“I really was,” he admitted. “But it was a long time ago,” he felt constrained to add.
“I’m sorry if I said anything against Miss Black,” Diane said — a straight-faced irony, “but I really didn’t know. I had no idea.” She hung her head, a penance for her ignorance.
“You haven’t said anything against Lois.”
She put her head against his foot. It was a special game of hers, part of the style of her charm, to pretend not to understand the implications of what she would say. “I’m sorry anyway,” she said.
“In what ways are Lois and I so different?” he wanted to know.
Diane raised her head, a child asked something beyond the comprehension of innocence. “It was presumptuous of me to say that, wasn’t it? I really don’t know Miss Black well enough to say this, but it seems to me”—she glanced at Peter for approval before continuing, withholding the insinuation of a smile; the knowledge of her pretense, the joke of it, a secret she shared with him — “that Miss Black is nice, in fact I think she’s very nice. I really think so, but in some ways kind of petty and self-concerned. You’re much nicer than she is.”
“That’s not true at all,” he said angrily. “You obviously don’t know Lois very well.” It was a lame defense for a lover to make, a former husband — but why should Lois have to be defended? “She’s a hundred times better than I am,” he added, which, as he didn’t quite believe it, only made him feel more disloyal. And Diane saw through him — to the flattered pleasure behind the gesture of protest.
“I don’t claim to know her very well,” Diane said. “From what I’ve seen, she can be very nice when things are going well for her — as nice as anybody — but when they’re not, when something’s bothering her or if she’s made a mistake about something, she takes it out on whoever’s around.”
“She’s only human,” Peter said, struck by it as though it were an insight.
“I know,” Diane said. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”
The phone went off, a minor explosion in the room. Trained to reflex, Peter got up in a hurry — the pains of the flesh as nothing to the anxieties of the spirit.
“Your back,” Diane warned him.
His back hardly bothered him. What could he do? He groaned a little in commemoration, pained at the fickleness of his ailment.
Lois’s voice on the phone, even when he anticipated it, had a way somehow of taking him by surprise. It seemed each time like a voice from the past, and he associated it not with the Lois he saw almost daily, but the one he hadn’t seen, hadn’t talked to, in fourteen years. It took only a minute or so for the illusion to die.
Lois asked how his back was getting along, though it was clear from the tone of her inquiry that she didn’t take his pains very seriously.
“You don’t think it hurts, do you?” he said, turning to look at Diane, who was standing, her face averted, at the other side of the room. His back throbbed dully, a justification of itself. “You’ve been in publishing so long you don’t take anything seriously any more.”
“Oh, come on. You know yourself that as soon as Phil shows up, your back will stop hurting.” She lowered her voice: “I take everything about you seriously, Peter. You know that. The fact is, I take you much more seriously than you take yourself.”
“You see right through me,” he said.
“Your jokes haven’t gotten any better in fourteen years.”
“Is that what you called to tell me?”
“No, I called … Is there someone there with you?”
He looked over to Diane, surprised to discover that she was watching him, her face impassive. “Why should anyone be here?” he said.
“I don’t know. I just had the feeling that there was. You sound as if you have an audience.”
“No,” he said. The lie hurt him, but what else could he say?
“Peter, I’ve been thinking about tomorrow …” she said. “My going to the airport with you — it’s not really a very good idea.”
“All right.”
“You can take a cab if your back hurts too much for you to drive, Peter. I really think you ought to meet him alone. Really. Think of how the boy will feel about someone else being there. He’s coming all this distance, over five hundred miles, to see his father. He’s not going to want someone else there to have to share him with.”
“I said, all right.”
“My dinner offer for Saturday night still holds good. Don’t be angry with me, Peter. Please.”
“I’m not angry,” he said, restraining his irritation. “I just don’t like to be lectured at, Lois.”
“I’m not aware that I was lecturing you,” she said coldly. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she repeated, her voice making the effort of meaning it. “Should I come over,” she said softly, “or are you too disabled to want company?”
“Too disabled,” he said without hesitation.
“Oh!” A swallowing sound. Then, contrite: “Are you angry with me?”
He said he wasn’t, looking at Diane, who seemed, her back to him, to be reading the titles of his books. He sensed her unhappiness, distracted by it. “If I am,” he said, “I’ll get over it.”
“Remember, he’s not my son.”
“I remember,” he said, aggrieved at Lois for mentioning it, depressed. “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said.
“What way did you mean it?”
She chose to ignore his question. “You haven’t told me yet whether you’re coming to dinner with Phil on Saturday.” She laughed irrelevantly. “Will you come? I promise to make a good showing.”
“I’ll let you know,” he said. Then added: “If Phil wants to, we’ll come.”
“Good night, Peter,” she said in an injured voice.
“Good night,” he said, and waited, resisting the obligations of remorse, for Lois to hang up.
“Forgive me?” she said.
“For what?” he said, wanting to make it right, yet for some reason compelled not to be able to.
“I don’t know,” she said. ‘For whatever you’re holding against me.”
“If you do the same for me,” he said.
“You know I forgive you everything,” she said, which left him even more depressed than before — his back cramped, a little numb, under the burden of her forgiveness.
“Then we’re even. I’ll call you tomorrow, Lois.”
“Wait. Is there someone there with you?”
He hesitated, worried for a moment that he had given himself away. “Good night, Lois,” he said finally, refusing to lie to her again, a liar only to himself.
“I’m sorry,” she said dully. “You know, I worry about you. Even your psychosomatic back worries me.”
“I know,” Peter said.
“My trouble is I still love you,” she said in a low, almost threatening voice and without waiting for an answer, without wanting one, she hung up.
Holding the dead receiver in his hand, Peter thought seriously for a moment or two of pulling the cord out of the wall, but the new Becker, less rash than the old, decided against it. He needed the phone like he needed a bad back. Yet he discovered — all knowledge a penance for loss — that he needed them both.
The operator cut in. “Can I help you?” she asked.
He wondered what she had in mind, hung up without answering, with the nagging sense — like old times — that he had lost something irreplaceable.
Walking as though his spine were glued together, anticipating pain, Peter returned to his chair. “Hey,” he said, “what are you doing?”
“Nothing,” Diane said, leafing through the pages of one of his books, her back to him.