She expects that he will be in her office waiting for her, but she doesn’t see him all that day. She walks up the stairs instead of taking the elevator. Eventually the fluorescent lights make her feel warm, and with the warmth comes calm. She works with accuracy and speed. The day is over before it begins. She feels real relief, walking down the stairs, that she has not had to see him. She knows men, and that is why she thought he would be standing in her office, waiting for her when she came in in the morning, but this time she has been wrong. As she starts her walk across the parking lot she begins to think of dinner. Some of the ingredients for this night’s dinner are a little hard to find out of season, and she hopes he has not had to take the crosstown bus again. She’s tired, and she knows what it is to exhaust yourself in a day.
Then she sees the car. Far in the distance, blocking her own car from view, yet she knows with certainty that her car is behind it. She walks more slowly. She tries to think, but nothing comes. Yes — it’s his car. She remembers the color. She remembers the make: a Pontiac. She remembers him, too, sees his face as clearly as she now sees the car, although he isn’t looking in her direction, but in front of him, down the lot. She’s almost close enough to touch him before he realizes she’s there. In fact, her hand does touch the glass. She stands there with her hand against his window until he reaches across the seat and opens the door on her side. Then she gets into the car.
Tonight he has been unable to find fresh thyme. It is the first time he has ever failed. She makes the dinner without it, but it’s flat, lacking a certain delicacy of flavor. And he knows it, too, his palate as fine as hers. Neither of them eats much. The wine they have with the meal is very good. He has selected wisely. But the main course is a disappointment. He looks sad — eats listlessly, says little. He has failed.
After dinner she goes into the bathroom. The two little bottles of perfume are on a shelf. She takes them down and smells them, both much the same. With her eyes closed, slowly breathing in the aroma, she remembers the motel room, the ride, the hamburger she ate with him at a roadside stand. She had been very nervous coming back to the apartment, late again, but once more he hadn’t been there. He was hours late coming in, having searched everywhere for the thyme. And he was depressed not to have found it; he forgot to brush her hair. He sat in his own chair and said very little. Perhaps it is the memory of the hamburger-she never eats cheap food like that — or something about the strong smell of the perfume released in the small room that makes her sick. She is sick, vomiting in the bathroom for a long time before the sickness passes, and then she’s all right. He’ll say she has been pushing herself too hard, and that will start a whole discussion: moving to a larger apartment, his cooking dinners, everything. She goes into the living room to face it, but the room is empty. He has gone out for one of his infrequent walks.
Eventually she will be caught. She knows that. This night she is very late; she should have called with an excuse hours ago. She uses the telephone at the entrance to the parking lot, trying to keep her voice soft and regular, counting the white lines that divide the lot into the parking places until his voice comes on the line. Something happened to her car, she tells him. It did? His voice is strained. She doesn’t say anything.
“There’s a man,” she says.
“Speak louder. You said the car broke down. Where?”
“In the parking lot. There’s a man.”
“Yes?”
“Who’s going to fix it.”
There is another silence.
“Will you call back if there’s any real trouble?”
“Yes,” she says.
He is waiting in the car. It’s all right, she assures him. He rides her to her car at the back of the parking lot. She opens the door and gets in. She watches his car drive away in the rearview mirror, and then she gets out of the car and stands in the parking lot. Standing there, she thinks of her lover, gone in one direction, and of Jim, in another. She watches the leaves blow across the surface and sees that now the parking lot is mostly brown, instead of black. Autumn always makes her feel uneasy. Autumn, or the fact that she hasn’t eaten all day. She gets in the car and drives home to make dinner.
Vermont
Noel is in our living room shaking his head. He refused my offer and then David’s offer of a drink, but he has had three glasses of water. It is absurd to wonder at such a time when he will get up to go to the bathroom, but I do. I would like to see Noel move; he seems so rigid that I forget to sympathize, forget that he is a real person. “That’s not what I want,” he said to David when David began sympathizing. Absurd, at such a time, to ask what he does want. I can’t remember how it came about that David started bringing glasses of water.
Noel’s wife, Susan, has told him that she’s been seeing John Stillerman. We live on the first floor, Noel and Susan on the second, John on the eleventh. Interesting that John, on the eleventh, should steal Susan from the second floor. John proposes that they just rearrange — that Susan moved up to the eleventh, into the apartment John’s wife only recently left, that they just … John’s wife had a mastectomy last fall, and in the elevator she told Susan that if she was losing what she didn’t want to lose, she might as well lose what she did want to lose. She lost John — left him the way popcorn flies out of the bag on the roller coaster. She is living somewhere in the city, but John doesn’t know where. John is a museum curator, and last month, after John’s picture appeared in a newsmagazine, showing him standing in front of an empty space where a stolen canvas had hung, he got a one-word note from his wife: “Good.” He showed the note to David in the elevator. “It was tucked in the back of his wallet — the way all my friends used to carry rubbers in high school,” David told me.
“Did you guys know?” Noel asks. A difficult one; of course we didn’t know, but naturally we guessed. Is Noel able to handle such semantics? David answers vaguely. Noel shakes his head vaguely, accepting David’s vague answer. What else will he accept? The move upstairs? For now, another glass of water.
David gives Noel a sweater, hoping, no doubt, to stop his shivering. Noel pulls on the sweater over pajamas patterned with small gray fish. David brings him a raincoat, too. A long white scarf hangs from the pocket Noel swishes it back and forth listlessly. He gets up and goes to the bathroom.
“Why did she have to tell him when he was in his pajamas?” David whispers.
Noel comes back, looks out the window. “I don’t know why I didn’t know. I can tell you guys knew.”
Noel goes to our front door, opens it, and wanders off down the hallway.
“If he had stayed any longer, he would have said, ‘Jeepers,’” David says.
David looks at his watch and sighs. Usually he opens Beth’s door on his way to bed, and tiptoes in to admire her. Beth is our daughter. She is five. Some nights, David even leaves a note in her slippers, saying that he loves her. But tonight he’s depressed. I follow him into the bedroom, undress, and get into bed. David looks at me sadly, lies down next to me, turns off the light. I want to say something but don’t know what to say. I could say, “One of us should have gone with Noel. Do you know your socks are still on? You’re going to do to me what Susan did to Noel, aren’t you?”
“Did you see his poor miserable pajamas?” David whispers finally. He throws back the covers and gets up and goes back to the living room. I follow, half asleep. David sits in the chair, puts his arms on the armrests, presses his neck against the back of the chair, and moves his feet together. “Zzzz,” he says, and his head falls forward.