“Not that you observed. There were a few weeks when I thought I was going to be second in my class in med school.”
“Aren’t you embarrassed to be such an overachiever?” Martin says, shaking his head in amazement.
“I don’t think about it one way or another. It was expected of me. When I was in high school, I got stropped by my old man for every grade that wasn’t an A.”
“Is that true?” Audrey says. “Your father beat you?”
“It’s true,” Barnes says. “There are a lot of things you don’t know about me.” He pours himself some more wine. “I can’t stand pain,” he says. “That’s part of why I went into medicine. Because I think about it all the time anyway, and doing what I do I can be grateful every day that it’s somebody else’s suffering. When I was a resident, I’d go to see the patient after surgery and leave the room and puke. Nurses puke sometimes. You hardly ever see a doctor puke.”
“Did you let anybody comfort you then?” Audrey says. “You don’t let anybody comfort you now.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” Barnes says. He takes a drink of wine, raising the glass with such composure that I wouldn’t know he was drunk if he wasn’t looking into the goblet at the same time he was drinking. He puts the glass back on the table. “It’s easier for me to talk to men,” he says. “Men will only go so far, and women are so single-minded about soothing you. I’ve always thought that once I started letting down I might lose my energy permanently. Stay here and float in a swimming pool all day. Read. Drink. Not keep going.”
“Barnes,” Audrey says, “this is awful.” She pushes her bangs back with one hand.
“Christ,” Barnes says, leaning over and taking her hand from her face. “I sound like some character out of D. H. Lawrence. I don’t know what I’m talking about.” He gets up. “I’m going to get the other pizza out of the oven.”
On the way into the kitchen, he hits his leg on the coffee table. Geodes rattle on the glass tabletop. On the table, in a wicker tray, there are blue stones, polished amethysts, inky-black pebbles from a stream, marbles with clouds of color like smoke trapped inside. The house is full of things to touch — silk flowers you have to put a finger on to see if they’re real, snow domes to shake, Audrey’s tarot cards. Audrey is looking at Martin now with the same bewildered look that she gets when she lays out the tarot cards and studies them. Martin takes her hand. He is still holding her hand when Barnes comes back, and only lets go when Barnes begins to lower the pizza to the center of the table.
“I’m sorry,” Barnes says. “It’s not a good time to be talking about my problems, is it?”
“Why not?” Martin says. “Everybody’s been their usual witty and clever self all weekend. It’s all right to talk about real things.”
“Well, I don’t want to make a fool of myself anymore,” Barnes says, cutting the pizza into squares. “Why don’t you talk about what it’s like to have lived with Lynn for so many years and then suddenly she’s famous.” Barnes puts a piece of pizza on my plate. He serves a piece to Martin. Audrey holds her fingers above her plate. For a drunken minute, I don’t realize she’s saying she doesn’t want more food — her fingers are hovering lightly, the way they do when she picks up a tarot card.
“Last Monday I put in an all-nighter,” Barnes says to me. “Matty Klein was with me. We were riding down Park Avenue afterwards, and your song came on the radio. We were both so amazed. Not at what we’d just pulled off in five hours of surgery but that there we were in the back of a cab with the sun coming up and you were singing on the radio. I’m still used to the way you were singing with Audrey in the kitchen a while ago — the way you just sing, and she sings along. Then I realized in the cab that that wasn’t private anymore.” He takes another drink of wine. “Am I making any sense?” he says.
“It makes perfect sense,” Martin says. “Try to explain that to her.”
“It’s not private,” I say. “Other things are private, but that’s just me singing a song.”
Barnes pushes his chair back from the table. “I’ll tell you what I never get over,” he says. “That I can take my hands out of somebody’s body, wash them, get in a cab, go home, and hardly wait to get into bed with Audrey to touch her, because that’s so mysterious. In spite of what I do, I haven’t found out anything.”
“Is this leading up to your saying again that you don’t know why I’ve had two miscarriages?” Audrey says.
“No, I wasn’t thinking about that at all,” Barnes says.
“I’ll tell you what I thought it was about,” Martin says. “I thought that Barnes wanted me to tell everybody why I’ve freaked out now that Lynn’s famous. It doesn’t seem very … timely of me to be pulling out now.”
“When did I say that what I wanted was to be famous?” I say.
“I can’t do it,” Audrey says. “It’s too hard to pretend to be involved in what other people are talking about when all I can think about are the miscarriages.”
She is the first to cry, though any of us might have been.
Bruno, the dog, has shifting loyalties. Because Martin threw the football for him after dinner, he has settled by our bed in the living room. His sleep is deep, and fitfuclass="underline" paws flapping, hard breaths, a tiny, high-pitched yelp once as he exhales. Martin says that he is having running dreams. I close my eyes and try to imagine Bruno’s dream, but I end up thinking about all the things he probably doesn’t dream about: the blue sky, or the hardness of the field when the ground gets cold. Or, if he noticed those things, they wouldn’t seem sad.
“If I loved somebody else, would that make it easier?” Martin says.
“Do you?” I say.
“No. I’ve thought that that would be a way out, though. That way you could think I was just somebody you’d misjudged.”
“Everybody’s changing so suddenly,” I say. “Do you realize that? All of a sudden Barnes wants to open up to us, and you want to be left alone, and Audrey wants to forget about the life she had in the city and live in this quiet place and have children.”
“What about you?” he says.
“Would it make sense to you that I’ve stopped crying and feeling panicky because I’m in love with somebody else?”
“I’ll bet that’s true,” he says. I feel him stroking the dog. This is what he does to try to quiet him without waking him up — gently rubbing his side with his foot. “Is it true?” he says.
“No. I’d like to hurt you by having it be true, though.”
He reaches for the quilt folded at the foot of the bed and pulls it over the blanket.
“That isn’t like you,” he says.
He stops stroking the dog and turns toward me. “I feel so locked in,” he says. “I feel like we’ve got to come out here every weekend. I feel it’s inevitable that there’s a ‘we.’ I feel guilty for feeling bad, because Barnes’s father beat him up, and my sister lost two babies, and you’ve been putting it all on the line, and I don’t feel like I’m keeping up with you. You’ve all got more energy than I do.”
“Martin — Barnes was dead-drunk, and Audrey was in tears, and before it was midnight I had to admit I was exhausted and go to bed.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he says. “You don’t understand what I mean.”
We are silent, and I can hear the house moving in the wind. Barnes hasn’t put up the storm windows yet. Air leaks in around the windows. I let Martin put his arm around me for the warmth, and I slide lower in the bed so that my shoulders are under the blanket and quilt.
“What I meant is that I’m not entitled to this,” Martin says. “With what he goes through at the hospital, he’s entitled to get blasted on Saturday night. She’s got every right to cry. Your head’s full of music all the time, and that wears you down, even if you aren’t writing or playing.” He whispers, even more quietly, “What did you think when he said that about his father beating him?”