Then, pursing her lips, she was serious again. “What are we going to do?” she said.
He tried to kiss her, but she turned her head away.
‘That’s no answer,” she whispered. (It was the only one he had.)
“I’ll become a lawyer if you like, even two lawyers.”
“That’s not very funny,” she said, a remnant of a laugh escaping despite herself. “Be serious, Peter. For God’s sake, don’t kid about everything.”
“You’ll be late for school …”
She was crying, the tears falling like leaves. “What’s going to become of us?”
“We’ll both become lawyers,” he said, “we’ll form a corporation.”
It wasn’t funny. She cried.
He got out of bed, turned on the radiator, came back, freezing. Tiny explosions went off in the radiator, a clash of pots and pans. It got colder.
“Let me have a piece of the covers, honey.”
She was on her side, facing the wall, sobbing, blankets wrapped about her like a cocoon.
“Why weren’t you more careful?”
“What?”
“I’m only a child myself,” she sobbed. “That’s alclass="underline" a little girl.” She laughed, still crying.
“Lois, let me have some of the covers.”
“No. You’re a bastard,” she said. “If you weren’t only concerned with your own pleasure, we wouldn’t be in this fix, damn you. Damn you.”
“I’m cold,” he said.
“I hope you freeze your things off.” She laughed, more like a shriek than a laugh.
He pulled the blankets away from her and wrapped himself in them.
“I hate you,” she whispered. She had to climb over him to get off the bed.
He grabbed her, a thickness of blankets between them, held her.
“Let me go, Peter.”
And kissed her.
“Why do you love me?” she said, sitting on his chest, studying his face. “The truth, tell me the truth.”
At that moment it seemed to him she looked more like Delilah than … “I love you,” he said, “because you remind me of someone.”
“What do you mean?” she said. “Who do I remind you of?” Her eyes turned angry, then, withdrawing into themselves, suspicious. “Do you have another girl somewhere?”
The radiator was hissing madly, spitting its venom. A toilet flushed upstairs, and again — an encore by popular request. Lois was waiting, studying his face, for an answer. “You remind me,” he said, “of our child.”
“What?” she said. Then, as if hearing his remark in the echo of her memory, she shook her head. The next moment she was in the kitchen. Peter remained in bed, wondering to himself. What did he mean by what he had said?
He reasoned that Lois was suspicious of him mainly because she had something of her own to hide. The boy in the photograph. Or someone else? Who? When he thought of it, he was jealous of everyone — even of Dr. Henderson who, in the course of his examination, had in his medical way been intimate with her. Knew all her parts by their first name. And was it even his child — this fetus, this thing? When he shook his head to change his thoughts, his wife’s lovers, their ghosts, tumbled from his ear. A rustling sound like leaves. It was the radiator. It was the teakettle. It was raining outside.
Lois called something from the kitchen which sounded like I sat in the hay.
“I can’t hear you.”
“It’s Saturday,” she said, coming into the room tentatively, not to stay. “Why are you sending me off to school?”
He didn’t know. She looked lovely in her pregnant blue bathrobe, her hair like a jungle. The lovelier she looked, the more jealous he got. He was.
She came over and kissed him, tasting of salt and orange juice and mouth. “Do you have to work today, fat Peter?”
He pulled in his gut. “Yah. But I don’t really have to go in until about three.”
“Oh!” A lament of disappointment. At what? Did she think he wanted to go? Or was it that she was sorry he wasn’t going sooner? Her face drifted away from him as if a wind had blown across it. He closed his eyes and smelled from somewhere the smell of damp wool burning slightly. Was something on fire? he wondered. He sniffed again and it was gone.
“Anyway, you’re much better than your brother,” she said unexpectedly.
He opened one eye. “What’s the matter with Herbie?” “What isn’t?”
He tested her: “Maybe I won’t go to work today,” he said.
“We’ll do something.”
“What will we do?” She sounded dubious.
Something. He lolled in bed, a sleeping dog, while with cat pleasure she brushed her straight black hair, which extended, he noticed, he watched, to the edge of her butt.
“Lois,” he called softly, the sound against his throat like the brush against her hair.
Absorbed, her face like a ghost in the mirror, she continued to stroke her hair, dreamily, the rhythm quickening, the brush climbing down her hair, with pleasure, with great pleasure.
“Lois.”
“What?” She continued to brush — the voice, the acknowledgment, from somewhere else.
“Lois.”
“What do you want?” She stopped brushing.
“You,” he said.
“What for?” She smiled cannily. “I’ll make you breakfast as soon as I finish with my hair.”
Her hair became leaves, became trees. He was walking in the country, Delilah with him, leading him by the hand to a secret place in the woods, a grove enclosed by trees. “I wait for you here,” she said, “but you never, never come, you never come for me.” Lying in the grass now, he next to her, she said love. “But you’re my child,” he said. “Listen,” she said, her mouth to his ear. He listened. Remembered. Love. Her kiss. Remembered it. And all the time, without his knowing, without anyone knowing, they had been lovers. He opened his eyes, and she … It had never happened.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Lois said, her voice strangely charged. “But you look so beautiful when you sleep.”
He put his hands over his face. “Come to bed,” he said.
She shook her head, watching him with curious detachment, as though he were on exhibit under glass.
He took her arm. Pulled. “You look beautiful,” he said.
“You’re hurting me, Peter.”
He let go.
“You were dreaming of another girl,” she said, moving away from him, “and I woke you.” She was in the kitchen again, the familiar sounds of her activity coming through like a novelty record he had heard once too often.
“Lois,” he called in a loud voice, “come back here.”
He was surprised that she returned (an armistice in the war of wills?), disturbed at his inability to understand her. “I’m making you breakfast, like a dutiful wife,” she said.
“Are you in love with someone else?” he said, the question unintended, surprising him, as though someone else had asked it. He didn’t want to know.
Lois shrugged, started several times to say something, shook her head.
“Forget it,” he said.
“I’ve always been in love with Stanley,” she said, a faint smile somewhere in the tight line of her mouth.
So. He listened to the voice, unlistened to it, incredulous, as if he hadn’t already known. And he discovered — a murderous insight — that for all his suspicions (all of them: millions), he hadn’t known anything until this minute. He refused to believe it. Only in his dreams were they lovers.
“Since we were children,” she added as if talking to herself, musing, sipping her fingers.
And without looking, Peter could see them, a ten-year-old couple, a born dance team, Lois and Stanley going at it like monkeys in Lois’s mother’s kitchen, the crowd cheering them on. The youngest of their kind, someone said. It’s a world record. He turned to the wall and they were there.