When he got back to his place, he took a hot bath — the place stank enough without his smell added to it — had a double Scotch for luck, and called Lois. Her mother answered. Lois didn’t ever want to speak to him again, she said. “Fuck you,” he bellowed, smashing the phone against the wall. Afterward he had regrets.
The next day, in the evening, when it hardly mattered to him any more — who needed her? he kept telling himself — Lois came back.
Standing in the shadow of the doorway, her straight black hair hanging loose to her waist, her sallow face without makeup, she looked like a little girl, a child of twelve.
“My mother will never forgive you,” she said, grinning, her head half turned away from him. “Will you take me back?” she asked softly.
He said yes.
She approached tentatively. They embraced like strangers, the thickness of her coat between them.
“Did you miss me?” she said, surveying the room, the bed unmade, swollen by sleepless dreams. He was glad that he had at least picked her clothes up from the floor.
He nodded.
She took off her coat, pirouetted. “It’s good to be back,” she said. “My mother was really a pain in the ass, Peter, nagging at me as if I was ten years old. ‘Tell me what he did to you,’ she asked me every day, smacking her lips in anticipation. ‘Tell me, Lois, what did that brute do to you? I promise I won’t tell your father if you tell me.’ Babble, babble, babble. What a pain in the ass she is.”
Peter sat down on the bed (like a tooth with the root dead, the pain from somewhere else), numb, unloving.
She sat next to him, shy of his strangeness. “Did you really miss me?” she said.
He did. He was sorry she had returned.
She took possession of his hand, intruded her head against his arm. “I’m hungry,” she said. “Is there anything to eat?”
He couldn’t recall. He shook his head.
“Why don’t we go out to eat?” she said, coiling her arms around his neck. “As a celebration, let’s go to the Village and, like, have a drink and a good meal for a change.” She hugged him. “Would you like that?”
The room stank from the death of having been unlived in alone too long, the sallow-green walls stale with the sweat of terror. She held him, suffocated, a patient in a sickroom, deconvalescing.
“I don’t care,” he said. He removed her arms and got up.
“What’s the matter?”
“Where do you want to go?” he said, panicked. “I have no money.”
“Is that your problem?” she said playfully, taking some money from her wallet, holding it out to him. “I can let you have twenty dollars, on account of we’re married.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“I robbed a bank,” she said.
“Your father gave it to you, didn’t he?”
“What difference does it make? You never have any money, anyway … I’m sorry, Peter. I don’t want to fight with you. Let’s not fight. Okay?”
He shrugged. “How long do you plan to stay?” he said.
“Oh, Peter!” She glared at him, for a moment exasperated beyond speech, her fists clenched, her eyes clouded over, burning. “I’m sorry,” she said grudgingly — her hands raised in a gesture of frustration. “I really am. Is it so hard to forgive me?”
He wanted to forgive her — who was he not to? — but something in his chest, heavy and murderous, was unrelenting. “Do you see any point in continuing?” he asked, an old question.
“I came back, didn’t I? Do you want me to go away? I will if you want me to.”
He thought about it, unable to answer.
“All right,” she said. “You won’t see me again.” She started toward the closet for her coat, then turned back, bent as if something had broken in her, and, her dignity a matter of withholding tears, walked by him into the kitchen, closing the door between them.
“Lois,” he called. “I’m sorry.” When she didn’t answer he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, exhausted by the confusion of his feelings. He could hear her crying in the kitchen, softly, choking on her sobs. Numb, he was unmoved by her grief. Love was dead; pity was expensive; Peter was tired. He had spent most of the past two days in bed and had gotten out of the habit of being awake.
It was always a problem to comprehend after the fact how he had gotten — across what tightrope of impossibility? — from one point in his life to another. Without the prospect of a career — after six years in college he still had no clear idea of what it was he wanted to do — Peter had to be aware that marriage was an insanity for him. Yet he had married Lois in the teeth of that awareness. Frank with himself, aware of his own shortcomings (who better aware?), he had been confident at the time that Lois had no real interest in him; she was also — an insurance policy — engaged to someone else. So he pursued her without a sense of danger and paid the price for his courage: unexpected victory. About this, at least, he had no large regrets. If he thought he knew why he had married Lois — a failure of restraint, he had wanted her too much — he found it difficult to understand why she had married him. For what? Love? It was not impossible, nothing’s impossible, but he knew himself too well to believe it for more than a few minutes at a time. Security? A joke. He had nothing, would likely never have anything. Illusion? It was as good an answer as any. But what was it she had seen in him that he had not seen in himself? That was her secret, she would get over it.
| 2 |
In one of Peter Becker’s painting classes — he was taking a beginners’ and an advanced course at the same time — there was an undernourished, dark-haired girl who generally worked at the easel in front of him when he was able to arrange it that way. He thought she was beautiful, too thin perhaps, her ankles thick; yet the whole effect gripped his chest with longing. Her name was Lois Black — she followed Keith Battlecarp on the roll; Peter came last because he had registered late — and her painting had a kind of ingenuous charm, he liked to believe, which more than made up for its innocence of skill. They became friends before he had a chance to worry about it. He worried anyway.
At nineteen, Lois Black had retired from the world, but had consented to live in it as a token of her exile. She was now in her third year of college, majoring in education for her mother’s sake, drinking coffee in the cafeteria for her own when she met Peter Becker. Something about him amused her. He was in a painting class she took at night — another excuse to get out of her mother’s house — though it was in the college cafeteria that she first became aware of him. Carrying a cup of coffee, holding it out in front of her like a shield, she was looking for a place to sit when she noticed Peter, only barely familiar then, alone at a last-row table. She remembered him from her class — a big fellow who always looked as if he was angry about something. He had a good face; he almost never smiled. In a mood to talk, she sat down across from him, unnoticed, Peter musing, looking out the window. Strewn across the long orange table, the day’s debris — balls of wax paper, empty cigarette packs, coffee-sopped napkins, the twisted core of an apple — chaperoned them. Lois sipped her coffee, smiling to herself. She envied him his capacity for detachment, a necessary grace.
“Hello,” she said tentatively. No response. Two gumchewing girls at the other end of the table turned to look at her, smiled. She glowered at them for their presumption, turned away, gulped her coffee, searing the roof of her mouth. Why should he acknowledge her existence? She hardly believed in it herself.
When finally he noticed her he seemed embarrassed by her presence, as if she had caught him in a moment of terrible privacy. His dark face opened up, yielded an awkward smile which left him strangely naked. How vulnerable he was!