Already Rebecca can tell the story two different ways. One ends with them getting married. The other ends with her looking back over a cratered battlefield of a love affair and wondering: What were you thinking?
Harriet calls late one morning, practically in tears.
“What is it?” Rebecca asks.
“I’m still in bed. They haven’t—when I woke up I said I needed the bedpan. And the aide told me it was too much trouble, I should just… go, and they’d come clean me up. So I did, but that was a couple of hours ago—”
Rebecca looks at the clock hanging on the wall of the bookstore. It’s eleven-thirty. “I’ll call you right back.” She hangs up, and then calls the nursing home and asks to speak to Harriet’s caseworker. She describes what Harriet has just told her and ends by saying, “That is not okay.”
“No, it’s not,” the caseworker agrees smoothly. “You’re right. But sometimes they can make it sound worse than it really is; there may be a little more to the story. Let me go look into it.”
Rebecca’s hands are shaking. “I don’t think my mother is confused about what’s going on.” She keeps picturing the caseworker in her Halloween costume: her eye patch, her blackened tooth, her little plastic dagger. And she says again, “This is not okay.”
She hangs up and calls Harriet back. “The social worker is sending someone to help you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Mom. I’m sorry.” They stay on the phone until Harriet has to hang up because, she says, “Here everybody is, all of a sudden.”
Benjamin Ehrman comes in and buys the Oresteia and the complete Ecco Press set of Chekhov stories. Is he taking some sort of middle-aged Great Books course? Is he courting her, trying (successfully) to slay her with his taste?
He pays. He smiles. He doesn’t say anything, not even thank you. At the point when any other customer would have said, “Thank you,” he smiles at her again.
Oh, Rebecca, you tired, confused woman. You are so ripe for this kind of thing.
She goes down to visit Harriet at Christmas. (She and Peter have never spent the holiday together; she always goes to Harriet, and he is either with his kids or off skiing in Utah. This year, the separation bothers her. Not in itself—she hates skiing—but the fact that there is no expectation that they will make a plan together. How could there not be, after all this time? On the other hand, doesn’t the ease with which they go their separate ways—the pleasantness of it—confirm that she is free?)
She brings Harriet a beef tenderloin she has cooked, and she reheats au gratin potatoes and green beans in the kitchen microwave. The gray people in their straggly hallway flotilla watch, or don’t watch, as she walks by, holding dishes aloft. One woman looks at her and raises a forefinger, like someone timidly hailing a cab. “Excuse me,” the woman says, “but is this Washington Square?”
“No, it isn’t,” Rebecca says.
“Do you know how to get there from here?”
Rebecca shakes her head, and the woman smiles and shrugs.
Harriet says of the dinner, “You can’t imagine what a treat this is.”
“Yes, I can,” Rebecca says. “That’s why I brought it.”
Ralph’s children have taken him out for dinner—they all live nearby—but later that evening he comes to see Harriet. Rebecca likes him: he is blunt and loyal, and quick, like Harriet.
Rebecca sits trying to straighten out a piece of knitting (a red scarf, Harriet’s Christmas present to her, which, Harriet says, “should have been done ages ago but I keep screwing it up—you know I’m not domestic”), while Ralph and Harriet play anagrams on a table rolled up against Harriet’s wheelchair. They take turns flipping over a new letter and seeing if they can steal a word the other person has already made.
Rebecca, ripping out rows of Harriet’s impatient, thwarted knitting, is nearly in tears watching them: the speed, the sureness with which they play. Ralph steals risked from Harriet, adds his own T, and makes skirted. She steals donuts and makes astound.
One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of January, Rebecca goes to the movies by herself. She stands in line—a long one—not thinking of much. The smell of popcorn, and how sickening it is. The fact that the hole in the right-hand pocket of her orange wool coat has now become big enough that she ought to start carrying her loose change in the left one. Ahead of her in line a man is waving, beckoning, smiling. Benjamin Ehrman. She turns around to see if he means someone behind her; he grins, and points at her, and beckons again. So she goes to him.
“What movie are you seeing?” he asks, and she tells him, and he says, “Me too.”
She says, “So, you do know how to talk after all.” She feels like a jerk as soon as it’s out of her mouth.
But, “I know,” he says. “One of us was going to have to break that silence.” That sounds meaningful, erotic again; he defuses it by adding, “It was getting to be like those staring contests you have when you’re a kid.”
So they go in together, sit together, are deferential about the armrest, are aware of exactly where each other’s hands are in the darkness. The movie is a “little” one that has received doting reviews. The audience is enraptured with it, laughing, sighing. Rebecca hates it. She looks over at him and he looks back and rolls his eyes at her. They don’t know each other well enough to agree to walk out—they don’t know each other at all, so walking out would mean going their separate ways. They stay, sitting there through the whole thing grimacing at each other, sinking down in their seats, their shoulders growing conspiratorially closer as their silent agreement that the thing just stinks grows more and more intense. At the end they throw themselves out into the street, laughing. They go for coffee, but order wine instead.
A list of what shocks Rebecca, over the next weeks and months:
Bed. That something she’s done a lot of, and enjoyed in the past, could feel so fiercely new.
Underwear. He likes it, so he buys it for her, and she starts buying it for herself. Tarty, expensive stuff. And nothing in her objects—not the feminist part, not the shy part, not the part that is aware of weighing fifteen pounds more than she did in college.
Her hair. It’s long, it nearly reaches her waist; she’s always worn it up, or in a braid. He wants it down. She sits on the bed between his thighs with her back to him, and he brushes her hair, crooning to her. And she loves it—she, who has always disliked having anyone touch her hair since childhood, when Harriet used to yank a brush through it and say impatiently, when Rebecca flinched, “You have such a tender scalp.”
Pet names for each other. We won’t even put them in here, because the ones they make up are so incredibly silly.
German chocolate eggs with toys inside. He hands her one after dinner on one of the first nights he cooks for her. She thinks, Oh, how nice, a chocolate egg. When she unwraps it and breaks off a piece, she discovers a small plastic capsule inside; when she opens that, she finds six plastic pieces; when she puts the pieces together, they make a tiny pterodactyl holding a jackhammer. Oh, he says, the pterodactyl-road-crew ones are the best.
Jealousy. He is separated, but not divorced. Rebecca sees the wife around Cambridge, a narrow pretty greyhound of a woman, with a face that is at once anxious and arrogant. She looks rich. She is rich, because Ben is rich. Five years ago he sold his dot-com company and made the kind of money that can scatter people all over an expensive city in big houses: one for himself, one for his parents, one for a son and daughter-in-law, and then another one for himself when he moved out of the first one and left his wife alone there. That had happened a year before Rebecca met him. Rebecca hates seeing this woman—Dorinda. After a sighting she always has a sense of belated, alert panic, the kind you feel when you narrowly miss having a traffic accident. She sees Dorinda in the supermarket, and Dorinda’s eyes hold hers for an instant and then sweep coldly away. Is this just one person registering the presence of another, unknown one? Or is it the snubbing of a rival?