Milo and Bradley are creatures of habit. For as long as I’ve known him, Milo has worn his moth-eaten blue scarf with the knot hanging so low on his chest that the scarf is useless. Bradley is addicted to coffee and carries a Thermos with him. Milo complains about the cold, and Bradley is always a little edgy. They come out from the city every Saturday—this is not habit but loyalty—to pick up Louise. Louise is even more unpredictable than most nine-year-olds; sometimes she waits for them on the front step, sometimes she hasn’t even gotten out of bed when they arrive. One time she hid in a closet and wouldn’t leave with them.
Today Louise has put together a shopping bag full of things she wants to take with her. She is taking my whisk and my blue pottery bowl, to make Sunday breakfast for Milo and Bradley; Beckett’s Happy Days, which she has carried around for weeks, and which she looks through, smiling—but I’m not sure she’s reading it; and a coleus growing out of a conch shell. Also, she has stuffed into one side of the bag the fancy Victorian-style nightgown her grandmother gave her for Christmas, and into the other she has tucked her octascope. Milo keeps a couple of dresses, a nightgown, a toothbrush, and extra sneakers and boots at his apartment for her. He got tired of rounding up her stuff to pack for her to take home, so he has brought some things for her that can be left. It annoys him that she still packs bags, because then he has to go around making sure that she has found everything before she goes home. She seems to know how to manipulate him, and after the weekend is over she calls tearfully to say that she has left this or that, which means that he must get his car out of the garage and drive all the way out to the house to bring it to her. One time, he refused to take the hour-long drive, because she had only left a copy of Tolkien’s The Two Towers. The following weekend was the time she hid in the closet.
“I’ll water your plant if you leave it here,” I say now.
“I can take it,” she says.
“I didn’t say you couldn’t take it. I just thought it might be easier to leave it, because if the shell tips over the plant might get ruined.”
“O.K.,” she says. “Don’t water it today, though. Water it Sunday afternoon.”
I reach for the shopping bag.
“I’ll put it back on my window sill,” she says. She lifts the plant out and carries it as if it’s made of Steuben glass. Bradley bought it for her last month, driving back to the city, when they stopped at a lawn sale. She and Bradley are both very choosy, and he likes that. He drinks French-roast coffee; she will debate with herself almost endlessly over whether to buy a coleus that is primarily pink or lavender or striped.
“Has Milo made any plans for this weekend?” I ask.
“He’s having a couple of people over tonight, and I’m going to help them make crêpes for dinner. If they buy more bottles of that wine with the yellow flowers on the label, Bradley is going to soak the labels off for me.”
“That’s nice of him,” I say. “He never minds taking a lot of time with things.”
“He doesn’t like to cook, though. Milo and I are going to cook. Bradley sets the table and fixes flowers in a bowl. He thinks it’s frustrating to cook.”
“Well,” I say, “with cooking you have to have a good sense of timing. You have to coordinate everything. Bradley likes to work carefully and not be rushed.”
I wonder how much she knows. Last week she told me about a conversation she’d had with her friend Sarah. Sarah was trying to persuade Louise to stay around on the weekends, but Louise said she always went to her father’s. Then Sarah tried to get her to take her along, and Louise said that she couldn’t. “You could take her if you wanted to,” I said later. “Check with Milo and see if that isn’t right. I don’t think he’d mind having a friend of yours occasionally.”
She shrugged. “Bradley doesn’t like a lot of people around,” she said.
“Bradley likes you, and if she’s your friend I don’t think he’d mind.”
She looked at me with an expression I didn’t recognize; perhaps she thought I was a little dumb, or perhaps she was just curious to see if I would go on. I didn’t know how to go on. Like an adult, she gave a little shrug and changed the subject.
At ten o’clock Milo pulls into the driveway and honks his horn, which makes a noise like a bleating sheep. He knows the noise the horn makes is funny, and he means to amuse us. There was a time just after the divorce when he and Bradley would come here and get out of the car and stand around silently, waiting for her. She knew that she had to watch for them, because Milo wouldn’t come to the door. We were both bitter then, but I got over it. I still don’t think Milo would have come into the house again, though, if Bradley hadn’t thought it was a good idea. The third time Milo came to pick her up after he’d left home, I went out to invite them in, but Milo said nothing. He was standing there with his arms at his sides like a wooden soldier, and his eyes were as dead to me as if they’d been painted on. It was Bradley whom I reasoned with. “Louise is over at Sarah’s right now, and it’ll make her feel more comfortable if we’re all together when she comes in,” I said to him, and Bradley turned to Milo and said, “Hey, that’s right. Why don’t we go in for a quick cup of coffee?” I looked into the back seat of the car and saw his red Thermos there; Louise had told me about it. Bradley meant that they should come in and sit down. He was giving me even more than I’d asked for.
It would be an understatement to say that I disliked Bradley at first. I was actually afraid of him, afraid even after I saw him, though he was slender, and more nervous than I, and spoke quietly. The second time I saw him, I persuaded myself that he was just a stereotype, but someone who certainly seemed harmless enough. By the third time, I had enough courage to suggest that they come into the house. It was embarrassing for all of us, sitting around the table—the same table where Milo and I had eaten our meals for the years we were married. Before he left, Milo had shouted at me that the house was a farce, that my playing the happy suburban housewife was a farce, that it was unconscionable of me to let things drag on, that I would probably kiss him and say, “How was your day, sweetheart?” and that he should bring home flowers and the evening paper. “Maybe I would!” I screamed back, “Maybe it would be nice to do that, even if we were pretending, instead of you coming home drunk and not caring what had happened to me or to Louise all day.” He was holding on to the edge of the kitchen table, the way you’d hold on to the horse’s reins in a runaway carriage. “I care about Louise,” he said finally. That was the most horrible moment. Until then, until he said it that way, I had thought that he was going through something horrible—certainly something was terribly wrong—but that, in his way, he loved me after all. “You don’t love me?” I had whispered at once. It took us both aback. It was an innocent and pathetic question, and it made him come and put his arms around me in the last hug he ever gave me. “I’m sorry for you,” he said, “and I’m sorry for marrying you and causing this, but you know who I love. I told you who I love.” “But you were kidding,” I said. “You didn’t mean it. You were kidding.”
When Bradley sat at the table that first day, I tried to be polite and not look at him much. I had gotten it through my head that Milo was crazy, and I guess I was expecting Bradley to be a horrible parody—Craig Russell doing Marilyn Monroe. Bradley did not spoon sugar into Milo’s coffee. He did not even sit near him. In fact, he pulled his chair a little away from us, and in spite of his uneasiness he found more things to start conversations about than Milo and I did. He told me about the ad agency where he worked; he is a designer there. He asked if he could go out on the porch to see the brook—Milo had told him about the stream in the back of our place that was as thin as a pencil but still gave us our own watercress. He went out on the porch and stayed there for at least five minutes, giving us a chance to talk. We didn’t say one word until he came back. Louise came home from Sarah’s house just as Bradley sat down at the table again, and she gave him a hug as well as us. I could see that she really liked him. I was amazed that I liked him, too. Bradley had won and I had lost, but he was as gentle and low-key as if none of it mattered. Later in the week, I called him and asked him to tell me if any free-lance jobs opened in his advertising agency. (I do a little free-lance artwork, whenever I can arrange it.) The week after that, he called and told me about another agency, where they were looking for outside artists. Our calls to each other are always brief and for a purpose, but lately they’re not just calls about business. Before Bradley left to scout some picture locations in Mexico, he called to say that Milo had told him that when the two of us were there years ago I had seen one of those big circular bronze Aztec calendars and I had always regretted not bringing it back. He wanted to know if I would like him to buy a calendar if he saw one like the one Milo had told him about.
Today, Milo is getting out of his car, his blue scarf flapping against his chest. Louise, looking out the window, asks the same thing I am wondering: “Where’s Bradley?”
Milo comes in and shakes my hand, gives Louise a one-armed hug.
“Bradley thinks he’s coming down with a cold,” Milo says. “The dinner is still on, Louise. We’ll do the dinner. We have to stop at Gristede’s when we get back to town, unless your mother happens to have a tin of anchovies and two sticks of unsalted butter.”
“Let’s go to Gristede’s,” Louise says. “I like to go there.”
“Let me look in the kitchen,” I say. The butter is salted, but Milo says that will do, and he takes three sticks instead of two. I have a brainstorm and cut the cellophane on a leftover Christmas present from my aunt—a wicker plate that holds nuts and foil-wrapped triangles of cheese—and, sure enough: one tin of anchovies.
“We can go to the museum instead,” Milo says to Louise. “Wonderful.”
But then, going out the door, carrying her bag, he changes his mind. “We can go to America Hurrah, and if we see something beautiful we can buy it,” he says.
They go off in high spirits. Louise comes up to his waist, almost, and I notice again that they have the same walk. Both of them stride forward with great purpose. Last week, Bradley told me that Milo had bought a weathervane in the shape of a horse, made around 1800, at America Hurrah, and stood it in the bedroom, and then was enraged when Bradley draped his socks over it to dry. Bradley is still learning what a perfectionist Milo is, and how little sense of humor he has. When we were first married, I used one of our pottery casserole dishes to put my jewelry in, and he nagged me until I took it out and put the dish back in the kitchen cabinet. I remember his saying that the dish looked silly on my dresser because it was obvious what it was and people would think we left our dishes lying around. It was one of the things that Milo wouldn’t tolerate, because it was improper.
When Milo brings Louise back on Saturday night they are not in a good mood. The dinner was all right, Milo says, and Griffin and Amy and Mark were amazed at what a good hostess Louise had been, but Bradley hadn’t been able to eat.
“Is he still coming down with a cold?” I ask. I was still a little shy about asking questions about Bradley.
Milo shrugs. “Louise made him take megadoses of vitamin C all weekend.”
Louise says, “Bradley said that taking too much vitamin C was bad for your kidneys, though.”
“It’s a rotten climate,” Milo says, sitting on the living-room sofa, scarf and coat still on. “The combination of cold and air pollution …”
Louise and I look at each other, and then back at Milo. For weeks now, he has been talking about moving to San Francisco, if he can find work there. (Milo is an architect.) This talk bores me, and it makes Louise nervous. I’ve asked him not to talk to her about it unless he’s actually going to move, but he doesn’t seem to be able to stop himself.
“O.K.,” Milo says, looking at us both. “I’m not going to say anything about San Francisco.”
“California is polluted,” I say. I am unable to stop myself, either.
Milo heaves himself up from the sofa, ready for the drive back to New York. It is the same way he used to get off the sofa that last year he lived here. He would get up, dress for work, and not even go into the kitchen for breakfast—just sit, sometimes in his coat as he was sitting just now, and at the last minute he would push himself up and go out to the driveway, usually without a goodbye, and get in the car and drive off either very fast or very slowly. I liked it better when he made the tires spin in the gravel when he took off.
He stops at the doorway now, and turns to face me. “Did I take all your butter?” he says.
“No,” I say. “There’s another stick.” I point into the kitchen.
“I could have guessed that’s where it would be,” he says, and smiles at me.
When Milo comes the next weekend, Bradley is still not with him. The night before, as I was putting Louise to bed, she said that she had a feeling he wouldn’t be coming.
“I had that feeling a couple of days ago,” I said. “Usually Bradley calls once during the week.”
“He must still be sick,” Louise said. She looked at me anxiously. “Do you think he is?”
“A cold isn’t going to kill him,” I said. “If he has a cold, he’ll be O.K.”
Her expression changed; she thought I was talking down to her. She lay back in bed. The last year Milo was with us, I used to tuck her in and tell her that everything was all right. What that meant was that there had not been a fight. Milo had sat listening to music on the phonograph, with a book or the newspaper in front of his face. He didn’t pay very much attention to Louise, and he ignored me entirely. Instead of saying a prayer with her, the way I usually did, I would say to her that everything was all right. Then I would go downstairs and hope that Milo would say the same thing to me. What he finally did say one night was “You might as well find out from me as some other way.”
“Hey, are you an old bag lady again this weekend?” Milo says now, stooping to kiss Louise’s forehead.
“Because you take some things with you doesn’t mean you’re a bag lady,” she says primly.
“Well,” Milo says, “you start doing something innocently, and before you know it it can take you over.”
He looks angry, and acts as though it’s difficult for him to make conversation, even when the conversation is full of sarcasm and double-entendres.
“What do you say we get going?” he says to Louise.
In the shopping bag she is taking is her doll, which she has not played with for more than a year. I found it by accident when I went to tuck in a loaf of banana bread that I had baked. When I saw Baby Betsy, deep in the bag, I decided against putting the bread in.
“O.K.,” Louise says to Milo. “Where’s Bradley?”
“Sick,” he says.
“Is he too sick to have me visit?”
“Good heavens, no. He’ll be happier to see you than to see me.
“I’m rooting some of my coleus to give him,” she says. “Maybe I’ll give it to him like it is, in water, and he can plant it when it roots.”
When she leaves the room, I go over to Milo. “Be nice to her,” I say quietly.
“I’m nice to her,” he says. “Why does everybody have to act like I’m going to grow fangs every time I turn around?”
“You were quite cutting when you came in.”
“I was being self-deprecating.” He sighs. “I don’t really know why I come here and act this way,” he says.
“What’s the matter, Milo?”
But now he lets me know he’s bored with the conversation. He walks over to the table and picks up a Newsweek and flips through it. Louise comes back with the coleus in a water glass.
“You know what you could do,” I say. “Wet a napkin and put it around that cutting and then wrap it in foil, and put it in water when you get there. That way, you wouldn’t have to hold a glass of water all the way to New York.”
She shrugs. “This is O.K.,” she says.
“Why don’t you take your mother’s suggestion,” Milo says. “The water will slosh out of the glass.”
“Not if you don’t drive fast.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with my driving fast. If we go over a bump in the road, you’re going to get all wet.”
“Then I can put on one of my dresses at your apartment.”
“Am I being unreasonable?” Milo says to me.
“I started it,” I say. “Let her take it in the glass.”
“Would you, as a favor, do what your mother says?” he says to Louise.
Louise looks at the coleus, and at me.
“Hold the glass over the seat instead of over your lap, and you won’t get wet,” I say.
“Your first idea was the best,” Milo says.
Louise gives him an exasperated look and puts the glass down on the floor, pulls on her poncho, picks up the glass again and says a sullen goodbye to me, and goes out the front door.
“Why is this my fault?” Milo says. “Have I done anything terrible? I—”
“Do something to cheer yourself up,” I say, patting him on the back.
He looks as exasperated with me as Louise was with him. He nods his head yes, and goes out the door.
“Was everything all right this weekend?” I ask Louise.
“Milo was in a bad mood, and Bradley wasn’t even there on Saturday,” Louise says. “He came back today and took us to the Village for breakfast.”
“What did you have?”
“I had sausage wrapped in little pancakes and fruit salad and a rum bun.”
“Where was Bradley on Saturday?”
She shrugs. “I didn’t ask him.”
She almost always surprises me by being more grownup than I give her credit for. Does she suspect, as I do, that Bradley has found another lover?
“Milo was in a bad mood when you two left here Saturday,” I say.
“I told him if he didn’t want me to come next weekend, just to tell me.” She looks perturbed, and I suddenly realize that she can sound exactly like Milo sometimes.
“You shouldn’t have said that to him, Louise,” I say. “You know he wants you. He’s just worried about Bradley.”
“So?” she says. “I’m probably going to flunk math.”
“No, you’re not, honey. You got a C-plus on the last assignment,”
“It still doesn’t make my grade average out to a C.”
“You’ll get a C. It’s all right to get a C.”
She doesn’t believe me.
“Don’t be a perfectionist, like Milo,” I tell her. “Even if you got a D, you wouldn’t fail.”
Louise is brushing her hair—thin, shoulder-length, auburn hair. She is already so pretty and so smart in everything except math that I wonder what will become of her. When I was her age, I was plain and serious and I wanted to be a tree surgeon. I went with my father to the park and held a stethoscope—a real one—to the trunks of trees, listening to their silence. Children seem older now.
“What do you think’s the matter with Bradley?” Louise says. She sounds worried.
“Maybe the two of them are unhappy with each other right now.”
She misses my point. “Bradley’s sad, and Milo’s sad that he’s unhappy.”
I drop Louise off at Sarah’s house for supper. Sarah’s mother, Martine Cooper, looks like Shelley Winters, and I have never seen her without a glass of Galliano on ice in her hand. She has a strong candy smell. Her husband has left her, and she professes not to care. She has emptied her living room of furniture and put up ballet bars on the walls, and dances in a purple leotard to records by Cher and Mac Davis. I prefer to have Sarah come to our house, but her mother is adamant that everything must be, as she puts it, “fifty-fifty.” When Sarah visited us a week ago and loved the chocolate pie I had made, I sent two pieces home with her. Tonight, when I left Sarah’s house, her mother gave me a bowl of Jell-O fruit salad.
The phone is ringing when I come in the door. It is Bradley.
“Bradley,” I say at once, “whatever’s wrong, at least you don’t have a neighbor who just gave you a bowl of maraschino cherries in green Jell-O with a Reddi-Wip flower squirted on top.
“Jesus,” he says. “You don’t need me to depress you, do you?”
“What’s wrong?” I say.
He sighs into the phone. “Guess what?” he says.
“What?”
“I’ve lost my job.”
It wasn’t at all what I was expecting to hear. I was ready to hear that he was leaving Milo, and I had even thought that that would serve Milo right. Part of me still wanted him punished for what he did. I was so out of my mind when Milo left me that I used to go over and drink Galliano with Martine Cooper. I even thought seriously about forming a ballet group with her. I would go to her house in the afternoon, and she would hold a tambourine in the air and I would hold my leg rigid and try to kick it.
“That’s awful,” I say to Bradley. “What happened?”
“They said it was nothing personal—they were laying off three people. Two other people are going to get the ax at the agency within the next six months. I was the first to go, and it was nothing personal. From twenty thousand bucks a year to nothing, and nothing personal, either.”
“But your work is so good. Won’t you be able to find something again?”
“Could I ask you a favor?” he says. “I’m calling from a phone booth. I’m not in the city. Could I come talk to you?”
“Sure,” I say.
It seems perfectly logical that he should come alone to talk—perfectly logical until I actually see him coming up the walk. I can’t entirely believe it. A year after my husband has left me, I am sitting with his lover—a man, a person I like quite well—and trying to cheer him up because he is out of work. (“Honey,” my father would say, “listen to Daddy’s heart with the stethoscope, or you can turn it toward you and listen to your own heart. You won’t hear anything listening to a tree.” Was my persistence willfulness, or belief in magic? Is it possible that I hugged Bradley at the door because I’m secretly glad he’s down and out, the way I used to be? Or do I really want to make things better for him?)
He comes into the kitchen and thanks me for the coffee I am making, drapes his coat over the chair he always sits in.
“What am I going to do?” he asks.
“You shouldn’t get so upset, Bradley,” I say. “You know you’re good. You won’t have trouble finding another job.”
“That’s only half of it,” he says. “Milo thinks I did this deliberately. He told me I was quitting on him. He’s very angry at me. He fights with me, and then he gets mad that I don’t enjoy eating dinner. My stomach’s upset, and I can’t eat anything.”
“Maybe some juice would be better than coffee.”
“If I didn’t drink coffee, I’d collapse,” he says.
I pour coffee into a mug for him, coffee into a mug for me.
“This is probably very awkward for you,” he says. “That I come here and say all this about Milo.”
“What does he mean about your quitting on him?”
“He said … he actually accused me of doing badly deliberately, so they’d fire me. I was so afraid to tell him the truth when I was fired that I pretended to be sick. Then I really was sick. He’s never been angry at me this way. Is this always the way he acts? Does he get a notion in his head for no reason and then pick at a person because of it?”
I try to remember. “We didn’t argue much,” I say. “When he didn’t want to live here, he made me look ridiculous for complaining when I knew something was wrong. He expects perfection, but what that means is that you do things his way.”
“I was. I never wanted to sit around the apartment, the way he says I did. I even brought work home with me. He made me feel so bad all week that I went to a friend’s apartment for the day on Saturday. Then he said I had walked out on the problem. He’s a little paranoid. I was listening to the radio, and Carole King was singing ‘It’s Too Late,’ and he came into the study and looked very upset, as though I had planned for the song to come on. I couldn’t believe it.”
“Whew,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t envy you. You have to stand up to him. I didn’t do that. I pretended the problem would go away.”
“And now the problem sits across from you drinking coffee, and you’re being nice to him.”
“I know it. I was just thinking we look like two characters in some soap opera my friend Martine Cooper would watch.”
He pushes his coffee cup away from him with a grimace.
“But anyway, I like you now,” I say. “And you’re exceptionally nice to Louise.”
“I took her father,” he says.
“Bradley—I hope you don’t take offense, but it makes me nervous to talk about that.”
“I don’t take offense. But how can you be having coffee with me?”
“You invited yourself over so you could ask that?”
“Please,” he says, holding up both hands. Then he runs his hands through his hair. “Don’t make me feel illogical. He does that to me, you know. He doesn’t understand it when everything doesn’t fall right into line. If I like fixing up the place, keeping some flowers around, therefore I can’t like being a working person, too, therefore I deliberately sabotage myself in my job.” Bradley sips his coffee.
“I wish I could do something for him,” he says in a different voice.
This is not what I expected, either. We have sounded like two wise adults, and then suddenly he has changed and sounds very tender. I realize the situation is still the same. It is two of them on one side and me on the other, even though Bradley is in my kitchen.
“Come and pick up Louise with me, Bradley,” I say. “When you see Martine Cooper, you’ll cheer up about your situation.”
He looks up from his coffee. “You’re forgetting what I’d look like to Martine Cooper,” he says.
Milo is going to California. He has been offered a job with a new San Francisco architectural firm. I am not the first to know. His sister, Deanna, knows before I do, and mentions it when we’re talking on the phone. “It’s middle-age crisis,” Deanna says sniffily. “Not that I need to tell you.” Deanna would drop dead if she knew the way things are. She is scandalized every time a new display is put up in Blooming dale’s window. (“Those mannequins had eyes like an Egyptian princess, and rags. I swear to you, they had mops and brooms and ragged gauze dresses on, with whores’ shoes—stiletto heels that prostitutes wear.”)
I hang up from Deanna’s call and tell Louise I’m going to drive to the gas station for cigarettes. I go there to call New York on their pay phone.
“Well, I only just knew,” Milo says. “I found out for sure yesterday, and last night Deanna called and so I told her. It’s not like I’m leaving tonight.”
He sounds elated, in spite of being upset that I called. He’s happy in the way he used to be on Christmas morning. I remember him once running into the living room in his underwear and tearing open the gifts we’d been sent by relatives. He was looking for the eight-slice toaster he was sure we’d get. We’d been given two-slice, four-slice, and six-slice toasters, but then we got no more. “Come out, my eight-slice beauty!” Milo crooned, and out came an electric clock, a blender, and an expensive electric pan.
“When are you leaving?” I ask him.
“I’m going out to look for a place to live next week.”
“Are you going to tell Louise yourself this weekend?”
“Of course,” he says.
“And what are you going to do about seeing Louise?”
“Why do you act as if I don’t like Louise?” he says. “I will occasionally come back East, and I will arrange for her to fly to San Francisco on her vacations.”
“It’s going to break her heart.”
“No it isn’t. Why do you want to make me feel bad?”
“She’s had so many things to adjust to. You don’t have to go to San Francisco right now, Milo.”
“It happens, if you care, that my own job here is in jeopardy. This is a real chance for me, with a young firm. They really want me. But anyway, all we need in this happy group is to have you bringing in a couple of hundred dollars a month with your graphic work and me destitute and Bradley so devastated by being fired that of course he can’t even look for work.”
“I’ll bet he is looking for a job,” I say.
“Yes. He read the want ads today and then fixed a crab quiche.”
“Maybe that’s the way you like things, Milo, and people respond to you. You forbade me to work when we had a baby. Do you say anything encouraging to him about finding a job, or do you just take it out on him that he was fired?”
There is a pause, and then he almost seems to lose his mind with impatience.
“I can hardly believe, when I am trying to find a logical solution to all our problems, that I am being subjected, by telephone, to an unflattering psychological analysis by my ex-wife.” He says this all in a rush.
“All right, Milo. But don’t you think that if you’re leaving so soon you ought to call her, instead of waiting until Saturday?”
Milo sighs very deeply. “I have more sense than to have important conversations on the telephone,” he says.
Milo calls on Friday and asks Louise whether it wouldn’t be nice if both of us came in and spent the night Saturday and if we all went to brunch together Sunday. Louise is excited. I never go into town with her.
Louise and I pack a suitcase and put it in the car Saturday morning. A cutting of ivy for Bradley has taken root, and she has put it in a little green plastic pot for him. It’s heartbreaking, and I hope that Milo notices and has a tough time dealing with it. I am relieved I’m going to be there when he tells her, and sad that I have to hear it at all.
In the city, I give the car to the garage attendant, who does not remember me. Milo and I lived in the apartment when we were first married, and moved when Louise was two years old. When we moved, Milo kept the apartment and sublet it—a sign that things were not going well, if I had been one to heed such a warning. What he said was that if we were ever rich enough we could have the house in Connecticut and the apartment in New York. When Milo moved out of the house, he went right back to the apartment. This will be the first time I have visited there in years.
Louise strides in in front of me, throwing her coat over the brass coatrack in the entranceway—almost too casual about being there. She’s the hostess at Milo’s, the way I am at our house.
He has painted the walls white. There are floor-length white curtains in the living room, where my silly flowered curtains used to hang. The walls are bare, the floor has been sanded, a stereo as huge as a computer stands against one wall of the living room, and there are four speakers.
“Look around,” Milo says. “Show your mother around, Louise.”
I am trying to remember if I have ever told Louise that I used to live in this apartment. I must have told her, at some point, but I can’t remember it.
“Hello,” Bradley says, coming out of the bedroom.
“Hi, Bradley,” I say. “Have you got a drink?”
Bradley looks sad. “He’s got champagne,” he says, and looks nervously at Milo.
“No one has to drink champagne,” Milo says. “There’s the usual assortment of liquor.”
“Yes,” Bradley says. “What would you like?”
“Some bourbon, please.”
“Bourbon.” Bradley turns to go into the kitchen. He looks different; his hair is different—more wavy—and he is dressed as though it were summer, in straight-legged white pants and black leather thongs.
“I want Perrier water with strawberry juice,” Louise says, tagging along after Bradley. I have never heard her ask for such a thing before. At home, she drinks too many Cokes. I am always trying to get her to drink fruit juice.
Bradley comes back with two drinks and hands me one. “Did you want anything?” he says to Milo.
“I’m going to open the champagne in a moment,” Milo says. “How have you been this week, sweetheart?”
“O.K.,” Louise says. She is holding a pale-pink, bubbly drink. She sips it like a cocktail.
Bradley looks very bad. He has circles under his eyes, and he is ill at ease. A red light begins to blink on the phone-answering device next to where Bradley sits on the sofa, and Milo gets out of his chair to pick up the phone.
“Do you really want to talk on the phone right now?” Bradley asks Milo quietly.
Milo looks at him. “No, not particularly,” he says, sitting down again. After a moment, the red light goes out.
“I’m going to mist your bowl garden,” Louise says to Bradley, and slides off the sofa and goes to the bedroom. “Hey, a little toadstool is growing in here!” she calls back. “Did you put it there, Bradley?”
“It grew from the soil mixture, I guess,” Bradley calls back. “I don’t know how it got there.”
“Have you heard anything about a job?” I ask Bradley.
“I haven’t been looking, really,” he says. “You know.”
Milo frowns at him. “Your choice, Bradley,” he says. “I didn’t ask you to follow me to California. You can stay here.”
“No,” Bradley says. “You’ve hardly made me feel welcome.”
“Should we have some champagne—all four of us—and you can get back to your bourbons later?” Milo says cheerfully.
We don’t answer him, but he gets up anyway and goes to the kitchen. “Where have you hidden the tulip-shaped glasses, Bradley?” he calls out after a while.
“They should be in the cabinet on the far left,” Bradley says.
“You’re going with him?” I say to Bradley. “To San Francisco?”
He shrugs, and won’t look at me. “I’m not quite sure I’m wanted,” he says quietly.
The cork pops in the kitchen. I look at Bradley, but he won’t look up. His new hairdo makes him look older. I remember that when Milo left me I went to the hairdresser the same week and had bangs cut. The next week, I went to a therapist who told me it was no good trying to hide from myself. The week after that, I did dance exercises with Martine Cooper, and the week after that the therapist told me not to dance if I wasn’t interested in dancing.
“I’m not going to act like this is a funeral,” Milo says, coming in with the glasses. “Louise, come in here and have champagne! We have something to have a toast about.”
Louise comes into the living room suspiciously. She is so used to being refused even a sip of wine from my glass or her father’s that she no longer even asks. “How come I’m in on this?” she asks.
“We’re going to drink a toast to me,” Milo says.
Three of the four glasses are clustered on the table in front of the sofa. Milo’s glass is raised. Louise looks at me, to see what I’m going to say. Milo raises his glass even higher, Bradley reaches for a glass. Louise picks up a glass. I lean forward and take the last one.
“This is a toast to me,” Milo says, “because I am going to be going to San Francisco.”
It was not a very good or informative toast. Bradley and I sip from our glasses. Louise puts her glass down hard and bursts into tears, knocking the glass over. The champagne spills onto the cover of a big art book about the Unicorn Tapestries. She runs into the bedroom and slams the door.
Milo looks furious. “Everybody lets me know just what my insufficiencies are, don’t they?” he says. “Nobody minds expressing himself. We have it all right out in the open.”
“He’s criticizing me,” Bradley murmurs, his head still bowed. “It’s because I was offered a job here in the city and I didn’t automatically refuse it.”
I turn to Milo. “Go say something to Louise, Milo,” I say. “Do you think that’s what somebody who isn’t brokenhearted sounds like?”
He glares at me and stomps into the bedroom, and I can hear him talking to Louise reassuringly. “It doesn’t mean you’ll never see me,” he says. “You can fly there, I’ll come here. It’s not going to be that different.”
“You lied!” Louise screams. “You said we were going to brunch.”
“We are. We are. I can’t very well take us to brunch before Sunday, can I?”
“You didn’t say you were going to San Francisco. What is San Francisco, anyway?”
“I just said so. I bought us a bottle of champagne. You can come out as soon as I get settled. You’re going to like it there.”
Louise is sobbing. She has told him the truth and she knows it’s futile to go on.
By the next morning, Louise acts the way I acted—as if everything were just the same. She looks calm, but her face is small and pale. She looks very young. We walk into the restaurant and sit at the table Milo has reserved. Bradley pulls out a chair for me, and Milo pulls out a chair for Louise, locking his finger with hers for a second, raising her arm above her head, as if she were about to take a twirl.
She looks very nice, really. She has a ribbon in her hair. It is cold, and she should have worn a hat, but she wanted to wear the ribbon. Milo has good taste: the dress she is wearing, which he bought for her, is a hazy purple plaid, and it sets off her hair.
“Come with me. Don’t be sad,” Milo suddenly says to Louise, pulling her by the hand. “Come with me for a minute. Come across the street to the park for just a second, and we’ll have some space to dance, and your mother and Bradley can have a nice quiet drink.”
She gets up from the table and, looking long-suffering, backs into her coat, which he is holding for her, and the two of them go out. The waitress comes to the table, and Bradley orders three Bloody Marys and a Coke, and eggs Benedict for everyone. He asks the waitress to wait awhile before she brings the food. I have hardly slept at all, and having a drink is not going to clear my head. I have to think of things to say to Louise later, on the ride home.
“He takes so many chances,” I say. “He pushes things so far with people. I don’t want her to turn against him.”
“No,” he says.
“Why are you going, Bradley? You’ve seen the way he acts. You know that when you get out there he’ll pull something on you. Take the job and stay here.”
Bradley is fiddling with the edge of his napkin. I study him. I don’t know who his friends are, how old he is, where he grew up, whether he believes in God, or what he usually drinks. I’m shocked that I know so little, and I reach out and touch him. He looks up.
“Don’t go,” I say quietly.
The waitress puts the glasses down quickly and leaves, embarrassed because she thinks she’s interrupted a tender moment. Bradley pats my hand on his arm. Then he says the thing that has always been between us, the thing too painful for me to envision or think about.
“I love him,” Bradley whispers.
We sit quietly until Milo and Louise come into the restaurant, swinging hands. She is pretending to be a young child, almost a baby, and I wonder for an instant if Milo and Bradley and I haven’t been playing house, too—pretending to be adults.
“Daddy’s going to give me a first-class ticket,” Louise says. “When I go to California we’re going to ride in a glass elevator to the top of the Fairman Hotel.”
“The Fairmont,” Milo says, smiling at her.
Before Louise was born, Milo used to put his ear to my stomach and say that if the baby turned out to be a girl he would put her into glass slippers instead of bootees. Now he is the prince once again. I see them in a glass elevator, not long from now, going up and up, with the people below getting smaller and smaller, until they disappear.