“Jesus,” he said. “You really don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Why don’t I know what I’m saying?” She started to sit next to him, decided to sit on the floor instead. When she sat down, everything started to slow up: She couldn’t say the sentences she had thought to say; lifting the spoon from the bowl to her mouth was an effort. Her finger throbbed, and she looked down at the toilet paper she had wrapped around her finger, to see if it was red. It was white. She spooned another piece of orange off the top of the cereal and put it in her mouth and chewed.
“Why don’t I know what I’m saying?”
“Can we talk?” he said. “Are you going to rush out of here?”
He was crying. She looked up and saw that tears were rolling down his cheeks. She got up and walked to the sofa, sat down beside him. “What is going on?” she said.
“You’re right,” he said. “I don’t do this well, and I certainly didn’t do that well.”
“Wait a minute,” she said, lifting his hand off his leg, grabbing it hard. “What is going on?”
“I don’t know how to say this,” he said. “I’m just starting to realize that it’s odd that I’m here. Will you call Nick? Can you see if he’s going to be around?”
“Call Nick at home?” she said.
“It’s early in the morning, isn’t it? I forgot that. I can call Nick later,” he said.
“In the meantime, why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “What if you had slept with him? What if I walked in on that?”
“You could call before you come over.”
“But I never even thought about that. I think of this as home.”
“It’s my home. Your home is in Connecticut. Or Rye. Wherever you want to say it is.”
“It’s here,” he said, balling up a pillow. “It’s here, whatever you say.” He threw the pillow, hard. It tipped over an empty bottle — a ginger-ale bottle with cigarette butts in it. He stared at the chaos of the room.
“Nina,” he said, “I was coming up those stairs, and you don’t know what I was going through, trying to get to the top. It would have been such a goddamn soap opera if you had been here with somebody else.”
“Maybe it’s a soap opera anyway. A quick dinner and an off-camera fuck. Sometimes I think trying to keep you is hopeless, like trying to keep a hat from blowing away in the wind, when you can’t even put your hand up to hold it. I feel that powerless — that I can’t even grab on to the edge of something. If we hadn’t gotten stoned, I don’t know what things would have been like when you appeared here this morning. I just know that I’m tired of trying to keep things together. I feel like I don’t have any control. I’m sick of it. I might as well sit here and smoke the rest of that grass and lose my job, and not fucking care. You can support me, like a real mistress. Make this a real soap opera.” She got up, because her words were coming out funny, and she thought she was going to cry. She picked up the bowl of cereal and sat down again. She realized that the bowl was not a crystal ball, but she stared into it.
“You can’t go to work,” he said. “You aren’t going to work, are you?”
“You’d better tell me what’s going on. I’ve given all the explanation you deserve, and more, about what was going on here. Now you tell me why you showed up here at seven-thirty in the morning, and why I can’t go to work.”
“It’s not a quick dinner and a quick fuck. I’ve spent eight hours here a lot of nights. I’ve gotten back to Rye at three in the morning, and had to work the next day.”
“You want it to be over. Is that it?”
“That is the last thing I want.”
“Shall we play twenty questions?”
“Can we go lie down? Just lie down?”
He wouldn’t talk when they went into the bedroom. After a long while he rolled from his back to his stomach. He was too still, and too quiet, to be asleep. She decided to say nothing and wait. She even felt sorry enough for him, after a while, to put her hand on his back. She got up on one arm and put her hand on his back, stroked it down his spine, up again, lightly massaged his neck. She stared at the clock. Five minutes passed. She called Lord and Taylor’s and said that she was sick. Crying helped. She went back to bed and saw that he had rolled over on his back again, and that his eyes were very red — from being against the pillow, or because he had cried, she couldn’t tell. She stroked her hand down his chest. She unbuttoned his shirt and stroked the bare skin.
“Okay,” she said. “What?”
“What I was feeling coming up those stairs,” he said. “It was like coming to you was happening in slow motion. There were so many feelings, and they kept getting heavier and heavier. They were stopping me from moving.”
“It’s good you didn’t get stoned with us. If you think that when you’re straight, you wouldn’t have been a good influence last night.”
“Last night,” he said. “My God. Last night.”
“Look,” she said, “tell me you’re all right, and we can sleep, or you can have me play twenty questions, or if you just want to talk, I’ll listen to you. All right?”
Her finger was tracing the line of his breastbone. He could close his eyes, and feel a small path being traced on his body. Her finger inched along, traveling little distances. He had driven, on no sleep, from Connecticut to New York, gone to the garage, gotten a cab to her apartment, and now he was feeling more than he had felt in all the time he had been awake, traveling, going crazily from one place to the next. He was here, and still. Her finger was moving, curving around his body.
“I’m all right,” he said. “Mary isn’t. John Joel shot her.”
He was walking up the stairs. It was a simple accomplishment — the sort of thing they teach brain-damaged people to do. Later, when they master the mechanics of climbing, they teach them not to frown or squint. The trick is not to show that you’re concentrating. There was a school for brain-damaged people — teenage children, mostly — somewhere near where he worked, and several times during his lunch hour he had seen them parading down the street. They had things to do: trash to throw away. Well — maybe that was the only thing. They had trash to throw away. He and Nick had been coming back from lunch the first time, and Nick had called his attention to them. As months went by he and Nick had watched their progress. It was horribly slow progress, and it might never have occurred to them to think of it as progress at all if Nick hadn’t noticed the way they had stopped holding hands. At first, they held hands like small schoolchildren. Then they walked close together, almost shoulder to shoulder. Then, by the time spring came, when everybody else in the city was walking close together — men steering women along, their hands on their bare shoulders, people hip to hip on the grass in Central Park — the brain-damaged people had let go of each other and walked farther apart. Either they had been taught not to frown and look frightened or the spring had touched them in some way. One time, as they watched, a man carrying a blaring cassette player got into the middle of them, and they started to scatter like frightened ducks; then the two men at the front came and tried to round them up. Eventually they did, and the parade huddled together again and turned the corner. Nick claimed he watched because it reminded him that there were worse problems than having to deal with Metcalf. He claimed he watched because Nick had gotten him hooked. He was not used to seeing slow, regular movement in the city. He had gotten used to watching people slap down change for the newspaper without missing a beat, to arms suddenly stretched out for cabs, to people walking down a street so that you couldn’t tell whether or not they were together. Even when they spoke to each other, that didn’t mean for sure that they were together.