“It just got to be a standing joke. I don’t know why.”
“But you liked him.”
“Yeah. Of course I liked him.”
“I am not going to cry,” Louise said. “I am going to drive, and if I did not cry in the restaurant I am not going to cry now.”
When they were home, in the bedroom, she lay on her side, leafing through the magazine on the floor. He looked down and saw a picture of a woman standing beside a car with its door open, her hand on the door, her foot raised, resting on the doorsill, a gold buckle on her shoe. The woman was looking off to the left. She wore a scarf, long and white, the sort Isadora Duncan must have had hundreds of. The scarf dangled down the front of a maroon velvet jacket, and beneath the jacket was a long pleated skirt, as silvery as tinsel. Behind the woman was a string of fuzzy lights. A person with cataracts would have seen the lights that way, all aura and haze. The scarf was so white you couldn’t see the texture. The woman’s fingers held the edge of the scarf, as she stood with one foot in the door, one foot on the pavement, looking away.
“Vogue,” Louise said. “Care to make a comment?”
“I like the scarf,” he said.
He went into the bathroom. Through the wall he could hear, very faintly, the radio playing in Mary’s bedroom. She did not seem to be worried about flunking English in summer school. He supposed that it was his obligation to Mary to confront her teacher and say: She told me that Vanity Fair was about how things just fall into place. She’s fifteen years old and she knows that. Why is she failing English? He would imply, of course, that the teacher was not attuned to Mary. Not stimulating her. He tried to imagine Mary stimulated. She was always lethargic, resigned, sarcastic — though she had been right about his sarcasm. She had been the one to end that game, at dinner: Mary grew weary of things. He wondered if she might be weary of her weariness. If yes meant no in Angela’s case, then no might mean yes in Mary’s. He shook the thought away. He took a shower, blasting himself with hot water. He took four Excedrin before he got into the shower. It felt as if they had lodged about six inches down his chest and were there, still and heavy, like pebbles in a pond. He soaped himself briskly. The suds came up fast. Just as fast, he rinsed them off. He cupped his hands and splashed water on his face, then held his breath and turned his face up into the spray. When he took his face out, he thought he heard “Heart of Glass,” but when he turned the water off, he realized that what he had been hearing had been a man’s voice on the radio. It was not “Heart of Glass” for the second time that day, the millionth time this summer, after all. Nick had told him that once in Boston, years ago, he had been out of money and out of food, and the woman he lived with had left to keep bees with a sixty-year-old ex-professor of Slavic languages, and his eighteen-year-old sister had just put her baby up for adoption, and the girl he had hoped would be his new girl had called to say she had drawn night duty for the rest of the week. He had been sprawled in the hot Boston apartment he shared with four other people, the window in his room jammed so that it would open only a couple of inches, wearing the same clothes he had worn for four days, with a slow, drumming toothache coming on and no money, late at night. The people in the apartment next door had come home and they had been laughing, and he knew that pretty soon he was going to have to listen to them, having more fun on their mattress than he was having on his, and the most he had been able to do was roll to the far side of his mattress. And then two amazing things had happened. A breeze had started, as strong as the low speed of a fan, a breeze after days of nothing but still air; and at the same time, from the apartment next door, a song so beautiful that he had wept but decided to stay alive: Diana Ross singing “Everything’s Good About You.” Nick credited the breeze and the song with saving his life. Nick was only five years younger than he was, but when Nick told stories like that, it broke his heart, as much as his heart broke when something terrible happened to one of his children. Actually, nothing really terrible had ever happened. A couple of frightening runs to the emergency room with infants whose fevers rose and rose and wouldn’t break, but lately — summer school? The crisis was that Mary was not doing well in summer school. He would take care of it.
He got out of the shower and threw his sweaty clothes into the hamper, but not before removing the small package, wrapped in paper napkins, from his shirt pocket. He put it on the back of the sink, and reached in the medicine cabinet for adhesive tape and scissors. He cut off the right-size piece and taped it to the dry edge of the sink, then dried himself well and unfolded the napkins. Inside was the duck foot from the Chinese restaurant, gray and curved. He taped the duck foot securely to his penis, then put on his pajamas and went into the bedroom. If she didn’t laugh, it was really all over. It was even more all over than he had thought it could be. He got into bed and she closed the magazine and dropped it on the floor.
“Hot night,” he said.
She was lying on her back, with her eyes closed. She had combed her hair, and her lipstick was gone.
He struggled out of his pajama top. Then the bottoms. She didn’t look. He pulled the sheet over them and took her hand.
He got up on one elbow and kissed her on the forehead. She had no expression on her face, before or after.
“Hey,” he said, moving her hand down his stomach.
“Not on your life,” she said.
He kept moving her hand, until her fingers were touching the duck foot. She yanked her hand away, turned toward him, pulled back the sheet. He held his breath, trying to choke back his laughter. She looked into his eyes.
“Is this what you and the New York girls are into?” she said.
The grotesquely funny was obviously much in vogue. Women wore purple pedal pushers and hacked off their hair with a razor. A put-on. To be ugly is to be funny. To be funny is, maybe, to get through. But did he even realize that the horrible duck foot was a joke directed at himself and his own sexuality? He had changed so much. He would do things more childish than what the children did, and although he didn’t actually harm himself, there was something self-destructive in his shock tactics. A month before — three weeks before, five weeks, it didn’t matter — when there had been so much sun and the blackberry bush bore fruit so early in the summer, he had been picking up sticks in the grass before he mowed it, and she had been planting seeds in the garden. She had looked up to see him clasping his heart in mock-horror, a circular smear of red on his forehead. She had watched him lurch toward her, eyes big, the ugly red smear like a child’s finger-painting, then collapse without a word. He had mashed the blackberries and pretended to be wounded. He had been playing a game with her, but she could not imagine what part he had expected her to take. She had almost wanted to rush toward him — not because she was fooled, but just that if she grabbed him, if she got that close, she might find out something. Or break the tension. Or even laugh with him. But what he had done hadn’t really been that funny. The strangeness of it, the impetuousness with which he had acted, had convinced her that he really did have another life: not the life in Rye, but another life, a real life, a life she didn’t understand anymore. When he finally got up — slowly, like an exhausted person doing a final push-up — he had cocked his head and looked at her, and not wanting to look fazed, she had smiled at him. Just smiled. And then she had gone on sprinkling seeds, evenly, looking to see where they hit the dirt. They were so tiny that of course she couldn’t see. She would see when they came up. She would find out what was going on with John when he left her.