She looked at me in surprise. “You don’t want any eggs?”
The more I woke up, the worse I felt, like coming out of novocaine. “Maybe later,” I said, in re eggs, more to soothe Chloe and get her to stop talking about eggs than out of any conviction that I might at some future date begin to eat food again. “Just coffee now,” I explained further, to nail it all down, and went over to the complex of furniture in the middle of the room, where I sat down in the general direction of an armchair.
The Other Woman suggested, “How about toast?”
Toast. I squinted, to show I was trying to think. The mention of the word toast didn’t immediately repel me, so I said, “All right. That sounds all right.”
But she wasn’t done with me. She said, “How many slices?”
I frowned. I rubbed my nose. I blinked several times. I scratched my left ankle bone with the edge of my right shoe. I said, “I don’t know.”
“Two? Can you eat two?”
She insisted on an answer, that’s all there was to it. Little did she care that my mind wasn’t functioning. I said, “I guess so. No, maybe not. Or, wait a second...”
“I’ll make one,” she said.
I nodded. “That’s good.”
“If you want another one after, you can have it.”
“That’s fine.”
“With your eggs, if you want eggs after.”
“That’s wonderful.”
She went back, at last, to her chefery. But not for long; a minute later she wanted to know did I want jelly on my toast. When I said no to that, she wanted to know if I wanted honey on my toast. When she got another no, she announced she thought it might be a good idea if I had orange marmalade on my toast, what did I think of that?
“Shut up, Chloe,” I decided.
She turned around and looked at me. ‘What?”
“Stop talking,” I amplified. “Stop questioning. I don’t want anything on the goddam toast, not anything.”
“Not even butter?”
I got to my feet and threw sofa cushions at the walls.
Chloe stood watching me. When I was finished, she said, “I know what’s the matter with you. And it’s your own fault.”
“What?”
But now... now... now she was done talking. She turned an eloquent back on me and finished scrambling her eggs.
While waiting for my toast and coffee, I walked around the room picking up sofa cushions again and putting them back where I’d found them. I also found twenty-seven cents in the sofa, so it wasn’t a total loss.
The food and I were done at the same time. Chloe carried everything over to the furniture, put the plates and cups down on end tables, and sat in haughty silence directly in my line of vision while she went scoop, scoop, scoop with her eggs. I nibbled at my coffee and sipped my toast.
When I could stand the silence no longer, and even though I knew I was putting myself at a perhaps fatal disadvantage, I finally said, “What did you mean by that?”
“Mean by what?” she lied.
Oh. I could see the conversation stretching out ahead of us like one of those landscapes with the neat straight perspective lines meeting at infinity, the kind of thing done by schoolchildren in composition books and Salvador Dali in the Museum of Modern Art. I would say you know what I’m talking about, and then she would say no I don’t know what you’re talking about, and then I would say you know exactly what I’m talking about, and then she would...
But why go on? I avoided it, the whole thing, tons and tons of words in bales, by saying instead, “You said you knew what was the matter with me, and you said it was my fault. What did you mean by that?”
“You know what I meant,” she said.
So. She was determined to have that conversation no matter what.
Well, I was determined too. I nibbled some more coffee and said, “Well, I don’t. If you feel like telling me, fine. If you don’t, never mind.”
She frowned around her egg scooper and let the silence mount up in uneven blocks between us. I sipped at my toast — on which she had put butter, after all — and felt myself beginning, just beginning, to come back to life.
Chloe said, “Your grumpiness, that’s what I mean.”
I looked attentive, but I didn’t say anything.
“It’s because,” she said, “you didn’t get enough sleep last night.”
And then, for the first time since waking up, I remembered how last night had ended, the awareness that had washed over me and which had kept my little mind churning away until practically dawn, running pornographic movies on the white inner surface of my skull.
I could feel the blush starting. I held the toast and coffee cup up in front of my face for camouflage, and mumbled, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” All at once I wanted that round-and-round conversation.
We could never want the same thing at the same time. She brushed my attempt at verbosity aside and said, “It’s because you’ve got a letch for me, that’s why.”
“Nonsense,” I swallowed. And then, in one last-ditch attempt: “I don’t know what you mean.”
“And,” she went inexorably on, “you kept thinking about me in that bed in there with Artie Dexter, in that same bed you were sleeping in all alone, and me just one room away out here.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said bravely, into my coffee cup. “I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.”
“I heard you tossing around in there. Until practically dawn.”
“I thrash around in my sleep.”
“Funny you didn’t thrash the last few hours.”
I would have answered that in short order, but I seemed to have a mouthful of toast.
She said, “You’re a snob, that’s what you are.”
I pushed the toast out of the way long enough to say, “What?” I was legitimately astonished.
“A snob,” she repeated. Bright circles of color were burning angrily on her cheekbones. I saw with some surprise that she’d been, all this time, holding back a real fury. She said, “You wanted to start something with me last night when you took my hand. And you wanted to come out here afterwards, after we’d both gone to bed. And you didn’t do it.”
“Uh,” I said.
“I thought at first,” she said, “it was because you were shy, bashful. I thought that was kind of cute. But that wasn’t the reason at all. The reason was, you’re a snob. Because I’ve been to bed with Artie Dexter, you think I’m not good enough for you, that’s the reason.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “No no, that isn’t—”
“Shut up, you.” She got to her feet. “Let me tell you something,” she said. “You may think because I’m not a virgin I’m not good enough for you, but if you are a virgin you damn well wouldn’t be good enough for me. So you can just go to hell, that’s what you can do.”
What was there to say to that? Nothing; exactly what I said.
When she was done glaring at me and listening to my silence, she picked up her plate and cup and stalked over to the sink and busied herself there.
As for me, I stuck the rest of the toast in my mouth and ruminated.
Chloe’s charge, it seemed to me, broke down into sections, which would have to be dealt with separately. Part one: that I had slept poorly out of an awakened lust for her body. Part two: that I had done nothing to ease this lust because of moral snobbery.
Very well. As to part one, I could admit that much to myself as being true, though whether or not I would be able to make the same admission to Chloe was another matter. But as to part two, that was as wrong as it could be. I had done nothing about my lust, that was true, but it was simply and entirely because it hadn’t occurred to me there was anything I could do.