Why begrudge the spirit a little pleasure between pains? They had lunch together, Peter and Lois, like old times, at a tea-housey Swedish restaurant on Lexington Avenue. Lois indulged him with smiles.
“I still resent you,” she said between sips of her coffee. “Do you think it’s love?” She smiled brilliantly, the remoteness of her eyes belying the guile of her charm. It was merely talk, and also, despite itself, meant.
Still, he had trouble recognizing her. “I think it’s resentment,” he said. “Does this guy, Grims, Grimes — what’s his name? — does he know that you used to be married to me?”
“His name is Bob Grimes,” she said in an instructive voice. “I don’t think there’s anything to be gained in mentioning it, Peter. It’s not relevant, really. Is it? It’s just not relevant. You understand.” She smiled sheepishly, aware of her own game, aware that he was aware — her vanity a denial of itself.
He played along. “Is this guy Grimes interested in you?” The waitress, in a loose-fitting peasant blouse, a big Dutch-looking girl, bent over to clear the table. Peter couldn’t help noticing the ripeness of her breasts. He turned guiltily to Lois, discovered lines under her eyes, new ones.
“Are you jealous?” she asked.
He clowned, looking over his shoulder — a tray of Swedish cakes on the table behind him. “Who me?” he protested. “Who me — jealous? Why should I be jealous?”
She laughed with more pain than pleasure.
“I am jealous,” he said softly.
She turned away. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
She lit a cigarette, her hand tremulous. “You know what I’m talking about. Peter, I want peace and quiet. I need peace and quiet.”
He nodded.
“The truth is, I don’t love you any more,” she said matter-of-factly, her eyes averted. “It took me a long time to get over you; I was really neurotic about it, but it’s been done and I don’t want it undone. You understand.”
“All right.” What else could he say?
“Do you mean it?” An anguished smile, an attempt at a laugh. “I think you’re humoring me. Are you?” She stubbed out her cigarette murderously, as though she had a grudge against it. “Oscar has the idea that you’ve come back to New York — I told him it wasn’t true — because you think there’s a possibility of us getting together again.” She played with her napkin, embarrassed. “You don’t think that, do you?”
Peter glanced at Lois, her face fretted by uncharted fears, and found her (as never before) unattractive, curiously ugly. It was the light. When she turned to him, forcing a shy, broken smile, her face was lovely again. “You look very nice,” he said.
She shrugged, a girl again in her recollection of herself, embarrassed and pleased at the compliment. “I was much prettier when I was young,” she said wistfully.
They fought over the check, Peter winning an anxious victory — guilt the impulse of his pride.
As they got up from the table, Lois took a five-dollar bill out of her wallet and slipped it into his hand. He gave it back to her.
“Please,” she insisted, pushing the money surreptitiously, as if he couldn’t feel what she was doing, into a side pocket of his jacket.
He paid for the lunch with his own money, with as much grace as he could muster — Lois’s five-dollar bill weighing in his pocket like a stone.
Outside, Lois, her hand lightly on his arm, rewarded him with a smile. “When you get the job,” she consoled him, stroked the indifference of his pride, “you’ll take me out to lunch. Okay?”
He gave her back the five dollars, slipping it into the warm pocket of her coat, a lingering gesture, an unintended intimacy. Coming out, his hand was bruised by the cold. He rubbed his hands together.
“Is that the way you want it?” she said.
“I like to show a girl a good time,” he said. “That’s the kind a guy I am.”
“You’re a clown,” she said.
He bowed for his audience, did a dance step, a slow shuffle. Lois looked embarrassed.
They walked together back to Whartons Associates, Lois in a hurry — a slow, cold rain, a misty veil of rain impeding their progress.
“Remember,” she said at the entrance to the building, as if he were a small boy she were sending off to camp, “your appointment with Bob is for three o’clock. It’s twenty to three now. You don’t have a watch, so don’t go too far away.”
“Okay,” he said.
They shook hands. “Good luck,” she whispered. “Call me and tell me how you make out.”
He said he would. “Just be yourself,” she called back.
He waved. It was like old times, only different.
Alone, himself, in no mood to be interviewed, he had the urge to flee. Patience, counseled the new Becker. You’re winning. It only feels like loss. So he walked around the block a few times to pass the time; the icy rain, stinging his face, confirmed him in the illusion of his existence. Waiting on a corner for the light to change, he tried to remember Lois as she was fifteen years ago, but for no reason — a trick of memory — he recalled a delicate, long-haired blond girl of seventeen — she used to ride in his cab — he took her back and forth from school — her name Delilah — she had died. He wiped his eyes, a fool to cry on a busy street corner. All his losses, it seemed at that moment, in the haze of recollection, were one loss — something of himself. And something else: each loss a death, his own. Where was the new Becker when he needed him most? He shook his head in a paroxysm of grief, wondering if it would be possible to close whatever it was he had opened up in himself. The rain in his face seemed his own tears. It struck him then with a sense of discovery, though he had known it for a while, had been keeping it a secret from himself, that he was no longer in love with Lois. The knowledge, a kind of final terror, braced him. There was nothing else to fear, nothing worse. His nerves a fortress of scars. And yet it changed nothing. He vowed he would make it up to Lois if he could. And if he couldn’t? “Who couldn’t?” he said out loud. No one answered. The rain changed to sleet. The man standing next to him, younger and heavier than Peter, looked away.
| 2 |
A sometimes wise man, his brother, once advised him: “Don’t sleep when you’re awake.” He tried not to. But his dreams had an astonishing clarity and it always surprised him afterward, when he woke from them, that they had happened, that he had lived through them, when he was to all intents and purposes asleep.
Peter was sitting at the head (or foot) of a long table in an elegant Victorian restaurant with his father and brother, Diane and Lois, and a few other people he knew only casually. (His son, he was told, would be arriving later.) It was a marvelous restaurant, a waiter like a shadow behind every chair. His father, Morris, suggested a toast: “To Peter, whose courage and generosity has made this evening possible. To Peter, the pride of his family — not many of them still alive — we love you.” He blew his nose. There were cheers. While they were toasting him Peter sneaked a look at his wallet, which was empty except for a crumpled five-dollar bill and two subway tokens. Did they think he was paying for it all — the drinks, the food, the wine, a tremendous amount already consumed, latecomers still arriving? What a mistake they had made! How could it have happened? It had happened — did the world always make sense? Peter waved his hands for silence. There was applause. Herbie winked at him, banged his glass on the table. “Speech.”