“Is that why you married me?” he said, his voice breaking.
“I married you to get away from my mother,” she said. “Isn’t that what you think?”
They had a way of joking with each other that pained them both.
“Peter,” she said — they had turned to go back, “the truth: why did you marry me?”
As an answer, as a question in return, his feet cold (heart warm), he put his arms around her.
When he tried to kiss her, she turned her head away. “Not here,” she said, as though afraid that someone who mattered might see them. He looked around to see who his rival was. A middle-aged man passed them. “You don’t take me seriously, do you?” she said in a harsh whisper.
What could he say? They were standing in front of a two-floor orange brick house, drifts of snow like ghosts covering most of it, a leftover red-and-white plastic Santa Claus glowing in the front window, flickering. “Let’s go,” he said, jiggling his toes to restore circulation. Lois walked on ahead of him. When he wiped the snow from his face, he realized that he was crying. His shame was unbearable.
“What would you do,” Lois said as he caught up with her, “if I were unfaithful to you, Peter? Would you hate me very much?”
She knew how to get at him. Something gripped him at the back of the neck. In a rage, his tears blinding him, he took her by the shoulders and shook her until her scarf came loose. Then, embarrassed, he let her go.
She had a coughing fit, unable to catch her breath. “You bastard,” she said, her eyes dilated with fear.
Bearlike, he hovered over her, choked with the sour taste of regrets.
The next thing he knew, she was running away from him, small steps to keep from falling, almost skating on the slick snow, slipping, retaining her balance apparently as an act of will. He watched numbly — what else was there to do? — then went home to an empty apartment; Lois had not been back.
She stayed with her parents for the next three days. He called twice on the first day — his apologies written out on a 3 × 5 card so that he wouldn’t make a fool of himself (hard not to be what he already was) — but she refused to come to the phone.
He stayed home from work the next day so that in case she came for her things he would be there to talk to her, to unburden his guilt, to convince her of his remorse. It was a wasted day. Giving occasional side glances at the clock, he prowled about their basement apartment with the dull commotion of a trapped fly, picking up things that were out of place and putting them down again — God knows where — absent-mindedly. He made the bed but forgot the top sheet, lying a wad in a corner under the bed. A big man, he crowded the place with his misery, bumping his head against a low-hanging pipe, discovering the bump hours later. He swept one half of the room and left the dirt neatly piled in the other. The radio blared all day. Peter raged at the thoughtlessness of his neighbors and planned, against the scruples of a lifetime of cop hating, to call the police until he discovered that it was his own radio, which he had turned on in the morning, that was making all the noise.
In the evening he went to the grocery store — two blocks down and one over — and rushed back, leaving his purchases behind, afraid that Lois might come and go before he returned. On first sight he found his apartment more or less as he had left it, including the pile of dirt on the floor, which was beginning to erode, but it seemed to his practiced eye that the place had undergone some subtle change in his absence. Keeping his back to the door, a man of method, Peter glanced around the green-walled room, turning his head resourcefully in an attempt (had it ever been done before?) to keep the whole room under surveillance at once. It couldn’t be done. As soon as he took his eyes off them, large areas of the room managed through the desperate cunning of the in animate to get away from him. How his memory played tricks with him! There had been something on the desk, something of Lois’s, that wasn’t there now. Yet for the life of him he couldn’t recall what it was, except that he was certain (more or less) that it was a textbook for one of her courses or conceivably one of her handbags or something. Something was gone. Agonized, he forced open the top drawer of the imitation-maple dresser, breaking off one of the knobs in his haste, to see what else was missing, what else she had taken in his absence. In his grief, in his outrage at having been pillaged invisibly, he took her things from the drawer — scarfs, slips, blouses, stockings, sweaters — and flung them in a fury of energy, scattering Lois’s remains to the four walls of the room. When he ran out of things to throw, he sat down on the floor among the debris and had a heart-to-heart talk with himself. “Peter,” he said to himself, “you’re out of your mind,” which calmed him and left him exhausted. He fell asleep on the floor, tangled in her clothes, as close to her as he had ever been. He dreamed of love and awoke with a stiff neck.
In the morning, having overslept (forgetting to set the alarm), he decided to go to work anyway, even put on his only and best suit (a gray flannel he had bought at Klein’s out of season); but riding to the city on the IRT, airless and mobbed, something whistling at high pitch in the top of his head, he reneged on his decision. His eyes ached, among other things, and the prospect of a full day of proofreading economics reports was more than he could bear. He plunged through the doors at the next stop, then stood numbly on the platform, watching the train that had delivered him rush away from the station, nostalgic at its leaving without him. What could he do all day? Where could he go at eight-thirty in the morning? It struck him how regimented his life had become, how inflexible he had become. The subway soot, ancient and ineradicable, clogged his pores, infected his breathing. His head throbbed as though there were a huge crack in his forehead, getting larger by the minute.
“Buddy, watch it.” Somebody was touching his arm. “Don’t stand so close. What’s a matter — you got something against life?”
“Who me?” When he looked down he was surprised, scared to death, to find himself at the very edge of the platform. “I wasn’t looking,” he said, teetering nervously, backing up. “Sorry. Thanks.” He turned around to offer his appreciation — not many people in New York cared whether you fell onto the tracks or not — but the man who warned him had already disappeared into the crowd.
At nine o’clock Peter was sitting in the Fifth Avenue Cafeteria on Eighth Street, nursing a cup of coffee and a sweet roll — the economy of having something in your mouth to pass the time. He reveried about Lois (what else was there to think about?), blaming himself for her loss, hating her for his self-contempt. He had wanted her too much, and all his life he had never got what he really wanted, or if he did get it he didn’t keep it long. He knew he was anxious — everyone said to him, “Peter, you’re anxious”—but what could be done about it? You are what you are, he philosophized, and if you’re not, then you’re nothing. He was the exception: he was who he was, and he was nothing for all the pains of being himself. Someone sat down at his table, but in no mood to talk with a stranger, Peter kept his eyes on his coffee; tiny gems of grease floated by, winking at him.
For two days of absence without leave he would lose his job. He didn’t care, but cared that he didn’t. He was not a proofreader, not in the italics of his spirit he wasn’t, but then what was he if he wasn’t? Measured by what he had done in his lifetime — twenty-five going on forty — he just wasn’t. He was working himself into the anesthetic comfort of depression when he got the uncanny feeling that the man across the table was staring at him. Maybe not. Wiping the crumbs from his mouth, he looked up to see a familiar nose (broken and healed in two places), a nose like his own though even bigger and more assertive — his brother’s nose.