“I love you,” she said.
He sat up and drew back. “You don’t mean that.”
“I don’t know.” Her bewilderment increased. “I think I do.”
“You love me?” His voice was astounded and fluting. “You love me!” He opened the car door, bounded out, and jumped up and down in the street, yelling.
It’s true, she thought, astounded herself. It’s true.
He flew around the car, into the shelter of her open door, and knelt, his arms about her waist. “I love you too,” he said. “And I’m going to respect you. I’ll sleep here all night and I won’t try to do anything.”
“Sleep here?” She took his face in her hands and rubbed her nose the length of his. “No way. You’ll be after me all night, and I’ll never get any sleep.”
“I’m not leaving,” he said. “If I leave, it’ll ruin everything. I’m going away for a week tomorrow, and I’ve got to stay with you.”
“See, you’re doing it again. You’re not respecting my wishes.” But her voice was full of shy delight.
“I’ll sleep on the floor!” he said. “In the living room!”
“That’s ridiculous. It would be much too uncomfortable.” She paused. “You can sleep on the bed, but you have to wear your clothes and stay outside the blankets.” She felt like a little girl with a rhinestone tiara on her head. She waved her plastic scepter. “You have to promise.”
All night, he shivered against her warm, blanketed body. In the light from the window, her sleeping face appeared concentrated and intent. Once she twitched, and the tiny, urgent movement seemed the result of a fierce, private effort she was making deep in her head. He turned away from her so that he could look out the window, his back firmly against hers. His thoughts went forward, then backward, then he fanned them out laterally: a phone call to his mother, a quarrel with the drummer, a newscast about a raped and murdered teenage baby-sitter, the kitchen of that dump in Seattle where he ate hot french fries out of the fryer basket and listened to the cook talk shit about some girl. He imagined scooping up sleeping Valerie and placing her in the middle of his thoughts. He imagined her waking in the thriving garden of his thoughts, confused and possibly frightened. Then he imagined her realizing what he’d done; she put her hands on her hips, she tapped her foot, she fixed him with a fussing eye.
He was cold to the bone by now, but he didn’t move even to shut the window. He was respecting her.
“Michael?” She turned and gently groped his back. “What’s wrong? You’re shaking so—oh, you’re cold! Come under the blanket!”
“It’s all right. I said I would stay outside the blanket, and I will.”
“Don’t be silly. Come under the covers.” She lifted the blankets, greeting him with her warmth and smell. “Come on. You’ll get sick or something.”
He hesitated, drawing out the moment.
“Don’t you . . .” She faltered. “Don’t you want to?”
“Yes,” he said. “I want to.” And he did.
Comfort
Daniel sat in his San Francisco apartment on a big, mushy pillow, with his black rubber drum pad on his lap. He stretched his legs and pushed the coffee table on which he and Jacquie had just eaten dinner into the middle of the room at a cockeyed angle. Jacquie sat on the bed, coiled in a blanket, holding an Edith Wharton novel in her small, stubby hands. As she read, her gold-brown eyes moved intently back and forth, giving off a spark of private frisson. Half hidden under her lowered lids, the movement of her eyes reminded him of an animal glimpsed as it slips quietly through the underbrush. With loose-wristed strokes, Daniel cheerfully swatted his pad. The phone rang.
“Probably somebody we don’t want to talk to,” said Jacquie.
Daniel rolled his eyes. It was his brother, Albert, calling from Iowa.
“Dan,” said Albert. “Something bad happened.”
“What?”
“Mom had a car crash. She’s alive, but she’s really hurt. She’s broken her neck and smashed her pelvis.” He paused, breathing heavily. “And she also broke some ribs.”
Daniel made an involuntary noise. Jacquie’s quick glance was almost sharp. The drumsticks fell to the floor and rolled.
The evening became a terrible melding of misery and sensual tenderness. Jacquie held his head against her breast and stroked him as pain moved through him in slow, even waves. At moments, the pain seemed to blur with the contours of Jacquie’s body, to align itself with her warmth and care, as if by soothing it, she actually made it greater. He stared at their dirty dinner plates, shocked by their brute ordinariness: tiny bones, hunks of torn-up lemon, mashed fish skin.
Late at night, they lay without sleeping on their narrow bed. Jacquie held him from behind, one strong arm firmly around his chest, her dry feet pressed against his. She spoke against his back, her voice muffled, her breath a warm puff against his skin. “Your family gets in a lot of car crashes, don’t they?”
He opened his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “So do a lot of people. There’s car crashes all over America all the time.”
“Well, there was the one with the whole family in it when you were a little kid, and then the one when your father drove into the fence, and then the one where your mother got hit in the parking lot, and now this. That seems like a lot for one family.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m not trying to say anything. I just noticed it.”
“My mother’s lying in the hospital with half her bones broken, and you just noticed that.”
Jacquie took her arm from him and turned the other way.
There is something wrong with her, he thought. They had been together for two years; this was not the first time he had had this thought.
He flew to Iowa the following day.
He had not been in his brother’s suburban house before; he found it bland and characterless, and he was glad of that. A more decoratively expressive home might’ve waked his sensibility and made him feel worse.
Albert was a pharmacist. Together, he and his wife, Rose, reminded Daniel of two colored building blocks made to illustrate solidity, squareness, and rectangularity for children, the kind of blocks that, when picked up, turn out to be practically weightless and not solid at all. Apart from Rose, Albert became heavier, more sullen. His problems expressed themselves in his heavy brows. His hands took on a morose, defensive character. The brothers were eight years apart. They had never been close, and they had become less close in adulthood.
On the night of Daniel’s arrival, they sat at the kitchen table, eating Mexican takeout and trying to comfort each other. Their words were difficult and, on the surface, not especially comforting. Their halting conversation would’ve been small talk but for the emotional current moving under it, sometimes rising to fill whole strings of words with mysterious feeling, then subsiding to a barely felt pulse. Rose sat forward attentively, as though she were silently monitoring the unspoken current. When they got up from the table, Albert hugged Daniel as though part of him wanted the embrace and part of him wanted to get it over with. When his face came away, Daniel saw Albert’s left eye staring over Daniel’s shoulder, wild, bright, and oddly furtive.
All night, he lay awake in his hard little guest bed, thinking about his mother. He remembered her serving dishes of yogurt and cut fruit for dessert. He remembered her sitting with her feet up on the couch, painting her false fingernails pink. She was wearing her night-gown, and he could see that her knees were rough and that veins had flowered on her legs. Her hair was a manic knot of curls. She looked at her watch often. He could see all these images, but he could not feel them. He turned them this way and that, trying to feel his mother. She used to sit across the table from their father, working her jaws stiffly and minutely. “Daniel,” she said. “I want you to ask your father where he was last night.” For five years preceding the divorce, his mother and father had addressed each other primarily through their children, although when things got truly ugly, his mother would drop the act and scream at her husband straight on. Daniel brought his hard guest pillow to his side and hugged it. “Mother,” he said.