“Take it easy,” Bruce said.
“I hope when your little girl grows up,” Milt said, “she lives in a better society.” He moved in the direction of the door. “Well,” he said in a morose voice, “I’ll see you both when I’m through here again.”
As she opened the door for him, Susan said. “Don’t leave mad. I was just teasing you.”
Facing her calmly he said, “I don’t hold it against you.” He shook hands with her, and then with Bruce. “It just depresses me; that’s all.” To Bruce he said, “Where are you staying? I’ll look you up when I get back.”
Susan said, “He hasn’t gotten settled yet.”
“That’s too bad,” Milt said. “It’s hard as hell to get settled in a new town. I hope you find a place okay. Anyhow I can always get hold of you at R & J Mimeographing Service.”
He said good night, and then the door shut after him. Presently they heard a car start up and leave.
“I thought I should tell him that,” Susan said.
“You did right,” he said. But it disturbed him.
She said, “I didn’t want you to have to take the responsibility of answering. There’s no reason why it should fall on your shoulders. Do you think he came over to check and see? Maybe he had a suspicion about us. I don’t see that it matters. He’s only around here a few times a year. I think he’s still interested in me, and it makes him jealous.”
“That might be,” he said. But in his own mind he believed that Milt had merely been lonely and had wanted company.
“If we went through the legal arrangements,” Susan said, “we would be immune to this kind of situation. Otherwise it’ll crop up again and again. You’ll have your mail to think about … and don’t you have to give the draft board your permanent address? And your driver’s license. A million details like that. Even your withholding statements that I have to fill out, as your employer.”
My employer, he thought. That’s right.
“That’s not enough of a reason to get married,” he said.
She gave him a sharp look. “Nobody said it was. But I don’t like not telling people the truth. It makes me uncomfortable. I know we’re not doing wrong, but if we have to lie then it almost seems like an admission that we’re guilty, trying to hide it.”
“I’m not adverse to it,” he said.
“To marrying me?”
“Yes,” he said.
They both considered that.
After they had locked up the house and shut off the lights they closed themselves off in her bedroom, as they had been before Milt Lumky arrived. For a good long time they were free to enjoy each other. But all at once, without sound or warning of any kind, the bedroom door flew open. Susan sprang naked from the bed. There in the doorway stood Taffy.
“I lost it,” Taffy sniffled. “It fell down and I can’t find it.”
Susan, pale and smooth in the darkness, swooped down on her and carried her out of the room. “You can find it tomorrow,” her voice carried back to him as he lay in the bed, under the disordered covers, his heart pounding. More murmurs, both Susan’s and her daughter’s, then a door shutting. Susan padded back and returned to the bed. Against him her body was cold; she shivered and pushed against him.
“God damn that Milt Lumky and his combination bottle opener and ball point pen,” she said. “Taffy dropped it down behind the bed; she went to sleep with it. She’s got ink or whatever it is—dye, I suppose—all over the pillow.”
He said, “She certainly startled me.”
The thin, cold body pressed closer and closer. She wrapped her arms around him. “What a night,” she said. “Don’t worry. She was so sleepy she hardly knew what she was doing. I don’t think she realized you were here.”
But after that he remained in a state of discomfort.
“I know,” Susan said, lying beside him. “It’s upsetting. And you’re not used to a child around. I am. I taught children. It’s second nature to me, to think in terms of them. Don’t for God’s sake project on an eight-year-old child your own adult feelings. All she could see was me; it’s my room and she knows I’m in here. A child is a child.”
He tried to imagine himself at that age. Entering his parents’ bedroom. The scene remained hazy. “Maybe so,” he said.
“I’ve been married all the time she’s been on this earth,” Susan said. “Even if she had some notion of you here, it would seem natural. A man is a man. To a child that young.”
But he knew that it would have to go one way or the other. Either he would have to move out and find a place of his own, or he would go through with it and marry her. She recognized that, too.
Did he want to marry her?
What can I lose, he thought. I can always get unmarried.
Beside him, Susan had gone to sleep with his hand resting on her breast. She held it there with her own hand. Beneath his fingers he could feel her breathing, the regular, slow breathing of sleep. To go to sleep, he thought, here like this. For myself, my hand resting on her. Doesn’t that constitute the important thing in all this? Not the office or figuring out some method of making a lot of money, but times like this, late at night. And having dinner together, and the rest.
This is why I stopped in Montario, he thought. In fact, this is why I stopped at Hagopian’s drugstore. Of course he did not have to use his package of Trojans. Susan had something that she owned permanently, refills for which she had picked up on the drive home.
“Are you awake?” he said, waking her up.
“Yes,” she said.
He said, “I think I can see going ahead with it.”
In the dark she rolled over to him and put her head on his arm. “Bruce,” she said, “you know I’m a lot older than you.”
“You’re ten years older than I am,” he said. “But that’s okay. But I want to tell you one thing.”
“Tell me.”
“I was one of your pupils. In the fifth grade, in 1945.”
She said, “I don’t care whose pupil you were.” Her arms closed around him. “Isn’t that strange,” she said. That’s why I looked familiar to you. I never would have had any reason to be conscious of it.” She yawned, settled down until she was comfortable, and then, by degrees, her hands relaxed and released themselves from him. She had again fallen asleep. Her face, against his shoulder, joggled limply.
That’s that, he said to himself, a little dazed.
But what a weight it was off his mind.
On the fourth of the month, he and Susan flew down to Reno and were married. They spent three days there and then flew back. That night they told Taffy at dinner. She did not seem surprised. In Reno he had bought her an electric bowling game, and the sight of that did surprise her.
7
He found Susan, during one of the first evenings of their marriage, off by herself in the living room with the big scrapbook on her lap.
“Show me,” she said. “Are you sure? Or did you mean you went to Garret A. Hobart.” She surrendered the scrapbook to him, and, seated beside her, he turned the pages. Over his shoulder she watched raptly.
“Here,” he said. He pointed to himself in the class picture. The round boy-face with its oblique eyes, the shapeless hair. Fat stomach bulging out over his belt. He experienced very little sense of relationship to the picture, but nevertheless it was of him.
“Is that you?” she asked, hanging against him with her hand dangling past his throat, her fingers touching him in a series of nervous digs. Her breath sounded loud and rapid in his ear. “Now don’t play coy,” she said. She traced the legend under the picture. “Yes,” she said. “It does say ‘Bruce Stevens.’ But I don’t remember anybody in that class named Bruce; I’m sure of it.” She scrutinized the photograph and then she said in a triumphant, shrill voice, “Your name was Skip!”