“What do you want?” she said.
“Does Joanna still live here?”
“Yeah. Who are you?”
“I’m Bobby’s father.”
“What do you mean?” She looked confused. She put her face closer to the screen. Her eyes were large, like Anita’s. She was prettier. Older.
“I’m his father. I came to visit him.”
He snapped his arms into his sides. He had been standing there like a bear, leaning forward, arms away from his body.
“What does he look like?” she said.
“He has medium-length brown hair. He has braces. Wait a minute — he was getting braces when I was last here, but I don’t know if he got them. He looks like me. Don’t you see the resemblance?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Come on in.”
“Who are you?” Donald said. “Where are they?”
“Bobby’s gone over to a friend’s house. I’m waiting for him to get back. Your wife is playing volleyball.”
“Where?” he said.
“Do you know the Orrs?”
“No.”
“She’s there.”
They stood facing each other. She had a cigarette in her mouth and was about to light the filter.
“It’s to surprise them,” he said. “They didn’t know I was coming.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Wrong end,” he said, reaching out to touch her hand before she could touch the lighted match to the cigarette.
The television was on, but she had turned down the volume before opening the door. Red Skelton was gesticulating, his face expanding and contracting as if it were made of putty.
“If you’re going to be here,” she said, “I might as well go.”
He nodded. She was going down the walk when he remembered about paying her. She turned around when he called after her and cocked her head. “Pay me?” she said. “Joanna’s my friend. I watch Bobby and she watches my daughter.”
“You have a daughter?” he said.
“Yes. I have a four-year-old daughter.” She smiled, deciding to be more friendly. “Her father is watching her. They went to the beach. I just live three streets over.”
She waved. She went out to the car and started it. The radio came on when the car started. It was a fine car: in perfect shape, motor idling quietly, paint sparkling. She waved again. Donald waved. She was gone.
He walked into the kitchen to look for a drink, realizing that he was not only tired but depressed. Depressed that he didn’t know one friend of Joanna’s and that the one he had just met was by accident. Maybe it wasn’t one of her close friends. How could she be a close friend if she didn’t even know that Joanna had never married. But maybe Joanna had told people she was divorced, for Bobby’s sake. For Bobby’s sake he would have married her, but she wouldn’t do it. They had argued about it, but he couldn’t change her mind. She lived in an apartment in New York with three other girls — a tiny apartment on the East Side. When she was three months pregnant she started bleeding. She called the doctor and he told her to go to bed. She and Donald jogged around Central Park. They danced the Virginia reel in his apartment as best they could, because that apartment was only slightly larger than hers. They sat in a bar and she said, “Everything’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.” The bleeding stopped. They jogged again, every night for a week, running like maniacs. Bobby was born six months later, in Florida. She had gone there because she had friends in Florida, and because he would not stop pestering her to marry him. Bobby was born one week before Donald’s birthday. One of her friends called him at work to tell him. Ironically, after she described the baby, she said, “Everything’s okay.” She told him that Joanna did not want to see him, that when she was ready she would call. No call.
Most houses that look small outside are a little larger inside. This one was not. He found rum to drink and walked around the house sipping it. He went from the kitchen back to the living room to the bedroom adjoining it and went in. It was her room. There was no bedspread, and the bed was made with white sheets. He sat on it, realizing how tired he was, then got up and smoothed out the wrinkles. The room was almost empty. There was a wicker chair in front of a big antique mirror, an ugly high white-painted dresser. He walked out and into Bobby’s room. There was a pile of clothes on the floor. On his dresser was a letter. It was addressed to someone named Robert Winter. It could have been anybody. Robert Winter lived in Pennsylvania. Who would Bobby know in Pennsylvania? He looked in the bathroom (Jean Naté on the glass shelf above the sink, a sand dollar, a tube of toothpaste, coiled like a snake), then walked exactly three steps and went back to the kitchen, where he put down his drink because he didn’t want it, and stepped down one step into the living room. He hoped that Bobby would come home first. Then she would be cordial if Bobby was glad to see him. If she came first, there was little chance of her being friendly. On a table by the sofa was a pile of pictures. Most of them were of Bobby, in uniform, playing baseball. There was one of her father hugging Bobby, in the snow, outside his big house in Massachusetts. Probably they had gone there for Christmas. There was one of Joanna in a long yellow skirt and a white blouse, and she was standing stiffly, as she always did in photographs. She looked as if she was going out for a big evening. Who was she going with? Robert Winter?
“Starley,” he had said, years ago in New York, “Joanna is pregnant and she won’t marry me.”
“I wouldn’t marry you either,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“Because I’m a man.”
“Christ — what are you joking about? This is serious. She’s going to have a baby, and she won’t get married.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You’re sorry she won’t marry me, or what?”
“What’s the cross-examination?” he said. “I’m sorry about everything.”
They were walking past the reservoir, where he and Joanna had run the week before.
“Give her time, she’ll change her mind.”
He took big steps when he walked. Donald took big steps with him.
“What do you want to get married for, anyway?” he said.
Four months later Starley was married to Alice.
He sat quietly with his hands in his lap until he heard her car in the drive — the VW she insisted on driving, even though he had patiently explained each time he saw her how unsafe a car it was. He fidgeted, not knowing whether to get up and open the door, or just sit there. Either way, he would probably frighten her. While he sat thinking, he lost the opportunity to move. She opened the door a crack, put her head around the corner, and her eyes met his.
“Oh God,” she sighed. “I wondered why the door was hanging open.”
Her hair was pulled back in a rubber band. She was carrying a tennis racket. She had on white shorts and a black T-shirt. She wiped her hair out of her face.
“Okay,” she said. “What are you doing here? I assume it got too cold for you up north.”
“It did,” he said. “It really did.”
“Where’s Deena?” she said.
“Is that her name? The woman with the four-year-old daughter?”
“She didn’t have her with her, did she? Am I crazy or something?”
“No, she … she told me. She said she had a daughter. I didn’t know her name.”
“Deena,” she said. “Now, what are you doing here?”
She sat in a wicker chair. He thought, If I can still be so attracted to her, I can’t love Susan. If I had reached Susan on the phone, what would I have said?
“Who’s Robert Wilson?” he said.
“I don’t know. Who?”
“Isn’t that his name?” He got up and went to Bobby’s room. He came back. “I mean Robert Winter,” he said.
“A friend of his who moved to Pennsylvania,” she said. “Did you count the silverware to make sure it was all there too?”