Walking up the steps to Nina’s apartment, he had thought for a second that something was missing — a leader was missing. And no one was behind him. He was there alone, doing this simple thing; and he thought that he was never going to be able to make it to the top, and that if he did, it was too much to expect that he would have a pleasant expression on his face when he got there. He would just have to get there and be there, and then — and then what? The stairs were buckling and shifting under him; they were delivering him to a room that would tilt crazily. He rubbed his face. He hadn’t had any sleep, and he was exhausted, and the faint stinging-itch across his neck, below his ears, had started: the signal that he was about to have a pounding headache. He must have been on the stairs for a long time. He kept looking over his shoulder, as though there were better air below him, and if he turned his head he might be able to breathe. He kept turning his head, and the building was quiet — no one behind him. But every time he moved forward, there were just as many stairs, it seemed. His legs felt heavy. His head. Finally he had dashed up the stairs and gotten to the top, panting, feeling as crazy as one of the brain-damaged people would feel if he were capable of seeing himself in perspective. If the piece of paper drops on the sidewalk instead of into the trash container, so what? So what? he was saying out loud. So what? he whispered. No one heard the whisper, and he did not hear any noise: no breakfast dishes clattering, no radio music, no alarms going off. He put his hands over his ears and took them away, to see if there was more sound when he removed his hands. His hearing was fading. What if Nina opened the door and said something, said some important thing, and he didn’t know what she was saying? His eyes hurt too much to concentrate on reading her lips. Her lips. Nina. He knocked on the door, and he smiled. He heard something. From inside, he heard water running. And then he knocked again, and then she was there: he could see her breasts almost down to the nipples. She had on the robe she had given him, and when she spoke, he heard what she said. He saw the man, standing to the side. For an awkward second, nobody said anything. He looked behind him and saw the stairs. When he blinked, they stopped slowly swaying.
Sixteen
ALTHOUGH HE HAD promised Brandt he would take him to see the Little League game that night, he had gone to the house in Connecticut, instead of going back to Rye. Louise had called him and said that she wanted to talk. “Can you give me a hint?” he said, hoping that he was keeping his voice even. It had to be that she wanted a divorce. All that hanging out with Tiffy Adamson had paid off in the long run; Louise had not called him at the office for a year, except about the most trivial things. Certainly her calling him in New York and asking him to call the house in Connecticut because she was too busy, and Mary had to put hamburger meat out to defrost, was a little dig at him, a reminder that there was a world there he wasn’t a part of. It also let him know how banal she thought that world was, but that she was doing the proper thing, coping with it, while he was not. She had called and asked him to ask Mary to put hamburger meat out. He laughed, telling Nina later, and Nina had said that she thought it was sad. “Which part of it?” he said, and she said, “All of it.” So Tiffy had gotten through to Louise. She had convinced her to ask for a divorce.
“No hints,” she said. “Will you be here for dinner, or later?”
“I’ll come for dinner,” he said. He was suddenly feeling generous. The end of summer was coming, and she was making it easy for him — she was asking him to go instead of making him ask her. She was going to tell him that she wanted a divorce.
After a little while, he felt almost melancholy about it. He told Nick, when he came in with iced coffee for the two of them, that his sadness wasn’t really much about what he was losing: Visiting rights would give him as much time with Mary and John Joel as he spent with them now; and if he gave Louise what she wanted and she was halfway reasonable, they might even be friends in the way they hadn’t been friends for years. His sorrow was that he felt that he was losing so little. Or maybe he had lost a lot, fast, years ago; he had lost it and the loss had never caught up with him, and now he didn’t feel much emotion about saying that it was gone.
“It would serve you right if she demanded a mink coat. If that’s what the call was about,” Nick said. “My wife used to call when we were fighting it out in court. She would be in the courtroom the day before and wouldn’t even look at me, let alone speak, and then as though nothing had happened, she’d call and tell me about an August fur sale at Bendel’s.”
Nick was talking, but John was only half listening to him. He was looking at the picture of his family, minus Brandt, on Nantucket, and thinking how sad it must be to have old pictures, happy pictures, and suddenly see something ironic in them years later. Or for those pictures to give you a sense that something meaningful had been lost. He looked at the picture, and felt the same way he had felt when the roll of film came back from the camera store, the same way he had felt when he picked out the one he wanted to have enlarged to five by seven — that this was the expected picture. It was a picture he had known would exist one day before he ever met and married Louise. He stared at Mary’s bathing suit, at the rows of gingerbread men, arms outstretched, touching hands. A band of gingerbread men, and then another, and then another, as evenly spaced, as regular, as the gray bands on his mother’s television screen, but not rolling — no movement. Just the line of them, brown and expressionless. The gingerbread men looked like Mr. Bill. The man in the camera store had said that it would cost more, but that they could fix the print; they could burn in the deck, for instance. “Burn it?” John had said. The man at the camera store was young — probably some starving young photographer, probably some genius of a photographer, sick to death of looking at pictures like this day after day. “When you develop a picture — if it’s there in the negative — you can give some parts of the picture more exposure time than the rest, and that will darken it, bring in detail.” He had been so interested in the things the man described that he had bought a book about developing and printing pictures that he found for a dollar at a tag sale that summer. But he had not had the picture improved. He had just wanted it enlarged, and then he had framed it. No burning or dodging. Holding back, putting more in — it was a joke, how sexual everything was. He looked at Louise, her stomach big with Brandt, forcing her rows of gingerbread men to curve.
He had a picture of Nina that he loved — the only picture he had ever seen of her as a child, a picture her mother had sent to her when she was cleaning out the house. It had been taken, Nina thought, at a table in a seafood restaurant they went to in Atlantic City. Nina was sitting in an inside chair, next to her mother, a too-large white sailor’s hat perched on her head like Jughead’s crown, and her hands were neatly folded on the table — it could have been a Bible, instead of a food-stained tablecloth — and Nina looked beatific. He had had trouble explaining to her why he used that word. The glass of ginger ale — it had one of those silly paper umbrellas resting on the rim of the glass, and a cherry sunk halfway down — might have been a chalice. Her face was clear and pretty, and she looked like the Nina he knew now did when she was sleeping; but her big child’s eyes were open in the picture, and she was smiling a little more than she ever did in her sleep. Her father sat across from her. He had her wide-set eyes, her widow’s peak, her mouth. Her uncle — her mother’s brother — sat next to her father. There was a beer bottle in front of her uncle’s place, a Coke bottle beside a glass where her mother sat, and her father had a glass on a stem, a martini glass. Nina could remember her father telling the woman who came to the table to photograph them that he would take one big picture and a set of matchbooks. What had become of a dozen matchbooks with Nina’s family on them?