13

Diana pulled to the side of the road and consulted the map. As far as she could tell, it was over 400 miles from Washington to the New Hampshire border. She was, she deduced, halfway there. Halfway there. A relevant phrase.

Having liberated herself enough to reserve Lida’s house for that rendezvous with Lou, she had, when face to face with him, been unable to admit it.

“What would you like to do?” he’d asked.

“Um,” she’d said, inadvertently coy.

“I know,” he said, “we’ll drive to Baltimore. Get a corned-beef sandwich.”

And, ramrod of rectitude that she was, or seemed, she’d agreed.

Diana had consoled herself, there in the Pratt Street delicatessen, with balm she’d so often offered Lida. He, Lou, the burly man who sat across from her intently studying the stratified layers of his sandwich, was one of the Wrong Men. He had to be. It was that simple. But she knew now why Lida was never easily consoled.

She thought of Lida, thought of how their situations, hers and Lida’s, had reversed. After that awful business with Jerry in the hospital, Lida had withdrawn into celibacy. And she, Diana, was … well, ready.

She could hear Lida now, lingering over the details. The long row of stitches. The smell of iodine. The little machine strapped to Jerry’s body. Ghastly. And how he’d treated Lida later. Ghastlier still. Poor Lida. “If I were in love with him,” Lida had said, “I could take it. But I’m being treated like shit by someone I can’t even stand. God, I was doing him a favor! You should have heard him, ‘Please. Please.’”

She imagined Lida’s list of lovers yellowing, flaking with age. And would she, Diana, compile a list of her own?

Well, she wasn’t that ready. Just halfway there.

Diana tilted the rearview mirror and looked at herself: a stranger, albeit a pretty one. Lida had been right. Why, Diana wondered, had she struggled against Lida’s every suggestion?

“I’m not talking about a major overhaul,” she remembered Lida arguing. “No plastic surgery. No silicone injections.” She had been marched to the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. “Look, kiddo,” Lida had said, gesturing at Diana’s image and delivering the final blow. “I just want you to stop looking as though you’re on your way to some bingo.”

If Lou hadn’t noticed that she had stopped looking that way, stuff him! And if Lida hadn’t asked if he’d noticed, stuff her! Diana pulled back onto the highway, eager to travel the remaining stretch of road.

She suddenly felt free, apart from all restraint. Apart from them all—from Lida, from Lou, from her children. She felt alive! She felt single! And alone, wonderfully alone!

She leaned into the turns, driving faster than she’d ever driven. She passed several signs offering food and gasoline. Finally, when the gas gauge sank perilously low, she followed one of them off the superhighway and onto a two-lane road.

After he had filled her tank and taken her money, the attendant glanced at her out-of-state plate and seemed to scoff. He gave her a mocking stare.

“Is something wrong?” she called, daring him.

He looked away, even reddening a bit.

“Where can I get something to eat?” she asked in triumph.

“What’s that?”

“The sign said ‘Food.’ Is there a restaurant down this road?”

“Yep.”

Diana swooped off in search of it.

It was more like a roadside store than a restaurant, despite a weathered sign proclaiming it the latter. There were three cars in the gravel lot parked in no apparent pattern. Diana pulled up beside one of them and cut the engine off.

She wasn’t really hungry. The excitement had usurped her need for food. Nonetheless, she had a four-hour drive ahead. She started inside.

Diana regressed. She was instantly embarrassed.

There were shelves bearing grocery items, canned foods, loaves of bread and such, in the foreground. Beyond these was a counter with several stools. Behind the counter, a young girl, seventeen perhaps.

The girl was standing beside a meat slicer which held a huge round of bologna. She stood, semiconscious, pushing it to and fro. Her eyes were closed and her hair hung, limp and dirty, across her forehead. Her skirt was hiked up above one knee, which pressed forward. Her body moved in rhythm to the machine.

Two men sat at opposite ends of the counter. They were watching the girl as though hypnotized by her movement.

Diana stood at the door and steeled herself for retreat.

But the tableau ended. The girl folded the paper over the heap of meat she had accumulated, moistened a sticker to hold it shut, and looking directly at Diana, plopped the package on the counter in front of the man on the left.

He stirred his coffee and nodded, barely noticing. The other man raised a sandwich to his mouth. It would have been harder now to leave than to stay, and so Diana walked ahead and sat on the centermost stool. Woman of the world, ha! Halfway there, indeed!

She took the agenda for the conference from her purse and occupied herself with it. There would be coffee in the library at ten. Then the papers would begin, with hers scheduled to be the third. Then lunch, then more papers. Cocktails and dinner and, she might as well admit it, home.

Still, three years ago, she knew, the quality of the scene she had witnessed would have escaped her. Her mind carried her back further still. She thought of Bill and the pallor of her response to him. Then the sequence moved forward. She thought of her sons, of the kinky black hair that curled in their armpits. Of their voices, deep and deepening.

She would have to call Bill to check on the boys. She heard them already, talking all at once, each accusing the other and demanding that his brother be punished. The hell with it. She would tell them that she couldn’t call. Her room had no phone. The switchboard was closed. The lines all over New Hampshire had been severed.

Diana felt good again when she drove on.

Diana was aware that he had been watching her long before she rose to take the podium. She had arranged and rearranged her papers, but always in the same order. He had arrived later than the others, and so they had not been introduced.

“All the while they were talking the new morality …” That line from Ezra Pound hammered in her brain.

It was the question-and-answer period she had dreaded, but her fears, she discovered, had been unjustified. She answered their queries easily and well. She half-heard the directions to the room where the luncheon would be served, feeling his eyes, yes, exploring.

And when she arose to go …

She snatched up a napkin and an array of silver. He was beside her now.

“You were marvelous,” he told her.

But then there was another voice, nearer a rasp. “Hey, Dilworth,” it said. “You can’t keep this pretty lady all to yourself.”

Diana turned and forced a smile.