There were lines in her face, signs of wear he hadn’t noticed before — the change in the light, his proximity exposing them. “I’d like to see your paintings,” he said.
“They’re not very good.” She was being coy. “So what have you been doing? Tell me. You’ve been very evasive.”
Clowning, he hung his head. “I’ve been bumming around mostly,” he said, as if they couldn’t tell, “still looking for something I want to do.” He laughed, though it came out like a moan.
Patton was standing. “It’s time for us to go, I’m afraid,” he said. “We have tickets for the theater,” he explained to Peter.
Lois glanced at Peter, shrugged, made a child’s sour face.
“I have to go anyway,” Peter said, getting up, his legs cramped. “I have some work to do.”
While Patton was getting the coats, Lois motioned Peter to the other side of the room. “Would you come to dinner tomorrow night?” she whispered to him. “Please. It would make me happy.”
He nodded, his voice choked.
“Sevenish,” she said.
As they filed out of the apartment, Peter glanced at Patton; their eyes brushed momentarily. In the mild gray, Peter saw something darker: reptilian wisdom flickering blandly, cold as a winter wind. Were they adversaries already? It hardly mattered.
A chilled silence hung over them as they waited in the street for an empty cab. Unwilling to separate, Peter hung on, dawdled, aware that he was an intruder. He was still there, looking on, as Patton maneuvered Lois into the back seat of a cab; he waved good-bye effusively to cover his pain, a mawkish uncle, as if anyone cared. They waved back behind their window, a blur of faces; the taxi splashed him as it bolted from the curb; when they were out of sight he walked to the subway, his feet cold. It rankled that neither had asked him if he wanted a lift.
That night in his four-dollars-a-day hotel room, lying awake, the passing cars spattering bones of light on his wall, Peter reviewed the pleasures of his life — small ghosts. A family of nomads, they had all wandered in different directions. He hadn’t seen his father in years, hardly knew where he was — somewhere in the Southwest, he thought, retired, perhaps no longer alive. Six years before, he had visited the old man, prosperous, ageless, in an air-conditioned imitationadobe ranch house in Tucson, Arizona. For the two weeks Peter stayed with him they even managed not to fight, lived together with the curious tenderness of neighbors in an old-age home. Peter thought of staying — his father asked him to (the small charity of old age), but at last he decided to move on. There was nothing for him in Tucson, an artificial Eden with orange trees growing out of the sidewalk, a hot, dry tourists’ paradise where the dying came to settle for their health. Since then there had been one post card from his father, mailed from some suburb of Los Angeles, on which the old man wrote of getting married “before he died.” A woman with three grown children, he wrote (and four or five grandchildren), who also raised cats for a living. He felt the need of a family, he said. That was two years ago.
So much depended on Lois — aside from his son she was the only one who really mattered to him — that he thought it would be best to leave without seeing her again. The problem was: Where to go? He was tired. He had been to too many places already, had used them up, had used himself up; in his time he had lived away from home (New York his home) in twenty-four states plus Canada and Mexico. After a while all places were alike. The trick was to get away from himself, an ultimate vacation, more expensive than he knew. While dragons of light clashed on his wall, he thought about it. (It was always there as something else to do, an untapped possibility, another place to visit.) In his whole life, he told himself, he had wanted not much: a family, something to do, love, accomplishment, talent, heroism; instead, at forty, he was alone with nothing. Why was that? Why? He wanted to know. A citizen, he had his rights. Dear God, what’s the matter with me? It was his only prayer.
Dozing, he saw himself falling from the window, arms outstretched like a diver, somersaulting now onto his back, floating — what peace! — landing on the sidewalk like a feather, without a scratch. It struck him suddenly — why hadn’t he seen it before? — that he was indestructible. His secret. He lifted his head from the pillow, amazed at himself. A horn honked, thunder cracked in the cave of his skull. Rain fell at the entrance; it washed his face, cooled his heat. Lying on the sidewalk, he remembered voices from the past, old faces (his mother and father, Herbie, Rachel, his son Phil), a familiar world. They hugged and kissed one another and he told them what he had discovered about himself, that he was indestructible. No one seemed surprised. Then, in a buzz of voices, in a circle of attention, his eyes closed, and he fell asleep and forgot.
At first glance the kitchen seemed to be empty, and Peter wondered if he hadn’t in a moment of madness hallucinated Lois’s return. But then he saw her, huddled on one of the gray metal kitchen chairs, her head tilted forward as if she were praying. Bent, she was staring at some glistening object in her lap, which, reflecting the overhead glare, looked as though it were on fire. The melodrama of preconception is inevitably inadequate to the facts. There was no fire. There was only, quite simply, a long stainless-steel carving knife across her lap, a red-knuckled hand clutching the handle. Absorbed in whatever it was she saw in the mirror of the blade, she gave no indication that she was even aware of his presence.
“What are you doing?” he said, hovering over her now.
A shiver went through her. There was no other answer.
“Let me have it, please,” he said, holding out his hand. “Lois.”
She crouched forward, shielding the knife with her body.
“Please give me the knife, Lois.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She shook her head.
“Then put the knife on the table.”
“No.”
To argue with her, he knew from experience, would only make her more resistant, but what could he do?
“Lois …” For no reason, out of some pang of tenderness, he bent to kiss the top of her head.
She jerked her head angrily, outraged, fending him off with her arm, the knife an extension of her hand. “Don’t!” Almost a scream.
He thought at first that she had hurt herself, a patch of blood staining his shirt. “What happened?” he asked her, (what?) and then he realized that it was him, that he was bleeding, the wound without pain, his shirt damp. Suffocating. Panicked, he held the arm up with his other hand, a sick, muttering noise in his throat. Still holding the arm, his dignity a matter of caution, he walked bravely to the bathroom, ashamed that he was leaking so much of himself.
The arm ached dully, his face a plastic white in the mirror.
Sick to his stomach, he was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, his balance shaky, waiting in a daze of shock for the blood to stop, when Lois floated in. A part of his delirium? In his sickness — his face pimpled with sweat — he had the feeling that she was smiling at his expense, though not her mouth really — the rest of her face.
“What can I do for you?” he said.
Without a word, with nurselike efficiency she took care of his arm, stopped the bleeding, washed the blood away, bandaged the wound, using a light silk scarf she often wore, to hold the dressing in place. Through all this neither of them spoke.
When she had finished, she asked him if it was too tight. He shrugged. “You’ll be okay,” she said. He planned to say something to her, but in the next moment, though he hadn’t seen her leave, she was gone.
It took him a while to find the energy of will necessary to get up, to leave. Clearly, he was tired. He was numb.