“How long will I have to rest?” Peter asked. “You’ll have to rest until the pain is gone,” the specialist advised him.
“How long should the pain last?”
“How long?” the specialist queried himself. “It’ll last,” he said philosophically, “until it’s not there any more. Does the pain tell me how long it’ll last? When you reach a certain age, my friend, you got to learn to slow down.”
“You don’t really think I’ve reached that age, do you?” Peter said, and had the notion for the moment that his back was much better. He moved his shoulder gingerly as an exploratory gesture. “It no longer hurts,” he started to say when the pain took him (revisited him), bending him over with the fierceness of its assault.
The specialist shook his head. “Don’t tempt fate,” he said.
“I have to pick up my son at the airport tomorrow,” Peter explained, “and I don’t want him to see me like this.” He was ready to show the doctor a picture of Philly he had just gotten in the mail, but as it was painful for him to reach into his pocket, he decided against it. “Aren’t there some pills you could give me to ease the pain a little?”
“I could give you a hundred pills,” the specialist said. “Would you like a hundred pills?” He removed his glasses, contemptuous of any man who wanted a hundred pills. “You’ve consulted me,” he said, “and I’ve told you all I know. Now do exactly what you like. I’ll tell you this: if you run around with a back like that, I won’t be responsible for what happens.”
Though a little doubtful about the specialist’s competence — his office, except for a television set opposite the examination table, twenty years out of date — Peter was worried. “What can happen?” he asked.
“What can’t?” the specialist said.
“Is it all right for me to go to the airport tomorrow?” Peter asked.
The specialist put his glasses back on, considered the question. “What do I know from airports?” he said. “I know backs. If you were an airplane, I’d say not to fly with a back like that.”
The fee for this advice was fifteen dollars. “I’m retired,” the specialist explained. “I don’t practice much. If it’s not better in two weeks, come back. To tell you the truth, I don’t expect to see you again. That’s my professional judgment. No heavy lifting. No sex. It’ll be better before you know it.”
The back got worse before it got better. In the evening every move he made seemed to break him in half — the pains, never quite the way he expected them, sharper and more frequent than before.
In the only comfortable position he could find, Peter was sitting, immobilized, in a high-backed leather armchair, his feet propped up on an ottoman while Diane, who was in love with him (another responsibility), waited on him as though she were his private nurse.
“Do you want me to hold your coffee for you while you drink it?” she asked, a big, handsome girl, overgrown and ingenuous, a beauty in her way — her way long-legged, small-breasted, a girl with beautiful eyes.
“I can hold it myself,” he said, a little oppressed by her dedication.
“Please let me do it,” she said, and overriding his refusal, held the cup to his lips. “If it’s too hot, let me know.” Peter protested silently and drank, the coffee a little warmer than he liked it.
Their relationship puzzled and flattered him, and only now was beginning, for all its pleasure, to worry him a little. Why was she treating him as if he were breakable? From their first dinner together he had acted toward her as if their being together was some kind of game, a joke they were playing on the adults. Even after they had become lovers — some jokes more involved than others — he had assured them both that it wasn’t serious. They liked each other, liked the game of liking each other — her interest in him no more, he believed, than that of a young girl for an older man, a stage of growth. No more? Who had been kidding whom? He thought to send her home, but instead finished his coffee at her hand. And how could he be sure, after all, that she wasn’t just playing at playing house?
After coffee she washed and dried the dishes. “Is there anything else I can get you, jerk?” she called from his kitchen.
“I have a little ironing that needs to be done, some socks to be washed. Do you do laundry?”
Diane returned to the living room, a shadow of pain in her large eyes — the first he had seen there. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” she said solemnly. “You know that.”
“Who’s kidding who?” he asked, turning his head inadvertently, the knives in his back taking him by surprise.
Diane winced in commiseration. “I’m sorry it pains you,” she said, sitting on the ottoman by his feet. “I know what it’s like.” They suffered together.
“How does it feel?” she asked after a while — the sound of a voice, even her own, better than nothing at all. “Would you like me to give you a back rub, Peter?”
“No,” he said. “It’s all right.”
He was worrying again, as he had all week, about Phil’s arrival — what would he say to the boy when he actually showed up? He had a picture of the two of them sitting glumly around the living room, unable, for all the effort of their need, to talk to each other. They would end up, he was afraid, hating each other. On top of it, he had his back to worry about now.
“Would you like me to read to you?”
He shook his head, unaware of her, oppressed. “You don’t have to stay,” he said. “The old man’ll be all right.” “Are you angry at me?” she asked.
‘Who could be angry at you?” he said easily, looking at her, touched despite himself by her beauty, and for the flicker of a moment felt that he might be in love with her — it was not impossible. He resisted it, a man with a back and a son to worry about. “Who do you think you’re looking at, wise guy?” he said, a kidder from way back.
A generous audience, Diane laughed. “You, old man,” she said. “If you don’t like it, you know what you can do about it.”
‘What?” He had a premonition that Lois was going to drop in on them — though she almost never came over without calling first — and wondered, more curious than concerned, what would happen if she did.
“Nothing,” she said. The joke was over. “Is it true …” she started. “It’s really none of my business.”
“What do you want to know?” When he moved to change his position in the chair, his back seemed less painful than before, though it may have been only that in anticipating the pain he was less vulnerable to it.
“Peter, there’s a rumor around the office, which I’ve done my best to squelch — I’ve denied it about five times already — to the effect that you and Lois Black were once married.” She studied his face for an answer — her lovely brown eyes like undiscovered countries — as ingenuous and cunning as a child. (A daughter at her father’s feet — who needed sons?)
“Where did you hear that?”
“Oh, it’s just a rumor that’s been floating around. I think one of the secretaries started it. It’s not true, is it?” Her tone betrayed her concern.
A wry patriarch, Peter issued a benign smile from the throne of his chair, wondered himself at the facts of his own past. “Does it seem unlikely that Lois and I could have been married?” he said.
“Well, you’re such different types,” Diane said. “Yes, it seems unlikely. To me it does, though I’m not the most objective person in the world for you to ask.” She shrugged. “You really were married to her, weren’t you?”