Only moments after his conversation with Gloria. Lois phoned. “Hi,” she said in a sleepy voice, relaxed and inviting, broadcasting in its tone her circumstances — he could see the rumpled blue pastel bedsheets, the California sun bleaching the tiled windowsill, the white phone cord stretching from the night table across her breasts.
He had showered first thing to wash off the residues of last night’s copulation with Betty. He couldn’t bear speaking to Lois with his wife’s liquids still on him. “Are you in bed?”
“No, I’m in the kitchen,” she said, still in that dreamy tone. “I miss you so much already, it’s sick.”
Tony sighed. He hadn’t expected it to be easy, but the way she spoke to him made it impossible. “We have to talk,” he said sharply.
“Oh?” She was alert almost instantly. “I knew it!” she added with surprising energy and command. “I had a feeling last night it was going to happen — Judy said it was paranoia. But I was right! You went home and you got scared, right?”
“Well, don’t say it like I’m a wimp. Not scared, no. It’s just … this isn’t right.”
“What isn’t right?”
“Doing this. To you. To Betty. To me. It’s too much pain — it’s too hard. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know who I’m living with — I spend every minute with Betty scared I’m going to call her Lois.”
“And do you spend every minute with me scared you’re going—”
“No! God, no.” He sighed. He felt put upon, cast in a role he didn’t want to play. He wanted a rewrite, something more in a star’s part, where all the sympathy would be with him. Make his wife a bitch, or Lois a scheming home-wrecker, at least give him a tragic past so that there would be something to take the curse off his treating these two women so badly. “I have to make a decision—”
“Then decide to move out here. Live with me, Tony. I’m good for you. How much writing have you done since you married Betty?”
He frowned at the phone, irritated by her question. It didn’t bother him that it insulted his marriage — he was annoyed that it was something he had never thought about. “I don’t think Betty’s responsible for my not writing.”
“Okay. I love you, you schmuck. No one could love you more than I do. If you don’t appreciate that, you’re an asshole.” She hung up. All he heard was the click, but he knew she must have slammed the receiver down. He dialed her number immediately, but got no answer. He tried to imagine whether she was standing there weeping at the ringing phone or whether she had stormed out, driving to work furious. The latter, he thought admiringly.
He estimated how long it would be before Lois reached work, but when the time came, he didn’t call. Speaking to her weakened his resolve to say that they should not see each other for a while (something that was likely to occur in any event) and that a good test of the seriousness of their relationship would also be to maintain “a silence of letters and telephones. She had guessed correctly at his mealy-mouthed introduction anyway; perhaps more talk was redundant. He reasoned this way all day, explanations for his cowardly silence evolving by afternoon into a monologue that minimized how intimate he and Lois had been.
Altogether they had had only twenty days of physical contact. And though they had spoken on the phone almost daily (Tony had praised the fates that Betty never looked at New York Telephone’s itemized list of long-distance calls), most of their talk was no different from conversations with friends. (Even Tony, in the throes of rationalization, knew that this particular diminishment of his relationship with Lois was specious — the warm, gossipy conversations they had were what made him fall in love with her. The sex was great, but her absorption in his career and life was what had made him feel she was superior to Betty, who seemed slightly bored and depressed when hearing his anxieties and hopes.) But he told himself these lies over and over, masking the real face of their love, dressing it up in shabby cloth, and by nightfall the costume had become convincing, the ugly nose he had put on the face of their romance had made the loss seem unimportant and easy to bear.
He watched his wife when they went out to dinner, observed how many other men looked at her (there were plenty, he discovered, to his shock and irritation), and checked item by item Betty’s physical advantages. His wife was prettier. Any man would think him a fool to trade Betty for Lois. And, oddly, Betty seemed sexier, her perfect posture holding the breasts high, impertinently, exposing her long white neck, her eyes always on you, her mouth in a smirk of mild amusement. Lois was sincere, her thin body energetic, not sensual, her eyes guarded, often distracted, her flat breasts unimportant and undisplayed. Yet, in bed, Betty was dull, perfunctory, almost embarrassed, with none of the energy she displayed in conversation, while Lois was high-spirited, her tight body flowingly loose and embracing, her eyes sparkling from pleasure, her throat laughing with ecstasy. Maybe I’m responsible for the distinction, bored with Betty, and so making her boring.
For a week he thought of nothing else, and yet told himself how surprising it was that breaking up with Lois didn’t seem to bother him. He went to bed each night mildly outraged that Lois hadn’t phoned. He opened his mailbox with a little rush of anticipation, mounting as the days went by, that there would be something from her in there. She’s so damn proud, he thought to himself, imagining (somewhat hopefully) how miserable she must be.
He looked at the screenplay each morning, but couldn’t begin on the rewrite. The words themselves seemed drab and lonely on the page, as though they were uncollected orphans walking the streets aimlessly with runny noses and tattered shoes. It depressed him to meet their eyes and take them to the institution, to be washed with cold dirty water, dressed in uniforms, and left to the surveillance of cold-hearted taskmasters.
He did begin work on a play, as he had promised himself on arrival in New York. And although those words seemed cheerful, the bright students of an expensive school, clean faces pushing eagerly to the fore to be noticed — they still seemed like children. His plays didn’t have the stern power of an army assaulting the world with confidence and pomp, their mission profound, their audience cheering with ecstatic liberation.
He resumed his attendance at the Uptown Theater Company’s weekly readings. He hadn’t gone in more than a year and, to his surprise and delight, he was greeted like a brother returning from war: they asked awed questions about Hollywood, as if the experience was not only exciting, but deadly as well. Hearing the works in progress of fellow playwrights cheered him. Nobody was writing really well. Most were unable to execute even the simplest of structures, their characters frequently were unformed or their motivations inconsistent. The few whose skills at the craft of drama were sharp had no subject matter other than, usually, the story of their families. If they reached middle age, sometimes it was the story of their marriages instead. Tony had the same problem, and to be reminded that it was a universal condition made his illness seem less serious and easier to bear, though it also made him less patient with his own work, less eager to do it. The dialogue on his page the morning after a reading too often sounded like another’s, the story merely a rewrite of everything he had heard, in some ways more dramatic, often funnier, but never more profound.
He drifted through the days. Reading the paper, watching game shows, going to movies in the afternoon, writing a page of the screenplay once a week, discarding the play he had begun about his mother’s show, starting one on his summer visits to his father’s house, dropping that after a mere two scenes, and then taking out a draft of an old work, an ambitious drama about the three civil-rights workers who were killed in the South by Klansmen. He tried to rid it of its sixties “social-consciousness” tone, its obeisance to liberal principles, and focus it more on the questionable psychology of these middle-class kids who put themselves in jeopardy for a people and a life that, in truth, were no more their fault or responsibility than apartheid. But after a few weeks he concluded that the effect of his revisions was merely to diminish their heroism with obvious Freudian insights about middle-class family life; that he had managed, by a circuitous route, to take this story of the birth of social activism in the baby-boomer generation, an activism that he in fact believed had forever altered the terms of political debate, and turn it into just another play about how hard it is to fulfill the expectations of a Jewish mother without getting yourself lynched.