“It doesn’t seem to me an unreasonable ultimatum. Isn’t that better than being circuitous?”
“I think she knows already how I feel.”
“But you don’t know whether she’s seeing Ron or not.”
I admitted I didn’t, though had my suspicions. “Why won’t she tell me that she’s not if she’s not.”
“That’s a good question. Maybe she wants a deeper commitment from you. Maybe it’s her bargaining chip.”
“I don’t know if I’m ready to make a deeper commitment, which I assume you mean to be marriage.”
“You might see her more than you have without exactly marrying her.”
“I think I could do that,” I said. “I just don’t know what’s expected of me.”
“Yes you do,” he said. “You don’t know what you don’t want to know.”
I let his comment seep in, not free from the anxiety I was already feeling. I wanted, like Eva, to remain my own person which meant being by myself at times.
“Compromises may have to be made,” he said. “Not everything works out to our exact specification.”
I left him feeling both worse and better than when I came in.
I was walking with Eva three days a week and sleeping with her twice. I could expand that time, but I wasn’t quite sure how to offer the change.
I had the déjà vu feeling that I was at this juncture before. And what did I do then? I no longer remembered.
“Why do you think I’m obsessed with Ron?” I asked.
“Did I say that? Well, you’re always bringing his name up.”
“Do you think there’s a reason for it?” I asked.
“I’m sure there must be,” she said, “though I don’t understand it. I already told you that it’s you I care for and not Ron.”
“You said I was more important to you,” I said.
“And you are.”
“That’s a relative statement. That I’m more important doesn’t mean that Ron’s not important, does it.”
“I think I understand the problem,” she said. “Ron’s an old friend, but he’s not important to me. Is that clear?”
“It may be,” I said. “I’m not happy that he’s an old friend.”
“The past can’t be undone. You know perfectly well that he’s an old friend. Things change.”
This was the time to ask if she were still seeing him, but I resisted the question.
We walked in silence for awhile. Finally I said, “I’d like to see you more often than I do.”
“No one’s stopping you, Mel.”
So after this discussion, I began to walk with her four times a week and bed her down three times, an incremental change. It still left her time — less time of course — to see Ron if she was so disposed. The change cut into my periods of being alone, but I soon got used to it. Still, I didn’t want to wear out my welcome. And marriage which was on my mind at times, was out of the question at least for the time being. In a certain sense we were almost married.
“Does our time together always have to be on the same days,” she asked me, on one of our walks. “It deters spontaneity.”
“I like it better that way,” I said. I couldn’t explain my reasons. They were too private. “Would you like to change the days?”
“Once in a while,” she said.
So we entered the pattern of Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday one week and Wednesday, Friday and Sunday the next. This was for sleeping together. Our walking time remained the same each week. So far as I knew, I was the only one she took walks with.
I still couldn’t shake my so-called obsession with Ron. I thought the new arrangement would make it harder for him if he was still around.
On Monday, which was an unsubscribed day, I tried to listen at the wall and I could always imagine voices.
One Monday night in a nervous state, I knocked at her door.
“What?” she said, opening it in her bathrobe.
“I was thinking of you, Eva,” I said.
“That’s nice,” she said. “Do you want to come in?”
“That’s all right,” I said and gave her a quick hug. Being invited in wasn’t part of my scenario. That I was invited in was sufficient. If Ron were there, she would not likely have invited me in.
I went back to my place temporarily satisfied. Then I thought maybe Ron came over once every two weeks and this wasn’t his Monday. I would have to be with her all the time to know what I wanted to know. That was the sanctity of marriage, I thought and as I said I resisted marriage.
One day during one of our walks we noticed Ron walking by himself in the distance. “Do you want to say hello,” she asked me.
“Not particularly,” I said.
And so we slowed down — our pace was usually brisk — so as not to catch up. We never said hello or acknowledged one another in any way. Eva did not seem disturbed by my choice. “I don’t think he saw us,” she said.
Not unless he had eyes in the back of his head or he was following us by staying ahead of us, which meant he was aware of our usual route.
I told Klotzman of this perception and he laughed it off. “That’s a trifle far-fetched,” he said. “Do you really believe that?”
“Just an idea,” I said. “I can see it’s not likely.
“You’re not ready to let Ron go yet, are you?”
“He showed up,” I said. “I didn’t invent his appearance.”
“If Ron didn’t exist, Mel, you probably would have invented him.”
“I didn’t have to invent him,” I said. “He certainly does exist.”
“You’ve made him into something much more powerful and ubiquitous,” he said.
“I gather you don’t want me to mention him any more,” I said.
“Not true. I want you to feel you can mention anybody and anything in this room,” he said.
“Do you want to hear of my latest lineup dream? I asked.
“If that’s what you want to talk about.”
“In this dream, the first two candidates were versions of Eva. In the third spot, were Ron and Eva together under the same coat. In the fourth spot there was a woman I didn’t know, clearly not Eva. In the fifth spot, was a man who resembled my father as a young man. ‘Make your choice,’ I was told. I picked the Eva lookalike in spot one, but as I got closer I saw it wasn’t Eva at all, but Ron dressed in Eva’s clothes. The shock woke me.”
“You feel that Ron stands between you and Eva,” he said.
“He did in the dream,” I said. “What was my father doing in the dream.”
“What’s your reading of it,” he asked. “What was at stake in this lineup?”
“I was asked to choose the one most important to me,” I said.
“Your father’s appearance makes some sense then.”
“I don’t think about my father,” I said, disputing his importance.
“Apparently your unconscious thinks about him,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “What were Ron and Eva doing under the same coat?”
“At the very least, it’s a form of intimacy,” he said. “It represents something you dread.”
“It presented a comic picture to me as if there were only one coat to go around,” I said.
“I wouldn’t have thought of it in that way,” he said.
“It’s not a psychological reading,” I said.
“It may be that at some level, Eva and Ron are the same to you.”
“No way,” I said. “I don’t buy that.”
“What do you think the dream is telling you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, upset with the image of Eva and Ron being interchangeable.
“If there were no Eva, Ron wouldn’t matter to you,” he said.
“Whatever, I don’t like him,” I said. “And there is an Eva. You’re always dissuading me from unreal conjectures.”
“What about him don’t you like?” he asked. “It has to do with Eva, doesn’t it?”