Peter asked the thin-legged, very pregnant woman on the next bench if she knew the time.

She looked up in surprise, a bird noise squeaking in her throat. “Were you talking to me?” She seemed very young, tired, a gray of fear in her hazel eyes. “I don’t have any money.”

“Do you know what time it is?” he repeated softly.

She clutched her purse against her belly (which seemed another, larger purse), smiled. “I don’t.” Her eyes fretted.

She was wearing a tiny wrist watch, like the eye of a bird, which he tried to read but couldn’t. “Is your watch broken?” he asked.

She didn’t answer, looked up and down the street as though he wasn’t there. When he continued to hover, she snapped in a piercing voice, “Will you please go away?” He turned nervously to see if anyone had overheard. A woman was coming toward them. He stepped back, something crunching under his foot — a child’s miniature plastic tank. “I’m sorry,” he said, reaching in his pocket for money to pay for the toy, finding only three pennies — also a pair of dirty socks. Someone laughed. A child was crying. He was ready to flee — what else to do? — when it struck him that the woman coming toward him, only a few steps away now, was Lois.

“What were you doing to that woman?” she asked, a child’s smile at the corner of her mouth.

He looked at the woman on the bench, eight months or so pregnant, consoling a child of a little over a year. He nodded his sympathy. The woman turned her face away.

“It was a misunderstanding,” he said.

“Poor Peter,” Lois said, not looking at him. “Everyone misunderstands you.”

They picnicked in Riverside Park — Lois had brought sandwiches — on a grassy slope overlooking the playground, between a litter basket and a “No Picnicking” sign.

“You look better,” he said when they had finished lunch, her face gray but intact, a secret fever in her eyes.

She laughed without sound. “Better than what? Than when?”

“You look well, a little thin,” he said, his voice hoarse, strange to him, as if it hadn’t been used for a long time.

He thought of taking her hand, oppressed with the need to touch her, but was unable to communicate this dim sense of urgency from mind to body. As if seeing into his thoughts, Lois lit a cigarette, kept her hands busy.

For a long time nothing was said.

When he asked about Mildred and Will, she came alive momentarily, the passion of grief reviving her. “It’s impossible living at home,” she said, her eyes intent on some distant point on the horizon. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Peter.” She scraped tobacco from the corner of her lip with a yellowish finger, her nails beggars, tattered beyond recognition. “Mildred’s her old pain-in-the-ass self. Every time I go to the bathroom she wants to know how I feel. Last week I decided to get it over with, but when I started thinking how I was going to do it, I lost my nerve. Finally, so it wouldn’t be a total loss, I cut my wrists”—she held up her left hand to show him the fragile scar — “it wasn’t even really a try; I knew they would get to me before anything happened. I don’t even know why I did it.”

He nodded. “You’re all right now?”

“I’m great.” A broken laugh. She squinted at him, the sun between them. “When was the last time you shaved?”

“Two, three days ago,” he guessed, rubbing the back of his hand across his beard.

“I want you to take care of yourself,” she said. “One of us should.”

He wanted to carry her off with him, fly over the city, go somewhere, but even if it were possible, he realized, it would make no difference. “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said, “I’ll shave if you promise not to try to hurt yourself any more.”

Lois played with her hair, curling the ends around an index finger. “Let’s talk about something else,” she said.

At the moment there was nothing else. The silence a deception of intimacy. In the will of the imagination, the dream of love survives its loss.

Directly in front of them, a teen-age couple love-fought in the grass, elbows and knees, a game of inadvertence. Lois smiled wistfully.

Peter was impatient. “I wish to God there was something I could do,” he said.

“There isn’t,” she said, glancing up at him as if to make an identification. “You really think you can do anything, don’t you? Give up, Peter.” She touched his hand. “Don’t listen to me. I can never say what I mean.”

His hand burned where her touch had lingered. A sudden rush of wind came in from the river, playing havoc with everything, sending the wax paper from their sandwiches aloft like kites. Lois put her face in her hands to protect her eyes from the dust. The wind passed through him, exhausting him, leaving him stronger than before. “Why don’t we try again?” he said.

She lifted her head, her face suffused with an extraordinary tenderness. “What?” she asked softly.

“Try again,” he whispered.

“No,” she said immediately. Then, thinking about it: “I don’t know.” She moved closer to him.

“Why not?”

She whipped her head from side to side, dislodging tears. “I wasn’t going to cry today. I was going to be very good.” She averted her face, crying.

He held her hand, which was inanimate, told her a few jokes he had heard.

“You’re very funny,” she said, though she didn’t laugh. “The reason I called was this. I …” She read his face, which was very grim. “I want to ask your advice about something.” She laughed, suddenly giddy, cutting herself off before she lost control.

He waited, out of touch, expectant. (He imagined himself explaining the latest discovery of his feelings to Cantor. “I’m over her, Doctor,” he was saying. “I mean it. My only remaining concern is that I want her to be all right. That’s all.” The doctor appeared to nod. “That’s fine,” he said, “but why are you bleeding on my couch?”)

“I’ve been thinking of moving out of my parents’ house,” she said, “and taking some kind of apartment of my own or sharing a place with another girl, but I haven’t had the nerve to tell them, Peter. I’m afraid to tell them.” She pulled up a handful of grass from the ground and let it filter absently through her fingers. “I have to get out of there.”

“If you have to get out, get out,” he said. She could have gotten the same advice from anyone, he thought, if advice was really what she wanted. If not advice, what did she want? He turned to see: the sun was in his eyes, a scarf of light blinding him. For a moment, distracted, he had the feeling that someone had taken his picture. He smiled for the invisible camera.

“I suppose you’re right,” she said, “but I don’t want to hurt them if I can possibly avoid it. They’ve been good in their way, especially Will. They have,” she insisted. “Even Mildred, in her way, means well.”

“Okay.”

“Everyone means well,” she said ruefully. “Sort of. You can’t dislike anybody without feeling guilty afterward. Every morning Mildred nags me about eating breakfast; I tell her I don’t want any — I’ve never in my life eaten breakfast. You know that. Young lady,’ Mildred says, ‘while you’re living in this house, you’ll have a good breakfast.’ When I threaten to move out she clutches her throat and moans. Everything I do hurts them.”

He had the sense that all of what she was saying, the whole spectrum of her grievances, was in some indefinable way directed at him. “I see what you mean,” he said noncommittally.

“You can’t really,” she said, her body rigid as if braced against the anticipation of pain. “You don’t love them.” Her glance an accusation. “They don’t have anything in the world but me to live for. Will will become an alcoholic if I leave. You see, anything I do, whatever I do is wrong.” She started to cry, then as suddenly and mysteriously as she started, her eyes cleared. “Do you really think I should move out?”

He didn’t know what to say, he nodded.

She gave him her hand, unasked for, offered it to him as a gift (to be returned). “If you think I should, Peter, I will. I trust your advice.”

Impatient, giving up her hand, he stood up, walked away, came back. “Do you really want my advice?” he said, withholding his annoyance, his suspicions, willing to grant her (her prerogative) the right to use him in any way, in all ways. He owed her that, he was willing to believe. He owed her himself.

“Whatever you say I’ll do, old Peter. If you think I ought to stay with them, I will.” She closed her eyes, awaiting his decision. What decision?

He stood in a puddle of sun, burning, caught like a leaf in the sun’s eye. Then, on impulse, he squatted next to her on the grass, almost embracing her, almost. “I think you ought to move out,” he said, meaning other things as well.

“I will.” Her eyes opened, met his unexpectedly, lingered out of a curiosity of love, then fled. It was better not seeing than seeing not enough. (The incompleteness of her knowledge was her terror.)

He found a wilted daisy at his feet, the last of the season, and presented it to her.

She cupped the flower to her mouth. “I’ve missed you,” she whispered to it, crumpling it. “Have you missed me?”

When he said no, her face trembled, fell apart.

“Hey,” he said, holding her face together with his hands, “I’m kidding, Lois. Don’t you know I missed you? I missed you. What I missed most about you was your bawling. I missed that. Nobody cries on 113th Street.”

“I’m not crying now,” she said, faintly amused in spite of a predilection to be angry. Barely. Not. “And I wasn’t the only one who cried,” she said sadly, his failure looming up before her — all memory stained with regret. “Peter, what’s going to become of us?”

For a moment the sun died. Coming off the Hudson, the wind haunted the grass, conjured ghosts of dust. Lois shivered. Peter covered her with his arm.

The sun returned. They sat, she inside his shoulder, stiff shadows of themselves like snapshots in an album, hoarding the past.

Peter worried that it would end. Memory, the fret of old resentments, separated them.

“If you’re moving out, why don’t you come and live with me,” he said.

She smiled, shook her head reflexively, unable to believe in survival, grateful for the myth of its possibility.

He kissed her, her mouth a stranger, generous and indifferent.

He held her to him. “Stay a while longer, Lois,” he pleaded.

“Can’t.” Then she kissed him, a good-bye kiss, warm (blossoming) with the nostalgia of impossibility. “I worry about you, Peter,” she said distantly — a lover’s truth. “You fail at everything you do, baby. Will you ever amount to anything?”

It wasn’t a question he could answer. “I need you around,” he said lightly, “to make a success of me.” They were standing now, getting ready to leave. Lois was crying.

“I wasn’t any good for you,” she said. “We weren’t any good for each other. Only for a time, before we were married, did things seem possible. I can’t stop crying.”

He held her to him, unable to relinquish his memory of her. “I still miss you,” he said.

Her body turned against him, all bones and angles, in a sudden tremor of fear. “You’re not going to contest the annulment?” she asked.

When he said she could have the annulment, two if she wanted, she relaxed, and kissed him good-bye again. “It was a good afternoon,” she said, documenting the fact for posterity. “In some way I’ll always love you, Peter. I will.”

“In what way?” he wanted to know.

“Walk with me to Broadway,” she said, collecting her purse, her things. She took his hand. “You’re really better than anyone.”

They walked quickly. “It was a good afternoon,” she said again. “I’m glad we met, aren’t you?”

He nodded without moving his head.

“Are you sorry about today? Do you think it was a mistake to meet if we’re not going to see each other any more?”

He shook his head, trying to dislodge words yet unborn. “I wanted to see you,” he said slowly, as though he were a child speaking the only words he knew. A groan of laughter escaped. “I feel great,” he moaned. The weight of the city settled on his chest.

“I know,” she commiserated. “It’s terrible, I can’t stop crying.” Wiping her eyes with her scarf, tears coming faster than the ones she erased. Her face bone-thin, scarred with tears, beautiful to him. “I’d better go. I have to meet someone,” she said. “Peter, I wish it were you I were seeing.”

Obsessed, he turned on her. “Who’re you going out with?” he asked as if it were a matter of curiosity — he fooled nobody.

She turned her head in a gesture of impatience. “What difference does it make?” she said gently. “Let’s say good-bye here, Peter.” They were on 110th and Broadway — the IRT station across the street. They shook hands, lingered. She offered him her face to be kissed. A madwoman passed them, muttering, waving her head at them as she passed. “You’re dirtying the streets,” she mumbled. “Get off.” Lois laughed.

They walked to 108th Street, then wandered back to 110th. “I have to run,” Lois said, making no move to go. “Will you kiss me good-bye?” She laughed giddily. “That’s all we’ve done all day — is kiss each other good-bye.”

Her undereyes were charred, he noticed for the first time, like burnt-out fuses; her face tortured and amazingly beautiful in the late-afternoon shade. They embraced delicately, afraid of breakage.

They separated, Lois looking around as if concerned at who might be watching. They embraced again.

“Lois,” he said quickly; it was something he had to know. “When we were married, was there someone else …?” He watched her face as he asked but there was nothing to see, her eyes impassive or merely indifferent. And nothing happened. A twist of pain, almost a smile, lit the corner of her mouth. Then, abruptly, she turned and ran across the street into the entrance of the subway, her long hair in back unknotting, spilling loose as she went down the stairs. “Lois,” he called, “I didn’t mean it.” He was too tired to follow.

| 12 |

When he got back to his room there was a note under his door, printed in large, childlike red letters on yellow drawing paper: SOME GLORIA WANTS YOU TO CALL HER. KEEP IT UP. It was unsigned. He put the note away in his wastebasket for future reference, and paced the length of the room, six steps each way, as calm as a stone; then he picked up a straight-backed chair and for the hell of it heaved it against the wall, watching it dance its way up, then, shivering, flailing its limbs, slide to the floor. The wall bruised black, the greenish plaster chipped away where the chair had danced. Following the chair, Peter’s fist cracked into the wall, pulled back at the instant of contact, the wall turning soft, bleeding. His hand tingled without pleasure. The room murdered him with its cuts. The price of victory, he discovered, is the shared acknowledgment of defeat.

Sour rage mocked his efforts, though he did his mean best. He took them all on: chairs, desk, ceiling, walls, dresser, memories — one by one, all at once, as they came on from all sides — mechanical, murderous, intent on taking his life. He didn’t quit until it was over, and then, exhilarated — his wounds like medals — he spread himself out on the floor and went to sleep.

“Telephone, Becker,” someone called, and Peter heard — the name Becker familiar, his own name even — but it made in the larger contexts of movement and desire no difference, no difference at all.

“Becker, telephone. Telephone, you stupid bastard. You dumb shit. Schmuck, failure, clown, crap head, schmegeggi”

They were calling him.

“Hello,” he said. It was long distance — he could tell from the drone of voices in the background.

“Come home.”

“I am home. Who the hell is this?”

“Come on home, fellow. We need you.”

“Yeah? What for?”

“What a question! We need you to show us how it’s done.”

“I don’t mind. Who’s this calling, please?”

“How do you do it? What’s the story?”

“Well, you see, the way I do it is this …” He cleared his throat.

“Great!”

“I haven’t finished. You see …”

“I get it. Never finish anything ‘cause the finish is the end. That’s the secret, huh? Everything should be uncompleted, because that’s life — man, I mean you’re dead when you’re done. I follow you. If you ask me, I think you’re really on to something.”

“I don’t want to argue with you, but I don’t think you’re getting what I’m saying. I think everything you start ought to be finished.”

“Kill ‘em all, huh? I like that even better. Finish them off before they finish you off. Will you come home, Sam, and show us how it’s done? We haven’t had a hero in these parts in a dog’s age.”

“Sam? I think you have the wrong number, buddy.”

“That’s the way it is. Some days you get only wrong numbers no matter who you call. Anyway, keep up the good work, boy, and let’s hear from you now and again. What do you say?” Before Peter could say anything, the phone went dead.

‘What are you doing on the floor?” someone said, nudging him in the ribs with the toe of a shoe. “Did you fall? What happened to you?”

“The bed moved,” he said, a joker even in his dreams, but when he looked up — the walls moving in odd ways — he wasn’t dreaming. (Helena, the dark witch of the kitchen, was straightening up his room.)

He blinked his eyes.

“I got tired of waiting for you to invite me in,” she said. “There was all this noise. I came in to see if you were all right.”

His body ached: head, hands, back. The room half dark, he wondered what time it was, what day. What year. “I’m all right,” he said, groaning, trying to find a painless way of getting up. He had the feeling, still undefined, that he had lost something. “How did you get here?” he asked, not quite sure yet that he wasn’t the one out of place.

“The door was open,” she said. “Do you want me to go away?” She was sitting on his bed, her back against the wall, with a kind of proprietary confidence. “I’ll go if you want me to. I know I’m much too aggressive; I have a way of imposing on people who interest me, so if you want to get rid of me, just say so. I won’t be hurt. Just tell me to get out.”

“All right. Get out,” he said.

She didn’t move. “That was a cruel thing to say. Men who feel inadequate tend to assert themselves by being cruel,” she said with impressive authority, “but I didn’t expect that of you; you have a kind, generous face. It’s not handsome but it’s a nice face, a kind face.”

“What do you want from me?” He worked himself into a sitting position to get a better look at her, a sullen, knowing witch.

“Not what you think,” she said, sucking on her wrist. “In fact, I don’t want anything from you. Okay?”

“Good.” Curling up on the bed of the floor, his eyes closed, Peter pretended to sleep, exhausted beyond the possibility of sleep — charting his wounds in the body’s memory. Several times, in and out of his dreams, he thought he heard his visitor leave — each time gently banging the door after her so as not to disturb him, so as to make him aware of her consideration. But when he got up, confident that he was alone, Helena was there, perched on his bed as before, a guardian owl, a mad-eyed witch. And the hell of it was, he was pleased to see her.

“Why don’t you come in?” he said, sitting next to her on the bed, receiving messages from uncharted pains.

She condemned him with a look, stared at the ceiling — he had to look around to make sure it was his room they were in. And who had asked her in?

What the hell did she want from him anyway? He wondered if his breath was bad — his tongue sour — unable to remember the last time he brushed his teeth. Why not? he told himself, putting his arm around her shoulders, only to have it lifted off and returned to him, his bruised knuckles brushing the wall.

He groaned.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” she said, holding his hand in front of her, reading his wounds like a prophetess. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I have a way of hurting people without meaning to.”

“Why don’t you go back to your room?” he said.

She looked at him piteously, her eyes filling with tears. “Please help me,” she said.

“What kind of help do you need?” he asked as a reflex, not wanting to know.

So she told him. A long story about a former teacher of hers — married, with a family — “a very good friend,” who was fatally in love with her. He listened uneasily, suspending belief, incapable of disbelief — the story familiar and incredible. And why was she telling it to him?

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” she said, “but to continue the relationship as it was would have been a lie. Do you see what I mean?”

He nodded out of courtesy, seeing nothing, which in its own way was too much.

“It was terrible,” she said, slowing down to reflect. “He refused to believe me. He said he knew I loved him — that it was my analysis that was screwing things up. The poor guy! He was deliberately blocking what he didn’t want to hear. I told him that I still admired him a great deal, that I thought he was a brilliant man, which he is, though he has certain blind spots, but that — I couldn’t help it — I no longer was in love with him. Then he broke up and started accusing me of things, and crying. It was pitiful.” She glanced at Peter’s face. “You think I’m a bitch, don’t you?”

He shrugged, scowled, depression embracing him like an unwanted lover.

“You think so, don’t you?”

“What difference does it make?”

“You do. I can tell from your face. But if you understand me better, you’ll know I don’t mean to be. I really felt sorry for Harry — do you know him? Harry Lowenstein? He teaches sociology at Barnard. I couldn’t stand seeing him, a man I had admired so much, behave so badly, so … this’ll sound silly to you … I went to bed with him. It was mostly out of pity.” She glanced at Peter to catch his response. “I did it to help him regain his confidence,” she said, the shakiness of her voice belying the smugness of her remark. “Afterward we agreed not to see each other again.”

Helena turned silent. Peter got up and paced the room, still wobbly from his bout with the furniture. “Was that the end of it?” he asked, curious in spite of himself. (He promised himself, no matter what — love and death all the same to him — not to get involved.) “What was Harry like?” he asked, merely to make conversation.

Helena stared at her hands, enjoyed the melodrama of silence.

Peter looked out his only window, which offered a choice view of the corner of Broadway and 113th Street, and suspected, in the space of five minutes, three different men, one enormously fat, of being Harry.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “He wants to see me again.”

When Peter sat down at his desk the chair collapsed under him, spilling him heavily, the floor receiving him as its own. What had he expected? The inanimate always seemed to have it in for him — in conspiracy against him. He decided to remain on the floor — his arms spread-eagled — accepting the fate of his role, awaiting sympathy.

The girl seemed unaware of his tragedy. “What am I going to do?” she complained. “He’s coming here tonight to see me; he may be here already, for all I know.” Without asking him, she latched his door from the inside. “Harry can be very violent when he doesn’t get his way. He’s a paranoid type, Peter, which as you probably know can be very dangerous. Did you hurt yourself?”

“A little.” Peter climbed to his feet recklessly, showing off.

“I put the chair together so that the room would look better. You weren’t supposed to sit on it.”

Peter wandered about, looking for a place to sit. Both chairs were broken; he settled for the edge of the bed.

Helena bounced up as though tilted from the bed by Peter’s weight. “No matter what I tell him, he insists on seeing me. When I told him that I didn’t want to break up his marriage, you should have seen him — he wasn’t rational, Peter. He grabbed my arm in such a way that I thought he was going to break it.” She stalked the window like a skittish kitten playing at being a tiger, and standing sideways at the window’s edge, peered through the half-closed blinds. “What time is it?” she asked in a conspiratorial whisper.

“About six. Do you see him?” Peter said. His clock had stopped — the glass smashed, one of the hands bent — at about twenty after five.

She shook her head in a pantomime of despair. Then, coming away from the window: “It’s possible that he’s already in the building. He won’t take no for an answer, Peter; he really means it, that’s the thing: he really means it. He insists that I’m really in love with him.”

“You have to make it clear to him how you feel.”

“Would you want the truth if you were in his place?”

Peter leaned forward on the bed, imagined himself in Harry’s place, which was not hard to do. “Yes and no,” he conceded.

“That’s no answer.”

He leaned his head against the wall, exhausted, deceived. “I can’t speak for Harry,” he said. “I don’t know him. I’ve never met him.”

“I don’t love you,” she said.

Peter raised his head, startled into memory. Grief visited his chest, knew his wounds. For no reason he could understand — indifferent to Helena’s feelings about him — he had to fight to keep from crying. “What does that mean?” he muttered.

“I was just practicing,” Helena said, looking out the window again.

Peter wiped his eyes. When he looked up, Helena was staring curiously at him — a pleasure of triumph around the mouth as if in a moment’s comprehension she had reduced him to bite-sized morsels of knowledge. “What …?” he asked.

Moving toward him, she turned away, swallowing a smile. “You’re nice,” she said softly, her voice nervous, cajoling.

“No, I’m not,” he said.

‘You are. I can tell.” She smiled at him sweetly, stroked his face. He turned away in a rage.

“Cut it out, huh?”

“Will you let me stay here? I promise to be good.”

“No.”

“Please.” She turned to him again, her eyes making special plea — the promise of incalculable reward.

He wasn’t interested, though something in him registered the pressure of attraction. Not for him. Among other disabilities — exhaustion, multiple wounds, the self-satisfaction of pity — Peter was suspicious: he suspected Helena of smiling behind the mask of desperation she wore on her face. He trusted no one. It had been a long day — none longer since last week — and he wanted, if he wanted anything, a night of painless sleep (a week of sleep would not be too much), though he thought also of calling Dr. Cantor — he had questions to ask — and of going back to Gloria and, maybe in a day or so, of leaving New York, just for a vacation, just to get away from … where he was.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Helena, who was sitting next to him on the bed. “I don’t think I ought to get involved in things that are none of my business.”

“All right.”

He had expected more of a fight. Was she desperate or wasn’t she? “You’re going to have to face him eventually,” he said, hoping to ease her distress. “You’ll feel better if you get it over with.” He attempted a smile, his mouth intractable.

She didn’t answer, sucked nervously on the back of her wrist.

“Besides,” he said, “there’s no place for you to sleep here. Where would you sleep?”

“You’re right. No place.” Wearily, she climbed off the bed. ‘Where are you going?”

She shrugged airily, mock-curtseyed. “Good night.”

“You can stay,” he said impulsively — no one more surprised to hear it than Peter. “I’ll sleep on the floor. It’s really more comfortable on the floor.”

“No, no,” Helena said bravely, hoarding her martyrdom. “I wouldn’t think of taking your bed.” She put her ear to the door. “Shh!”

“I wasn’t saying anything.” Peter watched her butt jiggle as she concentrated on hearing what might be heard — a man who knows a good thing when he sees it jiggle. He blew his nose to pass the time, jiggled a bit himself. A tired lecher, a lover of mad witches.

“Shh! He’s out there,” she whispered. “I can hear him.”

“How do you know it’s Harry and not someone who lives here?”

Helena edged her way across an invisible tightrope to the bed. “I know it’s him,” she whispered. “He’s walking back and forth, working himself up into a rage.” She offered Peter a sad, conspiratorial smile, shrugging whimsically — a love gesture between thieves. “I’ll stay until he leaves. All right?” She smiled in the face of adversity. “Poor Harry. It must be terrible to love someone that way.”

With the rakish courage of a private eye — who needs movies? — Peter went to the door to see what he could hear, heard the toilet flush and nothing else. “There’s no one there,” he said, his ear still to the door.

“Shhh!” Helena listened next to him, a breast nudging him in the back. “Listen,” she whispered. Peter listened, sweated (sweat steaming out of him).

Helena moved to the other side of the room, beckoned to him. “Did you hear him?”

“No.”

“You didn’t hear anything?”

“I didn’t hear anyone pacing.”

“He’s standing outside the door to my room, waiting for me to come back. Every once in a while he paces around a bit. Didn’t you hear someone moving in the hall? He has a light step.”

“Do you want me to go out and look?” Peter asked. But when he thought about it, the idea of confronting Harry unnerved him. If Harry were unhinged, who knows what he might be capable of? At the same time he wondered if there was a real Harry — afraid of a man who possibly didn’t even exist. He called himself a coward, insulted to be called coward by a coward.

“You don’t have to go,” Helena said, sneaking a look out the window, then back to the door, now huddling against his arm, her breasts cozening him. “I appreciate you wanting to do this for me.”

Who wanted to? The truth was, he was ashamed of not wanting to go, but the private eye in him was curious and the bathroom was across the hall. Nervous, Peter felt the need to urinate — an old habit of the bladder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t talk to him. I’ll just go to the bathroom and come back.”

“Okay.” She begrudged him his departure, blew him a good-bye kiss. “Come back soon now.” She stretched languidly, stifling a yawn, her breasts flowering suddenly against the skyline of her blue sweater; she was wearing, he discovered, no bra underneath. (He left with a pastoral vision of nipples.)

When he got into the hall he was wearing the horny side glance of an erection — a fool’s fool. No one was at Helena’s door, but there was a man he hadn’t seen before hanging about the entrance to the kitchen, facing away from Peter toward the stairwell at the far end of the hall. The man turned quickly; their eyes met briefly without acknowledgment as Peter ducked nervously into the bathroom. For all Peter knew — people in rooming houses change faces regularly — the man at the end of the hall was one of his neighbors.

Peter was about his business — in the middle of things — when the door opened and someone light-footed came in. The man was standing somewhere behind him, tapping his foot, which made Peter nervous, regretful that he hadn’t latched the door. He finished in a hurry, a few reluctant drops staining his pants. Uneasy about meeting people in the bathroom, he washed his hands with the kind of concentration that jewelers affect when they anatomize a watch.

The man — doubtless Harry — walked around, a tourist, inspecting the walls, occasionally glancing at Peter as though he wanted to talk, but saying nothing.

Peter kept washing his hands, waiting for Harry to do or say something. I’m not who you think I am, he was prepared to say in his defense — a lie in the service of truth; but recalling in a sweat of pleasure the touch of Helena’s breast against his back, he decided to keep his mouth shut. When he turned, Harry, feet apart, head forward, confronted him. “Do you live here?” he said solemnly — a strange question to ask a man in his bathroom.

“Here?”

“You know what I mean. Do you live in this building?”

Peter hesitated, looked around. On the wall above one of the urinals someone had written: Look where you’re going, squinty. Peter turned back to Harry, who had the face of a sensitive boxer: a thick-necked, curly-haired man, turning gray at the temples, who looked to have taken more than his share of beatings. It was, in all — the pitted skin, the scarlike hollows under gentle, tortured eyes — a sympathetic face. Peter almost liked him.

“I asked you a question,” the man said softly, belligerently reasonable, “and I’d sure as hell like an answer.”

“Why should it concern you where I live?” Peter said with equal reasonableness — the madness reflected in the mirror above the sink; he wondered if Harry would try to stop him if he moved toward the door.

“If you want trouble,” Harry said, backing up a step, “Ican help you out. I’ll tell you something. The way I feel now, there’s nothing I’d like more than to beat the hell out of someone.” He beat his fist into his palm. “What are you — some kind of idiot?”

“Who’s an idiot? I came in here to take a piss and you ask me if I live here. Get out of my way, please.”

Harry’s head jutted forward, his arms hanging at his sides like handles. “I think what you need, buddy, is a lesson in manners. Now tell me nicely whether you live in this building or not.”

“You got your answer.” When Peter took a step to the side Harry moved with him — Peter’s reflection — blocking the way to the door. “What are you — some kind of nut?” Peter fairly shouted. “Get out of my goddamn way.”

“Come on,” Harry taunted him. “Come on, you big bastard. I’m waiting for you.”

Four inches or so taller than the man facing him, Peter guessed that he outweighed Harry by, maybe, fifteen-twenty pounds; still, he was tired, his right hand out of commission, and Harry (the bastard) was raging for a fight. “Why should I fight you?” Peter said, stalling, looking for an honorable way out.

“Because you’re a big witless bastard, that’s why,” Harry said, feinting his head. “Come on. Yahhhhr!” He lowered his head as though he were about to rush him. Peter backed up as far as he could go, his back literally to the sink,

“I’m not going to fight you,” Peter said, the declaration coming out curiously like a threat. “I have no reason to fight you.”

It was over in a moment. Harry, an old schoolyard fighter, charged head-down. Peter, surprised into reflex, caught him in the side of the head with a roundhouse left that spun Harry half-around. Then, as if recollecting the impact of the punch, Harry went wistfully down. Peter waited for retribution.

Once down, however, Harry made no effort to get up — or else remained down merely to recoup his strength, crouched on the bathroom tile (as though planning to get up eventually at some symbolic count of nine), his eyes averted, a bit shamefaced at his failure. Peter hovered, ashamed at the pleasure of the punch, nursing two sore hands. “Are you all right?” he kept asking, but Harry, giving him back his own, refused to answer.

“Can I help you up?”

The contempt of silence.

“Hey, let me help you up.” Peter extended his hand cautiously.

“Go away.”

“You’re all right, though?”

Harry growled something and Peter withdrew his hand in a hurry, as if afraid the man on the floor was going to take a bite of it.

Having no reason to stay, Peter started to leave, but when he noticed that Harry was not getting up, that he had covered his face with his hands, he came back, hovered over this stranger he had knocked down with a sense of pressing, if undefined obligation. “I live in this building,” he said, “What were you going to ask me?”

Harry looked up, his mouth opened and closed without sound, its movement like the rip of a seam. His fingers touched gingerly the side of his head where Peter’s punch had landed, and smiling savagely at some private irony, muttered something either to Peter or to himself.

“What was that?”

“Fuck you,” Harry said, no longer smiling.

Peter returned the compliment. At which Harry, unaccountably, burst out laughing. And laughed. And laughed. Tears coming to his eyes. (And maybe it wasn’t even Harry.)

“Where have you been all this time?” Helena said when Peter returned. She was lying in state on his bed, her shoes off, as though she was planning to stay for a while.

“This may be hard for you to believe,” Peter said, “but the truth is I had a fight with a man in the bathroom.”

“You what?” Helena was torn with laughter; then, afraid of being overheard, she covered her mouth. “Was it Harry?” she wanted to know, unable to stop giggling.

He had no way of knowing for sure, unable offhand to distinguish Harry from any other stranger looking for a fight in his bathroom. Helena described Harry for him. Peter described his man. There was a resemblance.

“He’s much shorter than I am?” Peter asked.

“Not much. A little.”

“This man was about five inches shorter.”

“Maybe.”

“Does he have thick curly hair?”

“Sort of. He has hair sort of like yours.”

They decided finally that it must have been Harry (who else would behave so irrationally?), and then sat guiltily on the bed together, their fingers laced, the joke of Harry’s performance a pact between them.

Peter took out a fifth of Macy’s Blended Whiskey which he had stored away in the bottom of his desk for the emergency of a friend dropping over. He ripped the seal and removed the cork with his teeth, offering the bottle first to Helena, who refused it with a witch’s smile. Peter took the first drink, the rawness of the stuff tearing his throat, and handed the bottle to the small dark-haired girl on the bed next to him. Helena took a drink, then held the bottle to Peter’s lips while he drank. It was hard work, the stuff burned its way down. Each held the bottle for the other while he drank — a matter of rite. They exchanged glances, an indecent, almost obscene pleasure in Helena’s face, as if in the intimacy of sharing the whiskey they were sharing Harry’s blood. The more they drank, the less it seemed to matter.

Without a word, the silence a part of their pact, they drained the bottle between them, killed it, buried it under the bed. Helena smiled and smiled. Peter preserved his grief with a mourner’s gravity. It was a tacit joke between them.

It was getting dark, but neither seemed to notice. Truck lights illuminated the room for a passing moment, crosses of light melting across the walls. He closed his eyes.

“Who’s going to sleep on the floor?” Helena said, her voice thick, dreamy.

“Harry,” he said.

She squeezed his arm, her breath too near — minutes, seconds away. There. She giggled.

“Shh.”

“Shh,” she parodied him, still giggling, caught in its terror. “There’s room for Harry under the bed. Hello, Harry,” she said giddily to the shadows. “How’s the weather down there?”

Peter laughed, the sound breaking from him, full of grief, night cries, loss, almost a wail for the souls — the ungrieved souls — of the lost.

The sight of Harry sprawled helplessly on the bathroom floor seemed, the more he dwelt on it, a miraculous joke. “He insisted on fighting,” he said, in pain from laughing, “and then he didn’t even land a punch.” He kept laughing, hating himself. “What happened to the bloody bottle?”

Helena bowed her head solemnly, mourned for its loss. A laugh, a giggle of laughter, escaped.

“You want a drink?” she said.

“Where …?”

“Come here, I’ll show you.” A laugh from somewhere in the room, from one of them.

He leaned toward her, a man without expectation — the room dark, her face flattened by a veil of shadows. “There’s nothing to drink,” he insisted, amused that she thought there was.

“Yes.” She gave him her mouth, her tongue, sour with blended whiskey and other bad memories. “Good?”

He wasn’t sure. “The truth is — ” he started to say.

Interrupting him, she flashed her pickled tongue into his mouth, taking it back before he had made its acquaintance. “More?” She licked his closed mouth, but when he tried to kiss her she pulled her head back, laughing at him. Did he need it? He found a breast in the dark, a lamb’s-wool sweater separating the nipple from the love of his fingers.

She removed his hand. “Be good, sweetie.” Kissing him.

“You’re a witch,” he said, half in anger.

She giggled, a witch’s laugh, pleased. “How did you know?”

He laughed villainously, put his hand inside her sweater.

“You have more hands than an octopus,” she said sullenly. “Did I tell you I’m really afraid of men?” A witch’s laugh — a child-witch’s laugh. “I like you, Peter.”

He took another drink from her store, squeezed her breast.

“It’s tender,” she said, a whining song. “Don’t …”

He accepted it as his luck, removed his hand. “Ahhh!” he complained.

“Let’s just sleep for a while,” she said.

“Ahhh!” he said, almost too tired to care. Almost.

They were lying back to back, crowded together on the small cot, their asses touching, desire like a warm breath denying him rest.

“I owe you an apology,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind my saying this — but I misjudged you.”

“Yeah?”

“My first idea of you was that you were out only for yourself, but now I feel — it’s taken me a while to understand you — that you’re someone one can trust.” She waited, glowing with self-approval, for some response.

“Cut the shit,” he said.

“I mean it,” she said tremulously. “You’re …”

He turned her over onto her back, held her down. “What do you want from me?” he said.

She stuck out her tongue in ironic defiance.

There was something in him, a sudden flood of rage, some memory of desire, of need, of something, that was unappeasable. Holding her down, he climbed on top of her.

“You’re beautiful,” he warned her.

“Do you love me?” she said.

“Who else?” he said, staring at her mouth.

“How do I know who else?”

“Only you,” he said savagely, rage burning him. “You.” He struggled, with more force than skill, to open the belt of her jeans; Helena helping him, their fingers getting in each other’s way.

“Let me,” she said.

Even in the dark, the grace of her movement was evident. She kicked off her jeans, wriggling out of them, and lifted her sweater over her head in one amazing acrobatic gesture. He watched with sullen admiration, a man with a diners’ card in a strange country, hungry, trusting no one. He thought to applaud, but didn’t.

“I love you,” he assured himself, lying in his throat.

She didn’t care, or if she did, kept it a secret from herself. “That’s nice,” she said wistfully. “Why don’t you take your clothes off?”

He got undressed — Helena helping, the buttons on his shirt offering minor resistance.

Still, he was distrustful; he had no right to expect anything but grief, which was the price (his own) of living in this world. It worried him that someone — who knows who? — might walk in on them without warning. He listened for footsteps.

“Is sweetie tired?” she said, stroking him. “Is he?”

So, without pleasure, he submitted to love — without pleasure, not without need — and made the best of his pains, a conservationist with nothing to conserve.

Exhaustion drove him. Witch, witch, witch, witch, witch, witch. He worked like ten (dying) men, expecting in his madness to get somewhere he had never been before.

She dug her nails in his back, directed traffic. “Not so fast,” she crooned. “Slowly. A little slowly.”

Too tired to slow down, Peter increased his pace — the energy of violence keeping him alive.

Helena rocked back and forth, dreaming of a surprise birthday party given her when she was eight or nine.

Peter kissed her face, fell in love with her briefly. Stalled.

“Keep going,” she advised.

In the middle of things — Peter, an alchemist, transforming base metal into dreams of gold, Helena also dreaming — there was a banging on the door, two heavy knocks, followed by two more, urgent and assertive.

Helena cursed Harry, scoring Peter’s back with her nails.

Peter froze — a secret penitent — awaited discovery.

Strangers hating each other, they separated.

The knocks continued.

Helena shook her head at him to make it clear that he was not, under any circumstance, to answer the door — and he was not to make a sound. She blew in his ear the breath of love, held his hand.

Nervous, impatient, sweating his guilt, Peter would have liked to answer the door, just to get it over with — the knocks like blows inside his head. He resisted — for Helena’s sake — he would have had to fight her to get to the door.

There was nothing for them to do but wait silently for whoever it was at the door (they assumed they knew) to make his move, tensed on the narrow bed in guilty postures of innocence as if posing before some easily gulled metaphysical camera.

The interval between knocks (usually three or four seconds) was harder to bear than the knocking itself. Peter felt the need to cough, also to urinate — the body’s vengeance on the soul’s deceit.

Their visitor persisted — who but a madman would go on so long? Helena stuck her tongue out at the door. Peter cleared his throat. The bed creaked. Every noise a wound.

Finally it stopped. The silence hung in the air, drew itself out indelibly, like the final note of a song. Listening, they could hear footsteps move away reluctantly, down the hall, recede indistinguishably into the sounds of the night.

Peter breathed again, a long time between breaths.

“God,” Helena said, “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

“Why did we do this to him?” he said.

“Please don’t make it worse than it is.”

“Worse? How could it be worse?”

As if in answer to his question, the door clamored open. “I know you’re in here. Why don’t you answer your door,” a woman’s voice said, Gloria emerging from behind the voice. “Do you think I care if I ever see you again? You left your wallet I wanted to return.” Her eyes, not good in the best of circumstances, gradually adjusted to the dark. “I’m sorry if I woke you.” Then she noticed that there was someone in bed with him, a dark-haired girl — his wife she guessed — a ragged sheet covering them both. “Well,” she sputtered, overrun with confusion. She stood over them, bravely embarrassed, a huge disapproving aunt, whipping her head from side to side, her fierceness a malediction. “So that’s it.” Her contempt beyond expression, she forced herself to the door, then whirled about for a final look, a final word — something. ‘You …” Then, to herself — the others, eavesdroppers: “I shouldn’t have come here. I have my pride.” She threw the wallet at the bed and made her escape; a whiff of her perfume and the comic shreds of her dignity lingered.

Helena glanced cannily at Peter, tittered nervously. Peter looked away, choked shamefacedly on a laugh. Helena nudged him, then shook her head imperiously in imitation of Gloria. “So,” she mimicked. “Well.”

The door opened again, Gloria peering in as though she had lost something. Peter, unamused, began to laugh. Gloria excommunicated them with a stare. “The hell with you both,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Peter said, getting out of bed, surprised to find himself unclothed. The door slammed shut.

“Who’s she?”

“My brother’s girl,” he explained, putting on his shorts, wondering how it was that he managed, almost without exception, to screw everything up.

Helena dressed quickly in a fury of purpose. “Thanks a lot,” she said, feeling around on the floor for her shoes.

The obligation of desire revived him. “You can stay,” he said.

“Sure I can, Peter. Thanks. The thing is, I have more than enough with my own problems. I wouldn’t know what to do, like if your father’s girl friend walked in on us next.” She looked back over her shoulder, allowed herself a moment’s nostalgia. “It wasn’t in the stars for us. Take it slow. I’ll show myself out.” And she was gone.

“I’m sorry,” he called after her.

Afterward, alone, he danced on the fires of hell and, burning, died awake — “Stardust” playing over and over in his imagination — unable to rest, the night a terror of dreams. Hell, out of season, was unoccupied. There was only Peter, and thousands of Coney Island mirrors distorting his image. And as eternity wore on — even the crippled images of himself deserted — the mirrors blank and, for all he could see, bottomless. He was alone. That was the hell of it.

| 13 |

Peter stayed with Gloria, vacating the 113th Street room, for another week of surrogate marriage. Gloria forgave him. “I don’t hold grudges,” she said begrudgingly. “None of us is perfect.” “You are,” he said, patting her ass — a secret kidder. He returned to the Goodwill couch, the bedroom denied him as part of the terms of his return, and banished, spent his nights and days there, half asleep, an exile, retired from the business of the world. He slept for almost three days, between dreams, exhausted, catching up.

“Aren’t you going to go to work any more,” she asked one morning, not wanting to nag but worried about loafers — her father, when he was alive, a loafer.

“Yeah, Glory,” he said, “one of these days I’m going to get up and …” Yawning.

“You’ll lose both your jobs, Peter, and what about school — do you want to throw away everything?” She worked herself into concern.

He opened his eyes only long enough to see that there was nothing to see. “Well,” he drawled, “the machine, the old machine slows down after a while, getting old.” He felt the years assault him, his hair turning secretly gray.

Gloria went to the bathroom to put on, as she called it, her face, and returned with an argument. “What do you think you’re talking about?” she yelled at him. “You’re just a kid. You got a whole lifetime ahead of you. How old are you, anyway? Twenty-eight?”

Almost twenty-seven. “Kind of tired, Glory. Can’t think of anything I want to do — sleep is all.”

“Peter,” she yelped, shaking him roughly. “Tomorrow you’re going to work, you hear me, or so help me, out you go.”

“I think you’re right,” he said.

“Promise me you’ll go to work tomorrow,” she said, “at least to one of your jobs.”

“You have only to nag,” he said, “and I gladly …” While she was waiting for him to finish his sentence, he stole a few seconds of uninterrupted sleep.

“What? Peter, it’s a sickness, sleeping like that.” She poked him in the side with her elbow. “Wake up.” She shook him, dislodging fragments of memory — his father went by, singing to himself.

“Can’t sleep when you shake me like that, Glory.”

She rolled him onto the floor. “Tomorrow you go to work, do you hear me?”

“Take my money,” he mumbled, “take my life, but spare this old gray head.” He dozed on the rug where he had landed, making the best of a hard bed. Money is honey, his father was saying to him — a first principle of natural lore.

“A man who doesn’t work has no self-respect,” she said, prodding him with her toe.

“I’ll work,” he said. “I’ll work. Promise. Work.” His father was going somewhere, leaving. I wish you the best, Peter, he said, everything — all of it. Whatever you do, I don’t want you to be a bum like your brother — and I’d tell Herbie that to his face if he were here.

“No one respects a man that doesn’t work.”

“Money is honey,” he said.

She tried tickling.

“Ummmmm. That’s nice.”

“Get up, Peter. Ira Whimple will be here in a few minutes.”

That got him. He lifted his head from the rug, opened the slits of his eyes. “You’re kidding me?”

“Maybe I am and maybe I’m not. Anyway, as I told you before, any friend of Herbie’s …”

He covered his ears, heard the roar of oceans.

“I have to go now,” she said. “I left a shopping list for you on the highboy — you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” she added. “There’s some coffee I made in the pot — all you have to do …”

Her words buzzed harmlessly in the air. As soon as his head touched the rug, he was asleep.

“I want you to see the way Peter can button his own coat,” his mother was saying. “He’s only five and he buttons his own coat with either hand, with his eyes closed if necessary. Come on up here, dear, and show everyone.”

Big for his age — he looked more like fifteen than five — he was embarrassed going up on the stage in short pants.

“He could tie his shoes by himself,” his mother added, “when he was only three and a half.” The enormous crowd cheered. “You can imagine how proud I am of him,” his mother said. “Go ahead, dear. Show them how you button your coat. He tends to be shy,” she explained to the crowd. “Show them, dear.”

It took him a moment to discover it: there were no buttons on the coat he was wearing. There was a zipper at the bottom, which turned out to be immovable — it was his oldest coat. He tugged at it in desperation, unable for the life of him to get it up; the tab of the zipper came loose in his hand.

The crowd hooted.

“Tie your shoes,” his mother stage-whispered from the wings. “Your shoes.”

He bent down reluctantly to tie his shoes, but because of the tightness of his pants — who but a prodigy could have such luck? — he was unable to reach his feet.

The crowd dispersed, audibly disappointed.

“Ask me to do something hard,” he yelled at the crowd, “something impossible.” No one listened.

“Come on away, dear,” his mother said gently. “You’ve done very well.”

“I’ve done nothing,” he cried.

“And who can say he’s done more,” she said.

The next morning Peter went to work. He fell asleep on the train and missed his stop, was shaken awake and evicted at 242nd Street, which was, he was told, the end of the line. Why the hell was he always falling asleep? And worse: why did he spend so much time awake? Ha! Who’s awake? He stood cross-legged on the platform and dozed. Each waking was an opening of wounds, a discovery of new losses. Too late to pick up the school bus and make his rounds, a man who dreamed of responsibility, Peter planned to call the Collegiate School and offer his regrets, thought seriously about it, wandered into a phone booth and actually called. He was surprised when someone answered — who knows what else he had dreamed was real!

“I’m afraid you have too many other interests,” the woman who ran things, the vice-principal and director’s wife, told him. Still drowsy, Peter was convinced, exalted by the insight — trains roaring by outside the booth — that too many other interests was his very problem. “In that case, I’d better give this job up,” he said, yawning.

“What about the children?” she said. “Think of the children.”

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” he promised.

He took the subway to Columbia, and while planning his day, had breakfast at Bickford’s: the 59-cent special (“Juice, I fried egg, sausage, potatoes, English muffin and coffee”). The comfort of the meal was not only that it was a bargain, but that everything — some things more than others — had the same reliable taste.

Whenever he was awake he had the obsessive urge to do something, aware as he sat, doing nothing, with nothing to do — no appetite even to eat — that he was wasting his life. He had only to look up; at the table in front of him (behind, if he was facing the other way), studying the New York Times, his face almost totally obscured, was someone familiar — the man he had knocked down in the 113th Street bathroom. It woke Peter momentarily. He wolfed down his meal — a breakfast of his own flesh — sitting sideways as he ate, to avoid being recognized. Embarrassed, he left suddenly — food still on his plate — and bumped into the man ahead of him at the door, who, on turning around, turned out to be Harry. “Excuse me,” Peter said, stepping back. Harry nodded darkly, straightened his tie, kept Peter waiting. They went off, not quite acknowledging each other, in opposite directions.

Impelled by regret, also discovering that he was going the wrong way, he whirled around and ran after Harry. “Hey. Hey, wait up.”

Harry turned, apparently startled, his neatly folded Times slipping from his hand. He waited for Peter, with his hands at his sides.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Peter started to say, when Harry punched him in the nose.

Peter nursed his nose with a handkerchief, stunned, his eyes tearing, while Harry hurried away down the street, a nervous glance over his shoulder. A small crowd, mostly students, which had gathered in expectation of a fight, dispersed sullenly. A few jeered at the ignominy of his defeat. “That guy was half your size,” a boy said, contemptuous of failure.

Peter growled, picked up Harry’s Times. “I’ll take any three of you on at the same time,” he said. But when he looked up there was only the boy, only one of him — slight, eighteen, as fragile as tinder. “You okay?” the boy asked.

Peter shrugged, walked away, wandered to 113th Street to see if there was any mail for him, though he hadn’t received a letter from anyone in months. He growled at passers-by along the way, aware of his enemies — they pretended not to notice him.

Expecting nothing, he checked the mail — two stacks of it on a table in the hall — and discovered, in a pile of outgoing letters, a card from Herbie, a picture post card of the Grand Canyon at sunset — Addressee unknown written next to Peter’s name. Unknown or not, he pocketed the card and went out in the sun.

It was a haunted day, the streets around Columbia mostly deserted. A girl with long dark hair was giving out Progressive Party leaflets on the corner. He went by without taking one. “Don’t you care what happens to your country?” the girl called after him. “Don’t you want peace?”

He cared, wanted peace, took refuge in a phone booth. He called Lois and got no answer; then Dr. Cantor, who would not be in for another hour; then, on a whim, an old Army buddy who, it turned out, was no longer living at the address Peter had for him — the address three years old, the buddy hardly a friend, then Gloria at Bloomingdale’s — Gloria the first one to answer him in person. “What do you want?” she argued.

“Not much,” he said.

“I can’t talk now, Peter. Can you call back later, the store just opened.”

“I’ve missed you,” he said. “I walk around New York missing you.”

“Thank you.” She lowered her voice: “My supervisor’s standing right behind me, Peter.”

He improvised, not wanting to lose the sound of her voice. “I think I’m in love with you,” he said.

“Peter, I’m going to have to hang up.”

“Doesn’t it matter to you that I love you?”

“You’re a character,” she said. “You really are.”

“Why don’t you take the day off? It’s a nice day out, looks like rain. I want to go to bed with you.”

She came close to a laugh. “This minute?”

His need owned him, desperation his middle name. “This minute, this second. Tell them you’re sick. I’ll meet you at the apartment in twenty minutes.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Do it for me.”

“I can’t.” She hung up.

Peter called again and got a wrong number. “Everybody calls here asks for Bloomingdale’s,” the man said; someone, a woman, laughing in the background. “This ain’t Bloomingdale’s, friend. I haven’t been Bloomingdale’s since the day I was born.”

“Whoever you are,” Peter said, “you’re a fucking impostor.”

“And what if I am?” the voice said.

Peter knocked at the door to Helena’s room, got no answer, knocked again.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me.”

“Who’s me?” She opened the door a quarter of the way, her face, spider-webbed with sleep, making a tentative appearance. She rubbed her eyes. “What do you want?”

Peter thought to use force — a foot in the door worth two in the hall — but decided to try diplomacy first, his own ambassador. “You look lovely,” he said.

“What do you want?”

“I have to talk to you, Helena. Can I come in?”

She blinked her eyes as though she had hallucinated him. “No. I haven’t gotten up yet. Peter, I’m still in my pajamas.”

Suspicious, he tried to see beyond her into the room. “It’s important,” he said.

“Important to who? What do you mean, important?”

Ahhh! He lowered his voice: “Can’t talk in the hall. Met Harry. Explain when I get inside.” He had more than enough guile going for him, his desperate spirit swelling with deceit, but he had run out of words … The lecher in him grinned boyishly, peered through her nightgown. “You’re looking good,” he said.

“Come back later,” she said, smothering a yawn, stretching. “Later, huh?”

“When should I come back?”

Helena thought about it, tapping her foot to the music of the problem. “Oh, in about an hour or so. I’ll get dressed and we’ll talk. All right?” Her smile brushed him off as though he were a fly.

He couldn’t wait, and as the door floated to its close he thought of forcing his way in, but out of lethargy rather than choice restrained himself — his urgency a sleepwalker’s need.

To pass the hour Peter walked around the block twice, went to Chock Full o’ Nuts for coffee and a doughnut. Time moved slowly, conspired against him — the city clocks, his own watch dying in the summer heat. He couldn’t wait, he couldn’t. In the desperation of want, he knew the treachery of time.

For a while, for minutes on end, he sat on a bench on Riverside Drive and daydreamed of Helena — her warm breasts, her witch-eyes, other parts — bewitched by recollection, the taste of love on his tongue.

A boy and girl walked by holding hands; they stopped briefly to kiss, which was too much for Peter to bear. He got up, a sigh breaking the bud of his chest, and walked away. Ten minutes to outwait. (Time on his neck like a dog’s collar.) He counted slowly to a hundred and twenty — eight minutes to go.

Peter returned to Helena’s door five minutes early, carrying a daisy, another flower blooming (looming) between his legs. He knocked on the door, a drum roll of anticipation, and waited, hand in pocket, with the anxious dignity of affected ease. Wilting, he knocked again, beginning to communicate his urgency. And again, harder this time, hammering away with the side of his fist — his knuckles sore — the door shivering at his rage. He listened for sounds, knocked again, imagined Harry and Helena frozen together on the bed, paralyzed with amusement. He convinced himself that he heard breathing (his own in his ears), and knocked again. No answer. Tears of frustration hung in his eyes. He twisted the wrist of the doorknob — the door un-giving — twisted the knob back and forth, twisted and pulled until it came loose, like the head of a flower, in his hand. He looked around to see if anyone was watching, felt foolish, returned the knob to its place and fled. An old woman’s hacking cough followed him.

After two wrong numbers, he got Dr. Cantor on the phone. “I have to see you,” Peter said. “I’m going mad.”

“I’ll be glad to see you. Who is this?”

It took a while for him to answer. “Peter Becker.”

“Well, how are you, Peter? For a moment there I didn’t recognize the voice.” His own voice careful, gentle, recognizing itself. “When do you want to come in? It’s my recollection that I had a cancellation for next Tuesday at eleven. How would that be?”

“Can’t I see you now?”

“Now? I’m sorry, but I have a patient coming in in about three minutes. I couldn’t see you today without taking time away from another patient. I’ll tell you what, Peter — can you come in at nine tomorrow? I’ll arrange my schedule so that I can see you then.”

“I have to see you now.”

“Why is it so urgent?”

A small dark-haired girl who resembled Helena from the rear went by the phone booth, her butt bouncing as she walked, Peter following its flight. “I’m going mad,” he said. “I have the feeling that I’m in love with every woman I see. I want to make love to them — every woman, even ugly ones — in the street if necessary. I want to make contact in some way.”

“Take some of those Miltown I gave you.”

The same girl went by again — his phone booth in the basement of the Columbia Bookstore — and he realized, a man with a gift for missing the obvious, that it was Helena, had been Helena. “Can’t talk now, Doctor,” he said, hanging up in a hurry, the phone missing, falling to its length of cord. When he had finally got the phone on its hook and fought his way out of the booth, Helena was gone.

On the wires of instinct he pursued her — the wires bent. He rushed to the Barnard campus, and not finding her there — Helena nowhere in sight — rushed back, soaked with sweat, to look for her in her room. Why, if she didn’t want to see him, should he want to see her? he asked himself. Mind your own business was the answer he got. What business?

While waiting for Helena, sitting on the steps of the 113th Street building, he browsed in his address book; old girl friends blossomed in and out of memory. He reminisced, the sun beating down on his head, accounted the girls he had been in love with, the ones he had made love to, others, nearmisses, Lois. His chest hurt, thinking about it. He read Herbie’s post card:

Peter folded the card in half and stuffed it into the zippered compartment of his wallet. What did Herbie mean by “don’t run amok,” he wondered. Had the two of them ever done anything else?

Though it was only eleven o’clock (actually ten to eleven) Peter had lunch at the West End Bar, a roast beef sandwich and two beers, to pass the time between breakfast and lunch, between want and satisfaction. He was still hungry when he finished. He had another beer and a corned beef sandwich, his appetite un appeased. He looked around, the place mostly empty, two women sitting at the bar — an enormous fan blowing sluggish flies in the air. He ordered another beer. One of the women at the bar shot a sultry glance in his direction. Peter daydreamed, sipped his beer, irremediably thirsty.

With a stub pencil someone had left in an ashtray he drew pictures on his napkin, wrote a prose poem to himself which was really, the napkin damp with beer, a fable. He called it:

After another beer his money was gone. He ran through the streets for a while, the beer joggling in his guts, then went back to Helena’s room to wait for her return, but when he knocked at the door she was there.

“Look,” he said, barging into her room. “I know what I want to do now. What I want is to make love to every woman there is without discrimination as to race, color, creed or age. That’s my ambition. I just worry whether there’s enough time.”

“Forget it,” she said. “It’s been done.”

“Who did it?” he said, incredulous.

And the witches, who had never even smiled at him, laughed. It pleased him that they did. They laughed like hell, and laughed. And laughed.

Peter phoned Delilah. A man’s voice answered.

“May I speak to Delli?” he asked.

There was a long silence. “Who?”

“Do I have the wrong number?”

“I don’t know what number you want,” the voice said.

“I’d like to talk to Delilah if she’s there,” he said aggressively, some part of him embarrassed. “Is there a Delilah there?” His voice was thick.

“That’s not possible,” the man said. “Who’s this calling please?”

In despair he hung up. He dialed again, taking his time; his finger slipped on the last digit and he had to begin all over again. The same man answered.

“I’m sorry,” Peter said wearily. “This is the number I have for Delilah.”

“It’s the right number,” the voice said. “Delilah was very sick, did you know that?”

“I heard something …”

“It was incurable.”

“How are you feeling today?” Dr. Cantor asked as if he were genuinely concerned.

“Fine. Not good.” Peter assumed his position on the couch, stretched out, yawned. (Was this what it was like to come home?)

“When you called me the other day,” the doctor said, his voice less bored than Peter remembered, “you felt you were going through some kind of extreme crisis. Do you want to tell me about it?”

After a moment’s hesitation Peter told the doctor of his most recent obsession, recounted in detail as much as he could remember of the madness of the past few days — the frustration eating away at him, the failure, the sense of failure.

“Why doesn’t anything work out the way I mean it to?” he complained to the face of the ceiling as though it were the face of God — a surrogate of the doctor. “Is it all my fault, do you think?”

The doctor cleared his throat. “Do you feel that it’s your fault?”

“You have to admit that I screw up more than most people.” Peter thought to turn his head — the doctor’s face had a way of disappearing from his memory’s eye — but instead he continued to stare at the ceiling. “You never answer my questions,” he said, resentful despite his intention not to be.

“What I think shouldn’t be of concern to you,” the doctor said reflexively. “We’ve been through all that before, haven’t we?”

“Okay. Yes. But what you want, Doctor — don’t take this personally — takes too much time for what it accomplishes.” “What’s the rush?”

The doctor’s responses were never quite what he expected. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Dr. Noah J. Cantor,” the doctor recited. “I’m fifty-six years old. I’m a pyschoanalyst.”

“Are you married?”

“I have two children, both married. One grandchild.”

“Are you satisfied with things — with the way things have worked out for you?”

“That’s not a question I can answer in a few seconds.”

Peter sighed, disappointed, wanting to believe in the doctor, also not wanting to. “Do you love your wife?” he said. “You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.”

“Thank you. My wife is no longer alive.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Peter, did this girl you were telling me about remind you of your wife in any way?”

“No,” he said quickly, then conceded, struck as though by insight, that it was not impossible. “In a way,” he said. “How did you know? When Helena wouldn’t see me …”

“Go on.”

Peter closed his eyes in an attempt to see. “I felt betrayed again,” he said with effort, “as if Lois were rejecting me all over again, but really they’re not at all alike, Helena and Lois, except that they’re both in some way …” It was still not quite clear to him.

“Yes?”

His sense of things had a way of eluding words. “They’re both childlike,” he said, stopping to reconsider, “and at the same time experienced beyond what they are, a kind of guileful innocence about them, their capacity for knowing things instinctively — Lois in this way more than Helena — disillusioning her, so that she felt, in order to justify her awareness of the world, she had to …” He felt on the verge of an important insight about his life. “She had to …”

“Excuse me, but you’re intellectualizing,” the doctor said.

“… ruin things, the very things she wanted, satisfaction impossible to accept while so much of the world suffers.”

“Who are you talking about?”

He wasn’t sure. “Lois,” he said. “I’m talking about our life.”

The doctor made a noncommittal sound. “Peter,” he said abruptly, “you said you felt betrayed — I think that’s the word you used — what did you mean by that?”

“Well, that … I meant … you know, betrayed, cuckolded.” He had a sense that no matter where you went, whatever you did, it was impossible not to suffer. And there were worse things than suffering.

“Why does that upset you so much?” the doctor asked.

‘Who’s upset?” A nerve like a horsefly buzzed at the back of his ear. “I admit I was jealous — I was obsessed with being betrayed.” He attempted a laugh which never came out.

“Did you feel rejected? Is that it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you feel that these other men were preferred to you?”

“I don’t know.” On the edge of tears he willed, as a matter of choice, not to cry; the tears came anyway, trickling foolishly down his cheeks. He closed his eyes, the lids sticking, flash bulbs exploding red lights at him from all sides. A thin girl, a red spotlight on her, danced naked in his memory. “I didn’t think about whether they were preferred or not, I don’t think I did — maybe sometimes I did. Even so …, People always seem to expect something from me and then are disappointed. I disappoint them. That’s what bothers me most, that people come to me for help and I fail them. Lois needed me, and with all my good intentions I failed her.” He blew his nose.

“And she failed you. It works both ways, doesn’t it?”

“No, it was my fault. What I mean is, why wasn’t I enough for her?” The question came out louder than he intended it, almost a shout.

“Isn’t that a presumption on your part? Look at it this way: why wasn’t your wife enough for you?”

“She was. Lois was.”

The doctor could be heard shifting in his chair. “But didn’t you tell me,” he said with only the slightest attempt to hide his irritation, “that while you were married you also had relations with other women? Didn’t you consider that you were betraying Lois when you had these affairs?”

“You should have been a lawyer,” he said, lifting his head with a kind of giddy pleasure, a sour taste in his mouth.

“Answer my question, please,” the doctor said sternly.

“Why the hell should I?” Peter sat up abruptly, cramped by the enclosure of the couch. “Excuse me,” he said, “but do I look like a philanderer?”

The doctor coughed, choked on something invisible lodged in his throat. “Who does?” he whispered.

Peter sank back onto the couch, luxuriated in the pleasure of lying down. “When I was a kid,” he mused, “I used to daydream almost all the time.”

‘You’ll have to speak a little louder.”

“I’m sorry. As a kid I had daydreams in which I would come across some beautiful girl, usually someone I knew remotely, being attacked by several guys who were bigger than I was, and I would chase them away, rescue her. In return she would fall in love with me — ha! In the dream it was the heroism that was more important than the love. And I think that at the time, if the circumstances had presented themselves, I would have done what I imagined myself doing. I would have tried … It wouldn’t have made any difference.” He remembered a time …

“About three years ago I was walking with a girl in Prospect Park — it was a few months after I had gotten out of the Army — when these two teen-age kids went by and whistled at her; one made an obscene remark. The girl was upset, so I asked the kids to apologize to her. They refuse. I insist. The wise one says it’s a free country and he can say whatever he likes. ‘If that’s the case,’ I said, ‘then I can break your neck if I like.’ ‘Just try it,’ he said. I couldn’t back down in front of the girl, so I get into a fist fight with these two jerky kids and get my nose broken. When the fight’s over — I nearly had to kill one of them to get him to back down — the girl’s gone. And when I call her up she won’t have anything more to do with me, because of the fight. And I had fought the kids for her. That’s what I mean about having a talent for screwing things up.”

The doctor sighed audibly.

“And another time …” Now that he was started — reminiscences of past failure pouring out of him like sweat — he didn’t want to stop. He told of knocking down a drunk in a bar who seemed to be molesting a woman — everyone else there minding his own business. “I didn’t even hit him,” Peter said, “I just pushed him away, but he lost his balance and hit his head on the floor. He was out cold for about thirty minutes, fish-eyed, his leg twitching as if he was dying. The woman left without thanking me. I don’t think I even noticed her leave. I thought I had killed the man. Even after it was clear that he was all right, I kept thinking, What if I had killed him? So much depending on chance, on accident. Afterward the bartender tells me that the woman was the guy’s wife, a really terrible bitch who deserved what she was getting. And anyway, I had no right to interfere. Do you see what kind of gift I have for screwing up? Last night, coming home from a movie about eleven o’clock, I find Gloria and Herbie’s partner, Ira Whimple, scuffling about in the living room — I told you, didn’t I, that I’m staying at Herbie’s place?”

“Uh huh.”

“Ira and Gloria were sort of dancing, mostly wrestling, when I walked in. Ira was trying to get her onto the couch; Gloria kept yelling, ‘No, Peter will be back.’ Neither of them noticed that I was standing in the doorway. ‘You don’t have to worry about him,’ Ira was saying. You just come to my place, Glory.’ Gloria pushed him away, said something I couldn’t hear — the phonograph drowning her out; then this bastard Ira hit her across the face with the back of his hand. I rushed in before I knew what I was doing and knocked Ira down — I only hit him twice. Gloria was screaming and crying. It took me a while to realize that it’s me she was angry at and not Ira. You’re a maniac,’ she screamed at me, and while I’m looking the other way, thinking what to do about Ira, she hauled off and slapped me across the nose, drew blood.” Peter felt his nose, still sore from the blow. “Then she went over to Ira, who’s curled up on the floor with his hands over his head, and makes these cooing noises over him as if he were a baby. It took a while but finally, between us, we got Ira on his feet, dusted the bastard off and sent him home — all the time Ira cursing me under his breath. Then Gloria started packing her things.”

The doctor coughed. Twice.

“Am I boring you?”

“No. Go on.”

“Where was I?”

“You seem to get into a good many fights,” Dr. Cantor observed. “Do you enjoy fighting?”

The ceiling stared back at Peter, one-eyed, a black patch of shadow covering the rest of its face, a secret grin extending from one end to the other. (If he didn’t know better — just a ceiling overhead — he might have thought, the grin unmistakable, that he was looking into the face of some whimsically malevolent god.) “I wouldn’t let her pack, I kept taking her clothes out of the suitcase as she put them in. We have a fight. She tells me she’s going to live with Ira Whimple, and there’s nothing I can do about it. This floors me. ‘I won’t let you go,’ I keep saying while she finishes packing, phones a cab. ‘Don’t try to stop me,’ she says, which I suspect means the opposite, but I just stand there and watch her, not doing anything. Before she leaves, she comes over to me and apologizes for the slap, her hand gently on my face, on the place of the slap, and she looks at me with as much affection as I’ve ever seen her offer anyone. I didn’t know what to say,” he said, touched, trapped in the circumstance of recollection. When he opened his eyes, a night had passed, a day — loss the first condition of waking. He let his eyes close — memory an act of salvage. “When I kiss her she pulls away and says good-bye as though she expects never to see me again … I still don’t understand her. “Why are you doing this?’ I ask. ‘For you,’ she says, marching like the Salvation Army out the door, turning when I think she’s already gone and blowing me a kiss. ‘What do you mean, for me?’ I yell after her. ‘I want you here.’ She returns, smiling her only-I-can-hear-the-music-jerk smile. ‘You don’t know Ira,’ she says. “Why do you think Herbie left town? There are guys …’”

“I’m afraid our time is up,” the doctor said.

Peter lifted his head from the couch as though it were an enormous feat of strength. “Please let me finish.”

“I have another patient waiting outside. How much more is there?”

“Not much. Five minutes.”

“Five minutes,” the doctor agreed. “I’d like to give you more time but I can’t, Peter. You understand. We’re already a few minutes over.”

Peter closed his eyes — Gloria, the shadow of her, in his doorway, a cab outside honking its horn. “There are guys owe Ira a favor,” she was saying, “who’d just as soon kill you as look at you. Don’t worry, Peter, I know how to handle Ira — he’s not so bad. Be good, tiger.” And she was gone. “I let her go,” Peter said. “I could have stopped her.”

“You wanted her to go,” the doctor said.

It was a revelation. “Do you really think I did? Why? Do you think I’m afraid of Ira?”

“I think we’d better save it for another hour.” Dr. Cantor walked over to his desk, sighed at the weight of his task, looked through his appointment book — Peter still lying on the couch. “Good,” the doctor said to himself. “Peter, I can see you again at this time a week from today. How’s that workout?”

Peter sat up with great effort, enormously tired, the room in motion. “I’d like to get out of the city for a while,” he said. “It’s an insane city, New York. You stand on any street corner long enough and some old lady you’ve never seen before is likely to hit you over the head with an umbrella. You know?” He looked at the doctor for verification. Getting none — the doctor involved with his appointment book — he laughed foolishly. “I thought I might visit my brother Herbie who’s in Arizona — my father’s out there too somewhere; Herbie writes that he saw him. Anyway, I’d like to see the West. I know a guy — he was with me at Brooklyn College — who’s a forest ranger somewhere in Colorado. He does nothing, he tells me, but ride a horse all day and think about what he wants to do — when he grows up.” Peter laughed, the doctor’s quiet patience unnerving him. “I think I’d like to do something like that, ride around all day on a horse and think, though I suppose I’d begin to miss people after a while.”

The doctor stood up, making it clear to Peter, with the special tact of gesture, that it was time for him to leave. “Why don’t you call me, Peter, when you decide whether you want to come in. I’ll hold the same hour open for you, for a few days anyway. As a matter of fact, on considering it, I think the trip west might be a good idea. There’s nothing for you in New York now, except painful associations.” He smiled generously, an indulgence of concern.

Peter took a last look at where he was. “Wouldn’t taking off like this, now, be running away?” Peter asked, shaken with a kind of tremulous joy, a man without responsibilities, the room slowing down, coming to a stop. “It’s too easy for me to go away now. I don’t have the right to go. People are suffering because of what I’ve done, what I’ve failed to do. What I ought to do is … Do you really think going to Arizona is a good idea?”

The doctor closed his eyes, a vision of the West behind the New York City owl of his glasses. “Why not?” he said.

“Why not?” Peter echoed him. “I can always come back and …” It remained unsaid — the sentence never to be finished.

And they shook hands on it, like two lone cowboys separating at the end of the trail.

Outside the doctor’s air-conditioned office, New York raged soot-skied in the August heat. Peter spent the rest of the day in Central Park, getting used to the feel of grass against his feet, the smell of country, getting a sense of the West, guilty at his freedom, frightened, lonely, sweating, a Western hero in his Central Park dreams. (Hi-yo, Silver — away!) A dreamer.