Now that he was facing her, grinning foolishly, she had nothing to say. She nodded, smiling. He nodded back, his smile like an ache.
“What …?” he started to say.
“How do you …?” She stopped herself. “Go ahead.”
“You …”
She waited for him to continue; he waited for her, his smile cracking under the strain.
“This is insane,” she said, hardly able to hear herself above the din. “Do you …?” She had forgotten her question.
He was his old grim self. “We’re in the same class,” he said solemnly.
“I know,” she said. “Do you think it’s a significant coincidence?”
He looked puzzled. People were getting up around them, though she hadn’t heard the bell ring. Could she have missed it? She glanced reflexively at the clock.
“You ought to use a wider range of colors,” he said irrelevantly.
“Okay,” she said, amused, annoyed. “It’s getting late,” she said, getting up.
He hesitated. “You go ahead. I don’t think I’ll go to class tonight.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I’m not making enough progress,” he said, looking down at the table as if he were angry at something.
“Maybe I don’t know anything,” she said, “but it seems to me you’re one of the best in the class. Really, I think your work’s very interesting, though I think it would improve if you used a smaller range of colors.”
He acknowledged her joke with a sad smile, then went on with his lament. “I’ve been painting for over a year,” he said, “and I should be much better by this time than I am.”
“You will be better,” she said. “You will. I have faith.”
He shook his head, but when she started to leave, he went along with her to class.
The next night she found him at the same table, a half-hour earlier, apparently waiting for her. He waved as she approached.
“Do you have another home besides the cafeteria?” she asked him. His answer was a shrug. Yet he seemed almost foolishly happy to see her, his feelings naked in his eyes; overvalued, she thought better of herself.
After a while she began to anticipate their regular meetings in the cafeteria, but guileful, withheld her joy, surprised and frightened of it. (Curiously, they almost never spoke in class.)
Questioning him, she learned that he worked during the day as a clerk in a shoe store (only for the money), and that he attended classes at night, some for credit, some not. He was twenty-five, among other things. He had been in the Army. He lived alone. An older brother was his closest relative, his mother dead, his father in the city only a few months out of the year. After three weeks she knew almost everything about him there was to know, except who he was. She made games of his questions — she had more to hide — but with all her evasions managed to tell him more about herself than she had ever given away before. They were old friends in three weeks, domesticated before they had even so much as kissed. Their bodies brushed occasionally, though it remained unacknowledged.
After class he would walk with her to the bus, waiting on the corner with her, dawdling like a lovesick schoolboy, until the bus stole her away; each parting brought an ache of loss as though she were leaving his life never to return. Once she was out of sight, he despaired of ever seeing her again. Still, their friendship did not go beyond their ostensibly casual meetings in the cafeteria. Both were afraid of disenchantment. Lois wondered why he didn’t ask her out, jealous of his time without her, though it would only have made things more difficult for her. She had a boy friend, Stanley, whom she was going to marry eventually — her concession to an otherwise anonymous future. Every Saturday night for over a year she had been seeing Stanley — it gave form to her life — her life needed form. They had an arrangement, a semblance of an engagement; she wore his pin. They were lovers. On occasion, mostly out of boredom, she accepted other dates without telling Stanley, feeling guilty afterward, then telling him. Poor Stanley, she thought; her dreams were unfaithful to him. Poor Lois! Poor Peter! She began to wonder if she hadn’t misinterpreted Peter’s interest in her.
When Peter finally asked for a date, she accepted before he could finish his invitation. “I was really afraid you would say no,” he said. She was astonished. “Why?”
He shrugged, self-deprecating. “Because I wanted it too badly.”
“Don’t give yourself away so much,” she said. He turned away in pain. God, she hated herself sometimes!
Immediately afterward, during class, she regretted her decision. Her friendship with Peter was fine the way it was. Why create new difficulties? If she could conceive of a future with him, it might be worth the risks involved (involvement a risk in itself), but otherwise she stood to lose what she had and gain nothing in its place. She needed the security of Stanley. And Peter — Peter, like a huge stuffed Teddy bear — made her happy; he was a luxury. She loved him in a way, but it was not to be confused with adult love. And clearly, Peter had no future — he was so obviously vulnerable. As soon as she decided to break the date she worried about how she would tell him, the lies of explanation like sores on her tongue.
And then, leaving the classroom with him, she lost her nerve.
“Can we go somewhere and talk?” she started clumsily — the start always the hardest.
“I have my brother’s car,” he said, in a buoyant mood. “I’ll drive you home if you like.”
“Look, Peter, about Friday night …”
“What?” His face seemed held together by paste, on the verge of splitting into a thousand fragments. “I’ll tell you later,” she said, pitying him, frightened.
“What?”
They were attracting attention. “I’ll tell you in the car,” she said softly.
They were at the top of a stairwell. He glanced at her darkly, then rushed down the steps as if he had just recalled another appointment. She had to run to catch up with him.
Seated in his car — an indefinably old gray Plymouth — she didn’t know where to begin. “I’m engaged to be married” was all she could think of to say.
Murmuring something unintelligible, he drove off.
“We can still continue being friends,” she said as he exploded through a red light. “Nothing is changed.”
Peter’s head jerked slightly, as if he were about to say something, his silence an act of will.
She hated the melodrama of his hurt, sorry she had been its agent.
He drove fiercely, cutting in and out of traffic, speeding, slamming on his brakes, starting abruptly, the car the voice of his discontent. More resigned than frightened, she put her hands over her eyes. If she was going to die in an auto crash, there was nothing to be gained by watching it happen.
When she looked up they were two blocks past her apartment building; she let him go on.
Finally he parked the car under a street lamp in front of a candy store (Sol’s Luncheonette) which was just closing for the night, Sol or one of his henchmen locking the newspaper stand in front. “Where do you live?” Peter muttered, staring ahead of him. “I think I passed it.”
“That’s right,” she said.
“I’ll turn around,” he said wearily. “You’ll have to direct me.”
She watched him (bent and exhausted, he was almost ashen in the yellow light), touched by something about him: his almost comic despair, his lostness — something. A quirk of instinct, she reached down and took his hand, and pressed it to her mouth. The lights in the candy store went out. Peter turned abruptly, surprised as though a flash bulb had gone off in his face. It was too much to bear: there were tears in his eyes. Embarrassed for him, she wished herself out of the car, their relationship over, eradicated irrevocably from the nerve ends of memory. What was he crying about? she wondered. A sympathetic bystander, the sensations of his grief pricking her throat, she could almost believe that she was crying herself.