Four days later the phone rang at one-thirty in the morning. Breavman bolted for it, happy to break his working schedule. He knew everything she was going to say.
“I didn’t think you’d be asleep,” Lisa said.
“I’m not. But you should be.”
“I’d like to see you.”
“I’d like to see you too, but I’ve got a better idea: put down the telephone and visit each of your children’s rooms and then go to bed.”
“I did that. Twice.”
It was a free country. The old taboos were in disrepute. They were grown up and wouldn’t be called in for supper. She was twenty-odd, wealthy, white, with a fast car and an out-of-town husband, classic commercial widow. He was alone with his insomnia and bad manuscripts.
Breavman, thou false lech, your room hideously empty as your charity smile. I knew she’d be delivered, Krantz.
She broke the silence. “Do you want me to come down?”
“Yes.”
He jammed all his laundry in the closet and hid an egg-caked plate in a stack of clean ones. He sat at his desk and slowly bound up his manuscript, taking an unfamiliar pleasure in the act, as if he now had some special right to condemn the papers.
She was wearing slacks, her black hair was loose, but freshly combed. She brought a clean Laurentian fragrance into the room.
“You smell like you just descended a ski slope.”
He poured her a glass of sherry. In a few minutes he had the whole story. Her husband wasn’t on a trans-Canada trip, opening bowling alleys. He was in Toronto living with some woman, an employee of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
“My father has the complete detective report. I didn’t want details.”
“These things happen,” Breavman said, its triteness crushing his last word into a mumble.
Lisa talked and sipped her drink calmly, far from losing the coolness she had carried in. He felt that, along with all her precious things, she had left her emotions at home. She knew that these things happen, she knew that everything happens, and so what?
“He’ll come back.”
Lisa told him with her eyes that her husband didn’t need Breavman’s defence.
“And you love him, Lisa, and your children, and your home. That’s the most obvious thing about you.”
She lowered her eyes and studied the wine glass. He thought she must be remembering the rows of crystal in her own house, comparing the disarray of his room with her own household order. But she had come for revenge, and the more distasteful the conditions, the sweeter. Perhaps she was not lonely, perhaps she was offended.
“I don’t feel like discussing Carl here.”
“I’m glad you came. You made me feel very good the night of the party, the way you listened. I didn’t think I’d ever see you alone again, and I wanted to.”
“The strange thing is that I decided you were the only one I could see.”
Perhaps she could express her revenge with him because he was secret, not part of her life, but not exactly a stranger — like meeting someone from your own town in a foreign place.
So they could sit together, perhaps he could hold her hand, and talk about the curious way things turn out. They could walk along Sherbrooke arm in arm, the end of the summer was coming. He could offer her his company and friendship as solace. Or they could find the bed immediately; there was no in-between.
Wasn’t there only one inevitability, and a weary one at that? He walked to her and kissed her mouth. She stood up and they embraced. They both sensed in that moment the mutual need to annihilate thought and speech. She was tired of the offence. He was tired of wondering why he wanted her body, or any body.
They performed the act of love, as he had many times before, a protest against luck and circumstances. He praised her beauty and the ski slopes that had made her legs so fine.
But he did not sleep with Lisa the child. He did not return to the park where nurses watched the sailor children. He did not build a mysterious garage above her naked form. He made love to a woman. Not Lisa. He knew this as they lay together and talked, finally, about their childhood and city. That contract, interrupted by the Curse, would never be fulfilled. This was a woman with whom he was beginning an affair, perhaps. The child that grew away from him into breasts and long cars and adult cigarettes was not the peaceful woman beside him. That child would evade him and cause him to wonder at her always.
The sun had already risen when she dressed to go.
“Get some rest,” she said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. You’d better not call the house. Never call the house.”
He went to the window to watch her drive away. She rolled down her car window and waved at him, and suddenly they were waving harder and longer than people ever do. She was crying and pressing her palm up at him, back and forth in urgent semaphore, as if to erase out of the morning air, please, all contracts, vows, agreements, old or new. He leaned out of the window and with his signalling hand agreed to let the night go, to let her go free, because he had all he needed of her fixed in an afternoon.