By popular request, “Stardust” was held over for a second performance. “I made it louder so you could hear it on your end too.”
The frivolousness of their enterprise began to bother him. “Gloria, when did Herbie leave? He didn’t say anything about it last night; I don’t remember him saying anything.” He felt oddly responsible for Herbie’s flight, as if through some secret malice — his itch for Gloria — he had willed Herbie out of the way.
“Listen to the music, will you?”
He listened. He could hear her breathe; the other music, “Stardust,” seemed out of tune.
Lois came in, softly, as if she wasn’t sure she belonged. “How are you feeling?” she asked, mouthing the question.
He shrugged, “Stardust” wheezing the deadening heart cries of nostalgia in his ear.
“Tell Herbie to call me when he gets in,” he said into the phone, nagged by a disproportionate sense of deceit.
“Is your wife there?”
He nodded.
Lois, changing her clothes, watched the silence with amused curiosity. “Who are you talking to, Peter? Is there someone at the other end?”
“Gloria,” he said. “Herbie’s Gloria,” he felt constrained to add.
“Don’t make a stranger of yourself,” Gloria whispered into his ear and with that, without a good-bye, she hung up.
“Good-bye,” he said to an empty phone and felt, without knowing why, as if he had lost something he needed.
Lois, in ass-tight tan slacks and her father’s white shirt, was sweeping the linoleum floor with a pushbroom in a fury of purposeful activity — the dust dancing in the air like pollen. Peter identified with the dust, felt displaced.
She raged silently at the linoleum, which seemed, as always, to resist all efforts to change its indefinably soiled face. Without a word — too much to say to be said — they were enemies. When the floor was suitably beaten, she began on the green walls with a discolored dust rag as if they were an ancient and implacable foe. What was her rush? he wondered. And tired — her fury exhausting him — he lay down on the bed to rest. Not to sleep, just to rest, to shut his eyes for five or ten minutes.
Lois woke him five hours later.
“You’ll sleep your life away,” she said sadly.
“Am I too late?” he asked, his head bobbing up as though it had been under water. Someone had been dying in his dream, or was already dead for all he knew, the face covered with leaves, and he had been looking desperately for help — the face of the earth deserted.
‘You’re always too late,” she said, and for some private reason kissed him on the forehead. “Let’s be friends, Peter. Please, baby.”
He agreed. They shook hands on it. Then, wanting what wasn’t offered, he kissed her; she seemed merely tolerant — an ache of regret in the deepest hollow of his chest. “For how long?” he asked.
“Don’t spoil it, Peter.”
Truces, he discovered, were even harder to fight than wars.
“I was fired today,” he confessed, to show his good faith, to test hers. Then, since they were friends, he told her of his interview at the Queens police station and in telling it had the sensation of having been hit anew on the back of the head.
Lois commiserated, sitting next to him, her arm around his shoulders. “And then what happened?” she asked with a child’s detached curiosity, as though the story he was telling had nothing to do with their lives.
His stomach yawned. “When I got back to the garage, Mr. Palace, the man who hired me, said that it looked to him that I didn’t have my mind on my work, and wasn’t there something else that I would be happier doing. I said no. ‘Let’s face the bitter facts, Becker’—Peter mimicking Palace’s fast-talking officiousness — ’you just weren’t cut out to be a hack driver. Some is. Some isn’t. In another line of work, you may be another Einstein or something — how do I know? — but you’re like tits on a boar hog as a cab driver, I hate to tell ya.’ “When he had finished, wilfully amused at the recollection, Peter looked as if he wanted to cry.
“That’s a laugh,” Lois said. “I bet you were the best cab driver they had.”
He thought so too. “Only second best,” he said modestly, though in getting lost, in getting into difficulties, there was no one better — Peter a master of screwing up.
For no apparent reason — nothing he had done at the moment — Lois moved away from him, her eyes raw with the memory of some real or imaginary hurt. Her silence, indelibly fragile, seemed to accuse him of some irreparable failing — accused him, judged him and found him guilty. And what had he done?
What’s the matter? he wanted to ask her, but was afraid of what her answer might be.
“Lois …” he said gently, his voice walking over a surface of eggs.
She shook her head. “You could have identified him,” she said, “if he was the one who robbed you. There’s nothing wrong in that.”
He climbed wearily off the bed. “I did what I did.”
“But why did you …? God, I don’t understand you!” Her voice almost a scream.
“My father used to say the same thing.”
“I should have married your father,” she said quickly, choking on it. “What bothers me, Peter,” she said in the voice of sweet reasonableness, “is that this man robbed you and almost killed you, and you act as if it was nothing. And what’s worse — and this is unforgivable — you throw away your job when we need the money most, to protect this man, this pervert, from a punishment he’s earned. Do you think he’s even grateful to you, you jerk? I think he probably wanted to be punished.”
He closed his eyes, trying not to hear, the words pouring through like beads of acid, poisoning his spirit.
His refusal to defend himself gave her the feeling, against all reason, of being in the wrong. “There’s no excuse for what you did, Peter,” she nagged compulsively. “By condoning his crime — don’t you see that? — you become as guilty as he is. You assume his guilt.” She was done, smiling bitterly at some odd reminiscence.
“Let’s not fight,” he said, barely in control of his rage.
“You started it.”
“The hell who started it, let’s stop it.” He shook her to make his point.
With a cry she sprang from the bed, her eyes large with terror, as if his shaking her had dislodged the anesthetic scab from some half-healed wound.
Peter stared blindly at the wall, his rage riding in him like too much of a heavy liquid, when a shoe came crashing against the back of his head. He stumbled to his feet, red coming off the walls like waves of heat. He had the peculiar sensation of being injured somehow beyond the reality of pain.
“Stay away from me,” she said.
He located the voice at the other side of the room. “I won’t hurt you,” he muttered, feeling his head, almost surprised at finding it still there.
“When you lose your temper I’m afraid of you,” the voice said.
The room was mostly dark; a puddle of light coming from a deserted reading lamp gave him the sense of a spotlight on an empty stage — the performer, for whom it was intended, forgotten or lost. The unused light touched him with inexplicable regret.
He discovered himself absently holding on to the shoe that had hit him, as though he had intended in the first heat of his rage (embarrassed now at the realization) to throw it back. Relaxing his grip, he let it slip out of his hand to the floor, the sound of its fall much louder than he had anticipated, the noise reverberating inside his head. His throat was chalk-dry.
“You win,” he said hoarsely and went into the kitchen for a glass of water.
He let the cold faucet run for a while, testing it with a nervous finger; Lois was on the phone in the living room, talking too low for him to overhear. When he finished his drink, which for all his pains was not cold enough to satisfy his thirst, Lois had already hung up.