“You’re not only the most dangerous cab driver I know,” Delilah said in her elocution-class voice, “you’re also the most impolite. As your employer, I think I have a right to know where you were. Well?”
“I was at your school at two-thirty, as you well know.”
“How do I know that?” she said. “I didn’t see you there.”
“That’s because you weren’t there,” he said. “I waited — ”
“The fact remains,” she interrupted, “that I waited for you and waited for you and you didn’t show up.”
“It won’t happen again,” he said, making a wrong turn. The persistence of her kidding, if that’s what it was, had a way of disconcerting him, as though something real were at stake.
“It doesn’t matter whether it does or not,” she said. “You’re already a disappointment.” Catching his eye in the mirror, she stuck out her tongue, pointing it at him like a weapon.
Absorbed in watching her, he barely avoided smashing into another cab.
A savage head leaned out the window. “What’s a matter, you some kind of nut? Schmuck!” It was Sclaratti. Peter averted his face, drove on without acknowledgment.
“What’s a matter, you some kind of nut?” Delilah said — a perfect imitation — and laughed furiously.
“You see what happens when you distract the driver,” he said pompously, running a red light.
“What you think, I also some kind of nut?” she said, and she laughed convulsively, hiccupping after a while, as if it was the funniest thing she had ever heard.
“Take me to the park,” she ordered. “I want to see how the other half lives.” He drove her directly home, parking, turning off the meter.
Furious, she remained in the back seat, her hands crossed in front of her, refusing to move.
“Last stop,” he said.
She pursed her mouth as though she had eaten something disagreeable. “I thought you were my friend,” she said piteously.
“Your friend has brought you home,” he said. “I’m not going.”
“What’s a matter, you some kind of nut?” he said.
She honored him with a bored smile. “You’re all right for a cab driver,” she said, paying him his fare, not quite looking at him.
Languid, taking her time, she emerged a perfect butterfly from the sanctuary of the cab, collected, full of herself. “See you tomorrow,” he said.
He was ready to leave, the best part of his day over, when her face appeared at his window. “Hello,” he said a bit foolishly, unrolling the glass. “What have we here?”
“Driver,” she said solemnly, “don’t ever not show up again.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Or I’ll lose my faith in you.”
She was gone before he could think of anything to say. What did it all mean? asked an anxious voice in his skull. The answer begging the question came from his chest: It means. What then? Ah, but Peter Becker, dreamer and hack driver, had secrets, self-surprises, he kept hidden even from himself.
In the evening, sweat-ridden, his dust-stained white shirt now flesh of his flesh, Peter returned home, guilty of unknown sins, to a wife he suspected of betraying him. A jealous man looks for signs and finds substantiations. In the day’s collected dust of their apartment, among the puffed-up worms of shadow, the hastily made bed, Peter saw too much; he regretted his knowledge.
They had dinner in the kitchen. His warmed-over hamburgers looked as if they had had a hard day; they bore up remarkably. Peter ate with little appetite, suspicious of everything, including the canned peas which deflated at the touch of his fork. Across the table Lois sipped her coffee.
“What have you been doing all day?” he asked. Though he meant it to be a casual remark, it came out like an accusation.
Lois looked up as if to make sure he was talking to her. “I haven’t been doing anything,” she said. “What have you been doing all day?”
He told her, leaving out a little, making up some for the sake of the story, not mentioning Delilah, saving Sclaratti’s remark for another occasion.
“Did you give rides to any beautiful girls?” she asked, pouring his coffee for him.
“Only beautiful girls,” he said.
Her arm jerked as if he had pushed her, the coffee spilling, trickling across the table. He made no effort to get out of its way.
“I would have finished my homework,” she said, watching him change his pants, “but my mother kept me on the phone for hours and then your brother called. Peter, I didn’t mean to spill coffee on you.”
“There was none as beautiful as you,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “Do you like my hair this way?”
He nodded, not looking. “What did Herbie want?”
“You didn’t even notice that it was done a new way.”
“I noticed,” he said, noticing for the first time an elaborate cabbage, withholding his disapproval. “Did Herbie want me to call him back?”
“No.” Her fingers like bird beaks, she began impatiently to undo her hair. “You like it better when it’s hanging loose, don’t you?”
It was always a problem for him whether to answer her honestly and risk the tense silence of her enmity, or to tell her what she wanted to hear, assuming (an impossible assumption) that he knew what it was. Anyway, he couldn’t win. And everything she did made him, who suspected her of all manner of betrayal, even more suspicious. But of what? And of whom? That he had no answers only testified further to the complexity of her deceit.
So, he came up behind her and kissed the back of her head. Leaning against him, she pretended that he wasn’t there. “My mother invited us for dinner Friday night,” she said, moving away, picking hairpins from the floor. “I think she means it as a gesture of reconciliation.”
“That’s very nice of her,” he said with invisible irony.
“You don’t mean it,” she said, “but I’ve already accepted for us.”
She had a predilection, a gift of instinct for irritating him. “You can go without me,” he said. He didn’t mean that either.
She came back to him, her head at half-mast. “If you don’t want to go,” she said piteously, her eyes mysteriously wet, “I’ll call Mildred back and say we’re not coming.”
“I don’t mind going,” he said, victimized by her tears. “It’s just that I wish you’d consult me before you … accept — you know.”
“I won’t do it again, Peter.” She put her hand gently against his cheek. “I don’t want us to fight. You don’t think I do, do you?” She smiled love, tears washing her face.
He resisted her, he tried.
“You’re still angry,” she said.
Exasperated, he insisted he wasn’t.
She started to say something, then shrugged woefully with the grace of resignation, turning her head in a gesture of inexpressible hopelessness. “We don’t know how not to fight any more,” she said.
What did she want from him? He reached out, put his arms around her, and overwhelmed, blazing with pity for her sorrow, kissed her eyes, her damp eyes, wanting only to make things right (everything wrong), pressing her to him, dissolved, mindless in the violence of his feelings.
“You’re suffocating me,” she said at last.
He released her, embarrassed, studying the long room of their apartment, which seemed strange to him, as if he had awakened into it after months of dreaming it.
“Be gentle with me, Peter,” she said. She kissed him gently on the mouth, her salty tongue making an unexpected visit.