THAT EVENING HE picked Barbara up at the realty offices and drove them to a restaurant. It was a thing they often did. Barbara frequently worked late, and they both liked a semi-swanky Polynesian place in Skokie called Hai-Nun, a dark, teak-and-bamboo hideaway where the drinks were all doubles and eventually, when you were too drunk to negotiate your way to a table, you could order a platter of fried specialties and sober up eating dinner at the bar.
For a while an acquaintance of Austin's, a commodities trader named Ned Coles, had stood beside them at the bar and made chitchat about how the salad days on the Board of Trade were a thing of the past, and then about the big opportunities in Europe after 1992 and how the U.S. was probably going to miss the boat, and then about how the Fighting Illini were sizing up at the skilled positions during spring drills, and finally about his ex-wife, Suzie, who was moving to Phoenix the next week so she could participate more in athletics. She was interested, Ned Coles said, in taking part in iron-woman competitions.
“Can't she be an iron woman in Chicago?” Barbara said. She barely knew Ned Coles and was bored by him. Ned's wife was also “kidnapping” their two kids to Arizona, which had Ned down in the dumps but not wanting to make a fuss.
“Of course she can,” Ned said. Ned was a heavy, beet-faced man who looked older than forty-six. He had gone to Harvard, then come home to work for his old man's company and quickly become a drunk and a nuisance. Austin had met him in MBA night school fifteen years ago. They didn't see each other socially. “But that's not the big problem,” Ned went on.
“What's the big problem?” Austin said, muddling an ice cube in his gin.
“Moi-même,” Ned said, and looked grim about it. “She contends I'm a force field of negativism that radiates into all the north suburbs. So I have to move to Indiana for her to stay. And that's way too big a sacrifice.” Ned laughed humorlessly. He knew a lot of Indiana jokes that Austin had already heard. Indiana, to Ned Coles, was the place where you caught sight of the flagship of the Polish navy and visited the Argentine war heroes memorial. He was old Chicago, and also, Austin thought, an idiot. He wished Ned's wife a good journey to Arizona.
When Ned wandered off into the restaurant, leaving them alone at the lacquered teak bar, Barbara grew quiet. Both of them were drinking gin, and in silence they let the bartender pour them another two on the rocks. Austin knew he was a little drunk now and that Barbara was probably more drunk than he was. He sensed a problem could be lurking — about what he wasn't sure. But he longed for the feeling he'd had when he put the phone down with Joséphine Belliard that morning. Ebullience. To be fiercely alive. It had been a temporary feeling, he understood perfectly well. But he longed for it now all the more achingly on account of its illusory quality, its innocent smallness. Even realists, he thought, needed a break now and then.
“Do you remember the other night?” Barbara began as if she were choosing her words with extreme precision. “You were in Paris, and I was back here at home. And I asked you if you thought you might be taking me for granted?” She focused on the rim of her glass, but unexpectedly her eyes cast up and found his. There was one other couple in the bar, and the bartender had seated himself on a stool at the end and was reading a newspaper. This was the dinner hour, and many people were in the restaurant section. Someone had ordered a dish that required fire to be brought from the kitchen to their table, and Austin could see the yellow flame lick up at the ceiling, hear the loud sssss and the delighted diners say, “Oooo.”
“I didn't think that was true,” Austin said resolutely in answer to her question.
“I know you didn't,” Barbara said and nodded her head slowly. “And maybe that's exactly right. Maybe I was wrong.” She stared at her glass of gin again. “What is true, though, Martin, and what's worse — about you, anyway — is that you take yourself for granted.” Barbara kept nodding her head without looking at him, as if she'd discovered an interesting but worrisome paradox in philosophy. When Barbara got mad at him, particularly if she was a little drunk, she nodded her head and spoke in this overly meticulous way, as if she'd done considerable thinking on the subject at hand and wished to illuminate her conclusions as a contribution to common sense. Austin called this habit “reading the ingredients on the Molotov cocktail,” and he hated it and wished Barbara wouldn't do it, though there was never a good moment to bring the subject up.
“I'm sorry, but I don't think I know what you mean by that,” he said in the most normal voice he could manufacture.
Barbara looked at him curiously, her perfect Lambda Chi beauty-queen features grown as precise and angular as her words. “What I mean is that you think — about yourself — that you can't be changed, as if you're fixed. On your insides, I mean. You think of yourself as a given, that what you go off to some foreign country and do won't have any effect on you, won't leave you different. But that isn't true, Martin. Because you are different. In fact, you're unreachable, and you've been becoming that way for a long time. For two or three years, at least. I've just tried to get along with you and make you happy, because making you happy has always made me happy. But now it doesn't, because you've changed and I don't feel like I can reach you or that you're even aware of what you've become, and frankly I don't even much care. All this just occurred to me while I was ordering a title search this afternoon. I'm sorry it's such a shock.”
Barbara sniffed and looked at him and seemed to smile. She wasn't about to cry. She was cold-eyed and factual, as if she were reporting the death of a distant relative neither of them remembered very well.
“I'm sorry to hear that,” Austin said, wanting to remain as calm as she was, though not as cold. He didn't exactly know what this meant or what could've brought it about, since he didn't think he'd been doing anything wrong. Nothing had happened two or three years ago that he could remember. Joséphine Belliard had had a small effect on him, but it would pass the way anything passed. Life seemed to be going on. He thought, in fact, that he'd been acting about as normal as he could hope to act.
But did this mean that she had taken all she intended to and was through with him? That would be a shock, he thought, something he definitely didn't want. Or did she only mean to say he needed to shape up and become more reachable, go back to some nice way he'd been that she approved of — some way he would've said he still was. Or maybe she was saying she intended to make her own changes now, be less forgiving, less interested in him, less loving, take more interest in herself; that their marriage was going to start down a new, more equitable road — something else he didn't like the sound of.
He sat thoughtfully in the silence she was affording him for just this purpose. He certainly needed to offer a response. He needed intelligently and forthrightly to answer her charges and demonstrate sympathy for her embattled position. But also he needed to stand up for himself, while offering a practical way out of this apparent impasse. Much, in other words, was being asked of him. He was, it seemed, expected to solve everything: to take both positions — hers and his — and somehow join them so that everything was either put back to a way it had been or else made better so that both of them were happier and could feel that if life was a series of dangerous escarpments you scaled with difficulty, at least you eventually succeeded, whereupon the plenteous rewards of happiness made all the nightmares worthwhile.