He could almost feel her wince. “What?” she said. “Excuse me, I didn’t hear you.”
He shook his head. “I want to understand my life,” he said. “I want …” There was no point in continuing.
She refilled his wine glass, the amoebic stain like a huge hand between them. “Be nice, Peter,” she said. “Please.”
The steak tasted to him like his own flesh, but he continued to chew it vengefully, without appetite, unable to swallow. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
He looked up, met her eyes — pinched, unloving — his whole life a mistake. “What’s the use?” he said. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“It doesn’t matter …” She covered her face with her hands.
“Lois,” he said. The table was between them; the stain continued to swell. “My life has been a series of mistakes and I seem to make the same ones over and over, whatever I do is wrong.”
She looked up, shrugged, besieged by some dim memory of her own.
“What went wrong?” he said, barely a whisper.
She turned her head as if she had been struck, and was too proud, too much in pain to acknowledge that it had happened. “What do you want, Peter?” The question an accusation.
You. The past. He couldn’t answer.
“I don’t mean to be a bitch,” she said, “but you can’t show up after fifteen years and make claims on my life. Don’t demand so much.”
“What am I demanding?”
“You know very well … I’d better start the coffee. Eat your steak, it’s getting cold.” She took her own plate, half finished, into the kitchen.
“Lois, I don’t want anything,” he said; she closed the door behind her, between them.
His food was cold.
She came back in a few minutes, smiling tremulously, the resolve of a new face. “The coffee will be ready in a few minutes,” she said. “Are you through?”
He nodded. “Very good, the food,” he said.
She laughed strangely. “You haven’t eaten very much.” She laughed again — a tense, sad gaiety that touched him.
“I liked it too well to eat it,” he said. “I’m joking,” he added solemnly.
She shrugged, a smile frozen across her face as though it were a wound. “Excuse me, the coffee should be ready.” She buzzed out, smiling, then back, grabbing his plate, smiling, and out again. And back.
“Where would you like your coffee?” she said. “We can have it in the living room, if you prefer. Or doesn’t it make any difference?”
“I don’t care …” She served him his coffee at the table and was off into the kitchen again for something else.
Her strangeness made him shy of her. “Lois,” he said softly, more to himself than to her, “what are you doing?”
She returned. “Did you say something, Peter?”
“No,” he said. “No.”
The longer they faced each other the harder it was to talk, to say anything that wasn’t only talk.
“You used to take milk and coffee in your sugar,” Lois said. “Sugar in your coffee, I mean.” Her laughter like a cough. “Both of us have changed,” she said.
“How have you changed?”
She started to say something, thought about it, pursed her lips, shrugged. “I don’t want as much as I used to … Would you like some brandy, Peter?”
He shrugged. It was impossible to talk. What had he expected? he asked himself. Sitting in the room’s one comfortable chair, a glass of brandy in his hand, Peter had the impatiently determined look of a man who knows that if he waits long enough, the weather will change. And nothing happened. There was no weather. Lois talked to avoid the silence, but the silence remained like a ghost in the room, denying her words.
There was nothing but talk, punctuated by paralytic grins, as if in a nightmare of hell they were doomed to rehash commonplaces over and over until madness.
“Are you happy?” he asked, interrupting her in the middle of an anecdote.
“I’m happy,” she said, holding on to a smile that seemed to bend her mouth under its weight. “As much as anyone is. Yes, I’m happy. Why did you ask?” She glanced at her watch.
“I suppose I should go,” he said, lethargic, enveloped in the chair’s comfort.
“Do you think I look unhappy?” she said, her voice anxiously casual.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking at her, his eyes evading the implications of their knowledge. She was still a lovely woman, but a vague sense of disappointment tortured her face, as if her life had promised wonderful possibilities and for no accountable reason had failed to make good on them. He might have been looking in the mirror.
“I don’t think I’m unhappy,” she said. “As I told you, my work — Let’s talk about something else. Why did you come back to New York?”
“To begin again.”
“To begin what again?”
He stood up to explain, realizing suddenly that the painting on the wall — the childlike girl in black — resembled Lois, a much younger Lois, though not as he remembered her. “Do you ever think about the past?” he said, musing, the question asking itself.
In a moment, Lois was standing. “You never give up, do you?” she said, nervously lighting a cigarette, discarding it, walking across the room as if she were late for an appointment. “Do you want to know what I remember most about our marriage?” she challenged him.
What could he say? Yes, but not that answer. He nodded, closing his eyes, aware of what was coming as surely (as painfully) as if he had been through it before.
“I don’t blame you for it really,” she said, her voice tightly controlled, “but I don’t want to be continually reminded. I have the feeling sometimes of being so dirty, beyond hope of ever being clean again.” She turned, smiling. Her face tilted, collapsed.
He approached her, his right leg half asleep. “It was a mistake, Lois,” he said. “I shouldn’t have permitted it.”
She sighed. “Why did you?” Tense. Reproachful.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was afraid you’d do something to yourself if I tried to stop you.”
“You damn fool!” Her face blank, as if the words had come from somewhere else. “God, don’t you ever understand anything?”
He wagged his head, dumb.
“You knew,” she said. “It’s inconceivable to me that you didn’t know.” Her voice soft, her hysteria like a hum in the air.
“What should I have known?”
She tossed her head in a paroxysm of irritation. “If you had said, ‘Don’t,’ if you had taken a stand … You fool! You fool!” The room grew smaller, the ceiling plunged downward. She continued to rail at him.
And the worst of it was, he had no other place to go. There was no place to go.
| 8 |
“Don’t be afraid to talk to your passengers,” Sclaratti had advised him. “They expect it, compa. They think we’re all a bunch of goddamn characters.”
Thursday, when he lost her in the park, was the last time Peter saw Delilah. He missed her on Monday, late himself — he had taken a fare to Long Island, unable to refuse, had gotten lost coming back — it ruined the day for him.
That night he fought with Lois for no reason, because she wanted him to be a lawyer instead of a cab driver. And all the time defending himself like a lawyer.
On Tuesday, Peter was at Delilah’s school at two-fifteen, eager to see her, full of explanations. Hundreds of students poured out at once from several exits, and when Delilah didn’t show — had he missed her again? — he stopped a boy and girl and asked about her.
“Does she play the flute?” the boy asked, impatient to leave. Peter didn’t know — the cello, he thought, though he wasn’t sure.