He hasn’t worn a raincoat. The light drizzle beads his heavy sweater, his beard, collects on his forehead, begins to trickle. Since he has no raincoat, since he’s wet and shivering, how can she refuse to let him in?
He parks his bike in the driveway, chaining it to the lilac bush, snapping the lock. As usual; but it isn’t as usual. He hasn’t seen her for a month. Four weeks. Tears from her, hangdog shrugs from him, and a lot of afternoon soap stuff from both of them, including It’s better this way. She’s phoned him a couple of times since, wanting him to come over, but he’s avoided it. He doesn’t like doing the same thing over again, he doesn’t like predicability. This time, however, he phoned her.
She lives in an A, 32A, a flat in one of the big older houses east of Sherbourne. Main number at the front, the A entrance around at the side. When he rings she opens the door immediately. She’s been waiting for him. No fresh-washed hair and velvet dressing gown though; just a pair of slacks and a slightly grubby light-green sweater. She has a glass, half-empty. A lemon peel floats in it, an ice cube. Fortification.
“Well,” she says. “Happy Anniversary.”
“Of what?” he says.
“Saturday was always our day.” She’s on the edge of being drunk, she’s bitter. He can’t blame her. Nate finds it hard to blame anyone for anything. He’s been able to understand her bitterness, most of the time. He just hasn’t been able to do much about it.
“Not that she ever stuck to it,” Martha goes on. “Emergency this, emergency that. So sorry to interrupt, but one of the children’s heads just fell off.” Martha laughs.
Nate wants to take her by the shoulders and give her a good shake, throw her against the wall. But of course he can’t. Instead he stands, dripping onto her hall floor, looking at her dumbly. He feels his body sagging on his spine, the flesh drooping like warm taffy on a sucker stick. Butterscotch. Don’t run with the stick in your mouth, he’d tell the kids, already seeing them fall, seeing the pointed stick skewering up through the roof of the mouth. Running, kneeling, lifting, a howl, his own voice. Oh my god.
“Could you keep the children out of it?” he says.
“Why?” Martha says. “They were in it, weren’t they?” She turns from him and walks down the hall into her living room.
I should leave now, Nate thinks. But he follows her, slipping his wet shoes off first, feet padding along the old rug. The old rut.
Only one light on. She’s arranged it, the lighting. She sits across the room from the light, in shadow, on the sofa. Plush-covered sofa where he first kissed her, unpinned her hair, stroking it down over her wide shoulders. Broad, capable hands. He’d thought he would be safe in those hands, between those knees.
“That was always her excuse,” Martha says. She’s wearing crocheted wool slippers. Elizabeth would never wear crocheted wool slippers.
“She never disliked you,” Nate says. They’ve done this before.
“No,” Martha says. “Why dislike the housemaid? I did the dirty work for her. She should’ve paid me.”
Nate feels, not for the first time, that he has told this woman too many things. She’s misinterpreting, she’s using his own confidences against him. “That’s unfair,” he says. “She respects you. She never tried to interfere with anything. Why should she?” He doesn’t reply to the crack about the dirty work. Is that how you felt about it? he wants to ask, but he’s afraid of the answer. Get your ashes hauled. Casual talk at high-school lockers. He can smell himself, the wet socks, turpentine on his pants. She used to tease him, scrubbing his back as they sat in her claw-footed tub. Your wife doesn’t take care of you. In more ways than one.
“Yeah,” says Martha. “Why should she? She always wanted to have her cake and eat it too. That’s you, Nate. Elizabeth’s cake. You’re a piece of cake.”
Nate remembers that when he first saw her, behind her desk at Adams, Prewitt and Stein, she was furtively chewing gum, a habit she renounced when he hinted he didn’t like it. “I understand why you’re angry,” he says. This is one of Elizabeth’s tactics, understanding, and he feels sneaky using it. He knows he doesn’t really understand. Elizabeth doesn’t either, when she says that to him. But it always deflates him.
“I don’t give a piss whether you do or not,” Martha says belligerently. No sops of understanding for her. She’s looking at him directly, though her eyes are in shadow.
“I didn’t come over to talk about this,” Nate says, not sure what exactly they’ve been talking about. He’s never sure in conversations like this. The clear thing is that she feels he’s wrong. He’s wronged her. He’s done her wrong. But he tried to be straightforward about it from the beginning, he didn’t lie. Someone should give him credit for that.
“So why did you come?” Martha says. “Running away from mother? Wanted some other nice lady to give you a cookie and a tumble in the sack?”
Nate finds this brutal. He doesn’t answer. This is, he realizes, what he had wanted, though he doesn’t want it at the moment.
Martha wipes the back of her hand across her mouth and nose. She’s dimmed the lights, Nate guesses now, not for romantic effect but because she expected to cry and didn’t want him to be able to see too well. “You can’t turn it off and on that easily,” she says.
“I thought we could talk,” Nate says.
“I’m listening,” Martha says. “I’m real good at it.” Nate doesn’t think this is necessarily true. She’s good at it when he talks about her, granted. All ears. You have the best thighs in the world. She does have nice thighs, but the best in the world? How would he know?
“I guess you’ve heard what happened,” he says at last. Unable to say why Chris’s death should make him want comfort. By popular wisdom he should be overjoyed, his horns gone, the stain on his honor wiped out by blood.
“You mean about Elizabeth,” Martha says. “Everyone in this town always knows what happens to everybody else. They all came and told me, you can bet on it. They love it. They love to watch me when they drop your name. Both of your names. Elizabeth’s lover dynamited his head. Some of them say Elizabeth’s man. So what? What’m I supposed to say? Tough tits? Serves her right? She finally got him?”
Nate has never known her to be so hard, even during their most violent arguments. What he liked about her at first was her vagueness, her lack of focus, an absence of edges that gave her a nebulous shimmer. Now it’s as if she’s been dropped on the sidewalk from a great height and has frozen there, all splayed angles and splinters.
“She hadn’t seen him for a while,” he says, taking Elizabeth’s side as Martha ritually forces him to. “He wanted her to leave the children. She couldn’t do that.”
“Of course not,” Martha says. She stares down at her empty glass, lets it fall to the rug between her feet. “Supermom could never leave the children.” She starts to cry, making no effort now to hide her face. “Move in with me,” she says. “Live with me. I just want us to have a chance.”
Nate thinks, Maybe we already had one. They don’t now. He begins to ease himself forward, out of the chair. She’ll be on him in a minute, arms winding like seaweed around his neck, wet face on his chest, pelvis shoved against his groin while he stands there withered.
“How do you think it feels?” she says. “Like a backstairs romance with the kitchen help, only everyone knows, and you go back at night to your goddamned wife and your goddamned kids and I read murder mysteries till four in the morning just to keep myself sane.”
Nate meditates on the kitchen help. Her choice of metaphor puzzles him. Who has back stairs any more? He remembers one evening, the two of them wrapped in a sheet, on the bed together drinking gin, watching Upstairs, Downstairs and laughing. The maid pregnant by the son and heir, being lectured by the ice-faced mother. That was early on, when they were having a good time. It wasn’t a Saturday; it was before Elizabeth said, Let’s be reasonable about this. We have to know we can depend on each other at certain times. She took Thursdays, he took Saturdays because it was the weekend and Martha wouldn’t have to get up early the next morning. And that other evening, when Martha said, I think I’m pregnant. His first thought: Elizabeth won’t put up with that.
If I console her, she’ll say I’m a hypocrite, he thinks. If I don’t, I’m a prick. Out now while there’s time. This was a bad mistake. Pick up my shoes in the front hall, shouldn’t have locked the bike. “Maybe we can have lunch sometime,” he says at the living-room door.
“Lunch?” Her voice follows him down the hall. “Lunch?” A retreating wail.
He pedals his bicycle through the rain, aiming deliberately for puddles, soaking his legs. Fool. There’s something missing in him that other people have. He can never foresee the future, that’s it, even when it’s clear. It’s a kind of deformity, like being tall. Other people walk through doorways, he hits his head. Once or twice and a rat would learn to stoop. How many times, how long will it take?
After half an hour he stops at the corner of Dupont and Spadina, where he knows there’s a phone booth. He leans his bike against the side of the booth, goes in. Glass cubicle, light on, total exposure. Feeble-minded creep goes into booth, removes clothes, stands there waiting for Superman to take over his body while people stare from passing cars and some old lady calls the police.
He takes a dime from his pocket, holds it. His token, his talisman, his one hope of salvation. At the other end of the line a thin woman waits, her pale face framed by dark hair, her hand lifted, fingers upraised in blessing.
No answer.