She invited him in for coffee. Maybe that’d be the best idea, she’d said, though she wasn’t sure why. They talked, drank tea and ate toast. Her expression when she’d opened the door was reserved, observing. He’d said then honestly, he had no gun and then that that was a stupid remark. After awhile she said there didn’t seem to be anything menacing about him but she still felt he’d acted very strangely, pursuing her when everything she’d said and did was against it and he could have been locked up. He said maybe once, twice in his life had he acted that way but never so inexorably. She said he was either lying to her, again or for the first time, or had forgot. Their respective families, educations, what each did professionally, where he lived and they’d been brought up, how’d she got the apartment, something about a print on her wall above the piano: naked woman riding a big furious bull, and not about what each thought it meant. Was that, he thinks he said, what playing the piano was to her? She laughed — not then, and he forgets what it was over or even if it was something he’d said that did it. Soon after she said maybe going to the party for half an hour — he’d asked again when she was still smiling — would be all right. Even if she wouldn’t know anyone there but the Rerkovskys, she liked champagne almost more than anything and at wedding receptions you usually got the best. She was kidding of course, and maybe it wasn’t such a good idea — it’d seem she’d come only for the party. Those questions she spoke about before would probably be asked: how’d they know each other, and so on. So they’d lie, he said. Oh, what should she do? — give her five minutes to dress. She shut the bedroom door. He sat on the couch not believing his luck and hoping she wouldn’t change her mind. They went. She said once that she was having a good time, smiled warmly at him several times, spoke at length with Sid Rerkovsky about a neighborhood park problem and that she thought she could be of some help, told Howard after about an hour that she was leaving and he needn’t walk her to her door. He stayed another hour, went home, couldn’t stop thinking of her, wanted to call her, told himself not to for a couple of days, drank himself to sleep while reading several days of papers. They saw each other a few afternoons later. For almost every other night for months. Had an argument: she said he’d been repeatedly rude and hostile to her mother and to a lesser extent to other people and that was something she couldn’t take in the man she was seeing. He said her mother had been hostile to him from day one, which would make him rude to her he supposed but didn’t know, and as for the other people, he didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about. They broke up, got back together a month later: he’d phoned, asked if he’d left a very important book to him at her apartment, knew she’d see through the pretext but thought he had to use something like it than saying straight off how much he missed her, dreamt of her, could hardly work because of her, that he’d been writing one a night these idiotic gushy poems about her, did she think they could meet to talk over some of their differences and so on? She said she didn’t remember seeing the book but would look, but before she hung up, was that really why he’d called? He said it was a pretext, knew she’d see through it and was glad she had, and how much he missed her… They met, talked, started seeing each other again, he moved in with her, they had dinner at the Rerkovskys a number of times and had them over once, got married, the Rerkovskys wanted to give the reception in their apartment but she wanted to have a small wedding in her apartment and didn’t want the Rerkovskys to be at the even smaller ceremony there. Had their first child less than a year later, moved to where a good job was for him, another child, she resumed teaching but evenings, lots else, then what happened to her happened.
Now he’s back with the woman whose wedding reception it was. Gail. She’s divorced, has a child. He got a Christmas card from her nine years after her wedding reception and wrote back saying what had happened to him since then. “You might remember the woman I came with, but I doubt you’d remember much on such an exciting day. Much that wasn’t connected to you, I mean.” She’d sent him a Christmas card the two Christmases after she got married. He sent her a card back for the first one but doesn’t think he got around to answering the second. Must have been just after Olivia was born, so too busy to, or just didn’t see the point. Then he stopped hearing from her. From the Rerkovskys he’d learned she moved to Rome with her husband, and soon after that he and Denise left New York and lost touch with the Rerkovskys. It was the Rerkovskys, she said, who told her what school he got a job at years ago, which is where she sent the card, hoping he was still there or it’d be forwarded. She called him a few months later saying she’d be attending a conference in his city and would he care to come by her hotel for a drink. Did. They met downstairs, drank in the bar. He called the sitter to see if she’d stay another two hours, they had a quick dinner in the hotel cafe, went to her room for beers, made love. They corresponded and called after that, visited each other, she wondered why she hadn’t found him this attractive back then. “I think I would have asked you to marry if I had. Maybe fatherhood and having been married and holding a responsible job and security and all you went through with your wife’s illness have toned you down a ways. You were often a lot too argumentative and unsociable and crazy to me then. Even your sex was a bit too flaky, picking me up with you stuck in me and pinning me against the wall and sometimes banging me against it till you came. That hurt. Who cared if you got lost in it — I used to get bruises on my ass and back. It used to piss me off, if you remember, since you continued trying to do it even after I told you how I felt.” “I’d probably still be doing it if I wasn’t ten years older and no doubt somewhat weaker. Last time I tried it with Denise was a couple of years ago — she was a little heftier than you, and she never complained when I did it — and I could barely pick her up. I think I even fell. Anyway, something for you to thank the aging process for.” “Even your foreplay action has changed. You used to rub my cunt too softly and kiss it too hard and I could never get you to switch those two.” “That was your and Denise’s doing. I figured that after the two of you had said it, and also some vague remembrances of other women saying something like it in the past, I had to be doing something wrong. Didn’t make me feel that good either, realizing my technique there had been off some thirty years, even if some women might not have been aware it was, but I’m probably wrong there too.”