13

THE FIRST MONTH was terrible. After Mark left me, I’d wake up in the middle of the night, trembling with anger and rage. Shaking as if something had terrified me as I slept. But with Sean it was different. This time I couldn’t find the name for what it was I felt. This time I didn’t wake, shaking and trembling. This time I slept. I slept long, deep, endless hours of untroubled sleep and woke more exhausted than before. The fatigue perplexed me. I lay in bed for hours like a beached whale and thought how this time I really had only myself to blame. Sometimes I blamed Lila for making me mistrust so deeply, but mostly I blamed myself.

It was Sally who figured out what it was that was making me so tired, that barely let me get through the day, then buried me in bed hours before anyone in Manhattan would ever dream of going to bed. She invited me to dinner one night. “You look like you have permanent jet lag,” she said when she opened the door. Sally made us green tortellini with funghi sauce, salad, and an Italian marinated chicken that was delicious. I could barely lift the fork.

“It’s not like the last time,” I mumbled as I tried to eat. “The last time I was furious. Now I’m just sleepy.” It had been more than a month since I got back from California, and I still dragged around. Sally listened to me patiently through dinner and into dessert. She didn’t protest when I hardly sampled her gourmet meal.

After dinner she lit one of the two dozen or so Carltons she’d smoke in the course of the evening. She ran her fingers through her frizzy black mop. “You know,” she said after a while, “I felt like that once. After my dad died. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever felt before. I was just exhausted. Maybe what you’re feeling is grief.”

It was having a word to label what I felt that enabled me to start feeling better. I was feeling a sense of loss as awful and festering as a child feels when it finds its puppy squashed flat as a manhole cover right before its eyes. How do you behave when you’ve lost something? A pen, your keys, a ring whose value is only sentimental? The first thing you are is disoriented. You look in all directions. Then there’s a rush to figure out where you may have left what you’ve lost. But retracing your steps doesn’t help. It’s gone, and you have to learn to live without it. Having the word for the emotion that ails you is like having the diagnosis for the disease. Only then can you begin to treat it. Once I understood I was grieving for something I’d lost, I began, slowly, to return to the world.

One Saturday I fell asleep in the middle of the afternoon, and when I woke, I decided the apartment looked dark, even though it was still daylight. It looked very dark to me. It occurred to me that the apartment had always been dark and that what I needed, what had suddenly become essential to me, was to purchase a new lamp. For five years I had lived in that living room with the same light, but on that dreary afternoon I had to go and buy a lamp.

I put on a rain slicker and headed toward Seventy-second Street. I wasn’t thinking about Sean; I was thinking about my new lamp. The store on Seventy-second Street had lamps that hung from the ceiling like sparklers and fireworks. It had lamps that looked as if they should live at the bottom of the sea. Twisted green tentacles, pink globs floating inside glass. It had regular old lamps, some with little Cupids at the base, some with elephants; a camel wore a lampshade as a hat; a rickshaw driver had a bulb for a head and a lampshade hat. It had regular old desk lamps, Tensors, night lights, Lightoliers, lamps for serious people, lamps for drawing tables, lamps for seduction, Donald Duck lamps, goose lamps, lots of lamps. Over the Muzak, Debbie Boone sang, “You light up my life,” and you could tell from the brainwashed pallor of the salesmen that this was the only song they heard all day.

But I wasn’t brainwashed yet. I’d simply entered this world of light, waterfalls of light, animals of light, giant squids of light. “Well, sweetheart, what can I do for you?” a bright-eyed salesman with a round belly asked.

“I want to buy a lamp.”

He chuckled. “You’ve come to the right place.” He began showing me lamps, but I knew what I wanted and spotted it right away. A five-foot-high Oriental bamboo lamp with a straight, plain shade stood out among all the tentacles and the geese with marked serenity. “I want that one,” I said.

When I handed the salesman my check and driver’s license, he looked at me, stunned. “Come on, you can’t be over twenty-two. I thought you were handing me your college I.D.”

“I’ll never see thirty again.”

“I don’t believe it.” He scrutinized me under all that light. “How do you do it? Special diet? Exercise?”

“It’s all mental,” I said, pointing to my head.

I walked along Columbus Avenue carrying my lamp. People paused to admire it. I passed the flower man on the corner of Seventieth. “Hey,” he called to me, “can I see that lamp? That’s a real beauty. Where’d you get it?” I told him. “In that junky store? You got the best thing in the place.” We talked for a minute and he told me it was a good time to buy birds of paradise. “They’re just coming into season.” I walked a little farther and an old woman, walking her three Yorkies, stopped and said, “What a lovely lamp!”

Everybody likes my lamp, I thought as I brought it into the house. As I dragged out the lamp it was replacing, one of those modern, space-age silver things Mark had picked out, I thought to myself that you don’t buy a lamp if the world looks grim. You don’t buy a new lamp if you aren’t planning on looking around.

 

The New York Center for Urban Advancement covers two floors of the newly renovated building that houses it. The architects, the planners, and engineers work side by side in large rooms with drawing boards. Only a few of us whose work is of a more private, contemplative nature have private rooms. I am one, and Frank Atkins, the landscape architect, is another. Frank was someone we’d stolen from Skidmore and he took a cut in salary but said he had to have privacy.

I never paid much attention to the men I worked with because I was married to Mark and then I was with Sean. But after I bought the bamboo lamp, I began to find excuses to go into Frank’s office. He was more than happy to show me how to take a brick-filled playground that doubled for a garbage dump and turn it into a little rock garden. I brought in some working drawings for a group of renovated, burned-out fifty-unit dwellings whose roofs, once our contractors put them back on, I intended to turn into sunbathing and picnic areas. I asked Frank to help me with shade, and he said, “Sure, how about over dinner?”

Frank looked a little like a tree. He had green eyes and dark skin, dark hair. There was a coarseness about him. “I never really got used to living in the city,” he told me as we ate seaweed in a nearby Japanese place. “I’m a country boy at heart. I guess that’s why I went into landscape.”

We had a lot in common. The next night we went to dinner and a Broadway play. During the play, he held my hand. His palms were a little sweaty. We saw Loose Ends, a play about the people of the sixties who suddenly found themselves in the seventies. “Boy,” he said afterward, “I can really identify with that. We experienced life differently because of the sixties. We saw a revolution. We had a feeling of commitment.”

Frank wanted us to go to Joe Allen’s after the show and I said, “All right, but I want us to split it, O.K.?”

He clasped my hand. “But I like taking you out. You aren’t under any obligation . . .”

“Oh, I wasn’t implying that.”

In the restaurant Frank pointed to the posters on the wall. “Do you know that those posters are from all the shows that flopped?” Yes, I knew that. Mata Hari, with Bette Davis. Home Sweet Homer, a musical version of the Odyssey, with Yul Brynner, Dude, by the people who brought you Hair. Sean and I had once sat at dinner and laughed over those flops. Over all the flops. I cursed the love that lingered, and made a decision, as the seafood combos arrived, to have a nice, simple, friendly relationship with Frank.

After dinner, we went back to my place and he thrust his tongue into my mouth. When we completed that first, breathless embrace, he said, “I wish I’d met you months ago. I’ve been having a hard time.”

“So have I,” I heard myself say.

The next afternoon, Frank was completing a rendering when I stopped by his office. “Hi,” I said, leaning against the doorway, waiting to be asked in. “You sure left early this morning.”

“I wanted to get an early start. Didn’t wake you, did I?”

I shook my head. “You going to be working late? I thought maybe we could go out for a drink.”

He was coloring a lawn a deep shade of green. “Oh, that’d be great, Deb, but I really want to complete these drawings.”

“You don’t even want to grab a bite . . .”

“Naw, I’m going to work straight through.” I was aware of the molding of the doorway as it pressed against my spine. I tapped it to see if I could identify the wood by its sound. Oak, spruce, pine. A cheap wood, no doubt.

For the rest of the week, I didn’t approach him. Once he came into my office with half a tuna fish sandwich he couldn’t finish. I knew I’d broken the cardinal rule: you should never date someone where you work. But on Friday he asked me to go out with him for a drink. We had the drink at Harry 0’s. Then we went to see Mean Streets and The Wild Bunch at the Quad. Then we had dinner at Scribbles in SoHo. I told myself I wouldn’t sleep with him, no matter what, but when it came time to go home, he asked if we couldn’t go back to my place. I thought it was a little odd, since his apartment was just around the corner, but we went uptown.

On the way, he told me he thought I was really a great person. “Oh, I think you’re great too,” I told him. “In fact, I’d love to see more of you.”

He said it could be arranged, except for this one little problem, “You see, I’ve got this lady. She lives part of the time in New Jersey and part of the time with me. But when she’s in Jersey, we can get together.”

“Uh-huh.” I didn’t feel so good. I’d eaten boiled chicken, and maybe it didn’t agree with me. Or maybe it was Mean Streets. Or maybe it was Frank. But in my old age I was growing pragmatic. I didn’t want to think about Sean. I didn’t want to get involved with Frank or with anyone else. But I didn’t want to be alone. I decided to expand my horizons.

I met George at La Fortuna. He was eating a cannoli and had powdered sugar all over his face. I laughed, then looked down into my cappuccino. “Not easy to eat these things,” he said. “Wanta join me?”

George Goldman taught sociology at Fordham and lived in the neighborhood. “I come here all the time. Best cannoli in the city.”

“I like to work here in the evenings sometimes,” I said.

“Oh, me too,” George agreed.

We started meeting at La Fortuna at night. He brought papers to grade. I brought my maps and sketchbooks. I was seriously thinking about returning to school in design, a fantasy I hadn’t had in a few years. It was easy to sit across from George and draw. George was very serious. His watery gray eyes, like pools of brackish water, his reddish beard, his wire rims, they all contributed to the sense of seriousness he exuded. “Do you know,” he said once, looking around at all the homosexual couples, “why there aren’t any S-and-M bars for men and women?” I couldn’t figure it out. “Because men and women don’t need them. It’s built right into the relationship.” He started to laugh, and I thought, Good, a serious man with a sense of humor.

With a little coffee in him, George was very talkative. He could talk and he could listen. He liked to talk about problems, especially mine. “Why didn’t your marriage work?” he asked me the second night we met at La Fortuna. “You know, marriage is very tricky stuff. I wrote my thesis on it.”

He reminded me of Mark in some ways. Mildly neurasthenic. Long, slender hands that moved all the time. Fine features. I wouldn’t go to bed with him. I didn’t want that. For the moment having someone to meet in the evenings at a local coffee house was fine with me. “My marriage? Why didn’t my marriage work? Oh, you know. It was just one of those things that was sixty percent right and forty percent wrong. I mean, we had tons in common, but Mark was sort of . . .”

“Insensitive?”

I smiled. “Yes, he was insensitive. He was very smart. A good lover, but basically, deep down, I think he wasn’t . . .” I searched for the right word describing what Mark was not, which I knew was something Sean was. “Mark wasn’t kind.”

“You still love him, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t love him.” I could now say that and mean it.

“Yes, you do. I can tell. I’ve done research in this area.” I shook my head. “It’s written all over your face.” I looked at my reflection in the glass. “I bet you haven’t been with anyone since you and your husband split.” I told him I’d been with lots of men, which was only mildly the truth. “Women,” he said sardonically, shaking his head.

George didn’t walk me home that night because he had an exam to write for the next day, but Lila did. That is, she walked about twenty yards behind me. I saw her at the deli and newspaper store on Columbus and she watched me as I walked by. At least I think it was Lila. She wore a fuzzy, pink angora hat, the kind I’m sure Mark would have hated, and she was reading a copy of the SoHo News.

I think she signaled to me as I walked past her, but I looked away. Maybe she didn’t signal me. Maybe I just wanted her to. I remember how Sean used to tell me I should just go up to her and tell her what I thought of her. But instead I picked up my pace. I knew she was behind me but I didn’t want her to catch up. I didn’t want to talk to her. As I crossed Columbus, I saw her reflection in the window of a store. The pink angora hat, the thin spindly legs. I wondered what she wanted. I wondered if she knew I’d spent a night with Mark. As I walked, I decided I should turn around and talk to her. I shouldn’t be afraid to confront her.

But when I turned, I saw she was gone, if she’d ever been there at all.

It was comfortable, meeting George in the evenings at La Fortuna. It was easy, and after a while I suggested we go to my place for a nightcap. Usually he wanted to go home. He always had exams to prepare, lectures to write. But one night he accepted. He fidgeted and was nervous inside my apartment. “And this is where you lived? When you were married?”

“George, listen, that was a long time ago. I’m over my marriage. I’ve had another serious relationship since my marriage ended.” George downed his Scotch as quickly as he could and said he’d meet me the next night at La Fortuna. For a few weeks we met there regularly and from time to time I suggested going to a film, a lecture. He always had some reason why he couldn’t go, and finally it struck me. I couldn’t get him out of the cafe.

One night I asked him to dinner. I managed to pin him down to a Friday and he could find no reason not to come. I was preparing a fish casserole with sour cream sauce when the phone rang. “Oh, Deb, listen, something’s come up. Have you gone to lots of trouble?” It turned out he had to teach a class for a sick friend that night, but I told him the food would keep until Saturday.

George arrived in jeans and a green turtleneck, without any wine. He poured himself several double Scotches and managed to get drunk enough to sit still for dinner. I put on Charlie Parker and lit some candles. After dinner, he said, “Boy, I love that music. Come on over here, baby, and sit by me.”

Half an hour later, George sat naked on the rug with his hands hiding his face, pressing his palms to his brain as if it were a grenade about to explode. “Look,” I said, “it’s all right; it really is.”

“You don’t understand. This has never happened before.”

“So then it probably won’t happen again. I wouldn’t worry about it.” I was putting my clothes back on.

“It’s because you’re so intense. I can’t take all that intensity.”

“George, it’s really all right. Let’s get some sleep.”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t possibly sleep here.”

He went home, promising to call. I waited three nights. Then I went to La Fortuna. George wasn’t there, but Lila was. That is, she stood outside in a raincoat, wearing that same pink angora hat, and she stared in. It suddenly occurred to me that she was looking for Mark. Just as I realized that, she saw me. My heart pounded as the two of us made eye contact for the first time since I’d learned she was sleeping with my husband. But then she got a startled look in her face, and before I knew it, she was gone again.

I buzzed Sally when I got in and we sat down to have a drink. “So,” she said, “how’s it going? You look better.”

I shook my head. “I’m better, I think.”

She looked at me, puzzled. “You’re not better?”

“The woman Mark lives with is following me.”

“Are you sure?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. I may be going nuts. That’s another possibility.”

“And Sean?”

I sighed. “Nothing. I think about him all the time.”

“Maybe you should call him. And call her while you’re at it.”

“I know I should. Everyone says I should . . . So tell me, what’s new?”

“Roger called me.” Roger is a man Sally used to live with. “He’s going out with my sister. Isn’t that incredible? He’s left the monastery and is dating my sister. So I called her and asked what she thought she was doing. She asked me, ‘Do you mind?’ I said damn straight I mind. So she told Roger she wouldn’t see him anymore. So now he calls me and wants to see me. The slime.”

Whenever I wanted to feel better about my life, I knew I could always talk with Sally.

A few weeks later I met a man named Samuel on a crosstown bus and he asked me out. He was doing his residency in sports medicine at New York Hospital. We started talking because there was an old woman sitting across from us, dressed like a baby in bonnet and diaper, nursing from a bottle. “You meet all kinds,” he said to me. Samuel took me to dinner a few nights later at the Saloon, where the waiters serve you on roller skates. He ordered a caesar salad and asked the waiter to hold the anchovies. The waiter thought it was one of the funniest things he’d heard in weeks. “And man,” he said, “you hear some pretty funny things in this job.”

After dinner Samuel invited me up for a drink. He lived at Lincoln Towers in a studio and he had a huge poster of an orangutan over his bed. He had a large Snoopy doll with a stethoscope around its neck. Samuel told me his specialty was going to be the Achilles’ heel, and we spent the rest of the evening looking at the x rays of famous athletes’ mutilated tendons. As he walked me toward Broadway, a mouse ran across the sidewalk. “Aren’t you going to scream?” he asked me. “I thought girls always scream when they see mice.”

I decided to stop at La Fortuna before going home to see if George was around. I just wanted someone to talk to. I walked in and he was sitting alone. “Hi,” he said, “I was hoping you’d call.”

“I thought you were going to call,” I replied.

“Well, I was hoping you’d call to apologize.”

I wrinkled my eyebrows. “Apologize for what?”

George stiffened. “Well, I think we both agree it was your fault. I mean, you were acting like a very threatening woman the other night.”

I’m not sure why I hadn’t noticed before that he was crazy, but I considered myself fortunate to have gotten away unscathed. “George, all I did was invite you to dinner.”

“Well, you were very pushy.”

So I apologized. Not so much to George as to myself. I said, Please forgive me. I’m sorry for what I’ve done. I canceled my cappuccino and assured George I’d see him around. I walked out. It was almost the end of March and I’d spend the spring, the summer, alone. I’d never spent those seasons alone before. I walked on Columbus past florists and pet stores, past all the zillions of mediocre restaurants. I walked past all the possibilities of human creatures eating together. Men and women, women and women, men eating together, women and men, gay people, straight people, people who had their kids on weekends, people who’d never have kids, kids with other kids, old people, tired people, miserable people, people who had it all, people who’d never appreciated what they’d had.

I walked among them like an invisible alien. I felt the pavement, hard and resistant beneath my feet. Something terrible was missing. There was some empty pit inside. It had a name. It wasn’t home and it wasn’t Mark. It wasn’t having a lover. What I missed was simply a friend. A pay phone stared at me. I found a dime and called. A woman answered. “Is Sean there?” I asked, not really caring very much what her relationship with him was.

“No, who’s this?”

“An old friend. Do you expect him?”

“Not really. He’s away. Who’s calling?”

I told her there was no message and I hung up. If he was with someone else, I didn’t want to bother him. I hadn’t been too much help to him when we were together. Maybe I really did love him, I thought as I wandered home. Maybe when you really love someone, it’s very subtle and doesn’t hit you over the head. Whatever it was, it would be a long time before anyone else meant to me what he did.

 

When Jennie called to tell me she had to get away from Tom, I told her Lila was following me. Neither of us really believed the other. She said Tom had not been the same since she’d spent time with Zap, and I told her that when I went to certain places in my neighborhood, Lila was there. Jennie had begun her class in microbiology, and we decided that the next time her class met, she’d spend the night with me.

If she hadn’t waved, I’m not sure I would have recognized her. She wore a long skirt, boots, and she dragged a canvas bag. When we sat down to eat, I noticed she’d bitten her nails down to the quick. “So,” she said, “tell me.”

I didn’t really want to talk about myself. I wanted to hear about her, but in the end I understood that I needed to talk about Sean. “I guess if I talk about Lila, I’d better talk about Sean. You don’t know about it, do you? We went to California.”

Jennie interrupted. “We saw him recently. He told us some of what happened. At least he told me. I’m not sure he and Tom are talking very much.”

“Did he say anything? About me?”

“Yes.” She paused. “He asked about you. I think he’s very upset about what happened. I also think he got hurt, somehow.”

I wanted to know all the details. “So how did he look? Is he the same?”

She laughed. “Well, he’s shaved his beard. And I think he’s gotten chubby.”

I wanted her to tell me more. “But what did he say about me?”

She hesitated. “It was difficult to talk with him. He . . . he wasn’t alone.”

“Oh.” I tried to appear nonchalant. “Who was he with?”

“Oh, I think it was just a friend. In fact, I think he’s recovering. He told me he’d had some bad months.”

Suddenly I felt very fat. “Jen, do I look fat? Have I gained weight?”

She laughed. “You look terrific. Are you kidding?”

“But am I still attractive? I feel so ugly.”

Jennie held my hands in hers. “What happened with you two?”

I shrugged. “Well, I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was he walked in on me and Mark.”

“Oh.” She widened her eyes.

I described to her the basic logistics of that night. “It wasn’t the greatest. The problem is, well, I was slow to come to my senses. Too slow.”

“Maybe it’ll just take him a while to come around.”

“I want to see him.”

She shook her head. “You know what I’ll never understand about you? Why don’t you just call the people you want to talk to on the phone?”

I sighed. “I did call him. A woman answered.”

“So what? That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.” She thought for a moment. “He’s not here now anyway. He went back to L.A. But I don’t see why you can’t contact him.”

I maneuvered the conversation to get her to talk about herself and Tom. “Please, tell me what’s happening with you.”

“Oh,” she said, “where should we start? He leaves for work at six, comes back at ten o’clock at night. Never talks to the kids, never talks to me. I’ve tried to get him some help. I phoned a local shrink and made an appointment, but he wouldn’t go.” We had left the restaurant and were walking back to my place. “The only thing he ever asks me is what really happened with Zap. He’s driving me crazy. I’m ready to leave for good.”

The next night Tom called. “Hello, Debbie,” he said to me rather stiffly. “Is my wife around?” His voice had a very cold, mechanical ring to it. I was on the phone in the kitchen and shouted for Jennie to pick up in the bedroom, which is what she did.

When Jennie got on, I was about to hang up when I heard Tom say, “Zap’s there, isn’t he? You lied to me again.”

“Tom, you are going to drive one of us completely nuts.”

“Tom,” I cut in, “it’s just me and Jennie. I’m getting off now.”

“No,” Tom said, “don’t get off. I know you’re both lying to me. I know he’s there.”

“Tom, would you please stop it.” Jennie spoke with a great deal of control. “You’re drunk and you don’t know what you’re doing. I think you need help.”

“You’re right, Jen, I probably do need help, but it’s probably too late for that. But I have something for you. Something you’re going to remember all your life.” From somewhere in the state of New Jersey, there was the sharp, amazingly clear blast of what I knew was a gun going off.

For an instant there was silence. I think Jennie and I had both screamed, but after that there was silence. Then Jennie began to talk, slowly, softly. “Tom . . . I am not having an affair, but you are going to have to get some help. Tom, I want you to tell me you’re all right.”

And then I heard a very soft voice say, “I’m not all right.”

Jennie sighed. “Good. I mean, it’s not good, but it’s good you haven’t hurt yourself. Now, listen, can you just sit there? I’m going to get in the car and drive home and I’ll be there in two hours. Can you wait two hours?”

“I can wait two fucking hours. I’m drunk as a skunk.”

“I know you are. I can tell by your voice. Now you just sit still.”

“I’m going with you,” I said.

We got in the car and drove quickly. “Maybe he’ll get help now. Idiot. If he doesn’t get help, I’m not staying with him, that’s for sure.” It amazed me that I hadn’t understood how much he meant to her until just then, as we headed back to the farm.

When we pulled up to the house, it was all dark, except for one light coming from the den. Inside the den, Tom sat alone in an armchair, a gun lying on the desk, staring into space. Jennie rushed in. “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right.” He nodded numbly.

“What the hell were you trying to prove?” She folded her arms across her chest.

“I think I was trying to get your attention.”

Jennie shouted back at him. “Well, why don’t you find a more constructive way to get my attention?”

I didn’t really want to participate in this, so I walked back to the living room and sat on the sofa. It was dark as I looked around. I stared at the spot where I’d first seen Sean, standing in the corner, Coke glass in hand, looking bored with us all.

Tom’s voice rose from the den. “I never was good enough for you. You always wanted someone better. My family wasn’t good enough for your family. My grades weren’t good enough for your family.”

I wandered through the darkened house. I didn’t want to listen to their fight, really. I walked down the corridor to where I’d slept. The bedroom was orderly, the bed neatly made. There was no trace of us here. I went back into the living room, hoping I’d see Sean really standing in the corner, sipping his Coke. I guess Roxanne was right; I guess it all is a question of timing. I looked into the dark corner again where I’d first seen Sean. This time I saw a form, moving, and I saw eyes, bright, glistening eyes, staring at me. Actually I saw two pair of eyes, and I walked closer to the corner. “Hello,” I said, “who’s there?”

I was moving closer to where the eyes stared at me. I heard muffled sounds, tiny voices whispering. When the light was switched on behind me, I spotted two children in their pajamas, huddled in the corner.

“What’re you doing up?” Jennie said. She walked across the living room. “Huh, what’re you doing here?” At first I thought she was angry but then I saw she wasn’t. She hugged them and made them come out and meet me. “Melissa, Cory, this is Deborah Mills. She is my old friend. I told you about her.” Melissa, who was perhaps eight and very ladylike, stepped forward and shook my hand. Cory gripped a blanket and nodded his sleepy head. He had dark, soft eyes and couldn’t have been more than six.

Tom walked into the room. “Why aren’t they in bed?” He did sound angry but then he noticed me. “Debbie . . . I didn’t know you were here.”

“Oh, I just came along for the ride.” He looked embarrassed. “It’s really all right,” I told him.

Jennie said she was going to take the kids to bed, but Cory started to cry. “You must’ve scared the daylights out of them,” Jennie said. “You’re going to get some help.”

Tom nodded. “I said I would.” He spoke softly.

Melissa gave me a kiss good night and Cory hid his face in his mother’s shoulder as Jennie took them upstairs. Tom looked at me, a blank expression on his face. “I don’t know what to do,” he muttered. “We’ll get some help.”

Jennie came downstairs a few minutes later. “They went right back to sleep. I told them you had to shoot to scare a dog away.”

“I didn’t even know I’d woken them.”

Jennie turned to me. “Can you stay the night? I can drive you to the bus in the morning.”

“I have to work tomorrow.”

“I’ll get you there in time.”

Tom slumped down on the sofa. “You’re as bad as I am,” he said to me.” You didn’t know a good man when you saw one. He was a terrific man. You just pushed him away. One of the best.”

“Shut up,” Jennie said to him.

“It’s all right, Jen. He’s probably right.” But then I thought that if Sean was a good man for me, I’d probably see him again.

In the morning I got up for the early bus, which would get me into the city before nine. “Are you sure? Can’t you stay?” Jennie kept asking.

I shook my head. Cory, Melissa, and Aretha Franklin all piled into the station wagon. I kissed Tom good-bye and Jennie drove me to the bus stop. “So,” I said to her as we waited for my bus, “what’re you going to do?”

Jennie looked at the station wagon, full of kids and the drooling black dog. “I don’t know what else I can do. I’m going to give it another try. It’s never easy, I guess . . .” Her voice trailed off. She paused and turned to me. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”

I thought about it for an instant as my bus pulled up. “I think I’m going to look for Sean.”