There was a chance also that it wouldn’t look awkward or strange when, at the end of the evening — he didn’t really believe that he and Kate would be staying in — he paired with Susan for the walk through the cold, from the restaurant to Elliot’s car. It might look, in other words, as if he were not bothered by Kate’s whispering to another man. (She had a way, with Elliot, of bowing her head and mumbling furiously through the strands of hair that fell across the side of her face, so that, in order to make out her words, Elliot was forced to stoop and lean into the fog of her breath.) Jim’s own affair, his affair with Susan, had been over for almost five months, long enough, he thought, as he approached the florist’s on the corner by his and Kate’s building, for him to begin experimenting — later that same night, if the mood was right — with innocently putting his arm around Susan’s shoulder while she and he and Kate and Elliot walked in two sets of two toward the parking garage.
Of course, he wanted to be careful not to punish Kate, or at least not to seem to punish her, for her success in adultery. Elliot made her laugh — in a sweet way. Anyone meeting them for the first time would think they were a new couple.
It was wrong to hate her.
He’d arrived at the florist’s. Inside, he went straight over to the roses in their refrigerated case. Though it was a cold day, cold and very windy, and he’d come in chilled, the short walk across the heated space warmed him, and he could feel the frigid air hit him in the face when he yanked open the glass door. He leaned in and peered at the flowers. He asked the girl, “Do you have yellow roses that haven’t already bloomed and, you know, opened?”
Yellow roses, signifying friendship more than eros, seemed right, given the complex potentials of the evening.
“We only have these.”
“They’re pretty, but they’re not going to last.”
She was pretty as well, the girl showing him roses. Had he seen her in here before and somehow not noticed? How old was she? Should he risk looking into her eyes? Was she wearing a ring? What about her ass? And what had he said to her just now? Blooming and opening meant the same thing in relation to flowers. He’d become inarticulate in her presence.
Kate, in the meantime, was upstairs in the apartment, talking on the phone to Elliot. The call had gone on for more than five hours. Kate had had to use all available phones: her cell phone and, before the cell, the apartment’s two cheap cordless handsets, one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom. “Can you hear beeping? I’ve got to switch phones. Hang on,” she’d exclaimed when the kitchen phone’s battery began dying. Carrying that phone (her first of the call), she’d gone into the bedroom, picked up its brother from the night table, and said, into this new phone, “Are you there? Can you hear me? Hold on while I hang up the other phone,” after which she’d taken both phones to the kitchen and dropped the dead one into its cradle on the wall. A small cabinet door beside this phone opened onto a narrow and dark airshaft that had once housed a dumbwaiter. Kate opened and closed this empty cabinet several times while explaining, on the bedroom phone, why Elliot’s being married and her being married shouldn’t necessarily be considered something they had in common. That they were both childless could stand as an area of emotional parity, she felt, considering the fact that they both remained unsure as to whether to have children, while their spouses frequently made it clear that, in their opinions — Susan’s specifically regarding Elliot, Jim’s specifically regarding Kate, and neither Susan nor Jim meaning to suggest a marital reconfiguration — they’d make “a great dad” or “a great mom.”
Elliot interrupted: “Don’t you get tired of hearing that?”
“It’s beside the point,” Kate answered, and went on, “Oh, Elliot, why is talking to you so damn fucking difficult?”
“Do you need an answer?”
“You know me, always curious.” How stupid was that? She’d been trying, not for the first time, to lovingly make clear to Elliot why she could no longer sleep with him. During the first hours of the conversation she’d been able to control the impulse to bait and flirt. But the business of swapping phones, the walking from room to room in the stuffy apartment, had, as it were, weakened her. It was as if, in losing that first phone, she’d lost a line of defense, however symbolic, against Elliot’s desire. Or maybe, she thought as she stood in the kitchen, opening and closing the dumbwaiter door with one hand, the necessary act of sacrificing one phone for another could be read as a veiled enactment of the sort of ambivalence required for alternating between lovers in the first place. Or was that too absurd?
“Say that once more. I didn’t hear what you were saying,” she said to Elliot. The heating pipes banged; day was turning to dusk. She listened to the hiss of steam escaping from the radiator beneath the kitchen window. Elliot began again, “I was saying that I sometimes think that you think that because I’m a psychiatrist I can automatically see all the different sides of a situation. But I’m not that kind of psychiatrist.”
“Please don’t talk to me like I’m one of your postdocs,” she said, and he took a long breath.
He said, “Kate, we’re involved with each other, Kate.”
“Jim’s your friend.”
“And so are you my friend.”
“Your wife is my friend, too.” She continued, “Fuck, I hate this. Now this motherfucking phone is beeping. Hold on. Elliot, can you hold on?” She swapped the bedroom phone for the insufficiently charged kitchen phone, went with that phone back into the bedroom, and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Kate, why are you bringing up Susan? I need to know what your point is. We agreed that we weren’t going to talk about Susan. So where are you going with this? Kate? Are you there?”
He waited.
“Will you talk to me? Please, don’t do this. Don’t do this, Kate. All right, fuck this, fuck this, fuck—”
His phone was beeping. It wasn’t the battery. It was another call. He said, “Kate, hang on a minute. Hang on, Kate.”
He took the call. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” she said, and then told him in a miserable voice that both her home phones were dead, and that she was on her cell phone and just wanted to say that she didn’t much enjoy dishonesty.
“You’ll have to speak up,” he said.
“Can you hear me? Tell me when the signal is clear.” She pressed the cell phone against her ear and walked from the bedroom to the living room, then into the kitchen, then straight down the hall, passing the tiny second bathroom, with the broken, unusable toilet, to the apartment’s miniature front foyer.
“Here?” she said. “Here?”
“I’m losing you,” he said. And so she retraced her route, winding up back in the living room, where she turned on a lamp. The sky was dark. Everywhere on the city’s horizon she saw other people’s lit windows. Once again, Elliot had bullied her — or she’d let him bully her — into leaving open the question of their affair. What was the use in arguing, anyway? Jim would come home any minute, and, a little later, the two of them would go out and meet Elliot and Susan for dinner. How crazy was that? She still had to shower and dress. She conceded to Elliot, “All right, I’ll think about it.”