Reunion

GRIEF, ARISTOTLE WROTE IN his chapter on friendship, “is lightened when friends sorrow with us”—I looked it up before Esther arrived. He ponders, then, why this should be so: do they help shoulder our burden, or does the pleasure of their company simply lessen it? Well, this is too academic a point even for Aristotle; he quickly moves on to undercut the reassurance he first offered: “People of a manly nature guard against making their friends grieve with them ... but women and womanly men enjoy sympathizers in their grief, and love them as friends and companions in sorrow. But in all things one obviously ought to imitate the better type of person.”

Smooth, soft, and colorful, settled on a large pillow on the floor with her peasant skirt spread around her, Esther suggested a floral arrangement. A large bouquet just past its prime, at the edge of blowsiness. She was munching from a handful of cherries and blowing the pits into her palm. Every so often her voice wavered—she had been telling sad tales of mistreatment at the hands of men—and from living so long in Washington among black Southerners she had the tinge of a drawl.

“Enough masochism,” Nina said. “Two hours is enough. I have discovered just the thing in the personals column. It’s for me and Lydie, though. You’re too earnest. And Gaby, well, you of course ...” Nina was flat on her back on my couch, all in black—black pants, black sweatshirt, black beads—and pale from a recent bout with the flu. With time she had grown farsighted: the New York Review of Books wafted high above her head.

“Oh, those. They’re awful. Althea used to read them aloud to me and Victor every week.”

“This one has class. ‘Wanted: Two ladies who would like a summer jaunt in a VW convertible. Must be sweet, loving, able to read a racing form and drink their fair share.’ There’s a New York phone number, then it says, ‘Ask for Steve or Cal at any hour.’ What do you think, Lydia?”

“It’s a gem, all right. Except are we sweet and loving?”

“We could be, given the right conditions. Do you want Steve or Cal?”

“Hm. Steve, I think, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Fine. I wanted Cal anyway.” Nina sat up nimbly, tossed aside the review, and withdrew behind her New York Times, folding the pages vertically, half over half, with the skill of a business executive on a crowded subway. All afternoon she had slipped in and out of attendance. I sensed a vague halo of anticipation, and was willing to bet that posed Indian fashion behind the stock exchange listings, she was off in some fantasy. Not with Steve or Cal. With Sam, the civil rights lawyer. Scattered evenings and weekends over the years, lifted out of his quotidian regularity of wife, kids, and job, enhanced by infrequency. I thought Nina deserved better, but it was what she had chosen, or been chosen by.

“I knew a Cal. I bumped into him on the bus one afternoon a few months ago, a friend of Clyde’s,” said Esther, undaunted. “He wasn’t one of those SAVE types; he did something with computers. I never knew him well—he used to come over to play chess with Clyde. I couldn’t figure out how such a straight guy came to be a friend of Clyde’s.”

“Clyde played chess?” Nina lowered the paper momentarily.

“Yes. He wasn’t stupid. Misguided, maybe, but far from stupid. Anyway, I hadn’t seen this Cal in almost four years, since we were divorced. We said hello, how do you come to be in Washington, and all that. I swear I did not say a thing that might be construed as encouragement, but the next thing you know he’s telling me about his wife’s various uterine problems and asking if I might care to stop in the Holiday Inn for an hour or so. I mean, really!”

“So what did you say?”

She jerked her head towards me. “I said no and got off the bus, Lydia. What’d you think I would say?” She turned to Gabrielle, who was active in several women’s protest groups, for support, but Gabrielle just sipped her wine and continued to tear the edges of a paper napkin, making a neat half-inch fringe along the perimeter.

Gaby was withholding herself out of righteous anger. “‘A friend is another self,’” she had quoted weeks ago, looking wise, her glossy hair streaked with gray. “You wrote it on the philosophy final, Lydia. Don’t you remember we drank to it and then danced up Broadway together? So why can’t she manage to get herself up to see you for one weekend?”

“You can’t hold people to things they felt twenty-five years ago. That’s silly.” I was not offended. Esther was working in a ghetto with clients she insisted on calling old, not senior citizens, and her weekends, she wrote in voluminous letters, were claimed by crisis: Mr. Green’s food stamps mistakenly discontinued, Mrs. Brown’s apartment cleaned out by junkies (fortunately she was not home at the time), Mrs. Gomez’s grandson needing fast help with English to pass his driver’s test and take that hospital aide job in Virginia. It appeared she had reverted to the school of William James, trusting her good actions would elicit the universe’s better latent meanings. Her letters had postscripts: “‘Say not thou, what is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.’” And in one that complained of my silence: “‘The fool foldeth his hands together, and eateth his own flesh.’” I didn’t have to look them up; I recognized the equivocal voice of Ecclesiastes.

Besides, I had had ample companionship in sorrow. Nina and Gabrielle were no Job’s comforters, either. No rationalizing or justifying or holding any hypersensitive power accountable. No dissecting my virtues and vices, my pride or humility, nor exhorting me to mend my ways. All they told me, at the beginning, was to get up, wash, dress, and see that Victor did the same. Gabrielle brought roasted chickens and vegetable casseroles and commanded that we eat. After our first week of utter sloth, she phoned every morning to make sure the children were going to school. When she appeared one day after work with a shopping bag from some East Side gourmet shop I felt the old suspicion conceived at her wedding stir again: friends with me, she was slumming, an impostor. Now a rich doctor’s wife as well. “Gaby, pate! For heaven’s sake!” Long silver earrings danced along her jaw as she flicked her head up from unpacking the bag. “Would you prefer ashes?” Gaby was so rarely sarcastic that Victor and I blanched with surprise and dutifully ate the pate. Nina came every few days and went about serenely emptying ashtrays and sorting laundry. She took off rings and jangly bracelets and dipped her lacquer-tipped fingers into steamy suds. Evenings she sat on the floor with Althea and Phil, going over the chemistry and physics they had missed. And the two of them nagged at me till I brought my puffy ankle to Don’s office to be X-rayed. After two and a half weeks I told them to stop, we could manage now. The house had never been so orderly.

“Another time I was on a bus,” Esther went on, “and got to talking to this young guy next to me. It started over something trivial—my library books dropped, he helped pick them up and said they felt like heavy reading.”

The young man was polite and soulful, Esther said, and when they got off at the same stop he invited her for a cup of coffee. In the coffee shop a faraway look came into his eyes. He declared she was his fantasy woman come true, what he had been dreaming of for months. Maybe years—she couldn’t recall his exact words. But for that very reason they could never meet again—he wanted his fantasy to remain intact and unsullied by the inevitable disappointments of reality. Esther didn’t know how to respond. She drank her creamy cappuccino while he sipped a muddy espresso. He mentioned Proust and Stendhal and the psychology of love; she wondered if he might have taken CC at Columbia. Then he had to leave, but would remember her forever. She found herself sitting alone at the wobbly wrought-iron table. He paid the check on his way out, she had to grant him that much, but she left the tip.

“I dreamed about him for a couple of nights. I couldn’t help it. You can’t control what you dream. He wasn’t my fantasy but he seemed rather nice, at first anyway. I might have risked a little reality with him.”

“Maybe your problem is spending too much time on buses,” I said. “Why don’t you try driving?”

“I haven’t driven since that accident when I had my teeth knocked out and almost my eye. I observe the world through the windows of buses.”

Gabrielle frowned. “Aren’t you being a bit melodramatic?”

“What do you know about it?” Patches of color studded Esther’s cheeks. “You’ve never been mortified or treated like some kind of less than human.”

“Esther, do you think there’s any one of us who doesn’t know what it’s like”—Gaby paused as if she were sorry she had begun—“what it’s like to lie awake half the night wanting someone? Do you? That is not politics.”

“Well, whatever it is, it’s too rough for me. I must have a way of picking them. I think I’ll try women and see if they’re any better. I’ll come out of the closet.”

“But, Esther, you’ve never been in the closet,” I reminded her.

She spit a pit into her hand. “I’ll go in, so I can come out. I’m glad to see you’re all so amused at my expense. Well, it’s better than silence. Silence makes me anxious.”

“Still?” I asked.

“In school there was hardly ever silence,” she said. “We had so many thoughts and theories about everything.”

“Yes, we were so determined to understand.” Nina’s hair tumbled down her back and she swiftly coiled it up again, pins between her teeth. “We really expected that what was in all those books would have some bearing on how to live.”

Nina rose and went to stare out the window, fingering the leaf of a plant. She still walked and looked like a lady, even in her sweatshirt. Through the radicalism of the sixties, the flaccid confusion of the seventies, she had moved and spoken like a lady. Like a lady she had marched, like a lady lectured at teach-ins on the effects of chemical warfare, and perhaps even made love like a lady, if that is possible. Now that gracious ladyhood was back in fashion she was not caught unprepared, like some. She had kept pace yet relinquished nothing. For all her escapades, her glittering jewelry and despairing eyes, there was a virginal, noli me tangere quality about her. Not girlish. More like a mature nun. She turned round and smiled. “We’re not so bent on understanding the world any more, are we?”

“No,” Gabrielle agreed. “Now we’re content just to live in it, without understanding.”

“Well, I understand plenty and I am not content.” Esther scrambled up and pushed frizzed curls off her forehead. She announced, “I’ve got to be off. I’ll just go wash my face and pee,” at which Gabrielle winced.

“You’ve barely arrived. At least stay and have dinner. I thought you’d spend the night—there’s room.”

“I wish I could, Lyd. But I’ve got to get back tonight. I promised to be in church early in the morning.”

“Church?”

“One of my clients is the lead singer in the choir in a Baptist church. She’s been asking me to come hear her for weeks now. I promised. I’ve always wanted to go to one of those rousing black churches where everyone gets all excited, but you can’t go as a spectator—it wouldn’t feel right. I finally got an invitation. Maybe I’ll have a religious experience, you never know.” She flounced off to the bathroom and returned with the scrubbed look of a child. Still pink-and-white-skinned, in her light ruffled clothes she might have been an illustration in a toddler’s book of nursery rhymes; she lacked only the broad straw hat with streamers. But the page was a trifle faded, a trifle smudged from being left out in damp weather. She had not combed her hair, either. Maybe her hairdo was the kind that couldn’t be combed: wild floppy curls. Maybe she just toweled it dry every morning and let it settle at random. For all its breeziness, it did not strike me as hair that would easily ignite. She twisted her skirt around till the zipper returned to the left side, then said her good-byes. Kisses and hugs. “If any of you are ever down in Washington ...”

At the door with me, alone, her face relaxed. “You don’t look so bad, Lydia, considering. How is Victor? I’m sorry I missed him.”

“He’s all right. Look, I’m sorry too, that this didn’t work out. I thought it would be a good idea, but I see I should have arranged for us to be alone. We still can, if you want to stay. Victor is—he’ll be out late.”

“I can’t. It’s true, about church and Mrs. Barker. Lydia, did I ever really thank you for the time you and Victor rescued me from Ralph and I slept on that mattress with all the baby toys around?”

“That was so long ago. You must have. What does it matter now?”

“I didn’t. I was so wrapped up in myself. Anyhow, thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Forget it.”

“Why are you limping?”

“I tripped over a skateboard and sprained my ankle.”

Esther clicked her tongue. “How’d you manage that?”

“When the police came to tell me, I fell. There was a skateboard in the hall.”

“Ah.” She nodded, as if this were an everyday occurrence.

“Yes. Well, thanks for all your letters.”

“You didn’t mind those little ... ?”

“No, I’ve always liked them.”

“Well, Lydia.” She sighed and hoisted her small overnight bag onto her shoulder. “Things happen. What’re you going to do?”

The words of my butcher! I had returned to my butcher yesterday, in fact, after three months. A man of elegant manners, unlike the fruit man, he had no questions, no recriminations. No nostalgic slices of bologna, either. A cordial greeting, a “What can I give you today?”

His daughter had given birth to an eight-pound boy.

“Okay, if you’re going, go. You’ll miss your train and church and all.”

She smiled shyly. “‘Where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?’”

“Ecclesiastes?”

“Job.”

“Job! So, where?”

“Well, it doesn’t say explicitly. Then it wouldn’t be a great book.”

“How come you know all of that by heart?”

“Hah! I’ll tell you—all the time I was in SAVE, they had no books around except pamphlets on organic gardening and righteous cookbooks. They didn’t want to be inhibited by established thinking. Each person was supposed to reinvent the wheel, more or less. There was a Bible, though. I guess that wasn’t considered dangerous. After a while I got desperate for something to read, so I read it.”

“Nearly two years, Esther. How could you?”

“What’re you going to do?” she repeated. “I did it. It’s done. I can quote a lot of the Bible, though. I’ll see you, Lyd.”

“Thanks for coming.” I went back to the living room. I wanted a crowd of people there. I should have invited everyone I knew; a growing crowd, not a shrinking one. Gaby was telling Nina the plot of her next mystery; it involved a woman diplomat from an imaginary South Pacific republic, caught up in a whirl of crime and intrigue at the United Nations. I stood a bit apart, half-listening to this woman’s existential but also fairly droll bewilderment, so far from the land of her birth, the grass skirts, the sea, the tropical fruits ...

“Lydia, the phone? Don’t you hear it?”

“Oh!” I dashed to the kitchen. Althea, itinerant student. What a wonderful day ambling through Greenwich Village! A Fleetwood Mac record on sale for three dollars! A fantastic guitar player in Washington Square! Jugglers, acrobats! She’d even had a second hole pierced in each ear; Diane held her hand. The ear-piercing place was called The Primitive Urge. “How apt. Perhaps you can have your nose done next time.” “Oh Mother.” “I told you how I felt about two holes, Althea.” “I know. But remember, you also told me it was my body and I had to use my own judgment about what I did with it.” “You know very well I wasn’t referring to your ears.” She giggled. She wasn’t calling to discuss her ears, though. Would I mind if she slept over at Diane’s house on Roosevelt Island? An impromptu party. Everyone was meeting at the cable car, to swoop over together. I didn’t mind. What had I been doing all day? My friends were over. Oh good, Mom, so you’re not all alone. See you.

Inside, Gaby was checking her watch. “Don should be here any minute to pick me up. We have this tedious doctors’ dinner. They’re honoring the new head of the hospital.”

“He can at least stay for a drink, I hope. I could call George. Make it a party.”

“I’ve got to go pretty soon also.” There was a slight stammer to Nina’s words. She paused and made an awkward gesture, fussing with a strap of her shoe. “Sam’s wife is in Philadelphia for the weekend.”

“Ah, visiting the aged parents? Thank heaven for aged parents. A whole weekend. I thought you seemed distracted.”

“Don’t be malicious, Lydia, please. It doesn’t suit you. Or me.”

“Right, right. No allowances. Do not under any circumstances permit Lydia to be bitter out of self-pity. She might even get like Esther. Keep her to her high standards.” I went into the kitchen again. Sure, George said over the phone, he’d come right over—why didn’t I tell him before that I was holding a reunion?—but he couldn’t stay long. A date with a yoga teacher. A new one? Yes, a new one.

I brought back another bottle of wine and handed it to Gaby with the corkscrew. She could open bottles like a man.

“Esther always had a short attention span,” she said, screwing it between her knees. “It’s gotten even shorter.”

Nina yawned and stretched one arm high, then the other, as Gaby used to do in the dorm at night. “Oh, why not be tolerant?”

“I’m doing my best.” According to Gabrielle, though, Nina was far too tolerant. Years ago she had begun to distrust Nina, when it became apparent that their lives had somehow gotten switched. Gabrielle was to have been independent, lean, adventuresome, Nina the respectable wife and mother, maybe struggling to hold a job as well—for that too was respectable now. Gabrielle envies the independence; if Nina envies the husband and children she doesn’t let on. For all her affection, Gabrielle finds Nina suspect, like a dear friend who might have stolen something while your back was turned, or then again you might have misplaced it yourself. And also, Nina lies. She has to tell a certain number of lies because her lawyer lover, Sam, is not only married but a public figure. (Of course Sam lies too.) Gaby is quite aware that with someone as intricate as Nina, further variables of which we know nothing may necessitate further lies of which we know nothing. Scientists should not get in the habit of telling lies, Gaby believes. (Of lawyers she expects it.) It weakens their credibility, vitiates their work, becomes a habit of mind. I tell her that’s nonsense. Surely in the lab and the classroom Nina is perfectly honest. Perfect, maybe, Gaby replies; not honest. And I think how far we have come from Aristotle’s ideals of friendship. Friends pleasant and useful, but loved really for something else. A mutual love of character, which endures a lifetime as character itself endures.

“You didn’t even tell Esther about Victor,” Gaby said, the bottle neatly uncorked. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. It’s too boring.”

“Boring?”

“Not so much the facts, though they are boring enough. I mean one’s own emotions become boring. Don’t you find that? That’s the trouble with Esther—she runs in the same old track. Events keep changing, but we always react with the same apparatus, in the same way. It’s like cooks. You know how with certain cooks, no matter what they fix, it comes out tasting Chinese or garlicky or bland? I wish I could feel things the way someone else feels them, for a change. Maybe that’s why I don’t get bored with music. When you perform faithfully what someone else has composed, that’s really what you’re doing, taking on another sensibility.”

“You’ve always wondered what endures, Lydia,” said Nina. “So there it is. A style of experiencing. You can’t escape it. Look at those ridiculous people at Esther’s wedding, trying to change the ways they felt life. You might just as well try to get a new body.”

“But you,” Gaby said to her. “You’re almost a different person now. Where’s the continuity in you?”

“Oh, I’ve arranged for different kinds of things to happen to me. That’s simply a matter of taste. But inside, what Lydia called the apparatus, the person to whom things happen, is the same. We all are.”

The doorbell rang, and Don, looking slightly untrustworthy himself in his white three-piece suit, slightly like a professional gambler, bent to kiss my cheek. Of course Don was quite trustworthy, only showing off the results of a diet; he had recovered his youthful shape and flair, and moved with the grace of the young man who used to come and take Gaby out on Saturday nights twenty years ago. He moved in the illusion that he had recovered the actual youth as well as the trappings.

“I’m going to have a look at that ankle,” he said as he followed me down the hall. “You’re still limping and I don’t like it.”

“It’s nothing. It barely hurts. Only when it snows. I mean, rains.”

“Hello, darling.” He kissed Gaby, and kissed Nina too.

“Hello and good-bye,” Nina said. “I must run.”

Yes, speed home in her white Triumph (a new one; the old had finally given out), shower, change, bedeck for Sam. Already as she gathered her purse, her jacket, her silk scarf, her newspaper, a bemused languidness was taking shape in her movements. Already she was feeling him. This love affair had not traversed the stages she had described to me at the race track. Through difficult, clandestine arrangements the fuchsia cloud had held for years; they found plenty to say without using each other up. But glory? Did he bring the world with him, and find it, this man who chose to sleep and shave and breakfast elsewhere? In the hall she said she was sorry to rush off. But clearly I had become an obstacle in the path of her need, just as Sam was an obstacle to mine, the pleasure of her company. We had become disturbances in that famous field of George’s, where mobs of people jostled for their daily bread and occasional caviar, where far across, farther than I could see, were good times, peace, relief of want. I made myself an obstacle at the door—she had to brush past me. It’s all right, dear. Go. I understand. Go get laid. But of course one couldn’t talk like that to Nina, even at the sharp edge of want.

“I’ll call you in the morning,” she said. I could see it. She would call from the white and purple bedroom, with Sam beside her. “Just a minute,” she would say to him. “I’ve got to call a friend.” No, he must know who I am. “I promised to call Lydia. Wait.” And as she speaks to me, kind and concerned, Sam will be teasing, stroking her here and there to distract her and make her laugh, make her brush him off with playful irritation so she can concentrate on me; at that moment Sam is less ardent than curious, one of those men whom sex truly interests, curious to learn exactly how far he can go, at what point Nina will be unable to keep up a rational conversation with her girlfriend. Ah, Sam! You don’t know the history. You’ll go far, and still she’ll talk to me, I’ll bet. She is after all a woman of formidable self-possession. You’ll have your fingers inching up the inside of a bare thigh, and she’ll talk to me. But briefly. She won’t linger on the phone. Nor would I. You’ll win soon enough, Sam. I waited with her till the elevator came.

While Gaby was in the kitchen mixing his martini, whose proportions only she could be trusted with, Don took off his white jacket to reveal a gold watch chain looped across his vest. My father neglected to tell me about vest pockets, even more secret places. Straddling a chair opposite me, he widened his eyes and attempted a leer. “Come now, my dear, let me have a feel of that luscious ankle.”

I laughed. “Don, the philanderer image is just not you.”

“No? Ah, what can I do? I try. Seriously now. Give me your foot.” I did. “These are ridiculous shoes. You should wear solid ugly shoes for a while.”

“Over my dead body.”

“You’re such a wonderful patient, Lydia.” He was feeling around the ankle, pressing with his thumbs. “Does this hurt? Does that hurt?” I answered no. “Why are you making faces, then? Look, I really wish you would cooperate. I want to see this get better, to make up for what I did to Mr. Dooley.”

“Who’s Mr. Dooley?”

“Didn’t I ever tell you that awful story? When I worked for the messenger service in Boston? Our mean old boss with the cane—we kept sawing bits off of it until he finally fell and broke his ankle.”

“Ah, yes, I remember. So I’m your means to redemption?”

Gabrielle came in carrying the potion and three glasses. “Well, how is it?”

“My ankle is something like a pathetic fallacy. It corresponds to the weather.”

“Weather?” said Don. “But look out the window. Today is a gorgeous spring day.”

It was indeed. With no effort, though, I could see the snow. Two young policemen had come to the door that early evening, one black and one white, one tall and one short, their dark slickers dripping onto my doormat. They had their hats in their hands, and snowflakes glistened and melted in the black cop’s thick Afro. They were solemn and nervous—I should have sensed it. But I was curt. I had been in the middle of a Bach toccata, and was sure they had come about the latest burglary, our building’s third in two months. Hadn’t I told the fellow who interrupted two days ago? I never heard anything—there was always music going. The white one said they’d come in regard to my children. Still curt, several beats behind, my ear lodged in a run of the toccata: My children? Some mistake. Big ones right here, little ones safely out of the city for the day. When the black cop leaned forward to say, “Please, ma’am, listen a moment,” I drew back. At his next words, that word “bus,” I crumpled like someone whose bones have suddenly disintegrated. Alan’s yellow skateboard skidded down the hall to escape the news, and I with it.

It hurt but I hardly noticed. It didn’t swell up till days later. Leaving the cemetery, Althea wanted to know why I was limping. No one else remarked. I was leaning on Victor’s arm and listing like the Titanic in the film; to be expected. Only Althea knew sorrow would not make me list, but stand straighter. She stood very straight herself, like a child being measured. Thales could have calculated the height of the pyramid by the accuracy of her shadow.

Mornings I would wake at four or five, having slept briefly after our late-night talks and silences; for a moment I would know only the dark and the configuration of bodies and blankets. Then, oh yes. That pit. That ravine they fell in, now in me, snow-covered. And the ankle would hurt, a dull local throb, like a buzz, an insistent fly that you’ve given up shooing, that you tolerate. It was a minor sprain which should have disappeared quickly, but I kept on limping, reluctant to allow it full weight, and when it rains—for it no longer snows, the snowy season is past, the globe tilts farther every day from the time when they lived, carrying me farther from them every day, if only I could stop its revolving—when it rains, I get a twinge like a siren circling the ankle. It’s not a bad pain; it soon settles into the dull throb, and with it I remember the slickers dripping onto the doormat, the melting flakes in the cop’s Afro, the feel of bone collapsing in the damp air. I remember rainy nights in the dormitory when the four of us sat around eating cookies and smoking horrid sample cigarettes, backward girls, not yet dreaming of love, far less of loving children and losing them, but giggling over novels in which weather too blatantly expresses the emotional states of the characters; a pathetic fallacy.

“You have it backwards,” Gabrielle said. “The term pathetic fallacy refers to the outside manifestation, to the weather and not to the person. Strictly speaking, your ankle is an objective correlative.”

“Thank you.”

“Once an English major,” said Don, “always ...Well, Lyd, hopefully it will clear up. If not I’ll have to X-ray you again.”

“Hopefully.” Gaby spoke with distaste, and the finest trace of an accent. “‘Hopefully’ is an adverb describing the way an action is carried out. The gladiators entered the arena hopefully. It is not a general term to convey the feelings of the speaker.”

“I know that,” Don said. “But it’s passed into the language by now. It must fill some need. Don’t you think you’re waging a losing battle, love?” There was such a silken ease to him. Maybe she had foreseen it long ago—she did have an instinct for discerning potential. She told me once that she was trying patiently to draw the male supremacist teachings of the culture out of him, like sucking poison from a comrade’s snakebite. It was unlikely that she would ever succeed completely, and I was glad: he might lose just that wry chivalry which made him charming instead of dull. Treacherous though it was, I wanted a drop of the poison to remain.

“We should still fight hopefully,” she said. “It’s wrong.”

Don sighed with good cheer. “Try not to walk on it more than necessary, Lydia, and soak it in cold water. Don’t neglect yourself, healthwise, that is.”

Gaby’s eyes flashed their two colors; her smile was immediate but grudging. “You use those words on purpose to irritate me.”

“To aggravate you, do you mean?”

“You two could work up a terrific floor show. I’ve never heard you like this before. What’s happened?”

“We have mellowed with age.” Don reached over and took her hand. “Haven’t we? We have forgiven and forgotten everything, so it’s as if we just fell in love.”

“Hopefully,” said Gabrielle.

Forgiven and forgotten what, I was starting to ask, but the doorbell rang. George’s warmth pervaded and changed the air. “It’s wonderful to see you,” I said, and I meant it. His shirt was half-open; a gold chain nestled in the hair on his chest. Still a dandy, and men’s affectations, alas, appear sillier than women’s. There clung to George the convivial, wistful aura of an organ grinder. He refused a martini—had to keep sober for his date tonight—but accepted a glass of wine with seltzer and a handful of cherries.

“You just missed Nina,” Gaby told him.

“No, I met her outside. Her car was parked right down the street. We talked for a few minutes.”

“All this coming and going,” I said glumly. “It’s like one of those French plays, a new scene every time someone walks in or out.”

“I had the strangest walk over here,” George said. “Twelve blocks crowded with incident. First, right on my corner I saw two little boys, around nine or ten, steal four apples from the fruit stand and run off. No one seemed to notice. Then a few blocks up Broadway I saw two teen-aged girls steal some paperbacks from an outside rack. They tucked them under their sweatshirts. They didn’t even run. I was beginning to wonder if something was wrong with me—I didn’t have any urge to stop them or say anything. It wasn’t that I identified with the kids particularly. I just observed. I remembered you once said I had no character, Lydia, and maybe you were right. Well, anyhow, crossing Eighty-eighth Street I happened to glance west, and down the block was a guy reaching into a woman’s stroller. He pulled out her purse and ran. She yelled, the baby yelled. I started to run after him. It was automatic. I mean, I didn’t feel the character stir within me or anything of the sort. I chased him across West End Avenue and all the way over to the Drive, and then he dashed down a flight of steps into the park. When I got down there he had vanished. I was really disappointed—I wanted to catch him. I didn’t even go back to tell the woman. I just went on up the Drive. Maybe she thought I was in cahoots.”

“I never meant you had no character in that sense.”

“I know. I was only kidding. But how do you explain so many in one day?”

“It’s probably always happening,” Gaby said. “But the chances of seeing three—Nina would have to figure that out.”

Don tapped ashes from his pipe. “Unless today is some secret thieves’ holiday. A counterpart of Labor Day or May Day.” He swallowed the last of his martini and stood up. “We’d better go.”

“I hate to leave, Lydia, but ...”

“If we don’t show, Webster will have my head, sweetheart, not to mention my grant money. Think of all those hobbling children—”

“Okay, okay, stop apologizing. Oh, your groceries, Gaby—in the refrigerator. Hold it, I’ll get them.” But when I got into the kitchen something happened. I hadn’t the will to move any more. I sat down and lowered my head to the table. Gaby came looking for me.

“Lydia? Oh God. What is it?” She bent and put her arm around me.

“It’s nothing. Only everyone’s going. This is the first night with no one ...”

“Where are the kids?”

“Althea’s sleeping at a friend’s. That was her on the phone before. Phil’s in Boston at a rock concert. I won’t get through the night alone, I know it. As it is, it’s endless.”

“You’ll get through. Look, I must go—he needs me there. But I’ll come back when it’s over. It won’t be that late—eleven.”

“No!” I hadn’t meant to shout it. “It’s now! Everyone walking out the door!”

“Call Victor. What do a couple of insane weeks matter? He’d be here in a minute, you know that. You do know where he is, don’t you?”

“Sure I know where he is. He’s over in the East Sixties with some flabby old cunt.”

“Lydia!”

“Oh, pardon my language. I forgot you’re a purist.”

“It’s not that. You told me once how you hated that word. You said you could never use it for anyone.”

“I was mistaken. I see now it has its uses.”

“Well, call him anyway.”

“No.”

“Give me the number, then. I’ll call.”

“No.”

George came in. “What’s the matter?”

I was an idiot making this scene. I was certainly not imitating the better type of person. The better type of person would not cry uncontrollably in public over spending the night in an empty house. Gabrielle murmured to George and he groaned, a weary, drawn-out sound. “Go on. I’ll stay.”

I stopped as abruptly as an infant lifted up out of its crib, and went to wash my face. At the door as they left, George kept his arm around my waist, holding me up. “You’ll be okay,” he whispered. “Take it easy.” Victor and I used to stand that way when guests left. “‘Bye. See you soon.” Definitely no Job’s comforters, those three pals. Job’s comforters hounded him, wouldn’t leave him alone, sat by his side day and night shredding logic. George’s hand slid down my hip. Make it an accident, I prayed as I closed the door and moved off.

“So, what did you have in mind to do this evening?” he asked.

“What I planned to do was listen to Esther. She’s as good as Saturday Night Live. I suppose I could work on the ‘Trout.’”

“The least you can do is keep me company, kiddo. I’m here as your guest, not your babysitter.” He was grinning but I could tell he was irked. “I’ll play Monopoly if that’s all you’re up to. But first there are a few, uh, needs I have. I’ve got to make a phone call, for one thing.”

“Oh God! The yoga teacher. I forgot all about her. I’m sorry. Honestly.” Go, I should have said right then. Go in peace. But I didn’t.

“Also I could use a pizza. A Sunday Times. A nice place to sleep—later, that is.”

I straightened up. “Very well. We can call for a pizza at once. Immediate gratification. The Timeses aren’t ready yet but at around ten we can go out to the corner and get one. So the gratification of that need will only be deferred a short while. It won’t fester unfulfilled, in the field. As far as sleep, you can have your pick. My bed alone could sleep an army. What do you like on your pizza?”

“Not anchovies.”

I ordered a pizza with green peppers and sausages, and then George called the yoga teacher and made his apologies. A sick friend. She must have offered to join him in his vigil. “Thanks, that’s sweet of you, but it wouldn’t work out. ... Yes,” he said, “she is, but it’s not at all the way you think.” True, but how is it then, I wondered. How? They didn’t talk for very long.

“I am sorry, George.”

“It’s okay. You’re a much older friend. I’ve only seen her a couple of times.”

“Still, she offers you something. I’m not offering much.”

“No,” he agreed.

The pizza arrived, and I locked the door after the delivery boy, feeling like a jailer. “Come in here. I’ve gotten to like eating in the bedroom. I’ll get us some wine.” We sat opposite each other on the huge bed, the box between us.

“Do you hear from Victor?” he asked.

“He called yesterday. He calls constantly. It’s like his voice is here. The Shadow.”

“He called me too, the other day. He didn’t sound very good. He said—”

“Please don’t tell me what he said, all right? I don’t want to know.”

He carefully extricated a slice of pizza from the pie. “I’ve been meaning to mention, I heard you last week at that Baroque Marathon thing. I happened to pass by at the right moment. I didn’t know you played the harpsichord.”

“You were there? I didn’t even see you. That’s nice. So what did you think?”

“Sounded fine to me. I’m no judge.”

I smiled. “You’re discreet. Competent but hardly inspired, is the best I’d say. The harpsichord is peculiar—the action feels totally different. Still, it was all right. Rosalie’s trying to keep me busy. She and Carla were terrific, I thought. Weren’t they?”

“Yes. Rosalie is always amazing. Why isn’t she more famous?”

“She had a late start. She’s not ambitious enough, either, in a commercial way, I mean. Listen, George. You want to be entertained? I can tell you a dream. I have the oddest dreams, since he left.”

He tossed aside the crust. “That is what is called a busman’s holiday.”

“You don’t have to analyze it. Just listen. I’d like to hear what it sounds like.”

“Sweetheart, I’m a captive audience.”

“Yes, you are, I guess. Well, I’m on this deserted subway platform at three in the morning, carrying a huge slab of raw meat in my arms. A whole side of beef.”

George’s mouth, surrounded by pizza, beard, and mustache, crinkled into a broad smile.

“If you’re going to laugh at me—”

“Tough shit. You said not to analyze. You didn’t say not to laugh.”

“All right. I keep peering down the track for these two headlights that look like big eyes coming at you in the dark, but for a long time nothing comes. Finally one does, and another and another, but none of them are my train. I’m getting very anxious. The only other people waiting are a few heavy men in work clothes, back from working the night shift somewhere. They see me standing there clutching my side of beef, and not one of them bats an eye. Like this is quite an ordinary sight. Finally the right train comes and I get on, dragging my meat along with me. It’s one of those old BMT cars. Remember, the kind with the pairs of straw seats all facing in different directions?”

“Mm-hm.” He nodded.

“When I first came to New York there were still a few of those left. So I sit down on a straw seat. The car is pretty empty—the workmen, a couple of elderly ladies, the ones who clean office buildings at night, in flowered dresses and oxford shoes and funny pillbox hats, and a pair of teen-agers with that dazed sweaty look you get from necking too long at the movies. Nobody seems to notice me or my meat. But I notice something. The meat is smaller. It’s about three-quarters of what it was on the platform. And—this is very weird—after each stop it shrinks a little more, till it’s the size of, oh, maybe a ten- or twelve-pound rib roast.”

“You’re sure you’re not making this up, Lydia?”

“No. What would be the point of that?”

“Some of my patients do. They think their dreams are too shocking, or too dull, so they do a little creative editing. Not that it makes any difference. What they invent is just as useful as what they dream.”

“No escape, eh? Well, I’m not changing anything. I can see you don’t like my dream, George.”

“Baby, I love your dream. It’s almost too good to be true.”

“But I haven’t even gotten to the best part. When it’s about the size of a moderate rib roast I put it on the floor and get down on my knees—on that mucky subway floor, imagine!—and I take a cleaver, no, it was really more like an ax—I had it in my briefcase with some music—and I start to hack at the meat. The lights are very glaring. One or two people glance over, but with no real interest. I was hacking it into steaks—I’ve seen my butcher do it dozens of times. I always watch closely. I’m impressed by that kind of skill, how they manage not to chop their fingers off. I did a fine job, I must say. I hacked it up into about half a dozen steaks. That was all I had left from the original whole side of beef. Then I wrapped it in some brown paper and tucked it under my arm and got ready to go home. That’s it.”

George drank some wine and reached for another slice of pizza, his third.

“So what are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

“But that I should be like that. It’s so brutal and violent, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But so was what prompted it. Here, you’d better have some before it’s all gone.”

We finished eating in silence. After the pizza and the wine I felt better. How infantile and selfish to make George break his date and stay with me. Needs conform to the available satisfactions, Gaby once said. Yes, I’d exaggerated mine, taken advantage of him. Probably all I had needed was another hour or two of company and some hot food. Everything seemed bearable now. The children—well, when I opened my eyes each morning I no longer felt a shock in my gut. And Victor? Women have died, but not for love. Maybe I’d never loved him all that much anyway. I’d never have made the kinds of sacrifices Gabrielle makes for Don. I didn’t quiver every time he entered a room. There had been times when his touch left me cold. There were even things I’d never liked about him. Bits of curling hair in the bathroom sink. Forgetfulness. The way he made love when he’d had too much to drink, in a fumbling, drowsy way. Leaving the phone off the hook in his studio—that capacity to shut us all out. How he put away his things so deliberately, as if to secure them against ... what? It was so unlike him to leave that book open, face down. If I had truly loved him would I have minded those things? Could it be I had never known real love at all? Almost forty-three years old and never known love! Ah, sad. Bad. “I think I’m a little drunk,” I said. “That Gaby makes a mean martini.”

“Don’t you dream about them?” he asked suddenly.

“Uh-uh.”

“You were never a good liar. Even I dream about them. I dream I take them to the zoo, to the beach. Once I even dreamed they were mine.”

“Yours?” I whispered.

“I lost them at sea. The three of us were crossing the Atlantic in an open boat, like some man I read about in the paper, who took his kids. Just as we were coming to the harbor—we could already see the Statue of Liberty—they somehow fell overboard. I threw them life preservers but they couldn’t reach them. And then—” He stopped. “This is the worst. I was afraid to jump in after them. I’m a lousy swimmer. I hated myself but I wouldn’t jump in to save them. Even after I woke up I was ashamed, as if you could be responsible for what you do in your dreams.”

“You knew even in the dream that they were not really yours. If they were yours you would have jumped, believe me. That bastard Victor certainly would have jumped.” In his dreams, awake, anywhere. What is he dreaming these days? Empty rooms, it was, weeks ago. Room after empty room, he told me in bed.

“Maybe I did know, but I think it was worse than that. I think I would not risk my life for anybody.”

“Well, you’re here now.”

“This is not much of a risk.” He gave a small laugh. “No, I’m not saying I’m not useful. I can listen to anything and stay calm. I’m a regular vault of secrets, and I do keep them. But sometimes I feel a little removed from things. Maybe it’s so many other people’s secrets, blocking the way.”

“I hate hearing you talk like this. It makes me feel bad.”

“You see,” and he laughed again, “you don’t have the tolerance for it. Well, so much for the pizza. You don’t want to go to bed, by any chance, do you?”

“Oh Jesus. Look, you know very well you could coax me and at some point I’d be susceptible. But I would really rather you didn’t.”

“I don’t want to have to coax. I’m past that. I want someone who wants. ... Lydia, didn’t you ever notice that red ribbon on Althea’s crib?”

I didn’t answer for a while. “You did that?”

“Yes. When I was a kid everyone in our neighborhood did it. I had this urge. You never said a word, though.”

“How was I to know? It never crossed my mind. I thought it was one of our mothers but that they were embarrassed to admit it. They told me what it meant.”

“Did you mind?”

“No, only I was baffled. Well, why the hell did you stop? Why didn’t you do it for all of them?”

“You never mentioned it, so ... I just didn’t. I’m sorry. But you don’t really think—”

“Don’t be silly.” I drank some more, though my head felt perilously light. “I do dream. I dream ... not that I lost them but they lost me. I mean couldn’t find me. They were out together at ... well, somewhere. They come home, come up in the elevator, get to the door. They can’t get in because they’ve forgotten their keys.”

“You’re fading, baby. I can hardly hear you.”

“I can’t talk any louder. My head is spinning.”

He pushed aside the pizza box and came closer. We sat cross-legged, knee to knee. “Okay. They forgot their keys,” he prompted.

I spoke with my head down. “No, that’s not right. Wait a minute, let me think. No. It’s not that they forgot their keys. They have their keys. But they don’t fit any more. They’re the wrong ones.” I looked up. “I did change a lock on the front door, just two weeks ago, after this kid broke in. I gave him a TV and sent him off.”

“Wait, I’m mixed up. Is this part of the dream?”

“No, no, this is true. He came in through a window. What you would call a disturbance in the field. He wasn’t violent or anything. I gave him an old TV we never used and he left, and I thought that was that. He didn’t seem like a bad kid, really, but later when I was getting ready to go out I saw the little son of a bitch had swiped my keys from the kitchen table, so I had to have the lock changed. I told Althea and Phil that I lost them and it wasn’t safe to keep the same locks.”

“Did you call the police?”

“I didn’t feel like seeing any more cops.”

“Lydia!”

“Don’t look at me that way, please. You didn’t call the cops, did you, this afternoon when you saw all those things?”

“Oh, but that was—”

“Different? Yes, I know. Anyway, in the dream they come home and they still have the old keys. They ring the bell but no one answers. I’m not home.”

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know. Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m like a presence, not a real person. I’m watching the dream as though it’s a movie. I’m there but outside it. I see them sitting at the door and I want to tell them I’ll be home soon, not to worry, go across the hall to Patricia’s, but I can’t because ... because I’m not in the movie. I’m only watching, they wouldn’t hear me.”

My eyes were streaming, but so calmly, as at the movies. George wiped my face with his dirty napkin. “So what do they do then?”

“They just sit on the floor in the hallway and think they’ve been abandoned. I know how they feel because I can see inside them, even though it’s like a movie. It’s as if I’m making up the movie as it goes along. The worst part is that I can’t tell them I’ll be home soon. They sit there for hours and it gets dark and no one opens the door for them. Their legs are all cramped. I can feel it, as if I’m their legs. I mean, I’m them and it’s my legs. Oh, I can’t explain it.”

I stretched out on the bed, on my stomach. George stroked my back. I was shaking. “It doesn’t make any sense unless you know where they were coming from.”

“Well, where were they coming from?”

“Riverside Church. There was a disarmament rally, more like a religious festival, a pageant, I don’t know how to describe it. I had been there too. They didn’t lose me till after—we got separated somehow, in the crowd.” I sat up again and looked at him. He seemed mesmerized. His eyes were shining wet, but calm, and calming. I felt quieter inside. I wondered if he shed tears for his patients too. “We were all actually at this thing, George, a year or so ago. In real life. It was a spectacle, almost something medieval. Thousands of people in the church, and music and singing and speeches, and in the middle of it all, the Bread and Puppet Theatre marched down the center aisle with huge puppets on sticks dressed up as skeletons and the devastations of war. And then the minister went up to the front—he lives in this building, it so happens; I see him all the time. All around him, up on the platform, were enormous Mexican piñatas in different colors hanging from that great ceiling. When he spoke it was magic. He has a theatrical presence: his gestures and his voice turn everything into theatre. The air around him gets charged. Even in the elevator. He spread out his arms as if he was being crucified, and he said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me.’ It was so rash—you know, he could have made an ass of himself, that’s what I thought at the time. But he didn’t. He was good. He said it right. He wanted all the children in the audience to come up to the front, he said, because they were the ones we had to preserve the world for. It was theirs. The future. He kept his arms stretched out, and children began to stream up from everywhere in the church. It was an amazing sight. He shook their hands and gave them big sticks to break the piñatas, and doves of peace came floating out. This I saw. In real life.”

“Did Vivie and Alan go up?”

“No. You know what they were like. They were too ... oh, self-conscious, and shy. A little too old, too. The kids who went up were younger. Phil, maybe, at six years old, could have done that. But in the dream ... I dreamed it all over, the entire spectacle. And you see, in the dream ... I see this man in the elevator all the time, George. It’s hard to talk to him. We used to be very friendly. He must think—”

“Well, in the dream?”

“I just can’t say it. It’s too absurd. Oh, all right. He stood up there pretending he was Jesus Christ again, and everyone was under his spell. He said, ‘Suffer the little children ...’ again, with his arms stretched out, and this time, in the dream, they went. They went! And then when they came home, they couldn’t get back in. They thought I abandoned them, but it was the other way around. They went and left me behind. It’s all wrong, don’t you see? It’s supposed to be the other way. I mean, even your mother—That was wrong, it shouldn’t be like that, but not, not so wrong as this.”

I bent my head and wept like never before. “Don’t make me tell you any more. I can’t. No, don’t hold me. Leave me be.” This is what you wanted, my love, and here I do it with someone else. Because to do it with you would be ... Because it was delight, the radiant side, that bound us, the sun rushing on the world, the future. Not this dark. Spoiled. All spoiled.

George cleared away the food, then came back and sat on the edge of the bed. I smelled cigar smoke. This damn crying, worse than the last time, drugged years ago.

“How will I ever stop?”

“People always do.”

“I’ll be crazy again.”

“No.”

I lay down with my face in the pillow. I must have fallen asleep as crying children do, torn with longing and helpless. A dreamless sleep, at last. I woke with him nudging my shoulder.

“Lydia,” he was saying softly. “It’s almost eleven. I must have a paper. I’ll be right back. Will you stay awake? or else give me your keys.”

“I’ll be awake. No, better take the keys. On the dresser.” I sat up. “Do you have to do the puzzle?”

“Yes.”

“Get two then. So do I.”

“Aha! And you thought you were falling apart. You see? It’s not so easy. You’re still not ready.”

“That’s all very well, you and Freud and your abstract theories. But what will I do tomorrow?” My butcher, philosopher: What’re you going to do?

“Tomorrow? Sunday. You’ll find, oh, inner resources.”

“Very funny. I mean do, specifically.” Fold my hands and eat my flesh?

“Straighten up the place a bit, it sure could use it. The kids will be back—cook something. Balance your checkbook. Walk in the park. Run, that’s even better.”

“Sounds like a thrilling day. Anyway, I can’t run with my ankle.”

“Well, work, then. Work on—what was it again?”

“The ‘Trout.’”

“Right. The ‘Trout.’”

“You don’t remember?”

“What?”

“I played it at school.” I hummed a bit of the fourth movement. “We sang it together. You were helping me. You told me I certainly wouldn’t die if I didn’t get picked to do it. That you don’t die of want.”

“Ah ... yes. No wonder I forgot. That was not my finest hour, was it?”

“No. You made your point, though. Wait, I’ll give you a dollar for the paper.”

“A dollar? You’re a laugh a minute, Lydia. Forget it. My treat.”

When he returned I was undressed and under the quilt. He tossed the papers onto the bed and began unbuttoning his shirt. “I trust you won’t mind. I’m not planning to sleep in my clothes. That would be asking too much.”

He sat up against the pillows on Victor’s side with the magazine section on his lap. On the cover was a photograph of Central American guerrillas training for battle; they looked like children. He leafed through till he got to the crossword puzzle.

“You’ll find a pencil in Victor’s nighttable. Top drawer.”

“Thank you.”

“Will you stay right there all night?”

“Yes, yes.” He grunted. “I’d have to be nuts to walk around this neighborhood in the middle of the night. Especially today. Muggers’ Day, was it?”

“I know it’s childish. I know I’m asking too much.”

“No. It’s not asking too much.” He put the magazine down and turned to me. His eyes were subdued now, and amused. “I’ve become interested in the possibilities of celibacy. I saw a talk program on television last week where two women discussed what they called the new celibacy. They found it worked well. It wasn’t too difficult and it had excellent effects on their concentration and energy levels.”

“Really. They could have asked me too. I don’t find it very difficult either. It is a dimension missing, but the longer it goes on, the less you miss it. I imagine it gets to feel natural.”

“These women,” continued George, “had been celibate for a week.”

We had a good laugh, like the old friends we were.

“Why is it that in the end I depend on you and not one of the women?” I asked. “What does that imply about men and women? I don’t think I like it.”

“I don’t see that it implies anything. I’m not here because I’m a man. I’m here because the others are busy with their own lives and I’m at large.”

“It used to be the other way. Men were busy, women were available.”

“Oh Lyd, come on. It’s an individual matter—you can’t make a social theory out of it. It would have been just the same if Nina or Gabrielle had stayed.”

“Oh no. Not the same at all. We would have talked very differently.”

“How?”

“You’d have to overhear it to know. It would sound more intimate in some ways—there’s a common idiom, a sort of native tongue, among women. More explicit detail, too. But less intimate in other ways. You put up guards in different places. With a man you guard your soul—I realize you don’t think there is such a thing—and with women you guard your pride. Men get to see that barrier down more than women do.” It was true, I regretted breaking down in front of Gabrielle more than anything George might witness, and not simply because George and I were once lovers and witnessed much. Because men are more tolerant of weakness in women: It bears out their deep suspicions; it allows them to play their protective role. And perhaps because I cared more for Gaby’s love, a reasonable love rooted in character and not sex. “In fact men may even be better, I mean more cost-effective, friends in a pinch—you can let your pride go and gratify them simultaneously.”

“Somehow I don’t feel flattered, sweetheart. Or gratified either, for that matter. You’re so cynical. That’s not quite what women have been saying lately, is it?”

“No, because they’re speaking to other women, out of pride. Which is fine—everything they say is true.” That in the long run, yes, you pay through the nose for indulging yourself with men. That a woman, however critical, would see weakness as your low moment, while a man assumes it’s your true nature. “Except ... except for these other truths we feel in the middle of the night, in the dark ...”

“I don’t think there’d be a hell of a lot of difference with Gaby or Nina here. I think you’re splitting hairs, Lyd.”

“Maybe. You’re probably a better feminist than I am. Maybe I could have slept with Nina.”

“There goes the new celibacy! At this point you’d do almost anything, I see.”

I laughed too. “No, I think there’s always been something in the air.

“Well, she’s awfully nice,” said George.

“You should know.”

“I do. Did you ever do that, though? I mean with anyone?”

“No. Did you?”

“No.”

“Timid, both of us,” I said.

“You are funny. I haven’t thought of myself as sexually timid since I was sixteen. Uh, nor you, particularly, as I recall ... Oh, so you can still giggle like you used to. Do you really think that’s what it is, timidity?”

“Well, yes, frankly. Also I never had the time. Even to find the inclination, that is.”

“If an inclination is there you don’t need time to find it.”

“Yes, but don’t you think some tastes can be acquired, if you’re really an adventurer? Like squid or escargots?”

“Nina is an adventurer,” he said. “I would guess Nina has been everywhere.”

“I’m glad. I’m glad one of us has.”

“And you wouldn’t feel the same for Gaby?” he teased.

“Mm, no. Not that she’s not attractive. I just don’t—”

“Not your type, eh?”

It felt heady and strange, all this chuckling. There was suddenly the feel of a party. “I guess not.”

“Do you know that’s how Oscar Wilde messed things up for himself? At his trial, they asked him if he had held a certain boy on his lap, if he fondled him, if he kissed him. And he said, Oh no, he was much too ugly. He couldn’t resist his own wit. But they took him up on it. They actually built a case on his little joke.”

“Hoist by his own petard.”

“Yes. I wonder what that means, literally,” said George. “What is a petard?”

“I don’t know. Something on a ship?”

“No, I think it may be something to do with war, fighting.” We fell silent. When he picked up the magazine to return to his crossword puzzle, I saw he had an erection. He saw that I saw, and shrugged. “Why so surprised? You create a provocative situation, you say things, what do you expect?”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“You’re quite sure about that?” He laughed, but in a distant, excluding way. “Didn’t you ever hear those sirens on the radio, when they say, This is only a test, we are testing the emergency equipment?”

“Oh, good night!” I sank down and pulled the covers up to my chin. For about fifteen minutes I lay there unable to sleep, and then I said, “I was thinking before that maybe I should have stayed with you. We get along well. Then you say something—it doesn’t even matter whether it’s true or not, it’s the way you say it—and I remember precisely why we broke up. It would never have worked.”

George said nothing. He kept filling in his puzzle.

“It’s not my duty as a woman to relieve you, you know.”

“I never said it was. That’s your notion. Go to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning. Do you mind the light on for a while?”

“No, I like it.”

“Let’s not go to sleep angry.” He reached over to squeeze my hand.

Later, in the middle of the night, I felt his hands warm on my back. After all these years the touch was still familiar. In the dark I remembered everything about him.

“Lydie,” he murmured, “I’ve been awake for hours. I even finished the Double-Crostic. Look, baby, if it’s because of Victor, then never mind. But otherwise ... Tell me if it is.”

“It’s not Victor, no.”

“Then you’re not playing fair. You knew this would happen.”

“Don’t talk to me about fair.”

“I won’t talk at all.”

His lips brushed the back of my neck and my whole body trembled, proving Abelard was right. You can want what you don’t want to want.

It was like long ago, only richer, and this time I felt virtuous. Now no one could call me ungenerous or conniving. A tease. What could be more absurd than a middle-aged tease? The best friend in the world, George; he would see me through the most abysmal moments. But unlike Nina or Gabrielle he demanded payment. He gave nothing for free—maybe that was why he was alone. What he gave, though, was lavish, and something they couldn’t: he held me in his arms till the full light of day.