The Cost of Lunch, Etc. (8 page)

His hearty father makes a joke about their wan morning faces. His mother suggests with buttery kindness that the
girl’s dress is somewhat short for the street. All eyes pluck at the seams of bright (too bright?) cotton. Do they know? Their hopeful politeness enwraps him. Yes, they would be glad to spread her on that maid’s cot, to serve her up to ensure that he is whole and healthy. His mother has always read books on mind-repairing. “Son, I want you to feel free to bring your friends home.” “Remember you have nothing to be shy about.” “I’ve asked Nancy Bateman—you know the Batemans’ adorable younger daughter?—to dinner Friday …”

He says, “Mother, Father, we’re going to the cottage for a week. It’s too hot here. It’s unbearable.”

Her eyes leap from their private shade, but she only takes more jam and teases his father. He knows, in deep thankfulness, that she is pleased and will reward him with an easy day. She will take his wrist in a hard grip and pull him off to play tourists in his own city. All day she will ask nothing. All day she will turn them into magic children from a story. He wants to push away from the table and hurry out with her.

They go to the cottage. Coming back from the crossroads store with groceries, she looks at him beside her. She cannot imagine marriage. But she knows it is what makes a woman real, weights her to a name and place. That safe feeling she would seek walking in the old cemetery: names and dates neatly grouped in families, even the little babies accounted for. She wanted to get away as long as she can remember. But being a secretary is no better than being a waitress, except that her back and feet hurt less and her eyes hurt more.

He says, “I thought you’d be more struck by the townhouse. We’re proud of the wood paneling and the staircase. It dates from 1830.”

But all houses impress her. All other dogs have equally big bones. Walking beside him she catches her breath as they
come over a hill and the ocean stretches out into haze. She is surprised again how tall it is, how much sky it uses up. That blue yawn is her future. She will drown.

This cottage squats on the last dune, facing the sea. She puts down the groceries and sits at the white sea-blistered table. She sits still with concentration. On the table are shells and pebbles she has been collecting.

She says without inflection, “I packed my suitcase.”

“I saw you. Why? How can you leave?”

“There’s a bus that stops on the highway at four-ten, the woman at the crossroads store told me.”

“Why? Where do you want to go? You quit your job.”

She lays out the pebbles in circles. “You don’t want me to stay, enough.”

He sees himself returning to the city without her. The air will prickle with questions. Suppose after she leaves, he changes his mind and realizes he wants her? “Where will you go?” Her travel-worn suitcase with wheels that squeak stands at the door.

She picks sand from the ribs of a scallop shell. “New York? Maybe I’ll go west. Maybe California.”

Choosing a place so idly makes him dizzy. He sees her blown off like a grasshopper. People cannot just disappear. “By yourself?”

His tedious jealousy of tedious young men. She smiles. Her heart is chipping at her ribs. The road comes over the last dune fitted to its curved flank in a question mark. She does not dare turn from him to go inside and look at the clock. Will she really have to go? Will she have to get on that dirty bus and use up her last few dollars on a cheap motel? She concentrates on his bent head: want me! Want me, damn you. She is not sure how much money she has in her purse and wishes she had counted it in the bathroom.

He is staring at his knuckles, big for the thinness of his hands and bone-colored with clenching. “Do you love me?”

She turns her head. Her gaze strikes into his with a clinking, the stirring of a brittle wind chime. He is thinking about girls, the difficulty, the approaching, his shyness, the awkward phone calls with silences that open under him like crevasses in a glacier.

She is wondering what she is supposed to say. “What do you care?”

“I have to know.”

His long milky face, pleading laugh, set of mismatched bones. He is gentle. If he does not touch her with passion, neither does he hurt her. That is very important, not to be hurt. “Of course I love you.”

“Do you?” Once again he ducks to stare at his knuckles.

She must risk breaking the tension. She goes to read the clock.

“What time is it?” he calls.

She comes back to answer. “Five to four. I hope I haven’t forgotten anything.”

A strand of hair in the washbasin? Steel hands press on his shoulders: decide, decide. His father’s voice, rising with the effort to contain his temper. “Squeeze the trigger, Edmund, squeeze it. Come on, it won’t wait for you all day. Do it!” The rabbit bolted into the tall grass. In his relief he shot. His father strode away. Be a man, be a man. Pressure of steel hands.

He has always been fastidious not to give pain. “Let’s walk down to the water.”

She shakes her head. “Not enough time. I can’t miss the bus accidentally, don’t you see?” In New York it will be hot. She will call somebody. She will sleep on a couch, and the next day again she will go around to the temp agencies in whatever is still clean. Men will pester her on the street, men will buy her supper and expect to lay her as payment. “I can’t sit here any longer waiting for you to decide if you love me—can I?” She claps the sand from her palms, hating
herself for having listened to his quiet voice, for having given herself into his hands like a bag of laundry.

He cradles his head, elbowing aside the shells and pebbles. They move him, the sort of treasures a child might hoard. He feels wrong, not sure why. He hates the carelessness of men like his father, men in the fraternity of his college years whose act of power is to give pain. He does not know what he wants, only that everything is going away. She is about to walk off with that flimsy suitcase and leave him tangled here.

She reads his face—sullen, puzzled. He will let her go. Her skin crawls. One more defeat. “Well, want to walk me to the crossroads? It’s time.”

But he does not rise. “Stay.”

Hope scalds her. She wants, wants so badly that surely she must win. “Why let it drag on?”

“You know it’s hard for me to figure out what I feel sometimes. I’m slow to react. I can’t just decide like that.”

“You can tell if you love me. You could tell you wanted me here for the summer, before.”

He is afraid, but of what? Her leaving? “But I do love you!” He breaks from his chair, snatches the suitcase from her. “I do love you. I want us to stay together.” The words slam like a door he is finally through. He feels weak with relief. He has done the right thing. He too will have a wife. He will have a wife and children with his name.

“Then I’ll stay.” She stands quite still. That blue future gathers itself in a wave and goes crashing over her. I’ve won! she tells herself. Now I’ll be safe. Now I’ll belong. And I’ll be ever so good to him. I’ll never take another bus. I’ll never sleep on somebody else’s couch again.

But her spine is water and her hands curl up remembering that vertical house, his parents with their expectant eyes, his ivory bedroom with its air of sickroom. His thin arms fold around her in a tight but formal embrace like an up-ended box.

Circa 1970

Always the bedroom is dark. Oh, there are windows, two, onto a canyon echoing neighbors’ sorrows and appliances. The crash of a bottle. A husband and wife tearing at each other. Children disemboweling a cat. The pelvic throb of mating cries, falsetto yowls over electric guitars reverberating like a permanent hangover. Noises pulse from other boxes.

Afternoon. Heat packed like grime into the sockets of her body, she lies prone. Let out early today because the air conditioning broke in the false moon of fluorescence and files, she came home and did not pause at the refuge of coffee shop where students sit in swirls of talk and where she sometimes sits pretending she is a student still. If you are a student people talk with you, they ask questions. If you are a working wife they look through you. She came home to clean the apartment thoroughly. Today she would set everything right.

She entered the dark, the summer sun fading into her skin. Their rooms felt packed with stale breath. On the cot that served as couch, the coverlet frowned wrinkles. On his desk her husband’s work crouched waiting for him. Posters tacked to the walls look faded, outdated. Who cared about
that band any longer? Not her. Then she wanted only to be swallowed into sleep. Fingers sunk into the pillow now she runs through clotted thickets hung with huge red flowers. The pursuing male, naked anyface, runs close behind. She stumbles. He overtakes and takes her. Memory of orgasm, the overtones from silence. She rises into shame. Kneels in her sweat scrubbing the roach-stained floor. When he comes home, it will be nice for him.

He wakes in the dark. Though the bedroom is always dark, night thickens it. Coming from a late seminar, he saw the white wafer of October moon, but it cannot enter here. Straightening his knife-blade back, he heaves the chilly air into his lungs. Peers into the dark. Hears only the wind scraping drifts of fallen leaves and discarded papers in the canyon between the apartments. Why should sweat slime him as if an army of frogs had crawled over his skin? Her hot body swamps his flank. The walls lean inward. He thrust free of the coil of sheets, gathering his pillow and the spread from the foot of the bed. As if he stood in a cave and looked out, at the corridor’s end white moonlight pierces the bay window of the living room to freeze on the rug. She wakes, rolls on one round elbow to see him, pillow clasped to his shoulder, dragging the spread behind like a broken tail of a peacock.

“Where are you going?”

“The couch.”

“Why?”

With the wincing shrub she knows too well, he ducks away. “I can’t sleep.” He stalks toward the white field that waits at tunnel’s end. His side of the bed cools under her searching hand. In some unconscious way she has failed or offended him. She calls his name. The word fades.

Light comes down the corridor from the living room where he studies. One o’clock. She must get up at seven for work. The wind will freeze her as she waits for her bus, ice
will enter her ankles. Kneeling naked and winter pale on the bed, she sees herself in the wavery mirror over the dresser that came with the apartment. He grunts distantly. She calls louder.

“What is it?” he says like a groan.

What? Me. Your wife you see as demanding. “When are you coming to bed?”

“When I finish. Go to sleep.”

She weighs her breasts in her hands with a smile of derision. When I was a graduate student, I did finish. She had left after her masters to support him, as his family, as her family, as he himself expected. After all, a physicist is more important than an English doctoral student. And do I believe he will be different later? I feel disloyal judging him. I am not supposed to think this way. But he is never done and I am always waiting.

She puts on her only nightgown, pre-wedding extravagance in blush silk and lace, brushes her hair crackling. In the wavery mirror, she seems to be dissolving in her flimsy nightgown. Why should she be more attractive dressed in this thin strip of silk than standing as herself? A pierced unicorn, image of a tapestry she saw at the Cloisters in Manhattan with another man years before, looks over her shoulder from the wall. Her husband tacked it there. She is not the unicorn, blood bubbling on the ice-white flank and deflowered by pike and dogs. Her face fixed in a smile, she goes barefoot into the living room.

Afterward she sleeps curled toward him, relaxed, looking pleased. Afterward he sleeps too and dreams of a bleeding unicorn who stares at him with his mother’s eyes. He grinds his teeth and groans. His out-flung arm strikes her. She wakes and leans to see him in his struggle. Her eyes drip hot as candlewax down her cheeks. Winning is losing and losing is losing too. Even in sleep they are chained together and she is dragged like a broken tail through his nightmares.

Whispering. Low sluttish whispers and a stench of fish. A cat scuttles past him with some live thing in its mouth. An old woman in black is watching him, and the beads of the portiere over her door click in her seeking hand. An open sewer dribbles down the winding stairs of street. Whispering again. Who? Awake at once, he sits up with a jagged hammering against his breastbone. No, not whispering. Just rain.

She stirs, far on her side of the gullied sheet. Just spring rain slithering down the windows, rain with a queasy smell of upturned earth. Something that should have been done has been forgotten. Something owed is coming due. His anxiety feels almost comfortable, accustomed. He knows that she is holding her breath like a silenced alarm, listening. To the rain? To his breathing?

He says, “You were out very late at your girlfriend’s. What time did you get in?”

Pretending sleep, she imitates soft noises of coming to.

More loudly he asks, “What time did you come home? What were you doing?”

“Just talking. I didn’t notice the time. Oh, hours ago.”

Two on the green-eyed clock. He is quite sure if he reached out his hand, her hair would be wet, freshly wet, with the rain.

The window is open on the mild leafy night and the shade taps and taps in the small late spring wind. He rises, gathers his pillow, yanks the spread off. Awake beside him from his tossing and the churning of her own thoughts, she sits up on an elbow and watches him go dragging his bedding down the dark corridor toward the cot in the living room.

Tonight he accused her of being unfaithful, and she laughed. Faithful, unfaithful to what, she wonders. He does not believe she has been with her friend, talking. He withdraws, withholds, makes himself scarce to punish her. She is already moving in another direction. She watches him go,
then stretches out again. And says nothing. She imagines a bed that will be all her own in a place that will be tiny but light and hers alone.

She has been making plans with her friend who knows a couple of available rentals. She made a list tonight. Saturday, the first day she doesn’t work, she will look for that space behind some rented door.