A Man to Conjure With

| 1 |

One forgets. Peter had forgotten. Or else when you come back to them after too many years, cities (like people) deceive you, pretend you never knew them, act in fact as if you had never been there at all, as if (the final contempt) you had never been born. The weather in Manhattan on the best of days is heavy. Something to carry around on your back. People commit suicide in San Francisco; in New York you carry the weather on your back.

Peter Becker wandered the city, looking at store fronts and faces. Some were familiar, as if at some time, in some dream of his life, he had known them. The sun was out though unseen, steaming through the haze, a warm day for February. Not warm, not cold, Peter sweated, wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief. And walked, carrying the weather with him. He walked along Broadway from Seventy-eighth Street to Houston Street, stopping on the way in bars, in Chock Full o’ Nuts. He had breakfast at a Bickford’s — the special was still the special: eggs and bacon, and potatoes and applesauce, English muffin and coffee. For a moment — among the other dispossessed, one of them — he was home. He had a second cup of coffee before he went out into the air. And then for the hell of it he began to trot, gradually increasing his pace — he crossed against the light, out-racing a car determined on its right of way — running like a kid, a young man at forty, a seasoned traveler, a bum. After two blocks of running, his chest hurt, and he walked very slowly after that so as not to joggle anything out of its natural order. In Washington Square Park he shared a bench with a pigeon. Neither minded, Peter less than the pigeon; it was like having company without the burden of making talk. Shooing the pigeon away with a rolled-up Daily News, a small white-haired man sat down next to him, exhaled a sigh of comfort. “Not so cold today,” the man said. “Not so warm either.” Peter nodded. The old man read his newspaper (yesterday’s, Peter noticed), glancing at Peter occasionally as though he wanted to talk, muttering to himself, glowering. “They want trouble, they’ll get trouble,” he said. “Trouble is what they’ll get.”

Peter took a soiled envelope out of his coat pocket, took out the folded sheets of paper from inside. He unfolded the pages anxiously — almost, one might say, with expectation — yet it was a letter he himself had written and had read, not counting the present reading, at least half a dozen times. He read the letter cautiously, as though it contained something which, if he weren’t on his guard, might scare him half to death.

My dear son Philly,

How are you, boy? I’m getting along all right, though miss you, Phil, as you know. (I hope you know.) I feel it’s a great lack that we don’t know each other better — who closer than a father and son? — but maybe that could be changed. Why not? It struck me the other day, Phil, that if I met you on the street I might not even know you. How tall are you now? I don’t even know. What I mean is, it hurts me not to know. I want to know. I have the sense that I’m missing something — your growth — I miss not seeing you grow. It’s hard in a letter to say what I mean. And I’m afraid if I say it, it may not reach you in the way I mean it. A writer I admire says about letters that the ghosts, wherever they dwell, always drink up all the words before the letter arrives. Maybe that’s why I haven’t written you as much as I should. It’s no excuse.

Phil, I want things to be different between us, different and better. This is my idea: I’m moving back to New York, which is, as much as any place, my home — and by that token, your home too, and you’ve never even been to New York City, have you? What I’m having so much trouble saying is, I’d like you to come and live with me in the city. I’ve meant to write this letter at least a dozen times before, but something always seemed to go wrong at the time — and I was moving around so much. It’s no excuse. I plead innocence, and acknowledge my guilt. It was not a failure of intention, Phil — believe me — but of opportunity. Will you forgive me? I’d like very much for you to come and stay with me in New York, but if not — after all, your grandparents have brought you up, you may have ties in Ohio that are important to you — I would understand, and not love you any less for your decision. I promise you that, word of honor. But Philly, listen, come to New York for a visit (no strings attached), and let’s see how things go. My idea is to rent a place with a room set aside for you, so that whenever you want to visit (if you want to), you’ll have your own room. But come only if you want to. No obligations, Phil. The hell with obligations.

There are things I want to tell you about which are hard to explain in a letter. One does what one has to do. I can’t explain. If I had these years to do over again they would be different, I tell myself, but in all likelihood I would do most of the same things again. And regret them again. In my spare time, Phil, I’ve been working on a kind of travel book about the United States, a journal of what’s happened to me, where I’ve been, what I’ve seen. If it’s ever published, it’s to be dedicated to you. What I mean is, Philly, it’s written for you. God knows, I haven’t given you much up to now. Things will be different, I keep saying. Don’t count on it, but they will.

Are you okay? In good health and all that? What are you studying? What are you interested in? I’d like to get you some books, but I don’t know what you like. Tell me. When I was your age, Ring Lardner (I think) was my favorite author. Have you ever read “Alibi Ike”?

So tell me more about your interests. But write not out of obligation, only if you feel like it. No obligations between us; I was a son once myself. (Still am, if you ask my father — your other grandfather.) Which reminds me — extend my regards to Mr. and Mrs. Van Wilhite, who are fine people. Give them my best.

And Philly, come to New York for a visit (a month, a year, as long as you like — just let me know a little in advance). Whatever its drawbacks, New York’s a great city. That’s why I’ve been away for fifteen years. One has to earn the right to return. Or return to earn the right. Maybe, after all — you take yourself wherever you go — all places are the same. Still, I think of New York as my home. And your home. To be alone anywhere, even in the place you were born and grew up, is not to be home.

My best wishes to all.

Your loving father,

And that was it: he had spent hours composing it, trying to strike the right tone, fatherly yet friendly, then writing it finally in his own voice as if he were talking directly to the boy. He couldn’t send it. It was full of evasions, half-truths, sentimental posturing. The boy (who was he, anyway?) would probably laugh at it, or be ashamed that his father (some father!) was such a jerk.

“Bad news?” the old man next to him asked, clucking with malicious sympathy. “I been there myself. Believe me.” The sky his witness.

Peter growled, his annoyance wordless. The man staggered up, making sounds to himself, and wandered, bowed, bow-legged, to another (more congenial) bench. Immediately, Peter was sorry — remorse the plague of his spirit. What right had he to be unpleasant to the old man who, like a child, only wanted attention, a little love — like anyone else, damn him!

Peter looked at the folded sheets of paper in his hand — he knew the letter almost by heart (what other way to know it?) — and decided — a penance for the old man — to take the risk of sending it. As a precaution against changing his mind, Peter rushed off to mail the letter — nodding at the old man as he passed him — with the secret exhilaration of a suicide plunging off a roof. Predictably, as soon as the letter had been lost to the mail box, caught in the underground process of its machinery, he had regrets. Among other causes for concern, he didn’t have a job (or promise of one), he didn’t have a place (still living in a flea bag of a hotel), and his money, what remained of it, would last him, with extreme care, he judged, at most another month. So much for his promises to the boy! And the book, the travel book he had bragged about in his letter (the one already dedicated to his son), existed only as a collection of notes — the passion of the moment of observation eroded by time and distance. To date he had written only one permanent sentence, had rewritten it several times, had polished it to a fine glow, and as a consequence was concerned that if he went on writing, it would inevitably be a falling off. Still, he told himself, he intended when he got the chance (evasion of evasions) to finish the book, to begin the actual writing — the book already written, already dedicated, somewhere inside of him, the trick being to find out where.

So what would he do with him if the boy actually decided to pay him a visit? It was a problem. Yet when he thought about it in cold February logic (the wind lashing his teeth) he couldn’t believe that this boy, his son, would want to come and live with him — why should he? — his father a stranger, a man of no account. Seated among the old men in the park, Peter suffered his son’s rejection as if his conjecture, the vision of his logic, were an irretrievable fact. And then — a man who needed a son — he hoped (having no hope) that Philly would accept the invitation to visit. The old anxiety like a frozen hand fixed itself in his chest. When you wanted something — one of the continuous lessons of his life — you run the risk of loss. Anyway, what could a bum lose he didn’t already not own? He could afford a few more risks — why not? As it was, the world risked your life every day without even asking you. And he was only forty, a slow starter. Plenty of time. Since Rachel’s death — it was curious how little he remembered of her — he had taken a minimum of chances, and for all his caution was still a loser, only lost less. He still had his health, though a chronic cough haunted his chest, occasional headaches worried him, he had trouble sleeping (his dreams taunting the failure of his life), he felt faint sometimes (shaken by blackness); otherwise he was fine.

Still, he would take better chances this time, he told himself as he wandered the streets of the Village, warming himself with recollections, a tourist of his own life, replanning the past. How many deaths can you die? he asked himself. “A million” was the answer, but who was counting? Coughing, the weather getting to him, he walked over to the Fifth Avenue Bar for a drink. It was gone; an office building had replaced it. He made accommodation — it was a new possibility of himself — and settled for a small bar on Bleecker Street, which may or may not have been in business fifteen years ago. He didn’t ask. (He didn’t dare.)

After three drinks he called Lois at work — a nervy gesture, impelled by a sudden, unlikely and remarkable confidence. Hadn’t she told him that she didn’t want to see him again? Ah, but Peter, a man of mission, believed only what he knew.

“Let’s have lunch,” he suggested, the suggestion making itself.

Lois seemed distracted. “Who is this, please?” “This is Peter. Let’s have lunch.”

“Hello. I’ve been thinking about you all morning. For some reason I didn’t recognize your voice.” She laughed nervously. “How are you, Peter?”

“Let’s have lunch.” His confidence was wearing thin.

“Today?”

“Why not?”

“I can’t today. I already have an appointment. What about tomorrow?”

Tomorrow? Tomorrow? He considered the question in all its metaphysical implications. He wondered, as if it mattered, what day it came out on — the issue resolving itself on what today was, Wednesday or Thursday — he hadn’t bothered to notice. His appointment book, if he had one, without days or dates. Tomorrow, when you had most of today to do, seemed a long way off.

“Peter?”

“Yeah? All right, tomorrow.” Though he tried, he was unable to disguise the pain of his disappointment.

“You were so silent, I thought we had been cut off.” She lowered her voice. “I worry about you,” she said.

“I’m all right,” he tried to say, the bones of his grief choking him. What good was confidence if it didn’t preclude pain?

“I’m sorry I’ve been so difficult,” she said.

“You haven’t.”

“I can’t hear you, Peter.”

“You have a right not to want to see me,” he said.

“Peter, I didn’t mean that. It was just seeing you … You understand.” Another nervous laugh. “Are you all right?”

“Who me? Never been better.” Through the glass of the booth he watched the thin Italian at the bar mix a whiskey sour, shaking it between his hands as though it had a life of its own. “Lois, I’ve decided I’m going to stay in New York,” he said, his excitement born and dying in the same sour breath.

“Don’t you think I knew that?” she said.

“You know everything,” he said.

She was immune to irony. “Peter”—she broached the subject with conspicuous tact — “do you have any plans? What I mean is, I may know of a job for you if you’re interested. You’ve had some editorial experience, haven’t you?”

He cleared his throat. “There was this magazine in San Francisco that ran four issues that I worked on, called Vision. I was art editor. It folded when I quit.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m sure you can do it.”

“I can do anything,” he said, “only …” The idea of working a full-time job, a restraint on his freedom to do nothing, depressed him. “I’m writing a book,” he announced. It sounded a bit foolish — why had he even brought it up? — a matter of identifying himself, a need.

“You’ll still need a job,” she said, “unless you’re independently wealthy.” She laughed politely, a little embarrassed at the joke. “What kind of book are you writing?”

He couldn’t explain over the phone. “A book.”

“I told you I was painting again, didn’t I?” she said. “Off and on. I mostly do it as a means of relaxation. Oscar says it’s good for me.”

“Is it good for Oscar?” he said, getting back at her. Then, the new Becker censoring the old: “I’m glad it makes you happy.” Though he meant it straight, it came out ironic.

“Peter,” she scolded. “There’s an opening here for a copy editor, at the magazine end of this place. It’s not a great job, but until you get your bearings in the city … I’ve already put in a word with the editor for you — Bob Grimes; he’s a nice guy, I think you’ll like him.”

“I’m putting myself completely in your hands,” he said, a conscious attempt at avoiding irony. “Any way you want to rehabilitate me is just fine with me.”

“Don’t be a bastard.” She whispered it.

The operator interrupted: “Five cents for the next three minutes.”

“You misunderstand me,” he said. He scavenged in his pocket for a nickel and came up with a subway token, lint, and three pennies.

“It’s not hard to misunderstand you,” she said gently. “Should I tell Bob that you’re not interested in the job?”

“Do you want me to take it?”

“Give me your number, Peter. I’ll call you back.”

“I appreciate this, Lois.” A heavy click. “Lois?”

A dial tone, the death of a connection between them.

He told a woman at the bar what it was like to be a forest ranger. “My job was mostly going around on a horse from place to place counting deer pellets,” he explained. “And this horse they gave me kept throwing me and running away. Sometimes I would lose a whole day just trying to find my horse.”

“That’s very interesting,” she said, and she might even have meant it.

When he called Lois back — an hour and three Scotches later — some girl (her secretary?) told him that Lois was out for lunch, and would he care to leave a message? His speech a bit thick, he asked the girl, whoever she was — he liked the sound of her voice — if she would have lunch with him, since both of them seemed to be free at the moment. The girl thanked him, said she was sorry — even sounded sorry — that she had already been out for lunch. Another time.

“What’s your name?” he asked. Then, sobering some: “You don’t have to answer.”

“Diane,” she said. “Why should I mind answering?”

He hardly remembered the rest of the conversation, but a few minutes after he had hung up it struck him that he had made an appointment to have a drink with the girl. What was he — out of his mind? If he wanted Lois back — why else had he returned to New York? — he had no business making dates with girls who worked in her office, even if it was innocent. Avoid rashness, he warned himself, and had another drink. Avoid innocence.

He left the bar at three o’clock in full control of one or two small areas of himself, and went about the cosmic business of killing the rest of the day. Time hardly moved, but he wasn’t around much to notice it. Tomorrow, he promised himself, tomorrow he would start fresh.

And the next day, no longer tomorrow, he did. It was a surprise even to himself. He started fresh. He woke early, only a little hung-over, shaved, dressed, and with uncharacteristic efficiency found a place to live: a semifurnished two-room apartment on West Seventy-third Street, at only (a bargain in New York) eighty-nine fifty a month, tsouris extra. Paying the rent — two months in advance — left him very nearly broke. (Thirty-seven dollars between Peter and his last fifty cents.) To his surprise he didn’t worry about it; yet a part of him, a remnant of the old Becker, was a little nervous.

Why begrudge the spirit a little pleasure between pains? They had lunch together, Peter and Lois, like old times, at a tea-housey Swedish restaurant on Lexington Avenue. Lois indulged him with smiles.

“I still resent you,” she said between sips of her coffee. “Do you think it’s love?” She smiled brilliantly, the remoteness of her eyes belying the guile of her charm. It was merely talk, and also, despite itself, meant.

Still, he had trouble recognizing her. “I think it’s resentment,” he said. “Does this guy, Grims, Grimes — what’s his name? — does he know that you used to be married to me?”

“His name is Bob Grimes,” she said in an instructive voice. “I don’t think there’s anything to be gained in mentioning it, Peter. It’s not relevant, really. Is it? It’s just not relevant. You understand.” She smiled sheepishly, aware of her own game, aware that he was aware — her vanity a denial of itself.

He played along. “Is this guy Grimes interested in you?” The waitress, in a loose-fitting peasant blouse, a big Dutch-looking girl, bent over to clear the table. Peter couldn’t help noticing the ripeness of her breasts. He turned guiltily to Lois, discovered lines under her eyes, new ones.

“Are you jealous?” she asked.

He clowned, looking over his shoulder — a tray of Swedish cakes on the table behind him. “Who me?” he protested. “Who me — jealous? Why should I be jealous?”

She laughed with more pain than pleasure.

“I am jealous,” he said softly.

She turned away. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

She lit a cigarette, her hand tremulous. “You know what I’m talking about. Peter, I want peace and quiet. I need peace and quiet.”

He nodded.

“The truth is, I don’t love you any more,” she said matter-of-factly, her eyes averted. “It took me a long time to get over you; I was really neurotic about it, but it’s been done and I don’t want it undone. You understand.”

“All right.” What else could he say?

“Do you mean it?” An anguished smile, an attempt at a laugh. “I think you’re humoring me. Are you?” She stubbed out her cigarette murderously, as though she had a grudge against it. “Oscar has the idea that you’ve come back to New York — I told him it wasn’t true — because you think there’s a possibility of us getting together again.” She played with her napkin, embarrassed. “You don’t think that, do you?”

Peter glanced at Lois, her face fretted by uncharted fears, and found her (as never before) unattractive, curiously ugly. It was the light. When she turned to him, forcing a shy, broken smile, her face was lovely again. “You look very nice,” he said.

She shrugged, a girl again in her recollection of herself, embarrassed and pleased at the compliment. “I was much prettier when I was young,” she said wistfully.

They fought over the check, Peter winning an anxious victory — guilt the impulse of his pride.

As they got up from the table, Lois took a five-dollar bill out of her wallet and slipped it into his hand. He gave it back to her.

“Please,” she insisted, pushing the money surreptitiously, as if he couldn’t feel what she was doing, into a side pocket of his jacket.

He paid for the lunch with his own money, with as much grace as he could muster — Lois’s five-dollar bill weighing in his pocket like a stone.

Outside, Lois, her hand lightly on his arm, rewarded him with a smile. “When you get the job,” she consoled him, stroked the indifference of his pride, “you’ll take me out to lunch. Okay?”

He gave her back the five dollars, slipping it into the warm pocket of her coat, a lingering gesture, an unintended intimacy. Coming out, his hand was bruised by the cold. He rubbed his hands together.

“Is that the way you want it?” she said.

“I like to show a girl a good time,” he said. “That’s the kind a guy I am.”

“You’re a clown,” she said.

He bowed for his audience, did a dance step, a slow shuffle. Lois looked embarrassed.

They walked together back to Whartons Associates, Lois in a hurry — a slow, cold rain, a misty veil of rain impeding their progress.

“Remember,” she said at the entrance to the building, as if he were a small boy she were sending off to camp, “your appointment with Bob is for three o’clock. It’s twenty to three now. You don’t have a watch, so don’t go too far away.”

“Okay,” he said.

They shook hands. “Good luck,” she whispered. “Call me and tell me how you make out.”

He said he would. “Just be yourself,” she called back.

He waved. It was like old times, only different.

Alone, himself, in no mood to be interviewed, he had the urge to flee. Patience, counseled the new Becker. You’re winning. It only feels like loss. So he walked around the block a few times to pass the time; the icy rain, stinging his face, confirmed him in the illusion of his existence. Waiting on a corner for the light to change, he tried to remember Lois as she was fifteen years ago, but for no reason — a trick of memory — he recalled a delicate, long-haired blond girl of seventeen — she used to ride in his cab — he took her back and forth from school — her name Delilah — she had died. He wiped his eyes, a fool to cry on a busy street corner. All his losses, it seemed at that moment, in the haze of recollection, were one loss — something of himself. And something else: each loss a death, his own. Where was the new Becker when he needed him most? He shook his head in a paroxysm of grief, wondering if it would be possible to close whatever it was he had opened up in himself. The rain in his face seemed his own tears. It struck him then with a sense of discovery, though he had known it for a while, had been keeping it a secret from himself, that he was no longer in love with Lois. The knowledge, a kind of final terror, braced him. There was nothing else to fear, nothing worse. His nerves a fortress of scars. And yet it changed nothing. He vowed he would make it up to Lois if he could. And if he couldn’t? “Who couldn’t?” he said out loud. No one answered. The rain changed to sleet. The man standing next to him, younger and heavier than Peter, looked away.

| 2 |

A sometimes wise man, his brother, once advised him: “Don’t sleep when you’re awake.” He tried not to. But his dreams had an astonishing clarity and it always surprised him afterward, when he woke from them, that they had happened, that he had lived through them, when he was to all intents and purposes asleep.

Peter was sitting at the head (or foot) of a long table in an elegant Victorian restaurant with his father and brother, Diane and Lois, and a few other people he knew only casually. (His son, he was told, would be arriving later.) It was a marvelous restaurant, a waiter like a shadow behind every chair. His father, Morris, suggested a toast: “To Peter, whose courage and generosity has made this evening possible. To Peter, the pride of his family — not many of them still alive — we love you.” He blew his nose. There were cheers. While they were toasting him Peter sneaked a look at his wallet, which was empty except for a crumpled five-dollar bill and two subway tokens. Did they think he was paying for it all — the drinks, the food, the wine, a tremendous amount already consumed, latecomers still arriving? What a mistake they had made! How could it have happened? It had happened — did the world always make sense? Peter waved his hands for silence. There was applause. Herbie winked at him, banged his glass on the table. “Speech.”

“My friends …” Peter said, searching for words to explain his predicament. More applause. “I have a confession to make.” A roar from the crowd. “I’m not who you think I am.”

“Sit down,” the fat man next to him said. “We’ve had enough speeches for one night.”

“There’s been a misunderstanding,” he shouted, trying to make himself heard above the noise of the crowd — everyone talking at once. “I have no money.”

Lois tugged at his arm. “Please, Peter! Don’t spoil everything.”

“What can I do? I have no money, and they expect me to pay for all this.”

The fat man laughed as if he had never been so amused in his life.

Everyone seemed to be looking in the direction of his dinner plate, Herbie pointing a long finger at it. Knowing smiles, nudges — a secret shared at his expense.

Dubious, Peter lifted his plate and found, pink on the white tablecloth, a check made out to him for five hundred thousand dollars — he read it twice to make sure — and thirty-six cents. A note clipped to it said: “For services rendered.” There was also a crushed white carnation. Peter looked around; everyone in the room, it seemed, was nodding at him.

“What’s this for?” he said. “I haven’t done anything to deserve this.”

“Ohhhhh!” A group disclaimer.

“Don’t be ungracious,” his father said. “If I told you once, Peter, I’ve told you a thousand times: money is honey. Finders keepers, losers weepers. A bird in the hand …”

Peter ripped the check in half, then in quarters, then in eighths. “I don’t want what isn’t mine,” he said. He threw the pieces to the wind — a huge exhaust fan at the center of the ceiling attracting them, whirring them about in the air like confetti. Pieces of check floated across the room, landing on tops of heads, in soup, in people’s mouths, eyes. One end of the banquet table collapsed. A white-haired lady was crying. A piece of ceiling fell. Someone screamed, “It’s the Titanic all over again.”

“What have you done, kid?” Herbie said, shaking his head sadly.

What had he done?

He awoke in a sweat, shivering, alone in his own bed, the covers askew. For moments on end, the room still dark, he suffered the dream as though it was a comment on his life, its implications a judgment. But after a while it faded from memory, and though he tried, he was unable to recall its details. Only its outline, the nightmare of his good fortune, remained to keep him awake. Since his return to New York, his life had been going remarkably well, everything (almost) as he wanted it, his luck too good for comfort. Going to sleep was risky when you had something to lose. Even the editing job, which he had had no business getting in the first place, had worked out. After only two months he had been given a substantial raise, more than he deserved. Yet it troubled him that the job took nothing of himself that mattered but his time. It was easy enough, gave him the illusion of achievement (money exchanged hands), made him a living and pleased Lois — what more did he have a right to want? He wanted more — or less. But that wasn’t the best (the worst?) of his luck. His son, Phil, had written to say that he wanted to visit him, was coming to stay with him in New York for the summer as soon as school was out. It worried Peter. Such luck couldn’t be his — a mistake? He looked over his shoulder at the guy in back of him, for whom the luck was obviously meant, hut no one was there. It worried him.

When he told Lois about his misgivings — an old ex-married couple, they had dinner together two or three times a week — she laughed at him as though he weren’t serious. “You’re out of your mind,” she said, serving him a martini — Peter in Oscar’s chair. “None of this has anything to do with luck.” She sniffed at the word as though it were scatological. “At least three people in the past week have said good things to me about you. You’re good. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“Who’s hard?” he kidded. “The rest of you are too easy.” Yet he had the feeling — a further disappointment in them both — that she had missed the point of his complaint, that he had missed making the point.

Peter sipped his martini, reacquainted himself with Lois’s face, which had a way of seeming different, seeming actually to change character in different moods of light. Sometimes he thought he was in love with her again — some of her faces he was in love with — but mostly it was something else, the low-flamed affection of people who mourned a common death. They were, in the conventional sense, old friends, or pretended to be. Peter told her about his son, underplaying his anxieties about the visit. “What do you do with a thirteen-year-old boy?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was never a thirteen-year-old boy.” She set the table for dinner, poured another round of martinis.

“He sounds pretty intelligent from his letter, though he doesn’t spell very well,” Peter said. “They must have bad schools in Ohio. Do you know what really worries me, Lois … I’m afraid that he’ll see through me.”

Lois nibbled on a nail, smiled. “What will he see?”

He couldn’t explain. “He’ll see that there’s nothing there.” Depression, like an old friend, hung on his neck.

“You’re not making any sense,” Lois said. “I can’t bear to listen to you talk this way, Peter.” She got up and went into the kitchen, returning almost immediately. “Sometimes you get me really angry.” She looked around as if to find something she could throw at him. “I know you’ve had some bad times, but you’re not the only one. What gets me so mad is that you’re doing so well now, and you still complain. Accept it. I’ve never known anyone — Oh, let’s eat.”

They ate like strangers, harboring private hurts, their dispute mediated into silence. “I still haven’t given up the notion of teaching,” Peter said, raising his fork, balancing a single pea on the edge of the middle prong. “The trouble is, I don’t know enough to teach. How could I stand up in front of a class? What could I tell them?”

“If you continue like this, Peter, I’m going to leave. I mean it. Why is it that nothing in the world satisfies you?”

He shrugged. The question was its own answer.

She glanced at him shyly, looked away. “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said. “I’d like to see your son’s letter if you have it with you.”

He took it out of his wallet, and with a curious sense of pride — the author, after all, his son — passed it over to Lois. He watched her nervously, studied her expression as she read, the shadow of a smile on her mouth. Holding the letter to the light — her eyes, slits of themselves, almost touching the page — she read without her glasses. Why? he wondered. For whose benefit?

“Uh huh,” she said, handing it back.

“What does that mean?”

“Uh huh, it’s a nice letter,” she said tonelessly.

“It’s just a letter,” he said. “There’s no point in making a big deal about it.”

“It’s just a letter,” she said, “but it’s a nice one. I’m sure he’s a nice boy.” The more she attempted enthusiasm, the colder her voice became — the word “nice” freezing all life for miles around. “What was his mother like?” she asked slyly, sipping her wine. “You know, you’ve never told me anything about her.”

Peter pretended distraction, studied the spidery lines of a woodcut on the opposite wall — the unadmitted knowledge between them demanding more than either was willing to give. “Nice,” he said. “The print.”

“Yes.” Lois didn’t ask again, though clearly the question remained in the air, to be reckoned with. She wondered if he had another woman somewhere — that is, a woman — she was only an old friend herself, a former wife. And besides, what could she expect from a man who didn’t answer her questions?

“Oscar Patton wants to marry me,” she said without warning. That got him. Peter raised his head, looked around like a man coming out of a trench in the middle of a battle to see what the noise was about. ‘You don’t like Oscar much, do you?” she asked.

“I don’t think you ought to marry him,” he said quickly.

“Why not?” The question issued as a challenge.

He didn’t answer at first, not prepared at the moment to tell her of his own plans, mainly because he had only plans for plans, a man who didn’t want to build a house unless he could also build the ground under it.

“Oscar and I get along very well together,” she added.

“You know why not,” he said, as much as he could say.

She shook her head. “I don’t. You have to tell me.”

They stared at each other across the table, old lovers — it was all there for a moment, everything that hadn’t been said, in the whisper of their eyes. Peter looked away, shaken.

“I couldn’t bear another bad marriage,” she said.

“I like Oscar much better than I did,” he said to be fair, the luck (too much of it) on his side.

“He doesn’t like you,” she said, a small smile at Oscar’s expense. “He says you’re destructive, Peter — self-destructive, too — that you set impossible terms for yourself, that you eventually cause a lot of harm to everyone around you because you’re incapable of compromise which is sanity.” She recited it as if it were a lesson she had memorized.

Peter looked at his hands, his nails dirty.

“It’s just that he’s jealous,” she said. “He thinks I see too much of you.”

“What do you think?”

“I think we ought to have our coffee in the living room.”

They resettled in the living room, Peter on the sofa, Lois in a charcoal yellow armchair, an unpractically low teak coffee table arbitrated between them.

“When you’re not around, Oscar’s a fine person,” she said, stirring her coffee, watching the circle within circles. She glanced up quickly to catch the unguarded moment of his response, saw nothing she hadn’t seen before. There was nothing to see. His face impassive, the pain in his eyes old news. “If I marry Oscar,” she said, “we won’t be able to be friends any more.” Her voice unnaturally high. “Oscar won’t stand for you being around. You know that, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“Does it matter to you that we won’t be able to see each other?” She poured him another cup of coffee, her hand trembling. Their hands touched, she moved back to her chair.

“Of course it matters to me,” he said, meaning it, wondering how much it really mattered. “That’s why,” he said solemnly, “I don’t have any right to tell you not to marry him.” He had a sense of being virtuous, which he immediately distrusted.

“You don’t take milk, do you?” she said, putting some in her own coffee. “That’s funny. When we were married, if you remember — but I’m sure you don’t — it was the other way around. I took it black then.” Her face turned toward him, wistful, years younger. Then: “You know you’re a liar.”

He laughed uneasily. “What are you talking about?” His voice cracking.

Lois stood up, stamped her foot, turned away, back, possessed, a child again, nibbling a finger. “You …” The phone rang. “You fraud,” she whispered, poised between nostalgia and intention, rushing off suddenly to the kitchen to answer her call.

Waiting for Lois, Peter gave himself over to the comfort of the couch, took off his shoes, loosened his belt — he had eaten too much. A sense of well-being, an excess of it, dulled his needs. He yawned, looked around, fought against sleep. The room was too small, overpopulated with taste: one of Lois’s paintings, a new one — an olive-faced woman in a room of flowers — peered at him from a cramped space of wall between two windows — the painting the only flaw in the room’s caution. The flowers more human than the girl — he knew the feeling. Which one was Lois? he wondered, knowing too well that she was all of them, but mostly, becalmed by terror, the olive girl. He drowsed, an invalid of comfort. Play it cool, a voice in him said (the new Becker), you’re winning, kid. Huh? How about that? He nudged the man next to him, who turned out — a coincidence — to be Oscar Patton.

“I’m sorry, Oscar,” he said, “but I’m taking Lois away from you for her own good. I had to do it, old man. It’s the rules of the street. I saw her first, married her first, held her hand at her first abortion. I hope you’ll be a good sport about it.” Peter offered his hand, which Patton pretended not to notice. “You’re taking it very well,” the doctor said blandly. “I’m proud of you, Peter. In your case, if you’ll allow me a professional judgment, the illusion is everything. Life itself. Destroy the illusion and …” His hand drew a cutting line across his throat. “Do you see what I’m getting at? Your common, run-of-the-mill sense of victory, as in this case, is all illusion anyway. Mortality, Peter, is its own defeat — life is compromise. So, you win her — so what? She’s a fairly attractive, unhappy woman in her late thirties. No great bargain. Anyway, I’m letting you have this sense of victory for your own good, Peter, so you can accept the larger defeats ahead of you with the proper respect and terror. If loss comes too easily, you don’t take it seriously.” He lowered his voice. “Beware of complacency, schmuck.” “Fuck you” was all Peter could think to say, but he withheld this timeless judgment, turned it on himself, since, half awake, he knew that Patton wasn’t actually in the room with him. He opened his eyes. The furniture sat erect, visitors on their best behavior. Lois returned, carrying bravely a smile like a wilted flower.

“I hope you’re in the mood for company,” she said, fluttery, looking around for something to do. “Oscar will be here in about twenty minutes.”

He nodded, finished a cup of cold coffee, not surprised.

“He asked to come over, Peter. I couldn’t tell him not to.” She picked up the coffee cups, then forgetting what she meant to do with them, put them down again in approximately the same place.

Her confusion made him uneasy. “Do you want me to leave?”

She shook her head. “I told him you were here. It would look worse if you left.”

He compromised with his anger. “You have enough furniture in here without me,” he said, a solemn kidder. “Lois, if you want me to stay, I will, but not for Patton’s sake.”

“For my sake?” She put her hands on his shoulders, flirted with him.

“Are you in love with Patton?” he asked, charmed into jealousy.

“If I were,” she said sweetly, “you’d be the last to know.”

When Patton arrived to occupy his chair, Lois gave him her undivided attention, as though Peter weren’t even in the room. And still it was clear to Peter, which made everything so much worse, that Patton, pampered like an honored guest, patronized by the woman he had asked to marry him, was the outsider — his place usurped. And Patton, for all the professional charm of his confidence, seemed to have a sense of it. The doctor sat at attention, white-maned, sucking an unfit pipe with absent-minded grace, a little more tired than usual. It was as though he had been sitting there for years waiting for a train, and was beginning to have some doubts that he was in the right place.

Lois served cognac, asked questions. The doctor lectured, told instructive anecdotes of cases he had been associated with — the patients referred to as “X” or “Y”—fascinating stories of fetishes, obsessive attachments, paranoia, dementia, divided personalities. Peter listened with horror; each aberration the doctor described seemed to him in some way an extension of one of his own. Peter wanted to declare a truce, but since the war itself was undeclared, to ask for a truce would be an act of aggression. And wasn’t it — the doctor merely telling stories — coincidence (madness?) that Peter saw what he saw? When he glanced at her, Lois smiled at him warmly, a lover’s smile. He had the sense, without knowing why, of being trapped between the two of them.

The last of the stories, an especially interesting case to the doctor, seemed to Peter, even more than the others, an attempt on Patton’s part to expose him. The doctor told about a man, a patient of a friend of his, who was obsessed with the notion of retaining the past exactly as it was. The man (Mr. Y, he was called), woke one morning of his life in terror of losing his memory, unable at the moment of waking to remember the details of some incident in his adolescence.

“Mr. Y had the feeling,” the doctor said, “that in losing the past — even this very minor incident he was trying to recall — he was losing himself, the very structure of his life, his identity as an adult human being. You can imagine what a nightmare this was to him.” The doctor puffed thoughtfully on his pipe, sucking in the vapor of truth, giving it back to the air again, wiser, filtered. “This is not as uncommon as it sounds. It was the extent to which Y carried it that made it a disorder.” The doctor paused, looked around benignly at his audience to see if there were any questions.

“How far did he carry it?” Lois asked dutifully.

“Not very far at first,” the doctor said. “At first it was just a matter of writing everything down in a journal so as not to lose contact with his experiences. Every detail of his day, even the most casual of conversations, was put into the journal. He would even chronicle the times he went to the bathroom. Sometimes, I understand, he would write in his journal about what it was like to write in his journal.” The doctor refit his pipe, looked around.

Lois laughed belatedly. “That’s really very funny.”

The doctor puffed on his pipe a few times, nodded solemnly. “This satisfied Y for a while,” he said, “but then he got to feeling that writing this one journal wasn’t enough. It left too much of his life — his childhood, his relationship with his parents, his early encounters with sex — unaccounted for. It was at this time he began, on top of his regular journal, to keep a journal of the past.”

“How old was this man, Oscar?” Lois asked.

The doctor concentrated, took sustenance from his pipe. “I believe the man was forty-eight when he went into analysis,” he said, nodding to confirm his judgment. “His obsession with the past had been active, in varying degrees of intensity, for something like fifteen years before that. The pressure of maintaining the past with flawless accuracy — Y was a bug about accuracy — finally became too much for him and he sought help as a matter of survival. At that point, I understand, he had written something like fifteen volumes of notes about his own life. Think of it. Fifteen volumes, over two hundred pages each. And he was constantly revising them. In the interest of accuracy he went around interviewing people who had shared experiences with him; he would call strangers up in the middle of the night and quiz them about a detail of an incident that might or might not have taken place twenty years before. In his journal he would sometimes have three or four versions of the same incident and then attempt to synthesize them in some scientific way to get at the truth. But of course, poor Y could never be sure he had it absolutely right, and as you can imagine, that frustrated the hell out of him. When things got too much for him to do alone, he hired a foundation to help him with his research. Fortunately for him, Y was a fairly wealthy man and had been able through most of this period to keep a profitable business running. He was a man of enormous energy.” The doctor glanced at Peter, who obligingly squirmed in his seat, his pants sticking to him.

“Peter,” the doctor said, pinning him with a smile, “it was only when Y began to invest all his energy into the reconstruction of the past that he finally collapsed, as much from exhaustion as anything else. In many ways he was an extraordinary man. What he wanted — that is, what he believed he wanted — was a kind of total knowledge insofar as his own life was concerned. Impossible, but you couldn’t tell him. The analyst had great difficulty reaching him. At their second meeting, Y accused the doctor of advocating imperfection. Of advocating imperfection.” He laughed. “Can you imagine that?”

Peter nodded.

“That’s very interesting,” Lois said, muffling a yawn. “Did you cure the man, Oscar?”

Patton looked at his watch. “I’d completely lost track of the time,” he said. “This man’s under treatment with another doctor, Lois. He’s been making progress, I understand, but a cure — what I think you mean by a cure — is out of the question.”

“Why is it out of the question?” Peter asked. He discovered that his right leg was asleep and he was gradually working it back into circulation.

“It just is,” Patton said, smiling patiently. “You can’t uproot the habit of a lifetime in a few years of analysis. At best, Y will learn to compromise a little with the demands he’s made on himself.” He tapped out his pipe in an ashtray. “I think we’d better go,” he said to Peter, winking, returning the pipe absently to his mouth. “Lois is tired and she’s been having some trouble sleeping, she says.”

“I’m not a baby, Oscar,” Lois said.

“Nobody said you’re a baby,” the doctor said, “but you have a tendency to get run-down, as you know.”

“I’ve never been healthier in my life,” she said. “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”

The phone rang. Lois looked anxiously at Peter, as if appealing to him to stop the sound of the phone before it reached Patton’s ears. “Who can it be?” she said.

Patton stood at attention. “The only way to find out is to answer it,” he said with a father’s amused tolerance, his smile like a bruise on an overripe peach.

Peter pulled himself to his feet. Lois backed out of the room, taking a last look, waving, as though she were going away for a year or two on a cruise.

“Well,” Patton said, glancing at his watch. With Lois gone, the two of them were like otters out of water. “It’s getting late.” What else was there to say? They waited, each second an hour, for Lois to return. The murmur of her voice carried through the closed door of the kitchen, but it was difficult, without actually eavesdropping, to get anything but an occasional word of what she was saying.

“Is she what you expected?” Patton said.

“What?” Peter held the question — not quite sure he had heard it right — at arm’s length, nodded. Patton, red-faced, breathing liquor, a breath away from him. “Look, Dr. Patton …” he said.

“Oscar,” Patton corrected him.

“Oscar, that man you were telling us about, the one who kept all those notebooks, did that have something to do with me?” It came out — Peter bleary with too much food and drink, memories, the exhaustion of being unable to remember — not quite the way he meant it. He meant — what?

Patton had the grace not to laugh at him. He smiled close-mouthed. “That’s interesting,” he said. “You felt that the story, which was an actual case — I didn’t make it up — had something to do with you?”

Peter smiled foolishly, his madness naked under Patton’s knowing glance. “I think that you thought it did,” he said, hoping to end it there. The difference, Peter decided, was that Patton’s man got lost in meaningless details — what Peter wanted was the substance of things.

Patton filled his pipe, relit it. “Why do you think that?” he said, the question insinuating its own answer.

Peter had the urge to shake him but was afraid that if he did, Patton might break. He sensed that though the doctor seemed solid to the eye, there was an invisible crack running through him. “Then, what was the point of the story?” Peter said mildly, compelled to pursue what no longer interested him.

Patton removed his pipe, coughed. A high-pitched laugh leaping suddenly from his throat as if it had been imprisoned there for years. “If I didn’t believe the story was relevant to you when I was telling it — and to tell you the truth, Peter, I wasn’t sure that it was — don’t you think that your reaction now is a giveaway?” Peter tried to protest, but Patton overrode him. “What worries me, Peter, is that like most obsessive people you are, essentially, for all your good intentions, unconcerned with anyone but yourself. I don’t want to see Lois hurt.”

“Don’t you think I’m concerned about Lois?” Peter said. Patton, puffing at his pipe, never got the chance to answer.

Lois’s voice reached them suddenly from the kitchen. “Please, Bob,” she was pleading. “When I say no I mean no.” Then, aware that she was shouting, she lowered her voice.

Peter was tempted to rush into the kitchen — the phone a lifelong enemy — but instead sat down, pinched by jealousy, and had the disquieting sense that somehow he had been through this all before.

Patton contemplated the ceiling. “Get it out of your head,” he said.

“Get what out of my head?” Peter said, standing up, rage reviving him.

“Excuse me,” Patton said, looking around, distracted. “I didn’t hear what you said.”

Peter saw no point in repeating it. “You told Lois that I was destructive, didn’t you? What did you mean by that?”

“What I meant,” the doctor said, backing up as though afraid Peter was going to hit him, “is that you must learn to bend a little with the wind.” He retasted his words, not a little proud of the poetic aptness of his phrase. “Peter, this attempt of yours to re-establish a relationship with Lois after not seeing her or corresponding with her for fourteen years is an example of what I mean.”

And then, as her name was mentioned, as if conjured by them, Lois appeared in the room. Neither had seen her come in.

Patton looked at his watch, recorded the time. “Who was it, Lois?” he asked.

“No one you know, Oscar,” she said, her glance moving from one suitor to the other, her face flushed. “Some girl in the office had this problem she wanted to discuss — the drawings for this book we’re doing aren’t up to the level of the manuscript.”

“Was this Diane who called?” Patton asked.

Lois hesitated, glanced at Peter who was staring at his shoes. “No,” she said. “This was Mary Louise. Mrs. Rougerie. I told you about her, Oscar. She has to do things her own finicky way or she can’t do them at all.”

Patton nodded. “I think I’d better be going, Lois.” Almost before he asked for it, Lois was at the closet getting his coat. Patton waited with a martyr’s patience, looking like a man who has just discovered his daughter is no longer a virgin, a man who has known it secretly in his heart since the day of her birth.

“Are you going too?” Lois asked him when Patton had gone, an edge of belligerence in her voice.

“It’s getting late,” Peter said, moving around in the semi-dark living room as if he were lost. “It was a good dinner,” he said, sorry for her. “It reminded me of dinner.”

Lois murmured something that sounded like “what did he say to you.”

“What?”

“Forget it,” she said. “Sit down if you’re staying, for God’s sake. Why are you wandering around?”

“Who’s wandering?” he said. “It’s so dark in here I can’t find a chair.”

“You’re not being funny,” she said, sitting down on the sofa. “Are you trying to be funny?”

He wasn’t and he was. Trying. “Why did you lie to him?” he asked.

She made a small noise of acknowledgment, an intake of breath — resigned to accepting what she already knew. “Did you overhear everything?”

Everything? Peter sat down — collapsed rather than sat — and turned on the lamp next to his chair. It was a three-way light, which he turned up to high, illuminating by degrees the entire room — the shadows like creatures moving up the wall. The light ghostly like a presence.

Lois had her hands over her face. “I have a headache,” she said in a small voice. “Do you really need all that light?”

He turned it off, the shadows returning, the room darker than before. Why was he staying? he asked himself. Was it out of a duty to the past? He recalled Herbie’s long-standing admonition, good for all occasions: Don’t get caught with your fly unbuttoned (Herbie, who had ended up an insurance agent in Los Angeles, married, with a child). And other times: It’s in your best interest not to give a shit, kid. Look out for number one. Through his adolescence, until he thought he knew better, Peter had believed implicitly in the underlying wisdom of Herbie’s advice, though he had never quite understood (did he now?) its practical application. As the doctor had said, compromise is sanity, but he had walked out — the doctor had (uncompromised?) — while Peter remained.

“Why is everything so difficult?” Lois asked, the question addressed to the darkness; also, but secondly, to Peter.

Peter didn’t know why, had begun to believe that everything — that was the difficulty — was too easy. Sitting there in the almost-dark, the only light from a small Japanese paper lamp, a firefly’s dying glow, Peter had the feeling that he was in his own place (the basement apartment?), that Lois was his wife, that nothing had changed. For a moment, in the spell of memory, he held the past. Then Lois was saying, “Peter, I lied because I thought I could get away with it. I’ve never told the truth in my life when I didn’t have to. You know that.”

He didn’t give a shit, practiced not caring, worried about number one.

“I’m not sorry about Oscar,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference, does it? Between us?” “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. It doesn’t, does it?” Against a resolve to give up smoking, she took a cigarette from a pack on the coffee table, lit it in a hurry, took two long puffs, then put it out. “Forget it,” she said. “You don’t have to answer.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Nothing.”

Peter got to his feet like a man coming up from under water. “Lois,” he said hesitantly — hard to talk to someone you couldn’t see, Lois’s face turned away, veiled in shadow, “I’m going now, Lois. Good night. I’m going.”

When she didn’t answer he approached the couch. “Good night,” he said again, then added, to show her that everything was all right (even if it wasn’t), “I’d like you to meet my son when he comes.”

“Aren’t you afraid that I’ll seduce him?” she said.

Peter got his coat from the closet.

“You don’t have to go,” she said softly, “if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to go, but I think I should,” he said, putting on his coat, a new one with exaggeratedly natural shoulders that Lois had picked out for him. (He wore it, still unused to it, like a responsibility.)

“Why should you?”

“Now you sound like Patton.” Standing with his coat on in the middle of the room, he procrastinated, fought temptation for its own sake.

“And who do you sound like, Peter?” she said, as if she had him there. “Anyway, I doubt that I’ll see Oscar again after tonight. In his undemonstrative way, he was really angry when he left.” She laughed sadly at the memory. “Will I see you again?”

“Yes.”

“We’re still friends?”

“Why not?”

“You’re very noncommittal, aren’t you? Are you disturbed about Bob calling after eleven like that?”

“A little,” he admitted, giving that much away, next to the couch now, hovering over her, logy with depression — his lethargy like a weight on his chest.

“Don’t be disturbed,” she said gently. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“All right,” he said abruptly, the irony implied. Then he said good night again, not moving, sweating under the weight of his coat. What was he waiting for? (He unbuttoned the coat.)

“Are you disappointed in me?” she asked him.

“No,” he said immediately, disappointed that she had asked. He planned to leave in the next minute, took a step toward the door in preparation.

“Why don’t you take off your coat?” she said, kicking off her shoes, putting her feet up on the couch.

“I’m leaving in a minute,” he said. Still, he was curious, felt compelled to know what he didn’t want to know. “What’s your relationship with Bob Grimes?” he asked.

“I knew you were going to ask that, Peter,” she said, pleased at seeing into him. “You haven’t changed as much as you think.” Her pleasure was too fragile to last. “Whatever I tell you,” she said bitterly, “you probably won’t believe me. You never believe anything I tell you.”

“What are you talking about?” he said. He took another step toward the door, edging his way; yet something held him, some dim quest. “I believe what you tell me,” he said.

“You’re treating me very badly,” she said in a hurt voice. “Do you mean to?”

Guilty, he returned begrudgingly to the sofa; Lois, moving over, made room for him next to her. He took off his coat. “I’m sorry,” he said reflexively, touching her arm. Lois lit a cigarette. They sat for a while without talking, only remotely aware of each other, out of time, as in the frozen moment of a dream. Like old times. Lois was crying. “I’m cold,” she whispered. What was expected of him? He covered her with his coat.

“I’ll sleep on the sofa,” Lois said. “All right? You can have the bed. I’m very shaky, Peter.” She held her hand up to the light to show him. “I’m afraid to be alone.”

Peter said he would stay — how could he refuse her? — but on condition that she take the bed and he the sofa.

They argued briefly over who would have the bed, who the sofa, Peter winning. The sofa. “You’re a man to conjure with,” she said. Old times? Lois poured them both a brandy as a nightcap; Peter drank his dutifully, as though it were good for him.

“Tonight proves,” Lois said, “that Patton’s notions about you were all wrong.”

He felt compromised by her compliment. “Wrong in what way?” he wanted to know.

Lois smiled enigmatically, blotted her eyes with a Kleenex, blew her nose. “I’m happy,” she said, as though it were an answer to his question. “Whenever you want to go to bed, Peter, let me know and I’ll make up the sofa for you.”

“How about now?” he said, yawning, afraid — anticipating the probability — of not being able to sleep.

“Fine,” she said, but made no move to get up, her legs curled under her, firmly established on the sofa.

Sitting next to her, Peter had the notion — what could be clearer? — that whatever the prose between them, the formal self-disguises, they would end up in the same bed. And though he didn’t know why — what difference would it make? — he didn’t want it to happen. Sitting next to Lois on the sofa, her perfume not the one he remembered, he presumed himself without desire. Traces of memory, scenes of love-making he recalled, stung him with nostalgia, but that was something else — not desire. Not love. What did he want from her? What? He wanted — nothing else — to make whole the broken parts of his life, to salvage the failures of the past. And Lois, who had been the deepest of his commitments, had been his greatest failure. He owed her the most of himself. But he wondered — there was no charge for wondering — whether the Lois next to him, so different from his memory of her, was the same Lois he had been married to, in love with, fifteen years before. As a matter of fact she could be no other, but he had yet to discover it for himself. In the secret places where it mattered. He was waiting. Was that compromise? The new Becker, he liked to believe, wanted even more than the old.

And Lois? What did she want from him?

At the moment, she wanted mostly to talk.

“I think we ought to go to bed,” Peter said after a while, meaning sleep — Lois amused at the slip. “We have to go to work in the morning.”

“All right,” she said, “but who’s sounding like Oscar now?” She continued to sit.

Peter got impatient waiting. “I’m very tired,” he said, in case she had forgotten.

She laughed at him. “You’ve really changed, Peter,” she said. “When you were younger you didn’t worry about missing a night of sleep. There was a time we stayed up all night together. Do you remember?”

He didn’t quite, but he recalled vaguely a night they had spent together before their marriage during which — impossible to sleep then with her next to him — they made love almost, it seemed, without stopping until morning. Was that what she had in mind? he wondered. It seemed inconceivable now that he had ever felt so strongly about her, though he knew he had — the recollection itself like a fever. While he was remembering — ashamed of being beaten by his former self — Lois brought sheets, pillow, a pink blanket from the closet, and made the sofa (a Castro Convertible: so easy even a child-woman could open it) into a bed. Peter stood by and watched. Who needed sleep? You waste, sleeping, lying in bed trying to sleep, a third of your life. As a kid, he used to test himself to see how long he could stay awake. At nineteen, he once went five and a half days without sleep, but then got sick afterward and spent a week in bed recuperating — the price of victory.

“Look,” he said when Lois had finished with the bed, “if you want to talk some more, I’m not really tired.” Stifling a yawn.

“Whoever thought you were tired?” she said, kissing him on his cheek. “Good night. See you in the morning, old Peter.” He stood stiffly, acknowledged her affection with a hand shake, wanting to avoid if he could the inevitable. And then, without further ceremony, Lois went to her room — it took him a moment to realize that she had gone. (So much for his presumptions!)

Peter took off his shoes and socks, and before he knew it — wondering what she wanted from him (what could it be?) — he was asleep. In a dream, he met Lois unexpectedly in the bedroom of their old basement apartment-each had come back after all these years, not knowing what to expect, on a nostalgic impulse. The room looked about the same, the walls, newly painted, a slightly darker shade of green — the scars, pockmarks, grease stains all there, preserved by the paint. Lois, in a black dress, a black hat with a veil, looked fine — lovely. They were sitting on the edge of their double bed, on a lump of mattress, solemnly silent, their hands connecting them. Peter wanted to lift the veil to see her face, but Lois said, “No, please. My mother will be here any minute.” Her fingers moved between his, the promise of love in their touch. “Where can we go?” he wanted to know, Lois irresistible beneath the shadow of the veil. Lois shook her head. “Where can we go?” she lamented — in mourning, it seemed, for both of them. Then she kissed him, the veil between them, her breath warm, silken. Love lolled on his tongue like a sip of schnapps. “This time, Lois,” he said, “this time it will be different — I won’t make the same mistakes. I’ve learned a little in fourteen years — not much, a little.” Lois on her back now, her knees up. “Quickly,” she said, “quickly, before my mother gets here and I have to clean the house.” It unnerved him. “Lois,” he said, “all these years and I still love you.” “You talk too much,” she said, opening his pants. “Hurry, for God’s sake.” He tried to lift her veil but he couldn’t reach it — important for him to see her face. “Why are you wasting so much time?” she said. “We only have a few minutes left.” Then, in a soft, yearning voice: “Come home, old Peter. Take me. Come home.” He lifted the veil.

He awoke, tangled in a sheet, the pink blanket on the floor, defrauded by his dream. It was still dark. The naked light of early morning filtering in like dust from the other side of the room. Peter stared at his watch, but he couldn’t quite make out the time — his eyes, he discovered, not yet open. Nagged by a lingering sense of his dream, flying an erection like an American flag on a national holiday, Peter tried, without much luck, to go back to sleep. What was there to do? What else?

After a few minutes of deliberation — what the hell! — he knocked on Lois’s door. When there was no answer he knocked again — a little harder this time. He heard Lois stirring — desire quickened by anticipation. He knocked again, shaking the door.

“Who’s that?” she called, her voice tremulous.

“It’s me. Peter.” He opened the door to show her that it was all right.

“What do you want, Peter?” she said in a child’s voice, hidden by the covers, a tangle of hair the only sign of her. “What time is it?”

“I had a dream about you,” he said, feverish — for all he knew, still dreaming.

“Uh huh.” A noise of acknowledgment. “I sleeping, Peter.”

Leaning over her, he kissed the top of her head, a strand of hair coming off in his mouth. She murmured something in her sleep.

His feet were getting cold and he thought of climbing into bed with her to warm them. He called her name instead, his patience killing him.

She sat up abruptly, looked at him with one eye. “Peter? It you? You frightened me.”

“Sorry. I had a dream about you, Lois, and I wanted …” He saw now that it was a mistake. (The woman in his dream had been someone else.)

She reached out as if to touch his face, but then absently withdrew her hand. “I’m not awake yet,” she said, staring ahead of her without the focus of sight, possessed by the memory of sleep. “Was the sofa uncomfortable for you?” she asked after a moment. “I’ll be glad to change with you. As soon as I have the strength to get up.”

He bent forward and kissed her, her mouth closed, indifferent. “I wanted to kiss you,” he said.

“You have,” she said, lying back with a smile, closing her eyes. “I’ll see you in the morning. Have lovely dreams.”

Lovely dreams he didn’t need. But he said good night to her again — what else? — then hung on a few minutes, watching Lois curl like an unborn child into the protection of her covers.

His first idea when he got back to the living room was to put on his socks and shoes, find his coat, and go home. He got as far as his left sock, tearing a hole in the heel, when he decided in the lethargy of depression — he would have to wait a half-hour for a train if he went now — that he might just as well go back to sleep. His watch, he took the trouble to notice, had twenty minutes after five. He covered himself with a sheet — his left sock still on — and closed his eyes. When he looked at his watch again, it was twenty-three after five. He sat up, tense with exhaustion, enraged at himself. He had misjudged Lois, misconceived what she wanted of him, taken pity for something more. A talent he had, it seemed to him, for not seeing what was there to be seen. Patton was a joker. Perfectionist? It was a joke. No one had further to go than Peter Becker. All he wanted to be was a little competent in his life, a little wise, a little decent, a little brave, to be loved and admired by his son, by Lois, by Diane, by others, to be able to love, to tell a funny joke every once in a while. And a few other things, odds and ends, immortality. Not much. It was better, when you had a tendency to be anxious like Peter Becker, not to think about the things you wanted; in fact, it was better still not to want them. But how could you change human nature?

Peter had one shoe on, was putting on the other, when Lois called to him from her room.

He didn’t answer at first, planned, if he could stick it out, not to answer. Lois’s door opened. “Peter?”

“Yeah,” he conceded.

“I was afraid you had gone. I thought I heard the door slam.” She stood in the doorway of her room, frail in a white nightgown, her hair in a thick braid down her back. “It was probably a dream.”

“I’m still here,” he said.

“I know that,” she said. “I can see that you’re still here.”

He waited for her to say something about his shoes being on — a little guilty about it, a little nervous — but she seemed not to notice, or if she did, she chose for some reason to ignore it.

“Thank you for staying,” she said gratefully. She blew him a kiss, whispered something unintelligible (love you, it sounded like — ah, the vanity of not hearing!), then she disappeared into her room, the door closing soundlessly behind her.

After that he went back to bed — with his shoes on — and in no time was on the way to falling asleep. As he dozed he heard the sound of a siren outside; it was either the end of the world, he decided, or a fire somewhere, but he was asleep before he had time to worry about it, dreaming. He had lovely dreams. And when he awoke there was a woman in bed next to him. He had only to reach over and touch her to know who it was. He didn’t forget much.

| 3 |

They were having breakfast. “Why the hell don’t we get married again,” he said to Lois.

“Why don’t we?” she said, buttering a piece of toast.

“You mean it?”

“Do you mean it?”

“Lois, I’m asking you to marry me,” he said.

“I know, Peter,” she said, looking at him out of the corner of her eye, like a child. “I know. I’ve already accepted.” When he looked at her closely he saw that she was wearing a black veil, the same one as before.

He awoke in a sweat, terrified. And what was he afraid of?

| 4 |

It was a tricky business, looking forward to something. After months of anticipation, the day before Phil was scheduled to arrive, Peter came down with a bad back. Its cause was obscure. He had merely, it seemed — perfectly all right when he went to sleep — awakened with the back, barely able in the morning to get out of bed; the pains, like thieves, taking him by surprise. Peter chose to not think about his back, on the theory that the pains would go away if he pretended they weren’t there, but intead of going away they got worse. It got so that almost every movement, even the slightest turn of the head was an agony — the torment at times so great that he had to hold on to something until it passed. In the afternoon he went to a back specialist Lois had recommended to him — a man who had once, some years before, treated her father.

“The only cure for what you have is rest,” the specialist told him after a rather cursory examination, which consisted of poking him a few times in different parts of the back and asking if it hurt. “I could strap that back for you, but I won’t guarantee a hundred percent that it will relieve the pain. For something like what you have, in my experience the best thing is rest.” The specialist was a remarkably vigorous man of about seventy, pot-bellied and tough, with a slightly bent-over walk, as though he had some kind of chronic back condition.

“How long will I have to rest?” Peter asked. “You’ll have to rest until the pain is gone,” the specialist advised him.

“How long should the pain last?”

“How long?” the specialist queried himself. “It’ll last,” he said philosophically, “until it’s not there any more. Does the pain tell me how long it’ll last? When you reach a certain age, my friend, you got to learn to slow down.”

“You don’t really think I’ve reached that age, do you?” Peter said, and had the notion for the moment that his back was much better. He moved his shoulder gingerly as an exploratory gesture. “It no longer hurts,” he started to say when the pain took him (revisited him), bending him over with the fierceness of its assault.

The specialist shook his head. “Don’t tempt fate,” he said.

“I have to pick up my son at the airport tomorrow,” Peter explained, “and I don’t want him to see me like this.” He was ready to show the doctor a picture of Philly he had just gotten in the mail, but as it was painful for him to reach into his pocket, he decided against it. “Aren’t there some pills you could give me to ease the pain a little?”

“I could give you a hundred pills,” the specialist said. “Would you like a hundred pills?” He removed his glasses, contemptuous of any man who wanted a hundred pills. “You’ve consulted me,” he said, “and I’ve told you all I know. Now do exactly what you like. I’ll tell you this: if you run around with a back like that, I won’t be responsible for what happens.”

Though a little doubtful about the specialist’s competence — his office, except for a television set opposite the examination table, twenty years out of date — Peter was worried. “What can happen?” he asked.

“What can’t?” the specialist said.

“Is it all right for me to go to the airport tomorrow?” Peter asked.

The specialist put his glasses back on, considered the question. “What do I know from airports?” he said. “I know backs. If you were an airplane, I’d say not to fly with a back like that.”

The fee for this advice was fifteen dollars. “I’m retired,” the specialist explained. “I don’t practice much. If it’s not better in two weeks, come back. To tell you the truth, I don’t expect to see you again. That’s my professional judgment. No heavy lifting. No sex. It’ll be better before you know it.”

The back got worse before it got better. In the evening every move he made seemed to break him in half — the pains, never quite the way he expected them, sharper and more frequent than before.

In the only comfortable position he could find, Peter was sitting, immobilized, in a high-backed leather armchair, his feet propped up on an ottoman while Diane, who was in love with him (another responsibility), waited on him as though she were his private nurse.

“Do you want me to hold your coffee for you while you drink it?” she asked, a big, handsome girl, overgrown and ingenuous, a beauty in her way — her way long-legged, small-breasted, a girl with beautiful eyes.

“I can hold it myself,” he said, a little oppressed by her dedication.

“Please let me do it,” she said, and overriding his refusal, held the cup to his lips. “If it’s too hot, let me know.” Peter protested silently and drank, the coffee a little warmer than he liked it.

Their relationship puzzled and flattered him, and only now was beginning, for all its pleasure, to worry him a little. Why was she treating him as if he were breakable? From their first dinner together he had acted toward her as if their being together was some kind of game, a joke they were playing on the adults. Even after they had become lovers — some jokes more involved than others — he had assured them both that it wasn’t serious. They liked each other, liked the game of liking each other — her interest in him no more, he believed, than that of a young girl for an older man, a stage of growth. No more? Who had been kidding whom? He thought to send her home, but instead finished his coffee at her hand. And how could he be sure, after all, that she wasn’t just playing at playing house?

After coffee she washed and dried the dishes. “Is there anything else I can get you, jerk?” she called from his kitchen.

“I have a little ironing that needs to be done, some socks to be washed. Do you do laundry?”

Diane returned to the living room, a shadow of pain in her large eyes — the first he had seen there. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” she said solemnly. “You know that.”

“Who’s kidding who?” he asked, turning his head inadvertently, the knives in his back taking him by surprise.

Diane winced in commiseration. “I’m sorry it pains you,” she said, sitting on the ottoman by his feet. “I know what it’s like.” They suffered together.

“How does it feel?” she asked after a while — the sound of a voice, even her own, better than nothing at all. “Would you like me to give you a back rub, Peter?”

“No,” he said. “It’s all right.”

He was worrying again, as he had all week, about Phil’s arrival — what would he say to the boy when he actually showed up? He had a picture of the two of them sitting glumly around the living room, unable, for all the effort of their need, to talk to each other. They would end up, he was afraid, hating each other. On top of it, he had his back to worry about now.

“Would you like me to read to you?”

He shook his head, unaware of her, oppressed. “You don’t have to stay,” he said. “The old man’ll be all right.” “Are you angry at me?” she asked.

‘Who could be angry at you?” he said easily, looking at her, touched despite himself by her beauty, and for the flicker of a moment felt that he might be in love with her — it was not impossible. He resisted it, a man with a back and a son to worry about. “Who do you think you’re looking at, wise guy?” he said, a kidder from way back.

A generous audience, Diane laughed. “You, old man,” she said. “If you don’t like it, you know what you can do about it.”

‘What?” He had a premonition that Lois was going to drop in on them — though she almost never came over without calling first — and wondered, more curious than concerned, what would happen if she did.

“Nothing,” she said. The joke was over. “Is it true …” she started. “It’s really none of my business.”

“What do you want to know?” When he moved to change his position in the chair, his back seemed less painful than before, though it may have been only that in anticipating the pain he was less vulnerable to it.

“Peter, there’s a rumor around the office, which I’ve done my best to squelch — I’ve denied it about five times already — to the effect that you and Lois Black were once married.” She studied his face for an answer — her lovely brown eyes like undiscovered countries — as ingenuous and cunning as a child. (A daughter at her father’s feet — who needed sons?)

“Where did you hear that?”

“Oh, it’s just a rumor that’s been floating around. I think one of the secretaries started it. It’s not true, is it?” Her tone betrayed her concern.

A wry patriarch, Peter issued a benign smile from the throne of his chair, wondered himself at the facts of his own past. “Does it seem unlikely that Lois and I could have been married?” he said.

“Well, you’re such different types,” Diane said. “Yes, it seems unlikely. To me it does, though I’m not the most objective person in the world for you to ask.” She shrugged. “You really were married to her, weren’t you?”

“I really was,” he admitted. “But it was a long time ago,” he felt constrained to add.

“I’m sorry if I said anything against Miss Black,” Diane said — a straight-faced irony, “but I really didn’t know. I had no idea.” She hung her head, a penance for her ignorance.

“You haven’t said anything against Lois.”

She put her head against his foot. It was a special game of hers, part of the style of her charm, to pretend not to understand the implications of what she would say. “I’m sorry anyway,” she said.

“In what ways are Lois and I so different?” he wanted to know.

Diane raised her head, a child asked something beyond the comprehension of innocence. “It was presumptuous of me to say that, wasn’t it? I really don’t know Miss Black well enough to say this, but it seems to me”—she glanced at Peter for approval before continuing, withholding the insinuation of a smile; the knowledge of her pretense, the joke of it, a secret she shared with him — “that Miss Black is nice, in fact I think she’s very nice. I really think so, but in some ways kind of petty and self-concerned. You’re much nicer than she is.”

“That’s not true at all,” he said angrily. “You obviously don’t know Lois very well.” It was a lame defense for a lover to make, a former husband — but why should Lois have to be defended? “She’s a hundred times better than I am,” he added, which, as he didn’t quite believe it, only made him feel more disloyal. And Diane saw through him — to the flattered pleasure behind the gesture of protest.

“I don’t claim to know her very well,” Diane said. “From what I’ve seen, she can be very nice when things are going well for her — as nice as anybody — but when they’re not, when something’s bothering her or if she’s made a mistake about something, she takes it out on whoever’s around.”

“She’s only human,” Peter said, struck by it as though it were an insight.

“I know,” Diane said. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

The phone went off, a minor explosion in the room. Trained to reflex, Peter got up in a hurry — the pains of the flesh as nothing to the anxieties of the spirit.

“Your back,” Diane warned him.

His back hardly bothered him. What could he do? He groaned a little in commemoration, pained at the fickleness of his ailment.

Lois’s voice on the phone, even when he anticipated it, had a way somehow of taking him by surprise. It seemed each time like a voice from the past, and he associated it not with the Lois he saw almost daily, but the one he hadn’t seen, hadn’t talked to, in fourteen years. It took only a minute or so for the illusion to die.

Lois asked how his back was getting along, though it was clear from the tone of her inquiry that she didn’t take his pains very seriously.

“You don’t think it hurts, do you?” he said, turning to look at Diane, who was standing, her face averted, at the other side of the room. His back throbbed dully, a justification of itself. “You’ve been in publishing so long you don’t take anything seriously any more.”

“Oh, come on. You know yourself that as soon as Phil shows up, your back will stop hurting.” She lowered her voice: “I take everything about you seriously, Peter. You know that. The fact is, I take you much more seriously than you take yourself.”

“You see right through me,” he said.

“Your jokes haven’t gotten any better in fourteen years.”

“Is that what you called to tell me?”

“No, I called … Is there someone there with you?”

He looked over to Diane, surprised to discover that she was watching him, her face impassive. “Why should anyone be here?” he said.

“I don’t know. I just had the feeling that there was. You sound as if you have an audience.”

“No,” he said. The lie hurt him, but what else could he say?

“Peter, I’ve been thinking about tomorrow …” she said. “My going to the airport with you — it’s not really a very good idea.”

“All right.”

“You can take a cab if your back hurts too much for you to drive, Peter. I really think you ought to meet him alone. Really. Think of how the boy will feel about someone else being there. He’s coming all this distance, over five hundred miles, to see his father. He’s not going to want someone else there to have to share him with.”

“I said, all right.”

“My dinner offer for Saturday night still holds good. Don’t be angry with me, Peter. Please.”

“I’m not angry,” he said, restraining his irritation. “I just don’t like to be lectured at, Lois.”

“I’m not aware that I was lecturing you,” she said coldly. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she repeated, her voice making the effort of meaning it. “Should I come over,” she said softly, “or are you too disabled to want company?”

“Too disabled,” he said without hesitation.

“Oh!” A swallowing sound. Then, contrite: “Are you angry with me?”

He said he wasn’t, looking at Diane, who seemed, her back to him, to be reading the titles of his books. He sensed her unhappiness, distracted by it. “If I am,” he said, “I’ll get over it.”

“Remember, he’s not my son.”

“I remember,” he said, aggrieved at Lois for mentioning it, depressed. “I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said.

“What way did you mean it?”

She chose to ignore his question. “You haven’t told me yet whether you’re coming to dinner with Phil on Saturday.” She laughed irrelevantly. “Will you come? I promise to make a good showing.”

“I’ll let you know,” he said. Then added: “If Phil wants to, we’ll come.”

“Good night, Peter,” she said in an injured voice.

“Good night,” he said, and waited, resisting the obligations of remorse, for Lois to hang up.

“Forgive me?” she said.

“For what?” he said, wanting to make it right, yet for some reason compelled not to be able to.

“I don’t know,” she said. ‘For whatever you’re holding against me.”

“If you do the same for me,” he said.

“You know I forgive you everything,” she said, which left him even more depressed than before — his back cramped, a little numb, under the burden of her forgiveness.

“Then we’re even. I’ll call you tomorrow, Lois.”

“Wait. Is there someone there with you?”

He hesitated, worried for a moment that he had given himself away. “Good night, Lois,” he said finally, refusing to lie to her again, a liar only to himself.

“I’m sorry,” she said dully. “You know, I worry about you. Even your psychosomatic back worries me.”

“I know,” Peter said.

“My trouble is I still love you,” she said in a low, almost threatening voice and without waiting for an answer, without wanting one, she hung up.

Holding the dead receiver in his hand, Peter thought seriously for a moment or two of pulling the cord out of the wall, but the new Becker, less rash than the old, decided against it. He needed the phone like he needed a bad back. Yet he discovered — all knowledge a penance for loss — that he needed them both.

The operator cut in. “Can I help you?” she asked.

He wondered what she had in mind, hung up without answering, with the nagging sense — like old times — that he had lost something irreplaceable.

Walking as though his spine were glued together, anticipating pain, Peter returned to his chair. “Hey,” he said, “what are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Diane said, leafing through the pages of one of his books, her back to him.

“I’m sorry about being on the phone so long,” he said.

“I’m sure you are,” Diane said quietly, and with sudden vehemence threw the book she was holding at him, hitting the leg of his chair. Was it a joke? “I’m sorry I missed,” she said tonelessly, staring at the floor. “Why did you lie to me?”

“I haven’t lied to you,” he said lamely, a defense against unknown charges — at the moment, for all he knew, the father of lies. “You knew Lois and I were friends. I never told you we weren’t, did I?”

“That’s the truth,” she said. “You never told me you weren’t, because you never mentioned it at all.” She remained almost motionless, staring at the rug. “I’m sorry if I’ve been presumptuous. Oh, Peter!” she screamed at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?” She took another book from the shelf, swung it over her head as though she were about to throw it, then put it back, laughing.

Unable to think of anything to say — could he tell her things he didn’t know? — Peter worried about the complications of his life, envied himself the lonely days of his freedom. ‘You haven’t been presumptuous,” he said, all he could say, hoping without much hope that it would ease the tension in the room, that the girl would see that he was fond of her, that he was extremely grateful for her affection, but that he was a man already — whether he liked it or not — committed to a future.

When she glanced at him, he was surprised at the intensity of bitterness he saw in her face. “I have a knack,” she said with an attempt at self-irony, “for falling in love with the wrong men.” A wry smile. “I shouldn’t have told you that, but I think you have the idea that because I pretend to take things easy I have no feelings.” Her child face shone, damp-eyed.

“How old are you again?” he asked. “Are you twenty-one or twenty-two?”

“You don’t have to make fun of me,” she said. Having said more than she meant to, she picked up her scarf and purse from the couch, in a hurry to get away. “I’ll be twenty-three in ten days,” she added. “You don’t remember anything I tell you. Good night, Peter.”

“If you wait a few seconds I’ll drive you home.”

“I’d rather take the subway, if you don’t mind,” she said, looking through her purse for a token, not finding any.

“Let me drive you home,” he said.

“No. I don’t want you to.”

“I’m grateful to you for taking care of me,” he said, standing up like a spectator at a game, the ache in his back a recollection of itself. “I feel much better now.”

“I feel much worse,” she said. Then, looking at the door:

“I didn’t mean that. Peter?” Turning to him.

“Yeah?”

“Did you know how I felt about you?”

He was standing next to her, listening to the machinery in his back. “I didn’t know,” he said.

“You should have,” she said. “Why did you think I came here tonight? Why do you think I spend so much time with you? I can’t believe that you didn’t know.”

What could he say? That it seemed inconceivable to him that a young and beautiful girl could be seriously interested in him, a man who had done nothing with his life of account, nothing he could be proud of. It seemed presumption to him to believe even now, even in the face of her confession, that Diane was in love with him. “Why do you spend so much time with me?” he wanted to know.

“God knows,” she said and bolted, leaving the door, for some reason, open behind her. Did she want him to follow? How could he be sure? Indecision, no friend of his, held him back.

When he finally made up his mind to go after her, she had just caught the elevator. He watched the indicators light up (5. ….4. ….3…), then he went after her down the stairs, racing the elevator. The faster he scrambled down the steps, the less aware he was of the jabbing pains in his back, and he had the feeling as he ran that if he went fast enough — a little nervous about the risk — he could escape his disabilities, outdistance them.

It took a while for him to discover her — shaken by the sense at first that he had lost her — Diane sitting, almost invisible, in a semi-lit corner of the lobby next to a potted plant, crying silently.

She didn’t notice him until he was standing directly over her. “Hello, jerk,” he said, still out of breath. “I’ve come to walk you to the station.”

“All right,” she said sullenly, grudged him, behind his back, a smile.

They walked the long block to Broadway in silence. It reminded him of times when he was a kid (eighteen or nineteen at most), taking a girl home after a date and having nothing to say to her, anxious about how he would approach her at the door for a kiss — the ambition of his desires slighter then, mostly symbolic. Out of regret for the failures of his youth — too late perhaps to undo them — he reached over and took Diane’s hand. She pressed it to her side, looked up at him, spying on his face, her eyes dark, noncommittal. Like a kid, he had moments with Diane — this one of them — when he was in awe of her beauty. As they walked he remembered a time with Lois, walking with her, a few days after their marriage — it had ended in a fight. The memory pained him.

“I’m not such a baby,” she said in her songlike child’s voice, looking at him, it seemed (how could he know in the dark?), with something like wonder.

The idea of it came almost as an aftermath of the act. The face was there, glistening, ingenuous as a child’s, tilted toward him. What else could he do? In the street light of Broadway and Seventy-third Street, Peter leaned over and kissed her, her face, meaning it only as a gesture, the convention of a kiss good-night. A connection with the past.

The past or the future? Diane held on to him, and with unexpected fervor — what had he expected? — kissed his face, kept kissing him, face, eyes, mouth — Peter standing there, an interested and incredulous bystander — the street lamp almost like a spotlight illuminating them. What was hard for him to believe was that all this affection, all of it, was meant for him. He had a sense of being an impostor, of impersonating the man he hadn’t yet become — the new Becker, the newer, the newest. His back, which knew him better than he knew himself, kept accounts.

“Talk to me, Peter,” she said.

It was hard for him to talk. “You’re lovely,” he said, which was only part of what he meant. He studied her face, amazed at it.

“Will you be good to me?” she wanted to know, hugging him. “Will you, Peter?” Then, without waiting for an answer, Diane ran down the street, away from him, turning around after a while to look back, waving, backing into someone, nearly falling, brushing hair out of her eyes, finally descending into the darkness of the subway. She had hardly gone and he missed her. What was the matter with him? He had enough trouble keeping in touch with the past without having to revise his commitment to the present. Watch yourself, Becker, something warned him. Watch where you’re going.

Restless, too exhilarated to go right home, he walked across Seventy-second Street to the park. It was a warm evening — the benches along Central Park West lined with people. The desolation of their faces — their vigil not to see — touched and frightened him. The eyes of so many of them seemed like prisoners, humiliated at the compromise of their lives, intent impassively on revenge. A crowd had gathered in a semicircle on the next corner. Peter, who had been walking slowly to protect his back, quickened his pace, curious to see what was going on. Two boys, both Negroes, were wrestling, the heavier of the two had pinned the other to the ground, and was now banging his head against the sidewalk. The crowd, mostly white, watched impassively. A few shouted encouragement to the boy on the bottom. “Why doesn’t someone break it up?” Peter asked. The man next to him shrugged. “You got a good fight to watch, mister. Don’t complain.” The smaller boy had gotten his knee in the bigger one’s groin and had succeeded in turning him over. The man next to Peter cheered. “I love an underdog,” he said. “It’s the American way — to love an underdog.” In a moment the big one was on top again, his knee in the smaller boy’s stomach. Peter stood with the crowd for a while, more out of lethargy than will, until his back began to throb, and then, with the caution of a man who had a frightening amount to lose, he made his way home. He didn’t interfere, he told himself, because Phil was arriving tomorrow, and his obligation, his first obligation, was to his son. Who could believe it? In some ways, he decided, he liked the old Becker (hard to tell them apart sometimes without a score card for a memory) better than the new.

As he got out of the elevator, he heard the ringing of a phone and sensed — though how could he be sure? — that it was coming from his apartment. It took him a while to find his key, to get it out of his pocket, to get it into the lock, to get the door opened. It took a while. And the more he hurried, the longer it seemed to take — his back as burdensome now as it had been at its worst. Just as he got the door open, the ringing stopped. Could he know what he had lost? He sat down, cautious of himself, in the stiff-backed leather chair and waited with dim and undefined prospect for the phone to ring again. Narrowing down the possibilities, Peter decided that it was Diane who had called, or possibly Lois, or Oscar Patton, or even — it was not impossible — his son Phil. It could even have been a wrong number. Not knowing was always worse for Peter than knowing the worst. If the call had been important, he decided, making an effort to keep himself awake, the phone would most likely ring again, but it didn’t. Or if it did, he had no recollection of it in his dreams.

If he remembered anything, it was the thumping on his door, a series of thunderous knocks that actually seemed to shake the walls of the room. As Peter went to answer it, the door cracked loose from its hinges, capsized murderously in front of him a few inches from his feet.

“I didn’t mean it, Pop,” someone said, a huge boy lumbering in. (Peter, who was six foot two himself, came up to the boy’s chin.) “Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.”

Pop? Peter looked around to see what the boy’s father was like — another, even larger monster perhaps — but there was no one else there.

“Phil?”

“Pop.” They embraced, the son almost crushing the father with his enormous arms. Why hadn’t his in-laws told him that the boy was almost a giant, almost a freak of a creature, too big to be kept in a New York apartment? (He would do his best, he vowed, to make room for his son.)

There was a party going on in his living room, dancing and drinking, a couple on the couch making love with their clothes on. He was embarrassed to bring the boy in; enormous as he was, he was only thirteen, an innocent.

“Everyone will have to go home now,” he announced in a loud voice. Lois, dancing with Herbie, waved to him. No one else seemed to notice him. “The party is over,” he yelled. Phil stood next to him, staring, mouth agape, his tongue hanging out, lolling like a dog’s.

“Let’s go to a movie, Phil. How about a movie, boy?” Peter tugged at his son’s arm.

His jaw hanging as though dislodged, Phil continued to stare blankly ahead of him. One of the girls, a secretary from Peter’s office, was doing a strip on an improvised stage in the center of the living room, the others standing in a circle around her, clapping, chanting: “Shake those tits, rock that ass.” It was no place for a young boy.

Peter pleaded with Lois for help. “What do you want me to do?” she said. “He’s not my son. Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with him, Peter? He looks rabid to me. When I was a kid we had a dog that got like that and we had to gas him.”

“Nothing’s wrong with him,” Peter insisted. “He’s just big for his age. If he were smaller, you’d think his behavior was perfectly normal.”

The boy was guffawing at something.

“Phil, what are you laughing at? Cut it out. Everyone’s looking at you. Cut it out.”

“You may have to gas him,” Lois said.

“What are you saying? It’s just that he’s probably not used to crowds. Come on, Phil. Let’s get out of here. Come on, son.”

Diane went by. Like a sleepwalker, his arms out in front of him, Phil lumbered after her, knocking over, not meaning to, whoever was in his way. Peter couldn’t watch.

Someone screamed.

“Let’s get out of here,” Lois said, “before the police come.”

“What’s happening?” he asked. “What’s he doing?”

“He’s just trampled a little girl,” someone said, “and all she did, the little thing, was offer him a flower.”

“Phil,” Peter called. “Phil, come here.”

“They got him now,” the man next to him said — Peter remembered him as the fight fan from the park. “They’ll teach the boy that in this country of ours you got to make a fair fight. Oh, if only Dempsey were still around, or Willard, or any of the good old boys …”

When Peter tried to get to the boy, no longer able to see him, Lois held him back. “That’s a mean crowd, Peter. If I were you I wouldn’t get too close, and whatever you do, don’t let them know he’s a friend of yours.”

Friend? Peter pushed his way into the crowd. “Let me through,” he yelled, knocking people out of his way, someone always in front of him blocking his view. One of the men he had knocked down, he noticed, was his father. “Sorry,” he said, “but my son’s in there somewhere.”

“My son too,” the old man said. “What’s his name? Maybe we got the same son.”

“Pop,” Phil called as though from a long way off, a child’s frightened voice. “Don’t let them hurt me.”

“I’m coming, Phil,” he called back. He had tears in his throat for his son. “Leave the boy alone,” he tried to say, his voice trapped in his throat. “I’ll put in the hospital the next man who touches my son.”

“Fuck off, buddy.” Someone tripped him.

“Pop …” The voice much fainter than before. “Pop …” Fainter still. It was an agony to listen.

As soon as Peter got to his feet, he was tripped again. Two policemen were sitting on him, one holding down his hands, the other his feet.

“I haven’t had so much fun,” the fatter of the two said, “since I shot my own son for running away.”

“I know what you mean,” the other said. “Kids nowadays are spoiled silly by their parents.”

Somehow Peter got up. The crowd had dispersed and he saw clearly that his son was dead, a huge formless carrion, vultures gnawing at the flesh, a dead girl lying next to him, a woman in black crying over the bodies.

“I’m responsible,” he announced, “but I’m innocent.” He tried to flee, though there was nowhere to go, a network of police surrounding him.

He leaped toward the ceiling. Shots. A bullet catching him in the back. He kept going, his hands out in front of him like a diver. The ceiling yielded, and suddenly he was outside, free of everything, flying. The air like water. The only problem was: Which way to fly? And did it matter? There seemed to be too many choices and no means of making a choice. No place he wanted to go. It struck him that his son Phil was dead, Diane also perhaps. He continued to fly straight up (or was it down?) — imprisoned, in his freedom, by regret. “Forgive me, Phil,” he said. “Forgive me, Father.” He had a feeling that no matter how far he flew he would never arrive anywhere. It was what he remembered first — the first and last of his knowledge — when he awoke.

In the morning (his back a little better — a few tame, if uncharted, pains all that remained) Peter received a telegram from his son.

Peter was disappointed. Yet at the same time — he couldn’t deny it — the telegram was in its way a reprieve, a stay of execution. For all the sense of relief it gave him, he regretted the postponement and began to believe, on his third close reading of the telegram, that possibly Phil would not come at all now, that the “bad summer cold” was merely a tactful way of putting him off. On the fourth reading he was able to believe in the bad cold — too obvious a choice of excuse to be a lie. Thinking about it, however, Peter conceived of the cold (like the soreness in his own back) as a psychological convenience, the body saving the spirit from the guilt of deceit. The telegram obsessed him. Worse than not knowing the boy’s real motive for not coming was the sense Peter had that he himself had somehow unwished the boy’s arrival — a man with a gift for undoing himself. It was an extension of his theory about his own life, that his failure was a fulfillment of the desire not to have, a triumph of metaphysical will over physiological possibility — all of it (all he knew) in his travel book. A godsend perhaps: he would use the two weeks of vacation he had taken to spend with his son, in order to work some more on the book — the book for his son. The book to be a better father than the man writing it. The idea gave him solace. Yet his dreams, the one about his son most of all, continued to worry him — a hellish prophecy from the nightmare of his secret will. Avoid prophecies, he told himself. Don’t kill your father. Stay clear of your son.

| 5 |

His son. It was something to conjure with. Peter was waiting for the boy to return from the men’s room, standing guard like a deflocked shepherd over two new bought-for-the-trip-looking brown leather valises. He didn’t mind waiting, but why had the boy run off as soon as they had met, before he had even had a chance to ask him how he was? There were toilets on the plane, weren’t there? He worried that the boy had been embarrassed by the effusiveness of his greeting. A thirteen-year-old boy brought up in Ohio wasn’t used to being hugged in public, he guessed.

“Phil!” he called. The boy had come out of the bathroom, and apparently confused, was heading in the wrong direction. “Phil!” An announcement came over the loudspeaker. Some flight from the West Coast had been held up because of bad weather; another flight (from Miami) had just arrived at Gate B. “Philly!” he yelled across the enormous waiting room, panicked that he would lose him. An old man looked into Peter’s face to see if by some chance the call had been for him; the boy, still wandering at the other end of the room, gave no indication that he had heard. “Philly,” he called again, “down here!” The boy looked up, but then, as if mistaking the direction of the voice, turned into another corridor. His son out of sight, Peter went after him. The boy was talking to a policeman, on the verge of tears it seemed, when Peter reached him.

“That’s all right, officer. I’m …” he started to say when he realized that the boy, this boy he had come after, was not his son, was smaller and younger than Phil. He turned.

The policeman detained him. “Do you know this little guy?” he said.

“It was a mistake,” Peter said. “I have to find …” Looking around for Phil — his son missing, lost.

“Is this your uncle?” the policeman asked the boy, his hand like a weight still on Peter’s shoulder.

The boy looked at him closely, his reedy eyes baleful, tremulously courageous in the face of deception and disappointment. “Who said he was?” the boy said.

“I’m sorry,” Peter said. “I thought you were my son. The thing is, I haven’t seen him in a number of years.” The boy looked away.

“C’mon, Herb,” the policeman said to the boy. “We’ll page your uncle on the loudspeaker.”

Peter retraced his steps in a hurry, Phil waiting for him disconsolately at the place of their separation. “My bags are gone, Dad,” he said.

“That’s not possible,” Peter said, but after a few minutes’ search it became clear that it was — that unless the valises had walked off by themselves, someone had taken them. Peter tried, to neither’s satisfaction, to explain his mistake to the boy, his words inadequate to the well-meaning failure of his intentions.

“Why didn’t you take the bags with you?” the boy asked.

“Now you tell me,” Peter kidded. “Why didn’t you tell me before they were taken?” Neither was amused; the father, if possible, more aggrieved even than the son. (If Peter had wanted to disappoint the boy, he couldn’t have arranged things more effectively.)

“Maybe someone took them by mistake,” the boy said. “If he did, when he discovers that they’re not his, he’ll want to bring them back.”

Mourning their loss, they decided — there was no point not to — to try the Lost and Found, in case, by some odd chance (neither believing in it), the bags had been returned.

“Dad, over there,” the boy said, pointing to the newspaper stand in the center of the room. “That’s them.”

The man the boy had pointed to was walking in long strides toward an exit, a brown valise in each hand, a newspaper tucked under his arm. Peter had to run to catch up with him.

“Excuse me,” Peter said, one eye on his son, one on the small dark-haired man he was talking to, “did you happen …?” The man didn’t turn his head, kept on going as though no one had said anything to him.

“Mister,” Peter said, his son watching him, “I’m talking to you.”

The man stopped, glanced at Peter without turning around, still holding on to the valises. “I no speak good,” he said in a thick Spanish accent. “You want something?”

“Those valises,” Peter said, “are they yours?”

The man shrugged at his failure to understand, smiled at the boy.

“That’s all right,” the boy said, touching his father’s arm, “I don’t think they’re my bags, Dad.” “Are you sure?”

“Mine were different,” the boy said.

“Sorry,” Peter said to the man. “A mistake.”

“Mistake,” the man repeated, nodding. He went on, cautiously at first, quickening his pace, it seemed to Peter, as he reached the exit.

“Are you sure they weren’t your bags?” Peter asked again.

“I don’t think they were,” the boy said.

The old man at the Lost and Found took Peter’s name and address, though he felt impelled to advise him that if they were new suitcases there wasn’t much chance of anyone returning them. “Mostly,” he said, “what shows up here is stuff nobody wants. You know how it is: finders keepers, loosers weepers.”

“Well,” Peter said, bravely putting his arm around the boy, “the only thing for us to do, Phil, is get you a new set of clothes. Okay?”

“Okay,” the boy sighed, as though it made no difference one way or another, his loss irremediable. His father’s son.

As they walked up Sixth Avenue, Peter felt an increasing, exhilarating sense of expectancy, though he had no clear idea what it was he was expecting. It had started at lunch, this manic sense of his that everything, everything under the sun he wanted, was possible. It had started when Phil seemed to warm to him for the first time, to forgive him his blundering at the airport — and whatever else there was to forgive. “We each made one mistake today,” his son had said. And listening to a story the boy was telling him, Peter had a recollection of himself talking to his own father with the same kind of fervor and difficulty — unable somehow as a child (and later?) to make clear to his father what he meant, the way he meant it. It struck him that this boy, his son, was extraordinarily like himself. And then — the best part of it — he had the sense, in being a father, of being again a son. It made him impossibly happy.

So they spent the afternoon — the two like long-distance runners — hurrying from one department store to another, buying things for the boy, all of it vaguely unreal to Peter, the boy a mirage on the desert of his need. There were things Peter wanted to tell him — all he knew; less and less, it seemed, every day — but he didn’t know where to begin, or how. It would have to wait. The prospect itself, for the moment, was enough.

It was a sultry day, and they couldn’t walk more than two blocks at a time without feeling the embrace of their clothes, the exhaustive pressures of the city. In his expansiveness (the city hardly spacious enough to contain him), Peter bought the boy much more than he had planned to buy, bought him — the buying an unexpected pleasure — new luggage, a cord summer suit, three pairs of pants, six sets of underwear, eight pairs of socks, four wash-and-wear shirts, polo shirts, a pair of desert boots, ties, a mohair sweater, a sports jacket. Whatever the boy needed he bought for him, whatever he wanted.

“Can you afford all this?” the boy wanted to know.

“Why not?” was his answer. Why not? Even if he couldn’t, he could. It was the kind of day when he felt there was nothing he couldn’t afford.

The boy looked at things as if he could own them with his eyes, yet the pace of the city, the stampeding quality of the crowds, the traffic, the noise, which Peter had learned to take for granted, were a little frightening to him. “Are there always this many people?” he asked his father.

The sun weighed heavy on Peter’s eyes. “It’s the heat,” he explained. “It gives you the sense of it being more crowded than it really is.”

The boy looked unconvinced. “I hate to be around when it’s really crowded,” he said.

For a moment Peter suffered the boy’s remark, slighted, as if it had been meant as a slight. He got over it, forgave the boy, though somewhere inside him it left, he sensed, the hairline of a scar.

They went into Schrafft’s for the air conditioning and a cold drink — a lemonade this time, their third stop in the past hour.

“Tomorrow,” Peter said, “I’d like to take you to the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Would you like that?”

The boy said that he thought he would, looked disappointed.

“Is there something else you’d rather do?”

Phil shrugged. “Whatever you want to do, Dad.”

“I live in New York,” his father said, pleased at the boy’s good manners, also a little disturbed by them, by the distance they imposed. “I have the opportunity to go to these museums every day if I want to — which means, Phil,” he added sadly, “I don’t go very often. Do you know I haven’t been to the Museum of Natural History since I was a kid your age? Okay, we’ll compromise. We’ll do everything. Whatever we ever wanted to do, we’ll do. Okay?”

The boy smiled over his lemonade, nodded.

Peter’s exhilaration soared in him like a dream. “What would you like to do first?” he asked, impatient himself to begin.

The boy kept one hand on his packages. “I’d like to see those museums,” he said. “Also …” He hesitated.

“What?”

“My grandmother gave me a list of some places.” He reached in the breast pocket of his jacket for a slip of paper which had, it seemed, been clipped to the pocket for safety. “She thinks I lose things,” the boy said apologetically.

Phil read the list to his father while Peter sipped his lemonade, the crushed ice teasing the nerves of his mouth. “The World’s Fair. The Statue of Liberty. Some Broadway shows. The museums …” He looked up — a laugh breaking loose as if the coincidence of it, if that’s what it was, made the bond of a joke between them. “The Empire State Building,” he continued, still laughing to himself. “Chinatown. The subway. The UN. Times Square. Coney Island. Radio City.” The boy put the list back into his pocket.

“Is that all?”

“After that, I’m on my own.”

“We’ll do the whole list tomorrow,” Peter said, “so then we’ll be free of obligations.”

The boy’s forehead wrinkled, his eyes turned dark as if he owned a wound somewhere which Peter’s joke had brushed against. “Is that good, to be free of obligations?” he wanted to know.

“It’s the only obligation to have.”

“I don’t understand. People shouldn’t have obligations, or they should?” The boy stared blindly at the empty glass in front of him, like an old man in his grief. “I don’t understand.”

If he could explain this to the boy, Peter decided, he could explain everything to him — what he had failed to accomplish, what he had wanted — why for fourteen years he had done nothing but bum around the country, a man retired from the world of obligations, his only purpose not to have any. When he thought about it, he had no words to explain it even to himself; yet somewhere at the purest nerve of himself he knew the why of what he meant. Examples crowded in his mind, none of which seemed exactly to the point. “What I’m saying,” Peter said, “is that you shouldn’t do anything for any other reason than that you want to do it.” It wasn’t quite what he meant.

The boy raised his head, squinted at his father as though he were looking into the sun. “What if you don’t want to do the things you’re supposed to do? Some of the chores I have — some of them I don’t like to do. Should I tell my grandmother that I don’t want to do them?”

“No, that’s not what I mean.”

The boy seemed to accept this on faith, waiting, at the edge of his patience, as though the two of them were on a train going through an extraordinarily long tunnel.

“It’s not easy to explain,” Peter said.

Phil nodded understandingly.

Peter listened to the unintelligible clamor of his thoughts. The boy’s extended patience measured the extent of his failure. All the things he had had to tell him at a distance — the sum total of his life’s knowledge — seemed now, with the boy sitting across from him, nothing — only the possibility of silence. Nothing or something. Which? When he closed his eyes, he heard his father’s voice like an echo from somewhere in the dark ages of his skull. “Once in a while, Peter,” the old man was saying, holding his trumpet up to the light, admiring it with something like awe, “a couple or three times maybe in my whole life, I get a beautiful, sweet sound out of this thing. That sound, Chickie, that’s what it’s all about. That’s the sweet mystery of life, right? There isn’t anything in the world you could give me, money included, that I would respect or value more. Not ten million dollars. If’s like conversing, Peter, I’m telling you, with the angels — the cream of the angels.”

What sound? The joke of it was, his father had been, at his best, a third-rate musician. And the last time he had seen him — two years ago — he had given up playing altogether. What sound had he heard? More important: what sound had he thought he heard? Are we all of us, Peter wondered, deceived by the immortal whispers of our desire? Or had his father, for all the years of drudgery and small competence, been granted a moment of something beyond the possibility of his powers? Peter looked up to see if anything had been said. The boy’s green eyes — like crystal — questioned him. The silence was there between them like a trust.

“The best way to do things,” Peter said, his voice hoarse and strange to him, as if it hadn’t been used for a long time, “is to be able to do them out of love.”

The boy brooded, said nothing.

“Obligations are inhuman,” Peter added.

“Dad,” Phil said, looking into himself, his eyes ravaged by some intolerable comprehension, “was the reason you never asked me to come and live with you before because you didn’t want to do it out of obligation? Is that why?”

Peter shook his head, his throat so dry that it seemed no words would ever come out of him again.

“Anyhow, I’m glad you asked me now,” Phil said.

The waitress took the lemonade glasses away, mopped the table with a white cloth. “Will there be anything else?” she asked.

“Nothing else,” Peter said.

“Would it be all right if I had some ice cream, Dad?”

They each ordered banana splits — Peter’s first, if he could trust his memory, in over twenty years. Though it was sweeter than he might have liked in ordinary circumstances, he managed to enjoy it, enjoyed the boy’s enjoyment of it — Phil humming to himself as he ate.

“So far I really like New York,” the boy said, licking the syrup from his lips. “It’s a neat town.”

“It’s a town to conjure with,” Peter said.

‘Yeah,” the boy said as though he knew what it meant. “It’s a town to conjure with, all right.”

Whatever his reservations about the boy before, he was whole-hearted now — a boy to conjure with, he thought. And then it struck him — the purpose of things suddenly becoming clear — that there was something he had to do, that had to be done now, the moment of its awareness the moment of its necessity.

In the phone booth before he made his call, he had to wipe his eyes, the confusion of tears perennially blurring his purpose.

He called Lois at work.

“What did you do with your son?” she wanted to know.

“He’s here.” He looked through the glass of the phone booth to make sure. Phil was waiting for him, looking mild and pleased and a little worried. “We’re at Schrafft’s.”

Silence, then a laugh. “Peter, you’ve always hated Schrafft’s.”

She knew him better than he knew himself. “We’ve had banana splits,” he said, as if it were an accomplishment.

“Which one’s the son and which is the father? I can tell you’ve really hit it off like brothers.” She bit her tongue.

“The reason I called, Lois, is that I … that I think …” He started over: “Why don’t we get married?”

She took a deep breath. “And adopt Phil?”

“And adopt Phil.” Now that it was done, yet nothing actually done — his book only slightly more than half finished — his spirit soared. There was too much of him for the phone booth to contain, the air crowded with spirit, so he opened the door. The sudden draft of air conditioning, the unexpectedness of it, chilled him.

“You’re mad, Peter,” she said in the voice of love. “Must I give you an answer this very minute?”

“You know I’m impatient,” he said.

“You’re out of your mind. Do you want to come to my place for dinner?”

“We’ll go out to eat somewhere. Why don’t we go to Chinatown? It’s on the boy’s list. Okay? His grandmother gave him this list of places to see. And Lois, in the rush I nearly forgot to mention it — I love you. And the boy. All of us.” (And Diane, he neglected to add, but that was another matter.)

“You really are mad.”

“I’ve never felt better in my life.”

“That’s what they all say.”

They arranged to meet at five-thirty on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first Street, the three of them: the father, the son and the former wife.

It was four-thirty. They went to Peter’s apartment by cab — an interim trip — to wash up (and dress for dinner) and to get rid of the packages, which by this time were becoming a burden. While the boy showered, Peter dreamed. Was it the heat? He had an incredible feeling of clarity. His life seemed to lay itself out before him. In a series of slidelike recollections, half-forgotten events recalled themselves to him with extraordinary vividness of detail — a day in the country with his father and mother and Herbie, a game of stick ball in the schoolyard, his first meeting with Lois — not quite as they had happened, but as he would have wished them to be, happening now like a command performance, a family reunion, the best and least likely fragments of his past coming together into some ultimate focus of meaning. At the last, he saw himself sitting with Rachel at the edge of a lake; her green eyes, when he looked at them, the image of the boy’s. It was almost, the sum of it, too much for him to bear. Peter made an entry in his notebook. “One has only to wait for the past,” he wrote. “At the end is clarity.” He felt compelled to add, “All clarity perhaps is illusion,” but then crossed it out.

It was ten after five. A heavy breath of storm in the air. The sky in shadow, the clouds like a congregation of mourners. The sun still burning somewhere, streaks of fire in the distance like the faded shreds of a scarf. They set out.

“Do you think you can walk it?” Peter asked the boy. “It’s about a mile and a half to where we’re going.”

“I can walk it if you can,” the boy said.

“Let’s see if you can.”

They went down Broadway from Seventy-third Street to Fifty-ninth, Peter setting a fast pace, Phil asking questions of his father as they walked, Peter slowing down only to answer them.

They were at Fifty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue at twenty-five past five. It had started to drizzle. A hot wind, almost liquid, raising dust from the pavement. Steam. The dark sky hanging so low that it seemed to Peter that he could reach up if he wanted to and puncture it with his finger. It tempted him to try — a sore temptation it was — but he was not fool enough actually to do it, the gesture performed only in the presumption of his imagination. It began to rain a little harder. Peter increased his pace, began to jog — the boy keeping up with him — the worst of the storm apparently ahead. Lois waiting. Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth.

“Race you to the next corner,” the boy said. Go! They were off.

Peter slipped on a sheet of newspaper which had floated under his feet, but managed, as a matter of will, not to fall. Phil nearly bumped into a fat woman carrying an umbrella and a small dog, stopped to apologize, and came in second to his old man. They embraced, winner and loser. What seemed remarkable to Peter was not that he had gotten to the corner ahead of his son but that he wasn’t even out of breath. He had never felt better in his life. They took shelter under the canopy of a store, the rain beginning to fall in earnest.

“Phil, I’ll tell you what — I’ll race you the rest of the way,” Peter said.

“This time I’m going to run you into the ground,” the boy bragged.

“Don’t make any promises you can’t keep.”

Now! “Go!”

The boy got a good jump and Peter, saving himself for the end, found himself almost two steps behind as they approached the corner. Though the light apparently had just turned green, Peter worried about the boy running blindly across the street; cars (especially taxis) had a way in New York of coming out of nowhere. So he opened up, for his son’s sake, increased the length of his stride — the boy would see, a matter of pride between the two of them, that his father could still outrun him, could outrun anyone if he had to. It gave him a marvelous lift to run with total freedom, the rain a blessing, birds singing to him as he ran. He had never, his legs like springs, moved so quickly in his life. At forty, he may have been — no way of knowing for sure — the fastest man in the world. He flew by his son at the corner, who seemed merely a shadow as he passed him, an imprint on the landscape. It was then that he felt something snap, a weight of metal cracking into him — or was it the storm? — lifting him, turning him over and over. And still he raced. Until it was too dark for him to go any farther. He saw the face of lightning. The rains fell.

“Don’t crowd him,” a voice was saying. “Give him air, for God’s sake.”

He was lying on something hard, a blur of faces hanging over him, though he saw Lois and Phil clearly, their arms around each other. Wherever he looked, they were there.

His arm was leaking and he waited for Lois to bandage it.

“Stand back,” someone yelled. Sirens going off from all parts of the world. A woman was crying.

“Don’t worry,” Peter said, raising his arm, without the effort of lifting it, to show them that he was all right.

“Look at that,” the crowd was saying. “Look at that arm.”

“You see,” he said, “nothing to worry about. I’m all right.”

The boy smiled. The rain. Lois bent to kiss him.

“The truth is,” he said, “I can’t be killed.” They all embraced. He had never felt so much love.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Phil, Lois — it’s the truth. I can’t be hurt. It’s impossible to kill me.”

He wondered after all — the weather making communication difficult — if they had understood what he was saying. When he closed his eyes he saw that the storm had passed over, the sky now like the inside of a shell. It was all right. As no one before or maybe ever again, he was flying. What more could he want? He wanted. He was, it was true, never satisfied.