"Shall we sit on Bruno?" Zora was laughing and backing her sweet tush into Bruno, who was now sprawled out on Ira's sofa, protesting in a grunting way. "Come on!" she called to Ira. "Let's sit on Bruno."
Ira began making his way toward the liquor cabinet. He believed there was some bourbon in there. He would not need ice. "Would you care for some bourbon?" he called over to Zora, who was now wrestling with Bruno. She looked up at Ira and said nothing. Bruno, too, looked at him and said nothing.
Ira continued to pour. At this point, he was both drinking bourbon and eating cake. He had a pancreas like a rock. "We should probably go," Zora said. "It's a school night."
"Oh, O.K.," Ira said, swallowing. "I mean, I wish you didn't have to."
"School. What can you do? I'm going to take the rest of the cake home for Bruny's lunch tomorrow. It's his favorite."
Heat and sorrow filled Ira's face. The cake had been her only present to him. He closed his eyes and nuzzled his head into hers. "Not now," she whispered. "He gets upset."
"Oh, O.K.," he said. "I'll walk you out to the car." And there he gave her a quick hug before she walked around the car and got in on the driver's side. He stepped back onto the curb and knocked on Bruno's window to say goodbye. But the boy would not turn. He flipped his hand up, showing Ira the back of it.
"Bye! Thank you for sharing my birthday with me!" Ira called out. Where affection fell on its ass, politeness might rise to the occasion. Zora's Honda lights went on, then the engine, and then the whole vehicle flew down the street.
at the cuckoo private school to which Marilyn had years ago insisted on sending Bekka, the students and teachers were assiduously avoiding talk of the war. Bekka's class was doing finger-knitting while simultaneously discussing their hypothetical stock-market investments. The class was doing best with preferred stocks in Kraft, G.E., and G.M.; watching them move slightly every morning on the Dow Jones was also helping their little knitted scarves. It was a right-brain, left-brain thing. For this, Ira forked over nine thousand dollars a year. Not that he really cared. As long as Bekka was in a place safe from death — the alerts were moving from orange to red to orange; no information, just duct tape and bright, warm, mind-wrecking colors — turning her into a knitting stock-broker was O.K. with him. Exploit the system, man! he himself used to say, in college. He could, however, no longer watch TV. He packed it up, along with the VCR, and brought the whole thing over to Zora's. "Here," he said. "This is for Bruno."
"You are so sweet," she said, and kissed his ear. Possibly he was in love with her.
"The TV's broken," Ira said to Bekka, when she came that weekend and asked about it. "It's in the shop."
"Whatever," Bekka said, pulling her scarf yarn along the floor so the cats could play.
the next time he picked Zora up to go out, she said, "Come on in. Bruno's watching a movie on your VCR."
"Does he like it? Should I say hello to him?"
Zora shrugged. "If you want."
He stepped into the house, but the TV was not in the living room. It was in Zora's bedroom, where, spread out half naked on Zora's bedspread, as Ira had been just a few days before, lay Bruno. He was watching Bergman's The Magic Flute.
"Hi, Brune," he said. The boy said nothing, transfixed, perhaps not hearing him. Zora came in and pressed a cold glass of water against the back of Bruno's thigh.
"Yow!" Bruno cried.
"Here's your water," Zora said, walking her fingers up his legs.
Bruno took it and placed it on the floor. The singing on the same television screen that had so recently brought Ira the fiery bombing of Baghdad seemed athletic and absurd, perhaps a kind of joke. But Bruno remained riveted. "Well, enjoy the show," Ira said. He hadn't really expected to be thanked for the TV, but now actually knowing that he wouldn't be made him feel a little crestfallen.
On the way back out, Ira noticed that Zora had added two new sculptures to the collection in the living room. They were more abstract, made entirely out of old recorders and wooden flutes, but were recognizably boys, priapic with piccolos. "A flute would have been too big," Zora explained.
At the restaurant, the sound system was playing Dinah Washington singing "For All We Know." The walls, like love, were trompe-l'oeil — walls painted like viewful windows, though only a fool wouldn't know that they were walls. The menu, like love, was full of delicate, gruesome things — cheeks, tongues, thymus glands. The candle, like love, flickered, reflected in the brass tops of the sugar bowl and the salt and pepper shakers. He tried to capture Zora's gaze, which seemed to be darting around the room. "It's so nice to be here with you," he said. She turned and fixed him with a smile, repaired him with it. She was a gentle, lovely woman. Something in him kept coming stubbornly back to that. Here they were, two lonely adults lucky to have found each other, even if it was just for the time being. But now tears were drizzling down her face. Her mouth, collecting them in its corners, was retreating into a pinch.
"Oh, no, what's the matter?" He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away to hide her eyes behind it.
"I just miss Bruny," she said.
He could feel his heart go cold, despite himself. Oh, well. Tomorrow was Easter. Much could rise from the dead. Yesterday had been "Good Friday." Was this all cultural sarcasm — like "Labor Day" or "Some Enchanted Evening"?
"Don't you think he's fine?" Ira tried to focus.
"It's just — I don't know. It's probably just me coming off my antidepressants."
"You've been on antidepressants?" he asked sympathetically.
"Yes, I was."
"You were on them when I first met you?" Perhaps he had wandered into a whole "Flowers for Algernon" thing.
"Yes, indeedy. I went on them two years ago, after my 'nervous breakdown.'" Here she raised two fingers, to do quotation marks, but all of her fingers inadvertently sprang up and her hands clawed the air.
He didn't know what he should say. "Would you like me to take you home?"
"No, no, no. Oh, maybe you should. I'm sorry. It's just I feel I have so little time with him now. He's growing up so fast. I just wish I could go back in time." She blew her nose.
"I know what you mean."
"You know, once I was listening to some friends talk about travelling in the Pacific. They left Australia early one morning and arrived in California the evening of the day before. And I thought, I'd like to do that — keep crossing the international date line and get all the way back to when Bruno was a little boy again."
"Yeah," Ira said. "I'd like to get back to the moment where I signed my divorce agreement. I have a few changes I'd like to make."
"You'd have to bring a pen," she said strangely.
He studied her, to memorize her face. "I would never time-travel without a pen," he said.
She paused. "You look worried," she said. "You shouldn't do that with your forehead. It makes you look old." Then she began to sob.
He found her coat and drove her home and walked her to the door. Above the house, the hammered nickel of the moon gave off a murky shine. "It's a hard time in the world right now," Ira said. "It's hard on everybody. Go in and make yourself a good stiff drink. People don't drink they way they used to. That's what started this whole Iraq thing to begin with: it's a war of teetotallers. People have got to get off their wagons and high horses and—" He kissed her forehead. "I'll call you tomorrow," he said, though he knew he wouldn't.