The maître d’ who could walk backward recognized Cook and worked hard with him searching for Paula, no doubt curious about what this new regular customer’s third date would look like. But she was nowhere in the building.
This left Cook with no plan. It also left him with no car. In his haste and fear that he would miss Paula, he had given up searching for a legal parking place after one circuit of the block and had parked in an alley, off to one side amidst some Dumpsters. His car had been towed as quickly as if it had vaporized. Cook stopped swearing in order to ask some pedestrians in the area where a car might go when it was towed, but all he got was gregarious speculation.
He set out grimly for the Wilsons’—a two-mile walk. He would call the airport and page Paula, or leave a message for her—something like “Leave town and I die.” He would find the keys to Dan’s car and drive there. Then, if time allowed, he would swing by Pillow’s office and rough him up a bit.
He discussed this plan with himself, quite happy with it, as he walked. But he decided he should call the airport as soon as possible. He remembered there were pay phones at the library, which he would pass if he stayed on Delmar.
When he reached the library, he saw a sign in the window announcing quite calmly that F. F. Sweet, author of A Valentine for Val, would be on hand to sign copies of his new book, Another Valentine for Val. Cook began to snort involuntarily. He read the sign again, finding it hard to concentrate. He compared the date and time of this splendid happening with the present moment, and when he saw that they matched precisely, he felt a smacking sensation, like that of two hands slapping him hard on each cheek at the same time. He peered through the window. There was a line stretching from a table, and all sorts of noisy activity. It was about to get even noisier. He reached for the door handle.
“Don’t go in there, Jeremy,” someone said. But not just someone. It was Paula.
Her hair was shorter, and she was so tanned that she looked like an Indian, but it was Paula, and at the sight of her Cook let out a shout he had never heard from himself before.
He grabbed her, held her, kissed her, pawed her, and then steered her across the street to a frozen custard place, jabbering the whole time. He sat her down at an outdoor table and bought her a cone, demanding extra toppings of Snickers chunks from the guy behind the counter, a stingy ignoramus who knew nothing of matters of the heart. Cook kept looking back at her while his order was being filled. She was wearing a loose, sleeveless white thing on top and khaki shorts with big button-flap pockets. She looked as if she had just returned from a safari.
He gave her the cone and sat down and watched her take a huge bite of the frozen custard. She always bit frozen things—ice cream, Popsicles, ice cubes. His happiness suddenly became clouded by the simple, specific fear that she would leave and he would never see her do this again. Had he made a strategic blunder by showing too much of his joy? He began to rein himself in. He knew how to do this all right.
“What were you doing over there?” Cook asked, looking across the street to the library.
“Looking for you,” Paula said cockily.
“But how did you know I would be there?”
“Your funny boss told me. Mr. Pillows.” She took another bite of her custard.
Cook frowned. “Pillow. How did he know?”
“What’s he boss of, Jeremy? What kind of outfit is it?”
Cook suddenly realized he couldn’t tell her. She would say he was unfit for the job, and they would fight and she would leave. He said nothing.
“I heard about Wabash folding,” she went on. “I was so sad. I have such nice memories of the place. You’ll have to tell me where everyone ended up. But I’ve been worried about you. What do you do? You a marriage counselor or something? That’s what your boss said.” She took another big bite. “Come on. Tell me.”
Cook sighed. She was always way ahead of him. It drove him nuts. “I’m afraid to.”
“Afraid? Why?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“So what?”
“We’ll fight.”
“I hope not.”
“You’ll leave.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You left before.”
“You wanted me to.”
Cook fell silent.
“You don’t deny it,” she said.
Cook took a deep breath. “I keep feeling like I’m going to cry.”
Paula leaned forward. “Is anything wrong? Has someone died? I mean it. Are you okay?”
“I’m just so full of emotion. Seeing you.”
Paula looked at him strangely. At first she must have thought he was joking, because her body tensed. Then she relaxed slightly.
“What are you looking at?” she asked suspiciously.
“You.”
“Why? It’s not like you.”
Cook wanted to say, “Because I love you.” And more. He wanted to say he would follow her on his knees wherever she went. And he would start right now—he would drop to his knees and crawl under the table and hug her bare brown legs. That was what he would do.
But instead, he said, “How did my boss get you to come here?”
Paula smirked behind her custard. “I’ll tell you in a minute. First tell me what you do.”
What the hell, thought Cook, and he told her. Paula did laugh, a lot, but only where Cook wanted her to, and he told her more and more of the kinds of things that made her laugh—he knew how to do this. He found he could do quite a good imitation of Pillow. What a joy it was to share his experience of this man with her! But even as she laughed, Cook could tell she was interested in Dan and Beth’s fate.
“So what’s going to happen to them?” she asked.
“I think they’ll be all right. Dan knows he has to change.”
“But can he?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Men hate to change,” she said flatly.
“Everybody hates to change. How would you like to change?”
“I don’t need to.”
“But if you had to. Look, what’s marriage? It’s being close, right? It’s wanting to be close.”
“Sure,” she said.
“Who spends more time being close with people before marriage—men or women?”
“Women.”
“By a long shot, right?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. That’s the whole point. Men are untrained for marriage. When they say ‘I do’ they should immediately add ‘But I don’t know how!’ After the wedding, they’re in for years of wondering what’s wrong, or maybe years of thinking nothing’s wrong, and one day the wife turns to the guy and says, ‘Something’s wrong,’ and he’s dead from that moment on—it’s either change, buddy, or burn in hell for the rest of the marriage. Now, just pretend it’s the opposite. Pretend that marriage required all the things men are good at—withdrawal, toughing it out alone, hiding feelings instead of just blurting them out. Could you change into such a person?”
“God, it would be awful. Who would want to?”
“But that’s the fix men are in. We’ve got to change just as much.”
“But it’s a change for the better.”
“I know that. But nobody else does.”
Paula smiled. “I think maybe there are one or two other guys out there who know it, too, Jeremy.” She studied him. “So you really believe this stuff? You’re not just parroting what I used to tell you?”
Cook frowned. “You never told me this.”
“But I did. Word for word.”
“I don’t think so.”
Paula laughed and shook her head. When she did this, her short hair shook slightly. It used to flow over her shoulders. He liked it this way. He had managed to touch it when he hugged her, and he liked the feel of it. He grew nervous again. She was already halfway through her cone. When she finished, what reason would she have to stay? But she’d shown up for his date. That meant something, didn’t it?
He said, “You were going to tell me how Pillow got you to come here.”
Paula winced—an inscrutable wince. “He told me I had to come to St. Louis or someone would sue me.”
“Who?”
“F. F. Sweet.”
Cook was silent. First, he hated to hear that name on her lovely lips. Second, what the hell did she mean?
Paula said, “The latest issue of Linguistic Inquiry has an article about your work on Kickapoo adverbs.”
“No kidding,” Cook said hotly.
“You’ve seen it, then. The author is F. F. Sweet.”
“You think I didn’t see that, too?” Cook glared across the street at the library. The line was beginning to spill out the front door onto the sidewalk. “Did you recognize the name? It’s the same twit who wrote about that stupid Indian boy with his bloody valentines. And he’s here.”
“Actually, someone else wrote the Linguistic Inquiry article and used F. F. Sweet’s name.”
Cook flinched as if wired to a generator.
“Actually,” she said, looking at him, “I wrote it.”
Cook’s face was somewhere in his hands. It stayed there a long time. He looked up and said, “Why?”
“Lots of reasons. Your theory was wrong, for one thing. I told you it was wrong when we were together, but you just told me to be a good girl and go finish my dissertation—which is pretty funny, because it was my Pottawatomie data that showed me what was wrong with your Kickapoo stuff in the first place. I’d worked out most of my thoughts about it before I went back to M.I.T. to defend, and as soon as I was done with that I went to Oklahoma and worked for a while with some great informants. I’ve been there ever since, actually. I just got a Kartoffel grant that’ll keep me afloat for a year, if I live frugally, which I’m good at.” She had lapsed into a leisurely, self-satisfied manner. She must have seen that Cook did not share in her satisfaction, and she became more businesslike.
“Anyway, the point is I was mad at you. Remember the punch line to that old Kickapoo joke?” Paula looked up to the sky and delivered it. Her pronunciation was so good that someone else seemed to have taken possession of her body for a moment. “Remember? It means ‘A wronged woman can make a man feel like dung.’ I wanted to do that. But I mainly wanted to kill the issue of your brains versus my brains. So—did it work?”
Cook stared at her, barely comprehending what she was saying.
“Too early to say, I guess,” Paula said. “I used F. F. Sweet’s name because his little book is such a nice statement about giving your love to someone and getting it back many times over. I always hated the way you made fun of it. I thought my article would carry a little extra punch with his name on it. How about it?”
Cook felt brainless, like one of those dumb china dolls he’d seen in the backs of cars, with their round heads bobbing endlessly on a spring.
“The editors weren’t any trouble at all. They loved the article. They said such a critique was long overdue—oops, sorry. They think I’m some free-lance linguist named F. F. Sweet. But your boss tried to give me trouble. He called and told me the real F. F. Sweet was thinking of suing me for using his name, and I had to come to St. Louis for a deposition or something.” Paula laughed. “I thought it was you on the phone, pretending to be a lawyer. I’d heard you were in St. Louis, and I figured you’d found out who wrote the article and were trying to get back at me. I said, ‘Come off it, Jeremy.’ When I said your name, it must have freaked your boss out, because he broke down and apologized all over the place. He told me the truth. I think I understand it. He offered you a date with any woman in the world, and you picked me?” She grinned.
Cook didn’t grin.
“Anyway,” she went on, “your boss sort of threw himself at my mercy. He begged me to come to St. Louis. Actually, I was delighted—the Historical Society here has a tremendous Pottawatomie archive, and he was paying my way. He told me to be at this library today at one o’clock. He wanted the two F. F. Sweets on hand, just to make trouble. He said you really liked surprises like that—which surprised me, actually. You’re just full of changes, aren’t you? The only thing I can’t figure out is how he learned I wrote the article.”
“He’s got a hell of a network,” Cook said grimly.
“So,” Paula said, as if everything were settled now, “your couple is on their way to Europe? Are you done with them?”
“You didn’t have to do what you did,” Cook said.
“I know. But it was the best way to show you I could wipe out the things you think make you worthy and still love you.”
Cook found this too theoretical. Did she still love him? He couldn’t understand her sentence.
Paula said, “Tell me what you think this horror in your couple’s marriage is. You never said.”
Cook’s hand went automatically to his shirt pocket. It was still there. He took it out and unfolded it on the table.
She’s a bitch.
He’s a prick.
Money.
He’s a failure.
She thinks he’s a failure.
He thinks she’s bad mother.
The in laws.
Dan.
Something was wrong with it. Pillow had said there was a horror at the core of every marriage, and it was the very same horror. Dan wasn’t in every marriage. Clearly a generalization needed to be made. Cook sighed, took out his pen, crossed out “Dan,” and entered his final theory on the subject:
The man.
“What are you doing?” Paula asked.
Cook stared at the words. He slowly folded the paper and put it back in his pocket.
“What is it?” said Paula.
He couldn’t tell her. She would see it as an admission that he was to blame for their breakup. She would beat him over the head with it. She was so damned competitive. That was her weakness. That was what he would have to absorb—if she still wanted him.
“Tell me,” she said.
“The horror is failing to believe that the other person can change.”
“Really?” She seemed a little disappointed and looked off into the distance. But she was thinking. Her eyes came back to his. “Yeah. I guess that is important.”
“Listen. I love you and want to stay with you forever.”
Paula blinked. “What? You quoting someone? You want me to guess who? We haven’t done that in a while, have we? Sure, I’m game. Say it again.”
Cook’s heart sank. He knew that the restatement of a difficult assertion was always harder than the original statement. He watched her pop the last bit of cone into her mouth and crunch it. He said, “I love you, Paula.” He shuddered with a violent chill. This perplexed him. So did the tears springing to his eyes.
Paula sat very still. She looked so hard to reach, so far away.
“Do you love me?” he asked. He now saw that there were tears in her eyes as well.
“Always have,” she said.
“Will you stay?” he asked.
“Always will,” she said.