“My friends …” Peter said, searching for words to explain his predicament. More applause. “I have a confession to make.” A roar from the crowd. “I’m not who you think I am.”
“Sit down,” the fat man next to him said. “We’ve had enough speeches for one night.”
“There’s been a misunderstanding,” he shouted, trying to make himself heard above the noise of the crowd — everyone talking at once. “I have no money.”
Lois tugged at his arm. “Please, Peter! Don’t spoil everything.”
“What can I do? I have no money, and they expect me to pay for all this.”
The fat man laughed as if he had never been so amused in his life.
Everyone seemed to be looking in the direction of his dinner plate, Herbie pointing a long finger at it. Knowing smiles, nudges — a secret shared at his expense.
Dubious, Peter lifted his plate and found, pink on the white tablecloth, a check made out to him for five hundred thousand dollars — he read it twice to make sure — and thirty-six cents. A note clipped to it said: “For services rendered.” There was also a crushed white carnation. Peter looked around; everyone in the room, it seemed, was nodding at him.
“What’s this for?” he said. “I haven’t done anything to deserve this.”
“Ohhhhh!” A group disclaimer.
“Don’t be ungracious,” his father said. “If I told you once, Peter, I’ve told you a thousand times: money is honey. Finders keepers, losers weepers. A bird in the hand …”
Peter ripped the check in half, then in quarters, then in eighths. “I don’t want what isn’t mine,” he said. He threw the pieces to the wind — a huge exhaust fan at the center of the ceiling attracting them, whirring them about in the air like confetti. Pieces of check floated across the room, landing on tops of heads, in soup, in people’s mouths, eyes. One end of the banquet table collapsed. A white-haired lady was crying. A piece of ceiling fell. Someone screamed, “It’s the Titanic all over again.”
“What have you done, kid?” Herbie said, shaking his head sadly.
What had he done?
He awoke in a sweat, shivering, alone in his own bed, the covers askew. For moments on end, the room still dark, he suffered the dream as though it was a comment on his life, its implications a judgment. But after a while it faded from memory, and though he tried, he was unable to recall its details. Only its outline, the nightmare of his good fortune, remained to keep him awake. Since his return to New York, his life had been going remarkably well, everything (almost) as he wanted it, his luck too good for comfort. Going to sleep was risky when you had something to lose. Even the editing job, which he had had no business getting in the first place, had worked out. After only two months he had been given a substantial raise, more than he deserved. Yet it troubled him that the job took nothing of himself that mattered but his time. It was easy enough, gave him the illusion of achievement (money exchanged hands), made him a living and pleased Lois — what more did he have a right to want? He wanted more — or less. But that wasn’t the best (the worst?) of his luck. His son, Phil, had written to say that he wanted to visit him, was coming to stay with him in New York for the summer as soon as school was out. It worried Peter. Such luck couldn’t be his — a mistake? He looked over his shoulder at the guy in back of him, for whom the luck was obviously meant, hut no one was there. It worried him.
When he told Lois about his misgivings — an old ex-married couple, they had dinner together two or three times a week — she laughed at him as though he weren’t serious. “You’re out of your mind,” she said, serving him a martini — Peter in Oscar’s chair. “None of this has anything to do with luck.” She sniffed at the word as though it were scatological. “At least three people in the past week have said good things to me about you. You’re good. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“Who’s hard?” he kidded. “The rest of you are too easy.” Yet he had the feeling — a further disappointment in them both — that she had missed the point of his complaint, that he had missed making the point.
Peter sipped his martini, reacquainted himself with Lois’s face, which had a way of seeming different, seeming actually to change character in different moods of light. Sometimes he thought he was in love with her again — some of her faces he was in love with — but mostly it was something else, the low-flamed affection of people who mourned a common death. They were, in the conventional sense, old friends, or pretended to be. Peter told her about his son, underplaying his anxieties about the visit. “What do you do with a thirteen-year-old boy?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was never a thirteen-year-old boy.” She set the table for dinner, poured another round of martinis.
“He sounds pretty intelligent from his letter, though he doesn’t spell very well,” Peter said. “They must have bad schools in Ohio. Do you know what really worries me, Lois … I’m afraid that he’ll see through me.”
Lois nibbled on a nail, smiled. “What will he see?”
He couldn’t explain. “He’ll see that there’s nothing there.” Depression, like an old friend, hung on his neck.
“You’re not making any sense,” Lois said. “I can’t bear to listen to you talk this way, Peter.” She got up and went into the kitchen, returning almost immediately. “Sometimes you get me really angry.” She looked around as if to find something she could throw at him. “I know you’ve had some bad times, but you’re not the only one. What gets me so mad is that you’re doing so well now, and you still complain. Accept it. I’ve never known anyone — Oh, let’s eat.”
They ate like strangers, harboring private hurts, their dispute mediated into silence. “I still haven’t given up the notion of teaching,” Peter said, raising his fork, balancing a single pea on the edge of the middle prong. “The trouble is, I don’t know enough to teach. How could I stand up in front of a class? What could I tell them?”
“If you continue like this, Peter, I’m going to leave. I mean it. Why is it that nothing in the world satisfies you?”
He shrugged. The question was its own answer.
She glanced at him shyly, looked away. “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said. “I’d like to see your son’s letter if you have it with you.”
He took it out of his wallet, and with a curious sense of pride — the author, after all, his son — passed it over to Lois. He watched her nervously, studied her expression as she read, the shadow of a smile on her mouth. Holding the letter to the light — her eyes, slits of themselves, almost touching the page — she read without her glasses. Why? he wondered. For whose benefit?
“Uh huh,” she said, handing it back.
“What does that mean?”
“Uh huh, it’s a nice letter,” she said tonelessly.
“It’s just a letter,” he said. “There’s no point in making a big deal about it.”
“It’s just a letter,” she said, “but it’s a nice one. I’m sure he’s a nice boy.” The more she attempted enthusiasm, the colder her voice became — the word “nice” freezing all life for miles around. “What was his mother like?” she asked slyly, sipping her wine. “You know, you’ve never told me anything about her.”
Peter pretended distraction, studied the spidery lines of a woodcut on the opposite wall — the unadmitted knowledge between them demanding more than either was willing to give. “Nice,” he said. “The print.”