“Herbie, what the hell …?”
“I wondered when you were going to notice me. So what are you doing not working?”
Peter shrugged. “I didn’t feel like going in. I’d better call and say I’m sick, huh?” He got up; Herbie restrained him.
“Plenty of time, kid. Don’t be anxious. I haven’t seen you in weeks, not since the wedding. How’s the bride?” He had forgotten her name. Herbie, who was eight years older, had never married; he disbelieved in marriage, he insisted, though insofar as Peter could tell, spent most of his time living with one woman or another in his own uncommitted, freewheeling version of domesticity.
Peter sighed an involuntary wheeze, his spirit mourning for itself. “Okay,” he said.
“Yeah?” Herbie squinted analytically. “What’s the matter? You look bugged.”
“Nothing’s the matter.” He sighed again.
“If you say so.” Herbie went on line for some more coffee and a toasted bagel, taking Peter’s ticket instead of his own, because he had no use for money himself. When Herbie returned, Peter told him about the disrepair of his marriage. Why not? He had to tell someone and Herbie, this stranger, was his brother. At times when they were kids, Herbie had been like a second father to him — sometimes, beating him for his transgressions, like a first father.
“What do you need her for?” was Herbie’s advice.
Peter withheld a sigh. He needed her because he needed her. “I like her,” he said apologetically. “I mean, I married her.”
“So?” Herbie judged all lives by his own, which seemed to him, in the flower of its chaos, without a flaw. You either knew how to live or you didn’t. He knew; the rest — pheh! “There are more where she came from,” he said. “Take my word for it. Come on. I have just the thing for you.”
“What? I don’t want any of your girls.”
“Don’t bug me. Come on.” Herbie took a few swipes at his hair with a pocket comb, a man of habitual, unselfconscious vanity; then he grabbed Peter’s ticket from the table and was off. At the register he substituted an unused ticket and paid both bills, which totaled ten cents. In honor of his triumph, he winked at the cashier.
Peter went along under silent protest. He didn’t want to go; he went. Since it was not his decision, it had nothing to do with him, which was fine; he had enough problems of his own. And at the same time, if something good came from it — some pleasure — it was something for nothing, a bargain. A man who didn’t gamble, Peter couldn’t help but like the odds.
On the way to Herbie’s apartment (a shift in the odds), he borrowed ten dollars from Peter, to be repaid as soon as he laid his hands on a little cash. Peter consoled himself that it was only money he had given away and that brothers were flesh of the same flesh, and how could he deny his own flesh? But he worried anyway about the loss, because it was his nature to worry.
Surprise? There were two blowzy women at home in Herbie’s living room, sitting apart on the Goodwill couch as though they were strangers at a bus terminal, both puffing earnestly on cigarettes, the ashtrays running over.
“Well,” Herbie announced, “look what I found. My brother Pete. Huh?”
“lo,” the girls said in one nasal voice. They scanned him briefly, then went about their business; they were serious smokers. Peter recognized one of them, the heavier of the two, as the girl Herbie had been with at his wedding. The other, a small-town Betty Grable, was more conventionally pretty, but neither, in Peter’s opinion, was in Lois’s league.
Herbie introduced them. The one at the wedding was Gloria, the other Doreen. “They’re both modern dancers,” he said and laughed out loud at a joke no one else seemed to get. Doreen snickered as an afterthought. Gloria scowled.
Peter thought to run, but said hello. He made up his mind not to stay very long.
“Is he really your brother?” Doreen said. “You don’t look like brothers.”
Gloria sulked. “They’re brothers,” she said. “God, I’ve never been so bored in my life.”
Herbie ignored her and addressed his remarks to Doreen. “Sure,” he said, “we’re brothers just like you two are sisters.” He winked at Peter, through him, over him, at no one.
“Oh,” Doreen said, pouting, “you’re a tease. You know I’m Gloria’s cousin. I really am,” she said to Peter in case he thought she was also teasing; she was, but not about that.
“C’mon, Glory,” Herbie said, “get off your butt, honey, and make us something to drink. Hey, sit down, Pete, huh?” Herbie collapsed into an oversized red velvet armchair and closed his eyes. Relaxed, his gnarled face softened into momentary anguish as if a plaster cast had just been removed. “God,” he said, inhaling the stale room, “this is death.”
Doreen smiled brightly. If sulks could kill, Gloria would have been a mass murderer. A hostess despite her mood, she prepared and served Bloody Marys, spiked mostly with the quick-lime of her smile. “We’re out of gin,” she announced. Herbie and Doreen were dancing in a corner, his hand on her ass, to “Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night of the Week.” It was Tuesday morning, Peter kept thinking, keeping his hold on reality.
Gloria guzzled between puffs. “We don’t usually drink this early,” she said to no one in particular, “but today’s some kind of occasion. Isn’t that right?” Peter nodded. No one else answered. “Today,” she continued, glaring at the couple, dancing now to unheard music, “is the four-day anniversary of Cousin Doreen’s arrival in the city. Up Doreen! Up us all!” She finished her drink with a vengeance, then stared blearily through the mist of smoke surrounding her face like a torn veil. “You dance?” she said to Peter.
“Yeah,” Herbie said, “dance with her, Pete.”
“Thanks, but I’m not in the mood,” Gloria said.
Peter stood up, sat down.
“We need some more gin, Herbie,” Gloria said, acting the hostess again.
Herbie, holding Doreen, swaying to the music, held out Peter’s ten dollars behind his back with magnanimous contempt. “Get two quarts of Fleischmann’s,” he said. “Okay?”
Gloria wasn’t having any. She sat down, her arms crossed in front of her. “I don’t want to go alone,” she said.
“Pete will go with you. Will you go with her, Pete?”
Peter, dozing, grinned foggily. Where?
“Why don’t you go?” Gloria said. “This is your party.” Some party.
Herbie agreed that it was his party and left for the gin, taking Doreen with him.
“I don’t have to take this from him,” Gloria said as soon as they were out of earshot.
Peter nodded uneasily. Gloria scowled balefully, held him responsible in his brother’s absence. “He’ll be back,” she said doubtfully, picking up cigarette butts from the rug. “Anyhow, I’ve had it,” she said. “I mean it.”
Yawning, Peter got out of his chair, stretched, his arms almost brushing the low ceiling. It struck him — a pang of nostalgia, a betrayal of the demands of grief — that for the past hour he hadn’t been worrying about Lois. “Herbie’ll be back,” he assured her.
“Who needs him?” she said ruefully. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” replaced “Route 66” on the phonograph.
“Would you like to dance?” he asked.
Gloria half smiled, shrugged, sat down, not to be bought off by kindness.
Peter wandered the room, lost. He was reminded of the times at dance halls where girls, like Gloria, had refused his overpolite, anxious advances. Worse-looking men had less trouble. Was it the uncertainty in him, the nervous desire not to fail, that repelled them? Whatever it was, he had gotten over it, had learned through Herbie’s training to cover up his feelings, yet the recollection of his humiliation still haunted him. Thinking about it, a compromise with the past, his hands sweated.