And to Alice he proposed, brightly, “Hey, we’re looking for a hat for you, remember?”
But before they could make their getaway Margaret announced to her husband, “Oh, Rob! I know who he is!”
“You were on that TV show,” she said to Stephen. “Am I right? What was the show called? Was that you?”
“It may have been me, yes.”
“You were that friend of the main character who was always causing mischief for everyone.”
“Get out of my way,” Stephen said.
“What?” the husband said.
“The show was called Get Out of My Way,” Stephen explained, and added, “That was a long time ago. I’m amazed that you recognized me.”
“You were very funny.”
“Thank you.”
To her husband, Margaret said, “Do you remember that show, dear?” And he answered, “No, I don’t.”
“He’s not much for television,” she said to Stephen, in a low, confiding tone. “Are you on something now?” she asked, and he thought to make a joke about his meds.
“No. I’ve been on a hiatus.”
“Refueling your creativity?”
“Something like that.”
“And are you an actress?” Margaret was addressing Alice. Stephen said, “Alice, she’s asking you.”
Sleepy Alice replied, “Oh, no.”
“My wife is also between things,” he said, and then, stupidly, he remarked to Alice, “We’re taking some time to enjoy our lives, right?” He gave her a squeeze, and she glared at him.
Later, after they’d finally got free and resumed their trek up Madison Avenue, she accused him: “You were flirting with her.”
“What? I wasn’t.”
“She’s the type for you. Refueling your creativity.”
“Come on, let’s get you home.”
“I don’t have a home!”
“Yes, you do, you have a home with me.”
They’d been lost in these woods before.
“How many pills did you take, Alice? Will you tell me how many pills you took? You took more than five, Alice. Please don’t lie to me. How many?”
She wasn’t talking. They passed shop after shop, but she didn’t want him to go into any of them. She’d pulled away at last and was walking faster, out ahead of him now, fleeing. He buttoned up his coat and pulled off his scarf — it was the blue scarf that she’d given him in the first year of their marriage; he loved it and wore it all the time in the colder months — and ran up beside her and wrapped it around her neck. He said, emphatically, “Alice, nothing ever happened between me and Claire. Nothing was ever going to happen,” which was true, though Alice would not believe it. Alice had met Claire and found her to be very beautiful. She suspected that Stephen would be more comfortable, more at home, with a woman closer to him in age — Stephen and Claire had gone to college together. Alice had conceived of Stephen’s betrayal in the days before her breakdown, and, once in the hospital, when she’d been unable to simply go to a phone in the night and call him, the idea of their affair had grown in her; to this day, he could not say with certainty whether she’d tried to kill herself over her anticipated abandonment or whether that deranging fantasy had been a symptom of some deeper despair. It haunted them still.
Alice said, “Don’t blow up at me.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re shouting.”
“Alice, I love you! Please try to take that in!” he shouted, and then quickly glanced around to see if he’d been heard by people passing by. In a lowered voice he said, “Why must we always return to this?”
“You were sleeping with her when I was on a locked ward! I thought my life was over! Where were you?” she pleaded.
“I was with you every day, Alice. I visited you every single day.”
“And then you went to her!” she said angrily. Now he could hear and feel her terror, and he, too, began to feel frightened, because he knew where this fight could take them.
“Alice, stop this,” he commanded.
“Leave me, just leave me already,” she cried, and he watched as she ran away, up the block and across Seventy-ninth Street.
“Alice!” he called. But she was still going, a dark shape charging unsteadily up the street with her shopping bags.
It was the time of day when the lights from apartment buildings and stores began to shine brightly. Through the pools of light spilling out of shop doors came people in costume, not only children but adults, on their way to Halloween parties and bars. He forged ahead against a tide of ghosts and pirates and sexy nurses from the spirit realm. He passed a shattered Marilyn Monroe, but could no longer see Alice in the distance. With hands trembling, he took her pills from his coat pocket, opened the lid, and shook out two. Did he need one or two? It was the same question he’d asked Alice earlier in the coffee shop.
He put one in his mouth and another in his shirt pocket, in case. His mouth was parched from his own medications. He held the pill under his tongue. Eventually it would dissolve. He had only to wait.
He would wait at their bar. Maybe she was there already, he thought, as he turned the corner and left the avenue.
The place was a carnival inside. Cardboard witches and crepe-paper bats hung from the ceiling, and candlelit jack-o’-lanterns had been set out on the marble surface of the bar. Everyone inside was costumed, to some degree, but in his agitation Stephen imagined that it was actually he, in his soft windowpane jacket and pressed shirt and woolen pants — he and not the dead and undead thronging about him, blocking his way — who was wearing a costume. Through the crowd he pushed, searching for her. Finally he gave up and went to the bar, where he leaned into a gathering of wraiths and ordered a bourbon from a pretty bartender with a blood-red slash impastoed darkly across her neck.
The Valium was starting to help. He drank, and the alcohol burned his throat. When a seat became free, he took it immediately and ordered another bourbon, before locating his phone and dialing Alice’s number.
“You can run a tab,” he told the bartender, and added, “I could use some water, too, when you get a minute.”
Outside in the night, he thought, Alice would be walking, disoriented. She’d be feeling scorned. She would hear her phone ringing in her purse and know it was him, but she’d be unable to answer, though she badly wanted to. She’d be afraid of him pulling her back, afraid of going childless all her life and winding up a widow, like her mother, running from place to place and never stopping. He’d heard all of this played out before.
Of course, he’d told her again and again that he wanted to have a baby with her. Why hadn’t it happened already? Why hadn’t they yet done it, like normal people?
He pictured her gathering her coat around her and slumping on a town-house stoop, ignoring his calls, or, likely, though by now she knew better than to expect a helpful response, calling her mother.
When he dialed her number for the fifth or sixth time, Alice answered. He told her that he was in their bar and felt desperate. “Come back,” he said. “Will you?”
“Are you having a drink?” she asked.
“I am,” he said. He pressed his phone hard against his ear. Loudly, above the bar chaos, he asked her, “Where are you? Do you know where you are? Do you need me to come get you?”
“No,” she said. She hadn’t gone far; she was only around the corner from where they always wound up at the end of these days when he took her out and bought her gifts.
She said that she was on her way, and a few minutes later he saw her appear behind him in the antique saloon mirror above the bar. She peered over the crowd of monsters and ghouls, his statuesque, distraught Alice, until she caught sight of him, his reflection and hers making contact in the glass.