The long silence flickered with invisible movement. “Margot,” said Patrick, “I love you.” The movement shimmered in his voice.
The next morning Margot woke at six o’clock, riven by the half memory of Patrick on a damp gray day, holding his rough old coat about his bare neck, his full lips parted, dry granules of skin at one corner of his mouth. She couldn’t remember his eyes.
She rolled to one side of her bed and tried to comfort herself by putting her palm and face against the warm place where she had been lying. Her memory surged voluptuously: he’d held her against his chest and she’d cried about Chiquita. She rested in and was upheld by his strength and his glandular boy’s resolve. She put her palm against his chest. He covered it with his hand. “I’ve thought about us,” he said.
She opened her eyes. The artificial quality of his voice was pleasing in the way a song on a grocery store sound system can be pleasing. But it was not what she wanted.
“Basically, I could take it or leave it,” he said.
She sat up and stared at him. She got off the bed. “Then you can leave it,” she’d said.
Now she rolled onto her back and pulled the blankets up to her chin. She remembered Roberta getting up to go to work one morning, pulling away from Margot’s embrace as she rolled naked from the bed. She’d yawned as she walked across the floor, swinging her slim hips. “Then you can leave it,” Margot said aloud.
After that night, Margot had tried to act normal with Patrick, but it didn’t work. He was stilted and polite. When she asked him out for coffee, he couldn’t come. Breakfast conversations that should’ve been casual took sharp turns; innocuous comments seemed to have complicated, unseen meanings. Dolores and Donald looked on with sidelong glances. It seemed to her that Patrick had made her feel rejected for absolutely no reason when she couldn’t afford to feel that way. This idea made her indignant, and her indignation mounted with each odd conversational moment, finally rearing up to its full height one morning while Patrick was telling the house-hold about his disastrous encounter with two sisters, both of whom had briefly been lovers of his. There had been screaming, tears, awful accusations.
“The absurd thing is, I like both of them a lot,” said Patrick. “But I didn’t really want to have sex with either one. All this could’ve been avoided if—”
“Patrick,” said Margot, “if you didn’t want to have sex with them, then why did you?”
He tipped his chair back and looked at her with insouciant tension. “Because they wanted to, mostly.”
“That is not an answer.”
Patrick shrugged and eased his chair back onto its four legs.
As Margot left the room, she’d heard Donald say, “Isn’t she, like, supposed to be a lesbian?”
They made plans for another dinner date, but Patrick canceled it because he had to fly to Los Angeles to tie up business related to his CD-ROM. The whole project was driving him crazy, he said. The psychiatrists were hell to work with; they were all deluded egomaniacs. And things were not going well with Tricia, who was being stalked by a biker with whom she’d had a one-night stand. His first urge of course was to protect her, but he was also disgusted with her for allowing such a situation to come about. “I mean, for so long, she was really living straight, you know? And I respected her for it. And now—”
“Patrick,” said Margot abruptly, “how’s Dolores? Did you get her number for me?”
“Oh, damn,” he said. “I forgot about that. I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to think about her, it’s so sad. But I’ll get it.”
When Margot got off the phone she felt that she didn’t want to talk to Patrick again, let alone see him. “What an asshole,” she said to her darkened hallway. Hours later, preparing for bed, she spat diluted toothpaste into the sink, looked at herself in the mirror, and said it again. Her hair was held back in a ratty terry-cloth band, and her features were stark, inturned, and convictionless.
Once, on a brilliant spring day sixteen years before, she had come home just in time to see Patrick burst from their rented house with an enormous bundle in his arms. It was swathed in Dolores’s quilt, and it was apparently very heavy. Without speaking, he hurried past. He had put the bundle in his car and slammed the door before she realized that he had been carrying Dolores and that she was unconscious.
Patrick hadn’t come back to the house until evening. From her room she’d heard him open the refrigerator, close it, and then go upstairs to his room. She stood at her door for an irresolute moment, then she followed him. He opened the door before she knocked. They sat on his bed, and he lay his head on her shoulder, hunching his body as if he were smaller than she. She stroked his head and neck. His pulse was fluxing like an electrical current. Dolores had tried to kill herself with the Valium their mother had sent him. He’d found her on the bathroom floor.
Dolores came back from the hospital much the same as she had been before she left. She sat at the breakfast table for hours, affixing and polishing her false nails. Patrick slouched in the sun, and some-times his attention touched his sister like a traveling drop of light.
He was supposed to call her during the next week to make another dinner appointment, but he didn’t. She didn’t call him, either, and as one week passed and then another, she thought of him less and less. She would’ve said that she’d forgotten him, except that occasionally his image would come to her, attached to thoughts or events that had no apparent relation to him, and inside her, a little tongue of feeling would fly up.
One day at work, when she was on an intake phone shift, she received another phone call from the young man who believed he was being stalked.
Margot didn’t tell him they’d already spoken, and he went into his story at a full gallop.
“She keeps writing these fucked-up letters, and I don’t answer, except just to be polite I sent her this form letter I send all my friends, just to let everybody know what’s going on. And she called me and left this hysterical message on my machine, going on about how much I mean to her, and wanting to read me some poem—”
“Tell me as clearly as you can,” said Margot. “What would you like me to do?”
“—and when I called her back, she said she’d called because I’d answered her letter, but I didn’t! It was a computer-generated form letter; I didn’t even sign it! Hers were all personal, all handwritten! And they were sick! She’s going on about how she once drew a picture of me—I’ve never drawn a picture of anyone since I was, like, ten!”
Margot held the phone away from her ear for a moment. The little tongue flew up. She shook her head and returned the receiver to her ear.
“—and I said, ‘Oh, you like me, well, that’s very nice, why don’t you start a fan club?’”
“Perhaps,” said Margot, “you might want to make an appointment to discuss this further with a psychiatrist. Other than that, I don’t—”
He hung up.
Several days later Patrick telephoned to invite her to dinner and afterward to view his CD-ROM. She said yes.
He arrived at her apartment an hour and a half late. He was driving a new car, so elaborately appointed that sitting in it made her feel like a vegetable in a velvet box. He was dressed in an elegant suit that was an announcement of competence and public force. He wore a scent that had mixed with his sweat, and the smell of it made her imagine him naked and private, carefully daubing it on his neck, his stomach, his inner wrist. The contrast made him seem vulnerable and strangely innocent. He looked at her and smiled giddily. She thought, Orchid.