Then he got to wondering what his wife was doing in his absence. He hadn’t known or cared to know during the years he had lived with her. (And she had tried endlessly to make him jealous, flirting with friends of his in his presence.) Suddenly he found himself obsessed with the idea of calling her. He looked at his six days of beard in the mirror, embarrassed at the poverty of its growth, tempted in his despair to shave it off and start again. He was overcome with a sense of hopelessness. Who was it, the vaguely familiar face in the mirror staring blankly back at him, mouth agape, insinuating knowledge of his situation? They sized each other up, madman and reflection, not enough growth between them to make one decent beard.
With nothing else to do, he phoned his wife. He called her out of the best of intentions (what other intentions could he have?), to give her his phone number in case, in an emergency, she wanted to get in touch with him.
He had only to hear Carolyn’s voice again to remember how intensely he hated her.
“Where are you?” she insisted on knowing, with the possessiveness of a woman who divided the world into the things that belong to her and the things that don’t.
He made up an address and gave it to her.
“I hope you’re enjoying your freedom,” she said, “because when my lawyer gets through with you, you’re not going to have enough money left to breathe the air without it pinching”
“How’s the baby?” he asked.
“Fatherless,” she said quickly. “Is there something else you’d like to know? You don’t care how we are, so why do you ask?”
He couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Your student Christopher called, said he wanted to talk to you about something private. Whatever that means. I told him I had no idea where to reach you. I asked him to dinner…. Well,” she said, impatient with his silence, “do you have a reason for calling, or did you call just to torment me?”
“You? I called to torment myself,” he said, tormented by the fact that he had married her, that he had lived with her for almost nine years, and that in some perverse (and desperate) way he missed her.
“I’d like to see the baby sometime,” he said, suddenly aware of what it meant to him to be a father, how important it was. His daughter, a toddler now, would someday be a woman. He missed her already, felt her loss, knew what it was to lose. “Is it all right if I come over Sunday afternoon?”
Carolyn Parks took a deep breath, withheld the first cutting remark that came to mind, a martyr to his cruelty. “You’ll hear from my lawyer,” she said with transcendent dignity, and, waiting just long enough for him to phrase a reply in his mind — her timing enviably delicate in moments of crisis — hung up.
“Is that the worst threat you can make?” he said to a dead phone. “I’ll see my daughter whenever the hell I like. You narrow-spirited, ball-cutting bitch.” He had a drink of his host’s Scotch, took another shower (beginning to sweat again as soon as he got out), and went back to bed. Regret weighed on his chest. His beard itched. He lay stiffly in a pool of sweat, trying, with his eyes shut, to see some future for himself, some way out of the traps life had laid for him. If he hadn’t been married, or if he hadn’t been married to a woman like Carolyn, would things have been different? Thinking about it, terrified by the notion that his failures may have been his own doing, that he may have chosen Carolyn out of a need to fail, he fell asleep.
He was on a bus going west, a child he had never seen before — immaculate in a brown Eton suit — sitting at attention in the seat beside him. It was raining outside. Heavy winds buffeting the bus. The child’s silent presence disconcerted him. Who was taking care of the boy, where was his mother? A child that age, he assumed, would not be taking a trip like this by himself. When the bus lurched — a heavy gust almost lifting it off the road — the boy grabbed Curt’s hand, hung onto it.
“Who are you traveling with?” Curt asked him, anxious about the child, looking around the bus to see if there was someone he belonged to.
The child looked down, sulked.
Curt turned to look out the window when he felt a small pair of hands over his eyes. “Who is it?” a high-pitched voice asked him. “Who do you think it is?”
“Is it Huckleberry Finn?” Curt asked.
“No,” the child said, giggling.
“Is it the three bears?”
“No-o-o-o,” the child said, “it is not the three bears. It is no bears.”
Curt thought about who it might be. “Is it John Wilkes Booth?” “No.”
“I give up,” Curt said. “Tell me who it is.”
“You have to guess,” the child said, kicking him in the leg. “Guess who it is.”
“Is it the three pigs?”
“No pigs, stupid.” Kicking him again.
“Is it … is it Superman?”
“Say it again.”
“Superman.”
“Again.
“Superman,” he yelled, to a chorus of laughter from the seat behind.
“That’s who it is,” the boy said, removing his hands from Curt’s eyes. “It’s the mighty man of steel. You’re a good guesser, all right, when you know the answer.”
He had to go to the bathroom but worried that the boy would think he was deserting him. While Curt was worrying, burdened by an unlooked-for responsibility, his companion took a bus schedule from the seat in front of him and put it over Curt’s eyes. “Who is it now?” he asked. “Answer, buster, or I’ll drill you full of holes.”
“That’s enough.” Moving his hand away.
The child’s face collapsed. He bolted from his seat and ran, bawling, down the aisle, his voice fading like a siren.
“Come back,” Curt said, embarrassed at being stared at. “I’ll play the game.”
The child ran up and back in a mock dance. “It wasn’t Superman, stupid,” he yelled at Curt. “You stupid.” He stuck out his tongue.
The child continued to mock him. “I’ve never seen him before today,” Curt explained to the people around him. “He just happened to be sitting next to me.”
The bus slowed. The driver came down the aisle in a hurry and, picking up the boy from behind, dragged him to the front. Before Curt could protest, the boy was gently booted out of the automatic door of the bus. Curt saw him land in the dust, miles from the nearest town, as if he had been flying, a terrified look on his face, the face receding, getting larger in the distance, frozen in a shriek.
He woke in a sweat with no sense of where he was, the room in motion. What had he done? He had a sense of having committed some unforgivable treachery. In his dream. In his life. Feeling the tremors in his chest with the tips of his fingers, he recognized that it would be more painful than he had anticipated. And it would get still worse. How much more could he bear? And what was he doing on the bus? Where did he think he was going?
He kept his appointment with Carol, although he had been planning all day, even up to the time he left the house to call for her, not to show up, not to risk further involvement. What he really needed was to do something extraordinary, something outside the possibility of anything he had ever — in the darkest fevers of the imagination — conceived of doing. But if he hadn’t conceived of it, how could he know what it was he had to do?
They couldn’t decide on a movie. Which is to say that Curt couldn’t decide — Carol said she would see anything as long as she hadn’t seen it before, as long as it was supposed to be reasonably good, anything within reason, anything. They couldn’t decide.