When George is seated again, Sarah, anxious to please, tells him, “If only my. father could be like you.”
“Your father,” George says. “I won’t have that analogy.” He says it pleasantly, but barely disguises his dismay at the comparison.
“I mean, he cares about nothing but business,” the girl stumbles on.
The music, in contrast, grows lovelier.
Lenore goes into the kitchen to get the salad and hears George say, “I simply won’t let you girls leave. Nobody leaves on a Saturday.”
There are polite protests, there are compliments to Lenore on the meal — there is too much talk. Lenore has trouble caring about what’s going on. The food is warm and delicious. She pours more wine and lets them talk.
“Godard, yes, I know … panning that row of honking cars so slowly, that long line of cars stretching on and on.”
She has picked up the end of George’s conversation. His arm slowly waves out over the table, indicating the line of motionless cars in the movie.
“That’s a lovely plant,” Julie says to Lenore.
“It’s Peruvian ivy,” Lenore says. She smiles. She is supposed to smile. She will not offer to hack shoots off her plant for these girls.
Sarah asks for a Dylan record when the Telemann finishes playing. White wax drips onto the wood table. George waits for it to solidify slightly, then scrapes up the little circles and with thumb and index finger flicks them gently toward Sarah. He explains (although she asked for no particular Dylan record) that he has only Dylan before he went electric. And “Planet Waves”—“because it’s so romantic. That’s silly of me, but true.” Sarah smiles at him. Julie smiles at Lenore. Julie is being polite, taking her cues from Sarah, really not understanding what’s going on. Lenore does not smile back. She has done enough to put them at ease. She is tired now, brought down by the music, a full stomach, and again the sounds of rain outside. For dessert there is homemade vanilla ice cream, made by George, with small black vanilla-bean flecks in it. He is still drinking wine, though; another bottle has been opened. He sips wine and then taps his spoon on his ice cream, looking at Sarah. Sarah smiles, letting them all see the smile, then sucks the ice cream off her spoon. Julie is missing more and more of what’s going on. Lenore watches as Julie strokes her hand absently on her napkin. She is wearing a thin silver choker and — Lenore notices for the first time — a thin silver ring on the third finger of her right hand.
“It’s just terrible about Anna,” George says, finishing his wine, his ice cream melting, looking at no one in particular, although Sarah was the one who brought up Anna the night before, when they had been in the house only a short time — Anna dead, hit by a car, hardly an accident at all. Anna was also a student of his. The driver of the car was drunk, but for some reason charges were not pressed. (Sarah and George have talked about this before, but Lenore blocks it out. What can she do about it? She met Anna once: a beautiful girl, with tiny, childlike hands, her hair thin and curly — wary, as beautiful people are wary.) Now the driver has been flipping out, Julie says, and calling Anna’s parents, wanting to talk to them to find out why it has happened.
The baby begins to cry. Lenore goes upstairs, pulls up more covers, talks to him for a minute. He settles for this. She goes downstairs. The wine must have affected her more than she realizes; otherwise, why is she counting the number of steps?
In the candlelit dining room, Julie sits alone at the table. The girl has been left alone again; George and Sarah took the umbrellas, decided to go for a walk in the rain.
• • •
It is eight o’clock. Since helping Lenore load the dishes into the dishwasher, when she said what a beautiful house Lenore had, Julie has said very little. Lenore is tired, and does not want to make conversation. They sit in the living room and drink wine.
“Sarah is my best friend,” Julie says. She seems apologetic about it. “I was so out of it when I came back to college. I was in Italy, with my husband, and suddenly I was back in the States. I couldn’t make friends. But Sarah wasn’t like the other people. She cared enough to be nice to me.”
“How long have you been friends?”
“For two years. She’s really the best friend I’ve ever had. We understand things — we don’t always have to talk about them.”
“Like her relationship with George,” Lenore says.
Too direct. Too unexpected. Julie has no answer.
“You act as if you’re to blame,” Lenore says.
“I feel strange because you’re such a nice lady.”
A nice lady! What an odd way to speak. Has she been reading Henry James? Lenore has never known what to think of herself, but she certainly thinks of herself as being more complicated than a “lady.”
“Why do you look that way?” Julie asks. “You are nice. I think you’ve been very nice to us. You’ve given up your whole weekend.”
“I always give up my weekends. Weekends are the only time we socialize, really. In a way, it’s good to have something to do.”
“But to have it turn out like this …” Julie says. “I think I feel so strange because when my own marriage broke up I didn’t even suspect. I mean, I couldn’t act the way you do, anyway, but I—”
“For all I know, nothing’s going on,” Lenore says. “For all I know, your friend is flattering herself, and George is trying to make me jealous.” She puts two more logs on the fire. When these are gone, she will either have to walk to the woodshed or give up and go to bed. “Is there something … major going on?” she asks.
Julie is sitting on the rug, by the fire, twirling her hair with her finger. “I didn’t know it when I came out here,” she says. “Sarah’s put me in a very awkward position.”
“But do you know how far it has gone?” Lenore asks, genuinely curious now.
“No,” Julie says.
No way to know if she’s telling the truth. Would Julie speak the truth to a lady? Probably not.
“Anyway,” Lenore says with a shrug, “I don’t want to think about it all the time.”
“I’d never have the courage to live with a man and not marry,” Julie says. “I mean, I wish I had, that we hadn’t gotten married, but I just don’t have that kind of … I’m not secure enough.”
“You have to live somewhere,” Lenore says.
Julie is looking at her as if she does not believe that she is sincere. Am I? Lenore wonders. She has lived with George for six years, and sometimes she thinks she has caught his way of playing games, along with his colds, his bad moods.
“I’ll show you something,” Lenore says. She gets up, and Julie follows. Lenore puts on the light in George’s study, and they walk through it to a bathroom he has converted to a darkroom. Under a table, in a box behind another box, there is a stack of pictures. Lenore takes them out and hands them to Julie. They are pictures that Lenore found in his darkroom last summer; they were left out by mistake, no doubt, and she found them when she went in with some contact prints he had left in their bedroom. They are high-contrast photographs of George’s face. In all of them he looks very serious and very sad; in some of them his eyes seem to be narrowed in pain. In one, his mouth is open. It is an excellent photograph of a man in agony, a man about to scream.
“What are they?” Julie whispers.
“Pictures he took of himself,” Lenore says. She shrugs. “So I stay,” she says.
Julie nods. Lenore nods, taking the pictures back. Lenore has not thought until this minute that this may be why she stays. In fact, it is not the only reason. It is just a very demonstrable, impressive reason. When she first saw the pictures, her own face had become as distorted as George’s. She had simply not known what to do. She had been frightened and ashamed. Finally she put them in an empty box, and put the box behind another box. She did not even want him to see the horrible pictures again. She does not know if he has ever found them, pushed back against the wall in that other box. As George says, there can be too much communication between people.