Having put on his socks and shoes, and therefore now fully dressed, Albie returns to the living room to find Bunny unfurled from her curled-up-in-a-ball position. “Did you sleep?” he asks her.
“I don’t know. What time is it?”
“It’s getting close to one. How about some lunch?”
“Not now. Soon.”
Albie glances at the coffee cup, the second cup of coffee, also untouched. “You didn’t have any breakfast. You’ve got to eat something.”
It’s not an eating disorder like anorexia, and you can forget bulimia, and it’s not like Angela’s stomach cancer, either. People who are clinically depressed have their own disturbances with food. For some, it’s as if hand to mouth were an involuntary reflex, as if food could fill the abyss. Which it can’t, and they grow fat, which does nothing good for their state of mind. The others are rarely hungry or else they are never hungry. They emaciate, become insubstantial, a manifestation of the wish to disappear. Bunny is one of the thin ones.
She was always thin, but now you could rest a teacup on her clavicle.
No, she wasn’t always thin, but she was mostly always thin.
Now, she appears gaunt. Not just undernourished, but malnourished. Her lips are chapped and cracked. Her skin has a gray tint and her hair is flat, lifeless. It could be that she needs a good scrubbing even more than a good meal, but Albie prefers to approach her disturbances one at a time. “I really wish you’d eat something,” he says. “You haven’t had anything since yesterday afternoon.”
“I didn’t have dinner? I thought I’d had dinner.”
“You had a late lunch,” Albie says. “You need to eat. There’s some nice cheese in the refrigerator. A fontina and a Morbier. From Murray’s. And there’s an Amy’s sourdough in the freezer.”
“Really,” Bunny says. “I’m not hungry. But you go ahead.”
“I have a lunch date with Muriel,” Albie tells her. “That is, if you don’t mind my going out for a while.”
The holidays have resulted in an abundance of togetherness, and Albie is desperate to escape, even if only for a few hours. The air is stifling, thick and dank from Bunny’s misery and neglect of her personal hygiene. Her linen—sheets and pillowcase—are squirrel gray with grime.
“I don’t mind. Really, it’s fine,” she assures him.
And it is fine. Even if Albie’s presence didn’t feel like a plastic bag over her head, it would’ve been fine. One example of their compatibility is that neither of them believed that to be married was to be conjoined at the hip. Trust is, and has always been, solid and their loyalty to each other is complete. Trust and loyalty in the ways that matter most.
When Bunny and Muriel met for the first time, Bunny later said to Albie, “You should tell her to lighten up on the mascara.” Then, to put her remark in perspective, Bunny added, “But I really liked her.” About Bunny, Muriel had said, “She’s quite fabulous.” Yet, neither Bunny nor Muriel made any effort toward a friendship of their own because Muriel was Albie’s friend, his friend from work. A friend from work should be a compartmentalized and exclusive friendship; that is, my friend from work, as opposed to our friend from my work. Everyone should be free to go to lunch or dinner with a good friend from work without your significant other sitting there at the table letting go with bull-snort exhales of boredom laced with rising irritation while you and your friend are having what amounts to a private conversation about office intrigue.
Bunny knows that no matter what, you’ve got to have a friend all your own. Albie and Stella got along famously, but Bunny and Stella had a history together, one that was pre-Albie, one that didn’t include him. Stella was Bunny’s friend. Muriel is Albie’s friend, and Bunny is glad he has her.
To hurry him out the door, Bunny tells Albie to have a good time, and Albie asks her, “Do you want me to bring anything back for you?”
“A pack of cigarettes,” Bunny says.
“That’s it?” Albie asks.
That’s it. Bunny doesn’t want anything else except for Albie to go out and to leave her alone. Alone, as if it were something she’d come to regret.