The connection was bad, and suddenly she felt too tired. "Darling, are you okay?" he said faintly.
"I'm okay."
"I think I'm hard of hearing," he said.
"I think I'm hard of talking," she said. "I'll phone you tomorrow."
She phoned Walter instead. "I need to see you," she said.
"Oh, really?" he said skeptically, and then added, with a sweetness he seemed to have plucked expertly from the air like a fly, "Is this a great country or what?"
she felt grateful to be with him again. "Let's never be apart," she whispered, rubbing his stomach. He had the physical inclinations of a dog: he liked stomach, ears, excited greetings.
"Fine by me," he said.
"Tomorrow, let's go out to dinner somewhere really expensive. My treat."
"Uh," said Walter, "tomorrow's no good."
"Oh."
"How about Sunday?"
"What's wrong with tomorrow?"
"I've got. Well, I've gotta work and I'll be tired, first of all."
"What's second of all?"
"I'm getting together with this woman I know."
"Oh?"
"It's no big deal. It's nothing. It's not a date or anything."
"Who is she?"
"Someone whose car I fixed. Loose mountings in the exhaust system. She wants to get together and talk about it some more. She wants to know about catalytic converters. You know, women are afraid of getting taken advantage of."
"Really!"
"Yeah, well, so Sunday would be better."
"Is she attractive?"
Walter scrinched up his face and made a sound of unenthusiasm. "Enh," he said, and placed his hand laterally in the air, rotating it up and down a little.
Before he left in the morning, she said, "Just don't sleep with her."
"Sidra" he said, scolding her for lack of trust or for attempted supervision — she wasn't sure which.
That night, he didn't come home. She phoned and phoned and then drank a six-pack and fell asleep. In the morning, she phoned again. Finally, at eleven o'clock, he answered.
She hung up.
At 11:30, her phone rang. "Hi," he said cheerfully. He was in a good mood.
"So where were you all night?" asked Sidra. This was what she had become. She felt shorter and squatter and badly coiffed.
There was some silence. "What do you mean?" he said cautiously.
"You know what I mean."
More silence. "Look, I didn't call to get into a heavy conversation."
"Well, then," said Sidra, "you certainly called the wrong number." She slammed down the phone.
She spent the day trembling and sad. She felt like a cross between Anna Karenina and Amy Liverhaus, who used to shout from the fourth-grade cloakroom, "I just don't feel appreciated!" She walked over to Marshall Field's to buy new makeup. "You're much more of a cream beige than an ivory," said the young woman working the cosmetics counter.
But Sidra clutched at the ivory. "People are always telling me that," she said, "and it makes me very cross."
She phoned him later that night and he was there. "We need to talk," she said.
"I want my key back," he said.
"Look. Can you just come over here so that we can talk?"
He arrived bearing flowers — white roses and irises. They seemed wilted and ironic; she leaned them against the wall in a dry glass, no water.
"All right, I admit it," he said. "I went out on a date. But I'm not saying I slept with her."
She could feel, suddenly, the promiscuity in him. It was a heat, a creature, a tenant twin. "I already know you slept with her."
"How can you know that?"
"Get a life! What am I, an idiot?" She glared at him and tried not to cry. She hadn't loved him enough and he had sensed it. She hadn't really loved him at all, not really.
But she had liked him a lot!
So it still seemed unfair. A bone in her opened up, gleaming and pale, and she held it to the light and spoke from it. "I want to know one thing." She paused, not really for effect, but it had one. "Did you have oral sex?"
He looked stunned. "What kind of question is that? I don't have to answer a question like that."
"You don't have to answer a question like that. You don't have any rights here!" she began to yell. She was dehydrated. "You're the one who did this. Now I want the truth. I just want to know. Yes or no!"
He threw his gloves across the room.
"Yes or no," she said.
He flung himself onto the couch, pounded the cushion with his fist, placed an arm up over his eyes.
"Yes or no," she repeated.
He breathed deeply into his shirtsleeve.
"Yes or no."
"Yes," he said.
She sat down on the piano bench. Something dark and coagulated moved through her, up from the feet. Something light and breathing fled through her head, the house of her plastic-wrapped and burned down to tar. She heard him give a moan, and some fleeing hope in her, surrounded but alive on the roof, said perhaps he would beg her forgiveness. Promise to be a new man. She might find him attractive as a new, begging man. Though at some point, he would have to stop begging. He would just have to be normal. And then she would dislike him again.
He stayed on the sofa, did not move to comfort or be comforted, and the darkness in her cleaned her out, hollowed her like acid or a wind.
"I don't know what to do," she said, something palsied in her voice. She felt cheated of all the simple things — the radical calm of obscurity, of routine, of blah domestic bliss. "I don't want to go back to L.A.," she said. She began to stroke the tops of the piano keys, pushing against one and finding it broken — thudding and pitchless, shiny and mocking like an opened bone. She hated, hated her life. Perhaps she had always hated it.
He sat up on the sofa, looked distraught and false — his face badly arranged. He should practice in a mirror, she thought. He did not know how to break up with a movie actress. It was boys' rules: don't break up with a movie actress. Not in Chicago. If she left him, he would be better able to explain it, to himself, in the future, to anyone who asked. His voice shifted into something meant to sound imploring. "I know" was what he said, in a tone approximating hope, faith, some charity or other. "I know you might not want to."
"For your own good," he was saying. "Might be willing…" he was saying. But she was already turning into something else, a bird — a flamingo, a hawk, a flamingo-hawk — and was flying up and away, toward the filmy pane of the window, then back again, circling, meanly, with a squint.
He began, suddenly, to cry — loudly at first, with lots of ohs, then tiredly, as if from a deep sleep, his face buried in the poncho he'd thrown over the couch arm, his body sinking into the plush of the cushions — a man held hostage by the anxious cast of his dream.
"What can I do?" he asked.
But his dream had now changed, and she was gone, gone out the window, gone, gone.
Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People
it was a fear greater than death, according to the magazines. Death was number four. After mutilation, three, and divorce, two. Number one, the real fear, the one death could not even approach, was public speaking. Abby Mallon knew this too well. Which is why she had liked her job at American Scholastic Tests: she got to work with words in a private way. The speech she made was done in the back, alone, like little shoes cobbled by an elf: spider is to web as weaver is to blank. That one was hers. She was proud of that. Also, blank is to heartache as forest is to bench.
but then one day, the supervisor and the AST district coordinator called her upstairs. She was good, they said, but perhaps she had become too good, too creative, they suggested, and gave her a promotion out of the composing room and into the high school auditoriums of America. She would have to travel and give speeches, tell high school faculty how to prepare students for the entrance exams, meet separately with the juniors and seniors and answer their questions unswervingly, with authority and grace. "You may have a vacation first," they said, and handed her a check.