Some nights we talked about personal things we wouldn’t ever have mentioned in other circumstances, like death, of course, which we planned to beat. He told me how he and Sharon had met in high school, that neither of them had ever dated anyone else. And I told him more about Paulie and me than I’d ever told anybody, as if I’d just fallen in love and had to brag about it or die. The dark room must have opened us up, and that feeling of being shipwrecked together. He had a great sense of humor then, and what seemed like real courage and wisdom. In the morning he’d invariably greet me by saying, “You still alive there, kiddo?” When I would grunt sleepily, he’d say, “Good, then I must be, too.” It was a dumb routine, but it seemed funny then, and cheering. Later, while I was trying to get my soft-boiled, salt-free breakfast egg down, I’d think I’m alive, I’m alive, the way I’d kept thinking This is it the night Paulie brought me in. Now Gil was uptight and sanctimonious—the brainy nerd in school who won’t show you the answers. I was ready to tell him to fuck off when I saw him stick a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue. He did it fast, as if he was sneaking a breath mint, but I saw him anyway. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just can it, okay?” he said, glancing behind me.
I looked around and saw that the women were on their way back to the table.
Dessert wasn’t much more fun. We all settled for the fresh fruit—without the crème fraîche, naturally—but by then I wouldn’t have enjoyed the richest chocolate cake in the world. In fact, I felt a little queasy and there was a tightness in my own chest. I was sure it was indigestion this time, but I took a nitro, too, with the same sleight of hand Gil had used. I think he was the only one who noticed.
We livened up a little in the parking lot, joking around and making promises to get together again soon. Gil must have been sorry for acting like such an asshole, but he didn’t want to apologize. Instead, he punched my shoulder a few times, and said, “So, kiddo, are you still alive?” And as his car pulled away, he tooted a farewell riff on the horn.
Paulie and I were both quiet on the way home, but it wasn’t the cozy silence I used to long for whenever she talked too much. “That was sort of fun,” I said, as we walked into the house. She didn’t say anything, and I said, “I think I liked him better in pajamas, though.” We made our way down the hallway to the bedroom. I hung my jacket on one of the doorknobs we passed, my tie on another, and started unbuttoning my shirt. I was hoping Paulie would agree, or even say something catty or spiteful of her own. One of the best things about marriage was that you could do that, expose your worse side without being judged. I dumped my change and keys on top of the bureau. When I turned around, I saw that Paulie was sitting in the window seat, with all her clothes still on, and she was looking intently up at me. I sensed that something important and bad was about to happen, and I tried to forestall it. “Boy, I’m really dead,” I said, “aren’t you?” I sat on the edge of the bed and let one shoe drop to the floor with a thud.
“Howard,” Paulie said. “I have to say something to you.” I took a deep breath, but before I could let it out, she went on. “This has been on my mind for weeks, but I waited for you to get well before I brought it up,” she said. “It’s something that won’t go away by itself.”
“This sounds serious,” I said, and smiled at her to undo the seriousness.
“It is,” she said. “Do you remember that after … Marie, after you came back to us, I said that things were changed forever?”
“That was a long time ago,” I said. Why couldn’t she try and let it go away by itself?
“What I meant was that the balance of power between us had changed. Before you left, the thing that scared me the most was the idea of you ever leaving.”
“What scares you the most now?” I said, jumping in right over my head.
“That I want to leave you,” she said.
If I hadn’t asked her, she might not have said it exactly that way. Maybe she wouldn’t have said it at all. “Paulie,” I said. “You don’t mean that.” The irony of the whole thing occurred to me in a battery of wild heartbeats. I’d given up Janine, and Paulie had found someone else. Who was it? I thought of philandering Frank, of cocksure Mike, and, crazily, of Gil acting hostile in the restaurant and then popping nitro. Mine were down the hall somewhere now, in my jacket pocket.
“Yes, I do,” Paulie said. “Listen, Howard, there’s something I’ve sensed for a very long time and didn’t say anything about. I guess I didn’t want it to be true, so I pretended it wasn’t.”
“Maybe it’s not,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said. “But I think it is. I think you’ve had a lover for a while, Howard, the thing I’d decided I wasn’t ever going to tolerate or forgive again.”
“Why do you think that?” I said.
“Oh, clues … this and that. Things weren’t that great between us, anyway.”
Her incredible calm struck me, as if she’d rehearsed this conversation for ages, and had resolved herself to its outcome. Had I said what she’d expected me to? I hadn’t said anything that mattered yet, not a denial, not a confession. If I was going to deny it, I should have done that right away. It wouldn’t have seemed like much of a lie anymore. I hadn’t been with Janine for weeks, and I’d ended it on my own initiative. It was as if I were two separate people, the one before the heart attack and the one after. How could she hold me responsible for what the other one had done? “Paulie,” I said softly, “it isn’t true.”
“That’s hard for me to believe.”
“Is it because I’ve been a little grouchy? Is it because we don’t make love enough?” I had turned this into a game of twenty questions without meaning to. For the first time I understood Paulie’s compulsion to talk and talk into the silences between us, that it came but of uneasiness, and out of a desire to change what was probably out of your hands.
“It’s not any one thing,” Paulie said. “It’s many things. Our life together is all habit now, and it could go on like that until we die. You almost died, and I thought I’d be cheated of saying this to you, and it made me furious.”
“Is that all you thought?” I asked, fishing for something better, but hardly feeling hopeful.
“You know it isn’t,” she said.
“Then you still love me,” I concluded for her.
“Yes, in a way. But I’m also very angry with you, and terribly disappointed. I want to move out, Howard, and take a place by myself in the city.”
“This is crazy,” I said. “When did you decide all this?”
“A while ago.”
“Did you rent something yet?”
“Not yet. I’ll look again tomorrow, more seriously.”
“You’ve looked already?”
“Only once, when I was just trying out the idea.”
“Jesus, I don’t believe this,” I said. “Paulie, I love you. What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to just let me do this, peacefully.”
“Peacefully! We’ll get enough peace after we’re dead!” As I said it, I remembered this was what she used to say about sleep when I wouldn’t get up on Sunday mornings. “Our silver anniversary is coming up,” I said, and my eyes filled with tears, as if that was the central and tragic fact.
“I know,” Paulie said. “Exactly! Can you imagine feeling this way and going through that whole farce? With Ann hiring Madison Square Garden or someplace for a party?”
“The kids will be thrilled to hear about this,” I said. Everybody would hear about it.
“They’ll live,” Paulie said. “And so will we.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. I limped around the room until I flung off the other shoe. “You sure took a long time to get even with me.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” she asked.
“I don’t know what you’re doing,” I said. “I don’t think you know, either.”
“I’m mixed up about some things,” she said, “but I wa
nt to try a separation. I have to.”
“You only have to die,” I said coldly, and when she didn’t answer, I said, “Go ahead then, go!” I picked up the newspaper that was lying open on the floor next to my side of the bed. “Here!” I said. “Look through the real-estate section!” I threw the paper in her direction. It fell short by a few feet and the pages scattered all over the carpet.
Paulie walked noisily across them and picked up her pillow. “I’m going to sleep in Ann’s room,” she said. “Maybe we can talk again in the morning.”
I waited until I heard the door to Ann’s old bedroom close before I went back up the hallway to look for the nitroglycerin. I put one under my tongue, but what I really needed then was a cigarette. In the bedroom again, I rummaged through the pockets of my jackets in the closet, hoping to come across a forgotten pack of Marlboros. I only found a few shreds of loose tobacco that I chewed and spit out. I thought of the silvery smoke disappearing on the other side of the restaurant that night, and of everything lost through bad choices and lousy luck. “Shit,” I said, and went to the door of Ann’s room and knocked.
“Yes?” Paulie said.
I opened the door. She was sitting up under the covers in the white canopied bed. The room was still pretty much the way it was when Ann lived there—posters, photographs, high-school trophies—even though she’d been married for more than a year. Her child-sized Raggedy Ann doll still sat slumped in the wicker rocking chair. Paulie had talked about turning the room into a study for herself, but it remained a kind of shrine to Ann’s childhood. Being in there with Paulie now made me feel the positive vibes of the past, of the good times, at least.
“Paulie, there isn’t anybody anymore,” I said.
“But there was someone, wasn’t there?”
“Yes,” I said, and watched her whole body take that in. “But it didn’t mean anything. It was just something I got into, by mistake, and then got right out of again. It’s been over for a long time—I swear it—and it was never worth what this is doing to us, to you.”
“Was Marie worth it?” she said.
“Oh, Paulie …”
“I don’t think I can ever trust you again, Howard,” she said. “I don’t even really want to try.”
“I know that. I know that, Paulie, and I don’t blame you.”
“Then there’s nothing else to say, is there?” she said.
“Can’t you just try and forgive me?” I asked, and her mouth curved into a bitter smile. “Listen, babe,” I said. “Do you know what I used to talk about to Gil all night in the hospital? About you—about how much I love you.”
“That was probably out of guilt,” she said, “and fear.”
“I was scared, sure I was, but it was more than that. I felt lovestruck, as if we had just met for the first time. I drove poor Gil nuts talking about you. Do you remember I used to say that you were the words and I was the music? Oh, God, how can I say this?”
Paulie’s face was wide open, and miserable with confusion. I wanted to move in then, climb in next to her on the narrow bed and take her in my arms. Instead, I lifted the doll from the rocker and sat down with it on my lap. “I don’t think I could live without you,” I said.
“You’re the one who said that nobody dies of love.”
“I guess I was lying,” I said.
“That wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”
“But it would be the last. I know it’s corny to say this, but that first night in the hospital my life actually passed in front of me. The important parts, anyway. I remembered when we met at the dance, how gorgeous you were … that tremendous feeling I had when I first saw you. I remembered making love in my car. That time in Marine Park when the horn went off and I had to pull the wires to stop it. And waiting for Jason to be born. It was as if I was just being born then myself. I was sorry for ever hurting you. Paulie, I still am.”
I waited in the awful, punishing silence until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Then I put the doll on the floor and stood up. “I want you to stay with me more than I’ve ever wanted anything,” I said. “Please, my love.” She didn’t answer and I went to the side of the bed and took her hand. “Please,” I said again.
Paulie closed her eyes for a few moments, and when she opened them, they were darker, changed. “Oh, damn you to hell,” she said, and then she moved over for me.
11
WHEN I WAS A little girl, my father used to pretend to pull pennies from my ringlets, and I fell for it again and again. Even after the magic act was over, I always shook my head a few times, waiting for some spare change to fall out. This was more or less the same thing—Howard had pulled off his major trick once more, making me believe my instincts were wrong, and that love always triumphs over everything. As soon as I let him into Ann’s bed, I felt something leave me. Maybe it was courage. God knows I was relieved not to have to go through the agony of separating, but I was still sad. I wasn’t exactly convinced by Howard’s story, but I wanted to be, and that’s what mattered, finally. Tell all the Truth but tell it slant … I didn’t say any of that to him, though; I didn’t say anything at all. We made love in the space that was almost as small as the backseat of his old Pontiac. We were passionate and raucous; the canopy trembled above us, the way the car had once trembled and rocked on its beat-up springs. Later that night, we woke and went hand-in-hand down the hallway to our own bed. We fell asleep again in one corner of that broad expanse, staying as close as we could without merging again. But I was still sad.
For days, Howard did everything he could think of to cheer me up. It was a kind of courtship—that constant, anxious awareness, his earnest desire to please and be pleased. Why did I remember being much happier during our first, hurried courtship, even though I was doubled over most of the time then, in a cramp of longing?
Soon there were other things on my mind. One afternoon, about a week after my reconciliation with Howard, Sara came to see me, unexpectedly. I opened the front door, on my way out to the library, and she was standing there, about to ring the bell. “Sara!” I said. “You scared the life out of me.” When I looked back later, it seemed like a blackly humorous remark, since the life was really in her.
She’d come out on the train, she said, and walked the two miles from the station. My poor half-extinguished Flame. She was wan and exhausted, as if she’d trudged across the Sahara. My first thought was that Jason had left her. I remembered the tension between them that day in my kitchen, right after Howard came home from the hospital. “It’s a wonderful surprise, though,” I said, belatedly, and her bony little body collapsed against me. She began sobbing; the sound was throaty and desperate, strangely like the way she sang.
I took her into the living room and made her sit down. I brought her a glass of water, which she held for a while without drinking. It sloshed as the sobs subsided into hiccups. “What’s wrong, Sara?” I asked. “Tell me, and maybe I can help you.”
When she was composed enough, she said, “I’m pregnant.”
History, I thought. But it was my own mother I’d gone to. And I knew she hadn’t felt the queer thrill of joy that went through me when Sara spoke. “You are?” I said. “Oh, honey, are you sure?”
It was a foolish question. Of course she was sure. Her usually modest breasts were straining her glittery T-shirt, and her face was changed in mysterious ways beyond the pallor and despair. No doubt a handy home-pregnancy test had confirmed what she already knew from missed periods and other symptoms. She nodded, anyway, sipped a little of the water.
I took her icy hand and said, “Are you that unhappy about it, Sara?”
“I was happy at first,” she said, “until I told Jason.”
It was history. I could still conjure up Howard’s surprised face, the way his eyes shifted away from mine into the darkness of the future. He’d said, “What do you want to do about it?” and I said, “You know.” And that was how we became engaged. “What did Jason say?” I asked Sara.
“Oh, he wants me to have an abortion.”
My friends and I had marched at the clinic in Northport not long ago. Katherine didn’t bring her grandson along, but other women on both sides wheeled strollers back and forth in front of the building. And Katherine had put her commitment into the signs she’d made: CHOOSE FREEDOM; MEN MAKE LAWS, WOMEN MAKE BABIES; WHAT ABOUT OUR RIGHTS? Across the street, there were the other signs, including the ones I’d dreaded, with blown-up photos of fetuses on them.
“How far gone are you?” I asked, thinking what an awful expression that was. Right then, it evoked an image of a pregnant woman disappearing down a dusty road.
“About ten weeks,” Sara said. She put the glass of water on the coffee table and brushed her cotton-candy hair back with her hands.
“Have you seen a doctor?” I said. “Have you told your mother and father?”
“Yes,” she said. “No. I know what they’ll say.”
I’d only met them once, when the kids invited both sets of parents for supper after they’d moved in together. The Bartletts had declined, and then they showed up as we were finishing our dessert. They’d come all the way in from Westport for that brief, unhappy visit. It was clear to everyone that they strongly disapproved of Jason, of what had become of their daughter, and of that tiny, barricaded firetrap in the Bronx. Sara’s father was a pinstriped corporate lawyer, obviously not her model for the ideal lover. I imagined that Sara’s mother, a pretty, matronly blonde, had a head filled with snapshots of Sara’s childhood she wished she could reveal to us. “She had lovely hair,” Mrs. Bartlett wanted to say, “like mine, only lighter. I used to brush it a hundred strokes every night when she was little. Look, here we all are at the lake. That’s her sister, Peggy. I bought their clothes at Bonwit’s. They had French lessons when they were three.”
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