Jena turned and looked quickly back at the Avenue, where a driver had slammed on brakes and skidded over the frozen pavement. Two policemen in a white and blue cruiser waited at the curb, watching the car as it stopped sideways in the middle of the intersection. Perhaps she felt someone was following her. “We’re doing exactly what we want to now, aren’t we?” she said, distracted by the commotion.
“I am,” Wales said.
She looked at him and smiled tightly. He never knew what she thought. Possibly she was more like her parents than she realized. “It was just something to say,” she said and cleared her throat. “You shouldn’t take me so seriously.”
“Wonderful,” Wales said, and smiled.
“Believe it, then,” Jena said stiffly. “Everybody comes before somebody. Somebody always comes after.” She paused as if she wanted to say something more about that but then didn’t. “Why don’t we eat,” she said, and began to move along toward the restaurant’s glass doors, which were just at that moment opening again onto the street.
At dinner she talked about everything that came in her head. She said they should go dancing tonight, that she knew a place only a cab ride away. A black neighborhood. She asked if Wales liked dancing at all. He did, he said. She asked if he liked blues, and he said he did, though he didn’t much. She looked pale now in her black turtleneck with a strand of small pearls. She was wearing her wedding ring and a great square emerald ring he’d never seen before. They drank red wine and ate squab and touched hands like lovers across the small window table. Someone would know her here, but she didn’t mind. She was feeling reckless. What did it hurt?
She talked about a novel she was reading, which interested her. It was all about an English girl who’d once been an ingénue. There had been an influential film in France, and for a time the girl was famous. Then one thing and another went wrong. Eventually she came to live in Prague, alone, older, a former addict. Jena felt identification with her, she said, thought her story could be set in America. Somehow her parents could be in it, too.
After that she talked about her little girls, whom she loved, and then more about her husband, whom she’d asked him to kill and who, she said, was at his best a mild but considerate lover. She talked about scratching her cornea in Munich once, about what a bad experience that’d been — finding an ophthalmologist with American training, one who spoke English, one who sterilized things properly, one whose assistants weren’t heroin addicts or hemophiliacs. He realized that nothing he could do or say would have any effect on her now. Yet what kind of person would she be if he could so easily affect her. And being with her was such a pleasure. It made him feel wonderful, insulated. He wanted to see her again. Next week. Arrange something for then.
Only, he recognized, she was just now talking herself out of the last parts of being interested in him. Something must’ve seemed weak. Not being willing to kill someone, or at least say he would. She was raising the stakes, making it up as she went along until he failed.
“Tell me something that happened to you, Jimmy,” she said. “You really haven’t talked much tonight. I’ve just chattered on.” She hadn’t used the name “Jimmy” before. She was pale, but her dark eyes were sparkling.
“I was robbed tonight,” Wales said. “On the way out to my car at school. A black man stopped me in the parking lot and asked to borrow a dollar, and when I brought my billfold out he grabbed at it. Knocked it out of my hand. Scattered money all around.”
“My God,” Jena said. “What happened then?”
“We scuffled. He tried to pick up the money, but I hit him, and then he just ran off. He got a few dollars. Not much.” He stared at her across the table full of empty plates.
“You didn’t tell me any of this before, did you?”
“No,” Wales said. “I was happy to be with you and not to think about it.”
“But weren’t you hurt?” She extended one hand across the table’s width and gently touched his.
“No, I wasn’t,” Wales said. “Not at all.”
“Did it scare you?” she said. Interest rekindled in her eyes. She liked it that he was a man who withheld facts, who could make love, eat dinner, consider dancing and still keep all this to himself. She liked it that he would fight another man. Come to blows.
“It did scare me,” Wales said. “But the thing I remember, and I don’t remember very much, is how his hand felt when it hit my hand. There was terrible force in it. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever felt. It was need and desperation at one time. It was attractive. I’m sure I won’t ever forget it.”
Wales took a sip of his wine and stared at her. All of this had happened to him two months ago, when he first came back to America. Not tonight. He hadn’t fought such a man at all, but had been hit as he’d said and felt about it the way he’d just told her. Only, not now. He wished, for an instant, that he could feel that force again. How satisfying that had been. The certainty. She liked this story. Perhaps it would fix something.
“Are you sure you’re not hurt?” Jena said, folding her napkin, her eyes lowered.
“Oh no,” Wales said. “I’m not hurt. I’m perfectly fine.”
“You’re lucky to be alive, is what you are,” she said, and glanced at him as her eyes sought the waiter.
“I know,” Wales said. “I’ll add it to my list of lucky things.”
On the street, in front of The Drake, they stopped near the busy corner at Michigan, where taxis turned and idled past. It was after midnight, and seemed warmer. The wind had settled. In the curb gutters, ice was turning to murky water. The hotel glowed golden in the night above them.
They simply stood. Wales looked up the side street toward the lake as if he planned to hail a taxi.
“I’ll be going home in the morning,” she said and smiled at him, pulled her hair back on one side and held it there.
“Home, home,” Wales said. “I’ll be going too, then.” He wished he could stay longer. He felt her room key card still in his pocket. That was over.
A man almost directly beside them on the street was talking into a pay phone. He had on a tuxedo jacket and a pair of nice patent leather shoes. He’d been to a party in The Drake, but now seemed desperate about something.
Wales had expected to tell her about the woman he had seen killed, about the astonishment of that, to retell it — the slowing of time, the stateliness of events, the sensation that the worst could be avoided, the future improved by a more gradual unfolding. But he had no wish now to reveal the things he could be made to think, how his mind worked, or what he could feel in response to events. Better to be a spy, to be close to her now, satisfied with her, think exclusively about her. He knew he was not yet distinguishing things perfectly, wasn’t confident which feelings were his real ones, or how he would think about events later. It was not, perhaps, so easy to reveal yourself.
“Are you happy with these days?” he heard her say. She was smiling at him out on the cold sidewalk. “These were wonderful days, weren’t they? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a thousand of them?”
“I’m sorry they’re over,” Wales said. The man in the tuxedo jacket slammed the phone down and walked quickly away, toward the hotel’s lighted marquee. “Could I ask you something,” he said. He felt like he was shouting.
“Yes,” she said. “Do ask me.”
“Did this give you anything?” Wales said. “Did I give you anything you cared about? It seemed like you wanted there to be an outcome.”
“What an odd thing to ask,” Jena said, her eyes shining, growing large again. She seemed about to laugh, but then suddenly moved to him, stood on tiptoes and kissed him on the mouth, hard, put her cold cheek to his cheek and said, “Yes. You gave me so much. You gave me all there was. Didn’t you? That’s what I wanted.”