Peter smiled foolishly, his madness naked under Patton’s knowing glance. “I think that you thought it did,” he said, hoping to end it there. The difference, Peter decided, was that Patton’s man got lost in meaningless details — what Peter wanted was the substance of things.
Patton filled his pipe, relit it. “Why do you think that?” he said, the question insinuating its own answer.
Peter had the urge to shake him but was afraid that if he did, Patton might break. He sensed that though the doctor seemed solid to the eye, there was an invisible crack running through him. “Then, what was the point of the story?” Peter said mildly, compelled to pursue what no longer interested him.
Patton removed his pipe, coughed. A high-pitched laugh leaping suddenly from his throat as if it had been imprisoned there for years. “If I didn’t believe the story was relevant to you when I was telling it — and to tell you the truth, Peter, I wasn’t sure that it was — don’t you think that your reaction now is a giveaway?” Peter tried to protest, but Patton overrode him. “What worries me, Peter, is that like most obsessive people you are, essentially, for all your good intentions, unconcerned with anyone but yourself. I don’t want to see Lois hurt.”
“Don’t you think I’m concerned about Lois?” Peter said. Patton, puffing at his pipe, never got the chance to answer.
Lois’s voice reached them suddenly from the kitchen. “Please, Bob,” she was pleading. “When I say no I mean no.” Then, aware that she was shouting, she lowered her voice.
Peter was tempted to rush into the kitchen — the phone a lifelong enemy — but instead sat down, pinched by jealousy, and had the disquieting sense that somehow he had been through this all before.
Patton contemplated the ceiling. “Get it out of your head,” he said.
“Get what out of my head?” Peter said, standing up, rage reviving him.
“Excuse me,” Patton said, looking around, distracted. “I didn’t hear what you said.”
Peter saw no point in repeating it. “You told Lois that I was destructive, didn’t you? What did you mean by that?”
“What I meant,” the doctor said, backing up as though afraid Peter was going to hit him, “is that you must learn to bend a little with the wind.” He retasted his words, not a little proud of the poetic aptness of his phrase. “Peter, this attempt of yours to re-establish a relationship with Lois after not seeing her or corresponding with her for fourteen years is an example of what I mean.”
And then, as her name was mentioned, as if conjured by them, Lois appeared in the room. Neither had seen her come in.
Patton looked at his watch, recorded the time. “Who was it, Lois?” he asked.
“No one you know, Oscar,” she said, her glance moving from one suitor to the other, her face flushed. “Some girl in the office had this problem she wanted to discuss — the drawings for this book we’re doing aren’t up to the level of the manuscript.”
“Was this Diane who called?” Patton asked.
Lois hesitated, glanced at Peter who was staring at his shoes. “No,” she said. “This was Mary Louise. Mrs. Rougerie. I told you about her, Oscar. She has to do things her own finicky way or she can’t do them at all.”
Patton nodded. “I think I’d better be going, Lois.” Almost before he asked for it, Lois was at the closet getting his coat. Patton waited with a martyr’s patience, looking like a man who has just discovered his daughter is no longer a virgin, a man who has known it secretly in his heart since the day of her birth.
“Are you going too?” Lois asked him when Patton had gone, an edge of belligerence in her voice.
“It’s getting late,” Peter said, moving around in the semi-dark living room as if he were lost. “It was a good dinner,” he said, sorry for her. “It reminded me of dinner.”
Lois murmured something that sounded like “what did he say to you.”
“What?”
“Forget it,” she said. “Sit down if you’re staying, for God’s sake. Why are you wandering around?”
“Who’s wandering?” he said. “It’s so dark in here I can’t find a chair.”
“You’re not being funny,” she said, sitting down on the sofa. “Are you trying to be funny?”
He wasn’t and he was. Trying. “Why did you lie to him?” he asked.
She made a small noise of acknowledgment, an intake of breath — resigned to accepting what she already knew. “Did you overhear everything?”
Everything? Peter sat down — collapsed rather than sat — and turned on the lamp next to his chair. It was a three-way light, which he turned up to high, illuminating by degrees the entire room — the shadows like creatures moving up the wall. The light ghostly like a presence.
Lois had her hands over her face. “I have a headache,” she said in a small voice. “Do you really need all that light?”
He turned it off, the shadows returning, the room darker than before. Why was he staying? he asked himself. Was it out of a duty to the past? He recalled Herbie’s long-standing admonition, good for all occasions: Don’t get caught with your fly unbuttoned (Herbie, who had ended up an insurance agent in Los Angeles, married, with a child). And other times: It’s in your best interest not to give a shit, kid. Look out for number one. Through his adolescence, until he thought he knew better, Peter had believed implicitly in the underlying wisdom of Herbie’s advice, though he had never quite understood (did he now?) its practical application. As the doctor had said, compromise is sanity, but he had walked out — the doctor had (uncompromised?) — while Peter remained.
“Why is everything so difficult?” Lois asked, the question addressed to the darkness; also, but secondly, to Peter.
Peter didn’t know why, had begun to believe that everything — that was the difficulty — was too easy. Sitting there in the almost-dark, the only light from a small Japanese paper lamp, a firefly’s dying glow, Peter had the feeling that he was in his own place (the basement apartment?), that Lois was his wife, that nothing had changed. For a moment, in the spell of memory, he held the past. Then Lois was saying, “Peter, I lied because I thought I could get away with it. I’ve never told the truth in my life when I didn’t have to. You know that.”
He didn’t give a shit, practiced not caring, worried about number one.
“I’m not sorry about Oscar,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference, does it? Between us?” “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. It doesn’t, does it?” Against a resolve to give up smoking, she took a cigarette from a pack on the coffee table, lit it in a hurry, took two long puffs, then put it out. “Forget it,” she said. “You don’t have to answer.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing.”
Peter got to his feet like a man coming up from under water. “Lois,” he said hesitantly — hard to talk to someone you couldn’t see, Lois’s face turned away, veiled in shadow, “I’m going now, Lois. Good night. I’m going.”
When she didn’t answer he approached the couch. “Good night,” he said again, then added, to show her that everything was all right (even if it wasn’t), “I’d like you to meet my son when he comes.”
“Aren’t you afraid that I’ll seduce him?” she said.
Peter got his coat from the closet.
“You don’t have to go,” she said softly, “if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to go, but I think I should,” he said, putting on his coat, a new one with exaggeratedly natural shoulders that Lois had picked out for him. (He wore it, still unused to it, like a responsibility.)
“Why should you?”
“Now you sound like Patton.” Standing with his coat on in the middle of the room, he procrastinated, fought temptation for its own sake.