“Do you hate me?” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“You told me,” he said, “when you told me about him the first time, that you no longer loved him.” Anguish, rage, love, like fish bones in his throat, choked him.
“I love you both,” she said sadly. “You don’t want me to lie to you, do you?”
“No,” he muttered, and got up and turned off the heat.
“I love you too,” she said.
He paced the room, caged, furious, knocking over a chair, two chairs; a table hit him back. “God damn you!” he yelled, but no sound came out. Lois was on her back, staring at the ceiling, which, according to the landlord, was newly painted colorless.
“Peter …”
“What?”
“Will you love me, will you make love to me?”
“Why don’t you get Stanley?”
“I can’t. He hates me for marrying you.”
“Well, I hate you more than he does.”
“Dear God, I know, I know.” And she began to cry. “I know.”
“I didn’t mean it, Lois,” he said, coming over to the bed. “I’m sorry.”
Watching her cry, he drowned.
“Go away,” she said, meaning I can’t stop crying: love me. They kissed under water, under salt, slipping. Sticking. Without desire, with their clothes on (he in torn pajamas), Peter loved his wife and other ghosts. Under water.
“You hate me,” she whispered, a bubble.
“I don’t.”
You do. Don’t. Do.
Dont hateyoudonthateyou.
And leaves, dead lovers, Stanley, Gloria, Delilah, others, children, strange ghosts, sea monsters, movie stars, name bands, vocalists, swimmers: they went at it. All of them. Under water. Impersonal as fish, as husbandandwife, as fish.
Too many strangers, strange ghosts at once, is exhausting.
Among them, someone — Lois — said, “We’re so much alike, it’s like incest.”
Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t. “I love you,” he wanted to say, but he couldn’t — out of breath, drowning. Lost, he went deeper, as far as he could go, to an apparently bottomless place, a den of dragons, where he found her, his wife, his sister, himself, hiding, alone, without skin, found himself there, tourist and voyeur. Lover.
“God, I love you,” it said, himself said, loving her. At the moment he loved them all, loved all the others too. And Lois. She murmured something unintelligible. What? He heard what he heard. He loved her.
Afterward, in his dreams, he felt a sense of loss.
| 7 |
Lois was in the shower, washing off the day’s dirt, when someone rang the bell. Peter Becker? Who else could it be? He had a knack, a life history of showing up at the wrong time.
“Just a minute,” she called in a voice just loud enough to discharge her of the obligation of answering. One regrets the intrusions of the past.
The longer Peter waited the more panicked he became. What presumption it had been to show up unannounced after all these years, seedy, tattered, the sour look of failure. It was out of pity — how else explain it? — that she had invited him to dinner, charity from the soup kitchen of nostalgia; he couldn’t afford it. Still, there were questions he had to ask her …
He was already down the street when the door opened.
“Peter … Peter. Where are you going?”
He turned around reluctantly. “I just remembered,” he said, waving. “I have another appointment.”
“Jesus,” she said. “Come on in. You have an appointment here.” She stood in front of the house, shivering, frail in a black silk dress, her hair blowing loose.
“All right,” he muttered. His feet were cold. He trudged back across the matted snow, his footprints immortalized coming and going.
“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” she said, fluttering, nervous about him, “but I had just taken a shower, I wasn’t dressed.”
He nodded, following her inside, afraid that Patton would be there, curiously disappointed that he wasn’t.
There was no one else in the apartment. Lois excused herself, to finish whatever it was, in the disguise of getting dressed, that she had left undone. Alone, his coat still on, Peter toured the living room, an aimless search, mostly to warm his feet. A swollen African madonna hung on the lip of the fireplace, ready to give birth. He prodded the navel with his finger and had the curious sensation, the belly warm from the fire, that there was something moving inside. In an odd way it disturbed him.
He inspected the apartment as though it were a museum. He felt somehow that he ought to take notes on what he saw, but it would look foolish if Lois came in, and he hadn’t a pencil anyway. There were some prints on the wall — he recognized the Klee and the Picasso — and an original painting (a portrait of a girl in black), book shelves filled with new books, fiction in dust jackets, some paperbacks (also new), a few expensive-looking art books, a few books left over from the days of their marriage. In his browsing he discovered a copy of Ulysses he had once given her as a gift. A terrible nostalgia overwhelmed him. He took the book off the shelf, just to hold it in his hands, a dusty book, as if it were the past itself. He vaguely remembered having written something in it: an inscription. What was it? He closed his eyes and tried to recall it — the book burning his hands — but all he could remember was “. … for the season of memory. Love always, Peter,” which was something else, from some other occasion. His memory its own season, burning without light. Still, it was enough to hold the book in his hands — too much. Tears hung fire at the back of his eyes. In holding the book, he seemed to unlive the years, dead and wasted, that separated him from it. If only it were possible for him to begin again, to start over at the starting point — with Lois, with himself. He blew his nose. (Nostalgia warmed him like a sun lamp.) With a lover’s delicacy, he opened the book as though it might crumble in his hands and found no inscription inside, no word to indicate that it had been a gift from him. Could the past erase itself of its own volition? Spooked, he shuffled the pages, looking for evidence of his memory and found, stumbling on it — a curiously painful discovery — that the front page had been neatly clipped out, the scar barely visible. He was sorry he had looked. Reminded of the time he had searched her purse in the bathroom, he suffered the memory of his humiliation — a man perpetually embarrassed at himself. Hearing Lois, he hurriedly slipped the book back into its place. As he turned to her he realized — a delayed image — that the book had been put away upside down; she would know that he had looked at it, that he knew. What difference did it make?
Lois was solicitous, polite, treated Peter with conscientious kindness, as though he were an old friend of an old friend — buried him with charity.
In turn, he withdrew, answered when spoken to, accepted whatever was offered him. It was terrible. All through the meal — a fine dinner of steak, baked potato, red wine — he wanted to break something. An accident, he succeeded in knocking over his half-filled glass, spilling wine on the brocaded white linen tablecloth, the stain purple, swelling.
“Damn!” she said softly, staring at the stain with horror, as though it were something she had lost of herself. “Don’t worry about it. It’s all right.” She looked up, smiling, a crease of pain in her eyes.
“It was an accident,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “What else could it have been?”
“Look,” he said, not looking at her, “why did you walk out on me?”