“Lila, go on inside,” he ordered. “Your mother’ll have a fit if she finds you’re out here.”
“Yes, Uncle Alex,” she said, wide-eyed, mocking. “I certainly don’t want Mother to have a fit.”
When he was sure that Delilah was inside, Alex slipped two bills into Peter’s hand as though he were bribing a cop. “There’s no reason for you to hang around now, is there?”
Peter dug in his pocket, offered the man fifteen cents’ change.
“That’s your tip,” Alex said, a delayed smile on his thick face. “You’ve earned it — one way or another.”
Peter threw the fifteen cents at him and walked off, curiously tired. He had the feeling, without knowing why, that he had been defeated in the exchange.
Two of his tires were mysteriously low when he got back to the cab, the kids nowhere in sight, though he thought he heard laughing from the next house. He shook his fist at the street, secretly amused. For hours, through most of his benighted, unsuccessful day, Delilah’s ageless child face haunted him. Love? He was in love with Lois. (And Gloria.) He had enough troubles.
That night he told Lois about his new job, about having been out of work, a wholesale clearance of conscience.
“Do you think that makes any difference?” she said wearily.
His answer was to call her mother and begrudgingly apologize, which she grudgingly accepted, changing nothing.
“Is there anything I can do to change your mind?” he asked Lois, who was sweeping the kitchen.
“Nothing,” she said.
So he said nothing. He bided his time with the nervous patience of urgency.
An hour passed without an argument. Reading the afternoon paper, Peter fell asleep in his chair.
He was necking with an older woman (it seemed) in the back seat of another cab. Then all of a sudden Lois was there looking on.
“So that’s what you are,” Lois said. “I should have known.”
He freed himself from the woman’s hold. “It’s not what you think, Lois. You see, she was sick and I was trying …”
“He took me unawares, the dear,” the woman said.
“You revolt me,” Lois said to him, her voice like an icy wind. “God, what a fool you are! So, you married me to get at my mother. You deserve each other.” She opened a door, the cab stuttering to a stop.
“Your mother?” He was innocent of that at least. “That’s not your mother, Lois. Look at her.” The woman, wearing a black veil, laughed unpleasantly.
“I promise you’ll never see me again,” Lois said. She bolted from the car, running toward an enormous building at the end of the street. In love, he ran after her. A cab turning the corner — Peter yelled for it to stop — knocked her down. When he got to her she was already decomposing, her ashes floating away in the wind.
“Lois …”
He awoke with a shock. “Lois?” She wasn’t in the room. He looked in the kitchen, the bathroom, calling, tired as hell, “Lois, where are you, honey? Lois. Lois. Lois.” (Her coat was gone from the closet.)
He sighed and sat down on the bed. A man who would have such dreams, he decided, deserved the worst.
Before he had time to worry about her absence, she was back, humming to herself. “It’s not bad out, old Peter. It’s very warm,” she said, kissing him on the cheek, sitting down next to him. “And how are you?”
“I had a bad dream,” he said. He put his head in her lap, her tweed skirt smelling of cold streets.
“I have an idea,” she said, stroking his face, “that maybe it will abort by itself. Miscarriages, you know, are very common in the early months of pregnancy. And if I help it along … Anyway, I’ve been feeling much better about it.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Do you love me?” she asked wistfully.
“Yes,” he said.
“Do you mind my asking?” she said, as if he had a choice. “It’s important for me to know. Not that I always believe you tell me the truth, but I can tell when you’re lying.” She stroked his hair. “My problem is that sometimes I think I love you and sometimes I think I don’t. Is that how it is with you?”
His mouth was dry. “I said I loved you.”
“All the time?” she wanted to know, an important distinction. He could feel the springs of her nerves wind tight, her spirit on guard against him.
“I love you only when you love me,” he said, half a joke, more truth than he meant.
She thought about it. “That’s why I think we shouldn’t have this child,” she said. “We don’t love each other enough.”
As though it were an enormous weight, he lifted his head from her lap. “Do you really think that there are people in this world who love each other all the time?”
“Now you’re twisting my words. I think that people who love each other — really love each other — love each other all the time, more or less.”
As he watched her, she seemed to be moving farther and farther away from him, though in fact they were only a few inches apart on the bed, her eyes lost in the darkness of some obscure interior voyage. “Well,” he said, “don’t you think that we’re in that category, more or less?”
Her eyes returned, angry, strange. “I don’t love you when you’re like that.”
“Like what?” He thought of putting his arm around her but didn’t, wary of her mood.
“I hate you when you mock me,” she said. She was lying on her back now, her hands cradling her head, staring at the ceiling. “People who are in love don’t always argue,” she said.
He didn’t want to argue the point. “Okay,” he said, admiring her, flat-chested, bony, her face scarred with shadows — his enemy — in love with her.
“Okay what?”
“I was agreeing with you.”
She shaded her eyes to look at him. “You’re a clown,” she said, not without affection.
Always ready to oblige, he made a clownish face, which she pretended to ignore — some part of her, some distant part, amused.
Watching her, he tried to recall what his life had been like before Lois, in the days of his youth, the happiest days of his life; he could hardly remember. A few girls came to mind, a few faces without names, a few names without faces. In his memory, all were gentle, beautiful, in love with him. What had he given up? What he had never had he had lost. He remembered hawking ice cream at Coney Island with Herbie, running from the cops, just barely getting away, once he had been caught. All his memories were of flight. Still, he was his own man (or boy) then, without all this emotional touching which he couldn’t bear, which he couldn’t do without.
“Should I tell you what you were thinking?” she said, a face reader, a child’s canny smile lighting her sallow face.
“I wasn’t thinking of anything,” he said, pushing back his hair as though he were about to have his picture taken.
“You were thinking,” she said, staring at the bilious walls, “that you had trapped yourself by marrying me.” She glanced up at him slyly, testing his response.
He couldn’t deny it, though it wasn’t the whole truth. “What would I do without you?” he protested.
A laugh. “What would you do with me?” she asked.
She had him there. His answer: he kissed the back of her neck, the wisp-ridden down of hair that guarded the dark hollow of her back. She tolerated him. “I have to write a paper for school,” she said. “Don’t you have anything to do?”
He sulked.
She kissed him. “You’re so vulnerable,” she said, “that’s why I like you.”
He looked at Lois, her childish face, through the dark prism of his vision, just out of focus, and was reminded suddenly of Delilah, unable at the moment to distinguish one from the other. Was it in some way the same face, or the obscure and deliberate deception of his memory? He took Lois’s hand, which fitted into his fingers like a glove, a size too small.