“You’re a bastard,” she said, kicking him. “Peter … you …”
He mumbled something wordless, the crumpled sounds of indifference, then began to snore as if he didn’t know that she was there and needed him. She climbed over him onto the cold linoleum floor. “You don’t love me,” she said to the bed, to her husband who was there and wasn’t there. He moaned. She couldn’t find her slippers.
The room — the living and bed room of their marriage — was, she discovered, full of monsters. Shivering, she wended her way across the room, awful wings careening above her; but as she was brave, afraid only of the future, no monster dared to touch a hair of her. She went into the bathroom and put on the light.
When Peter stirred — the alarm waking him — he was alone in bed.
“Lois …” A light spilling from under the bathroom door, a liquid running out, freezing yellow. He followed it, holding its tail as he went, arriving, finally, at the sun, which originated in fact — why hadn’t he noticed before? — from the seat of the toilet. And the sun, he discovered — its brightness dazzling him at first — was in reality made of piss. The sun was made of piss. He was the first man to know. As he was about to tell Lois of his discovery, he came awake, amazed to find himself still in bed. He felt the beginnings of a headache over his right eye.
Where the hell was she? Remembering the light and something else — the fragment of a dream … something … what? — he pounded, rubber-legged, to the bathroom and found it empty.
“Hey, Lois,” he called, maddened by the absurdity of continually misplacing his wife. “Answer me, Lois, for God’s sake. Where are you?”
He found her sitting in a corner of the kitchen, staring at the stove, sipping her fingers.
“Why didn’t you answer when I called?”
She continued to stare at the stove as though she were catatonic. “I don’t know,” she said.
He made an effort to control his rage, knocking a cup off the table with his elbow. Barely raising her head, she looked up at him mournfully, then turned away.
“What’s the matter?” he said softly.
She mouthed the words without speaking them. “You are.”
He turned on his heels and went out, without a word, the bile of his rage choking him.
When he felt in control of himself he returned to the kitchen. Lois, baleful in her grief, waited for him. And again, as before, they rehearsed their grievances.
“Now I know why I don’t want your child,” she said at the peak of her anger.
“Are you sure it’s my child?” he yelled back.
And when she didn’t answer, he grew wild. “Who have you been screwing?” he bellowed, kicking a chair across the room.
“Fuck you,” she said contemptuously, her face ashen with a mixture of hate and fear. He raged, wanted to kill her.
“If you so much as touch me,” she said, challenging him with her contempt, “I’ll scream for the police.”
“I’ll never touch you again,” he growled, retreating to a chair in the far corner of the room.
And then suddenly: the dull pressure of silence, as if it was over, as if there was nothing more to be said. Not really a truce between them, but a point in which their war seemed beside the point, both sides conceding death.
I’m sorry, he thought of saying to her as she was putting on her coat, getting ready to leave for school, but since it was untrue, he couldn’t. So he let her go without saying it, sorry as soon as she was gone that it remained unsaid. Saying nothing was worse than nothing.
Enraged, he smashed whatever dishes remained in the sink, then had a good cry, in love with his wife, whom he hated (whom he loved).
That evening, his eye on his troubles, Peter got robbed and mugged in Queens — of all places — by a well-dressed, rather gentle-looking middle-aged man. Before he knew what had happened, he was being shaken awake by a policeman, a spotlight moving in and out of his face as if it was searching for something. “What’s a matter, Jack, you have one too many?” The voice from behind the flashlight.
“My head …” Peter explained.
“You’ll have to sleep it off somewhere else,” the cop said, pointing his flashlight at Peter’s neck.
“Sleep what off?” Peter wanted to know.
“You’re in a No Parking zone, Jack, and I’m doing you a favor by warning you, so don’t get wise with me. I’m giving you a minute to get your cab moving. You have fifty seconds now.”
Fuck you, he didn’t say, withheld it like a belch. It choked him.
The cop stood at the door of the cab, holding his watch up to the eye of the flashlight, as though he were studying the time, trying to make sense of it. “You have thirty seconds,” he said. “Twenty-five … twenty …”
Peter drove off, cursing under his breath — his head, a tubular balloon, miles away from the rest of him. When he turned his cab in he discovered that he was missing fifty-five dollars. And his head, what was left of it, hurt like hell. What had the bastard hit him with?
And when he came home he almost thought he was in the wrong apartment, Herbie and Gloria sitting in his living room, his only room, finishing off his only bottle of bourbon, talking to his only wife. He couldn’t believe it. Yet it was too much like a bad dream, actually to be one. Peter closed and opened his eyes several times, but Gloria and Herbie remained sitting in his living room like relatives. And Lois, apparently still angry at him from the morning, refused to look at him.
While Herbie was lighting a cigar, Gloria whispered something to Lois and they went off together, like club women or conspirators, into the kitchen. And what was it about? It made Peter sweat, his head beginning to ache again.
“How’s business?” Herbie asked, squinting at one of Peter’s paintings, hanging lopsided in an unlighted corner. Herbie straightened it. “Nice,” he said dubiously.
“Why did they go in the kitchen?” Peter said, suspicious of Herbie, of everyone, his head itself plotting against him.
Herbie shrugged modestly. “Gloria’s telling her what to expect.”
“What to expect?”
‘You know …”
Peter was horrified. “Look, Herbie, I don’t want ….
“Forget it,” he said, his arm on Peter’s shoulder. “Don’t worry so much about everything.”
It was too much to bear. Rage burning his chest, Peter swung his arm, heavier than he remembered, at Herbie’s thick mouth, the object of his animus. He missed — Herbie had stepped back — and tumbled through fires of pain onto the red linoleum floor, asprawl, face down, half conscious, aware of too much.
“Never telegraph your punches like that, kid. If you’re going to throw a surprise punch, look the other way …”
Peter sighed, didn’t move.
“Hey, Pete, you’re all right, kid. Take a deep breath.” Herbie bent over him. “I’m not sore at you. For God’s sake, the back of your head’s bleeding. Glory, come here, will you? How did it happen, kid? That didn’t happen when you fell, did it?”
“I was robbed,” Peter mumbled.
Herbie, with Gloria’s help, lifted him onto the white bedspread. “I would have let him hit me if I had known,” Herbie said.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“It looks like someone hit him on the head. Let Glory look at it; she used to be a nurse or something.” “I was a dental receptionist, not a nurse.” “Look at it and shut up.”
“I can’t see anything, Herbie, he’s got too much hair. His hair is in the way.”
“Here, let me look, will you?”
“Maybe we ought to call a doctor or — ”
“No, no. What is a doctor going to do? You have to stop the bleeding first, anyway, before you can do anything.”