He nodded. “You’re all right now?”
“I’m great.” A broken laugh. She squinted at him, the sun between them. “When was the last time you shaved?”
“Two, three days ago,” he guessed, rubbing the back of his hand across his beard.
“I want you to take care of yourself,” she said. “One of us should.”
He wanted to carry her off with him, fly over the city, go somewhere, but even if it were possible, he realized, it would make no difference. “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said, “I’ll shave if you promise not to try to hurt yourself any more.”
Lois played with her hair, curling the ends around an index finger. “Let’s talk about something else,” she said.
At the moment there was nothing else. The silence a deception of intimacy. In the will of the imagination, the dream of love survives its loss.
Directly in front of them, a teen-age couple love-fought in the grass, elbows and knees, a game of inadvertence. Lois smiled wistfully.
Peter was impatient. “I wish to God there was something I could do,” he said.
“There isn’t,” she said, glancing up at him as if to make an identification. “You really think you can do anything, don’t you? Give up, Peter.” She touched his hand. “Don’t listen to me. I can never say what I mean.”
His hand burned where her touch had lingered. A sudden rush of wind came in from the river, playing havoc with everything, sending the wax paper from their sandwiches aloft like kites. Lois put her face in her hands to protect her eyes from the dust. The wind passed through him, exhausting him, leaving him stronger than before. “Why don’t we try again?” he said.
She lifted her head, her face suffused with an extraordinary tenderness. “What?” she asked softly.
“Try again,” he whispered.
“No,” she said immediately. Then, thinking about it: “I don’t know.” She moved closer to him.
“Why not?”
She whipped her head from side to side, dislodging tears. “I wasn’t going to cry today. I was going to be very good.” She averted her face, crying.
He held her hand, which was inanimate, told her a few jokes he had heard.
“You’re very funny,” she said, though she didn’t laugh. “The reason I called was this. I …” She read his face, which was very grim. “I want to ask your advice about something.” She laughed, suddenly giddy, cutting herself off before she lost control.
He waited, out of touch, expectant. (He imagined himself explaining the latest discovery of his feelings to Cantor. “I’m over her, Doctor,” he was saying. “I mean it. My only remaining concern is that I want her to be all right. That’s all.” The doctor appeared to nod. “That’s fine,” he said, “but why are you bleeding on my couch?”)
“I’ve been thinking of moving out of my parents’ house,” she said, “and taking some kind of apartment of my own or sharing a place with another girl, but I haven’t had the nerve to tell them, Peter. I’m afraid to tell them.” She pulled up a handful of grass from the ground and let it filter absently through her fingers. “I have to get out of there.”
“If you have to get out, get out,” he said. She could have gotten the same advice from anyone, he thought, if advice was really what she wanted. If not advice, what did she want? He turned to see: the sun was in his eyes, a scarf of light blinding him. For a moment, distracted, he had the feeling that someone had taken his picture. He smiled for the invisible camera.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said, “but I don’t want to hurt them if I can possibly avoid it. They’ve been good in their way, especially Will. They have,” she insisted. “Even Mildred, in her way, means well.”
“Okay.”
“Everyone means well,” she said ruefully. “Sort of. You can’t dislike anybody without feeling guilty afterward. Every morning Mildred nags me about eating breakfast; I tell her I don’t want any — I’ve never in my life eaten breakfast. You know that. Young lady,’ Mildred says, ‘while you’re living in this house, you’ll have a good breakfast.’ When I threaten to move out she clutches her throat and moans. Everything I do hurts them.”
He had the sense that all of what she was saying, the whole spectrum of her grievances, was in some indefinable way directed at him. “I see what you mean,” he said noncommittally.
“You can’t really,” she said, her body rigid as if braced against the anticipation of pain. “You don’t love them.” Her glance an accusation. “They don’t have anything in the world but me to live for. Will will become an alcoholic if I leave. You see, anything I do, whatever I do is wrong.” She started to cry, then as suddenly and mysteriously as she started, her eyes cleared. “Do you really think I should move out?”
He didn’t know what to say, he nodded.
She gave him her hand, unasked for, offered it to him as a gift (to be returned). “If you think I should, Peter, I will. I trust your advice.”
Impatient, giving up her hand, he stood up, walked away, came back. “Do you really want my advice?” he said, withholding his annoyance, his suspicions, willing to grant her (her prerogative) the right to use him in any way, in all ways. He owed her that, he was willing to believe. He owed her himself.
“Whatever you say I’ll do, old Peter. If you think I ought to stay with them, I will.” She closed her eyes, awaiting his decision. What decision?
He stood in a puddle of sun, burning, caught like a leaf in the sun’s eye. Then, on impulse, he squatted next to her on the grass, almost embracing her, almost. “I think you ought to move out,” he said, meaning other things as well.
“I will.” Her eyes opened, met his unexpectedly, lingered out of a curiosity of love, then fled. It was better not seeing than seeing not enough. (The incompleteness of her knowledge was her terror.)
He found a wilted daisy at his feet, the last of the season, and presented it to her.
She cupped the flower to her mouth. “I’ve missed you,” she whispered to it, crumpling it. “Have you missed me?”
When he said no, her face trembled, fell apart.
“Hey,” he said, holding her face together with his hands, “I’m kidding, Lois. Don’t you know I missed you? I missed you. What I missed most about you was your bawling. I missed that. Nobody cries on 113th Street.”
“I’m not crying now,” she said, faintly amused in spite of a predilection to be angry. Barely. Not. “And I wasn’t the only one who cried,” she said sadly, his failure looming up before her — all memory stained with regret. “Peter, what’s going to become of us?”
For a moment the sun died. Coming off the Hudson, the wind haunted the grass, conjured ghosts of dust. Lois shivered. Peter covered her with his arm.
The sun returned. They sat, she inside his shoulder, stiff shadows of themselves like snapshots in an album, hoarding the past.
Peter worried that it would end. Memory, the fret of old resentments, separated them.
“If you’re moving out, why don’t you come and live with me,” he said.
She smiled, shook her head reflexively, unable to believe in survival, grateful for the myth of its possibility.
He kissed her, her mouth a stranger, generous and indifferent.
He held her to him. “Stay a while longer, Lois,” he pleaded.
“Can’t.” Then she kissed him, a good-bye kiss, warm (blossoming) with the nostalgia of impossibility. “I worry about you, Peter,” she said distantly — a lover’s truth. “You fail at everything you do, baby. Will you ever amount to anything?”