Kling hesitated.
“I was recently divorced,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Well,” he said, and lifted his wineglass, avoiding her steady gaze. “How about you?” he said. He was looking out over the river now.
“Still hoping for Mr. Right,” she said. “I keep having this fantasy… well, I really shouldn’t tell you this.”
“No, go ahead,” he said, turning back to her.
“Well… really, it’s silly,” she said, and he could swear that she was blushing, but perhaps it was only the red glow of the candle in its holder. “I keep fantasizing that one of those rapists out there will succeed one night, do you know? I won’t be able to get my gun on him in time, he’ll do whatever he wants and — surprise — he’ll turn out to be Prince Charming! I’ll fall madly in love with him, and we’ll live happily ever after. Whatever you do, don’t tell that to Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem. I’ll get drummed out of the women’s movement.”
“The old rape fantasy,” Kling said.
“Except that I happen to deal with real rape,” Eileen said. “And I know it isn’t fun and games.”
“Mm,” Kling said.
“So why should I fantasize about it? I mean, I’ve come within a hairsbreadth of it so many times…”
“Maybe that’s what accounts for the fantasy,” Kling said. “The fantasy makes it seem less frightening. Your work. What you have to do. Maybe,” he said, and shrugged.
“We’ve just had our ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this’ scene, haven’t we?”
“I suppose so,” he said, and smiled.
“Somebody ought to write a book about all the different kinds of clichéd scenes,” she said. “The one I like best, I think, is when the killer has a gun on the guy who’s been chasing him, and he says something like, ‘It’s safe to tell you this now because in three seconds flat you’ll be dead,’ and then proceeds to brag about all the people he killed and how and why he killed them.”
“I wish it was that easy,” Kling said, still smiling.
“Or what I call the ‘Uh-oh!’ scene. Where we see a wife in bed with her lover, and then we cut away to the husband putting his key in the door latch, and we’re all supposed to go, ‘Uh-oh, here it comes!’ Don’t you just love that scene?”
The smile dropped from his face.
She looked into his eyes, trying to read them, knowing she’d somehow made a dreadful mistake, and trying to understand what she’d said that had been so terribly wrong. Until that moment, they’d seemed—
“I’d better get the check,” he said.
She knew better than to press it. If there was one thing she’d learned as a decoy, it was patience.
“Sure,” she said, “I’ve got to run, too. Hey, thanks for bringing the earring back, really. I appreciate it.”
“No problem,” Kling said, but he wasn’t looking at her, he was signaling to the waiter instead.
They sat in silence while they waited for the check. When they left the place, they shook hands politely on the sidewalk outside and walked off in opposite directions.
When the telephone rang, it startled Kling.
The phone was on an end table beside the bed, and the first ring slammed into the silence of the room like a pistol shot, causing him to sit bolt upright, his heart pounding. He grabbed for the receiver.
“Hello?” he said.
“Hi, this is Eileen,” she said.
“Oh, hi,” he said.
“You sound out of breath.”
“No, I… it was very quiet in here. When the phone rang, it surprised me.” His heart was still pounding.
“You weren’t asleep, were you? I didn’t—”
“No, no, I was just lying here.”
“In bed?”
“Yes.”
“I’m in bed, too,” she said.
He said nothing.
“I wanted to apologize,” she said.
“What for?”
“I didn’t know about the divorce,” she said.
“Well, that’s okay.”
“I wouldn’t have said what I said if I’d known.”
What she meant, he realized, was that she hadn’t known about the circumstances of the divorce. She had found out since yesterday, it was common currency in the department, and now she was apologizing for having described what she’d called an “Uh-oh!” scene, the wife in bed with her lover, the husband coming up the steps, the very damn thing that had happened to Kling.
“That’s okay,” he said.
It was not okay.
“I’ve just made it worse, haven’t I?” she said.
He was about to say, “No, don’t be silly, thanks for calling,” when he thought, unexpectedly, Yes, you have made it worse, and he said, “As a matter of fact, you have.”
“I’m sorry. I only wanted—”
“What’d they tell you?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Come on,” he said. “Whoever told you about it.”
“Only that there’d been some kind of problem.”
“Uh-huh. What kind of problem?”
“Just a problem.”
“My wife was playing around, right?”
“Well, yes, that’s what I was told.”
“Fine,” he said.
There was a long silence on the line.
“Well,” she said, and sighed. “I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry if I upset you yesterday.”
“You didn’t upset me,” he said.
“You sound upset.”
“I am upset,” he said.
“Bert…” she said, and hesitated. “Please don’t be mad at me, okay? Please don’t!” and he could swear that suddenly she was crying. The next thing he heard was a click on the line.
He looked at the phone receiver.
“What?” he said to the empty room.
Had she been crying?
He hadn’t wanted to make her cry, he hardly knew the girl. He went to the window and stared out at the cars moving steadily across the city, their headlights piercing the night. It was snowing again. Would it ever stop snowing? He had not wanted to make her cry. What the hell was wrong with him? Augusta is wrong with me, he thought, and went back to the bed.
It might have been easier to forget her if only he didn’t have to see her face everywhere he turned. Your average divorced couple, especially if there were no kids involved, you hardly ever ran into each other after the final decree. You started to forget. Sometimes you forgot even the good things you’d shared, which was bad but which was the nature of the beast called divorce. With Augusta, it was different. Augusta was a model. You couldn’t pass a magazine rack without seeing her face on the cover of at least one magazine each and every month, sometimes two. You couldn’t turn on television without seeing her in a hair commercial (she had such beautiful hair) or a toothpaste commercial, or just last week in a nail-polish commercial, Augusta’s hands fanned out in front of her gorgeous face, the nails long and bright red, as if they’d been dipped in fresh blood, the smile on her lace — ahh, Jesus, that wonderful smile. It got so he didn’t want to turn on the TV set anymore, for fear Augusta would leap out of the tube at him, and he’d start remembering again, and begin crying again.
He lay fully dressed on the bed in the small apartment he was renting near the bridge, his hands behind his head, his head turned so that he could see through the window, see the cars moving on the bridge to Calm’s Point — the theater crowd, he guessed; the shows had all broken by now, and people were heading home. People going home together. He took a deep breath.