“I love sole. I forget until I eat it how fond of it I am. I’m feeling absolutely exuberant.”
“On one martini,” he said, and wished he could stop himself from sounding paternal. It was an impulse that seemed to grow in proportion to Libby’s desire to converse with him.
“It’s true, you know. Something about my kidneys makes me drunk much faster than normal people.”
“So you don’t feel normal either?”
“The day I strike people as normal …”
His response was so immediate that he had not even time to ask himself whether it might not, in fact, be true. “You strike me as normal tonight.”
“Oh good. But I feel different.” Leadingly: “I don’t know if you do …”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Happy?” She spoke the word so girlishly as to diminish the risk; she might have been asking nothing more than if he liked his food.
“Yes,” again without hesitation.
“I’m so … happy isn’t the word.”
“I don’t think it is for me either,” he admitted.
She went right on. “I’m trembling inside. Way inside, beneath the martini.”
“You look very composed.”
“Never as composed as you. Do you mind if I speak under the influence of alcohol?”
He could not have felt more sober himself, which accounted in part for the trouble he was having keeping up with her decision to be gay. He had grown so used to her fidgety that he did not really remember her animated. But tonight she managed to be full of excitement, and still to look as though under her red dress all her limbs were securely attached to her slight frame. If he was not able to look directly at her, it was only partly because she struck him as unfamiliar. It was also that he could not be sure what she was going to say to him, or ask of him, next. Probably she was not too sure either — which doubtless explained why the embarrassment was shared. At first he had believed that their discomfort tonight had only to do with their not being used to extravagances. He had difficulty recalling the last time they had gone out for the purpose of “having fun.” He had to go far back — and in going far back, he concluded that he was mistaken about the identity of the woman at the other table. At precisely the same moment he felt more disposed than ever to protect Libby. He would concentrate only on her. He felt her continuing to concentrate only on him. She had been concentrating on him, barreling down on him, for days; and for just as many days he had been doing his best to look the other way, to slide out from under her gaze by treating her like his child. Her total attention had gotten to him—
No. It was his mother’s arrival that was causing the trouble. He had already figured out Libby’s place in his life; consequently, he did not believe she could rattle him. “When we came in,” Libby was saying, “and everyone was waiting in line for a table — when you went up and said, ‘My name is Herz, I have a reservation,’ it was one of those moments when I just felt terribly married.”
“And you liked that?” Again, fatherly, as though he knew all there was to know about her — and at the moment when he was not sure, suddenly, quite what he did know.
“It was a small thrill,” she said. “Tonight’s a larger thrill.” He did not respond, and she rushed to say, “Unless — are we going to spend too much?”
He had to reassure the two of them; if Libby could not rattle him any longer, money could. “But we have so many things to celebrate, Lib.”
“I did have a little qualm when we came in here.”
“When I said my name is Herz?”
“About three seconds after that.” She put her hand on the table and he knew enough to cover it with his own. “I won’t have any dessert, darling,” she whispered.
Embarrassment settled over them. They returned to their food. He was finding this altogether different from any dinner they had ever eaten at home. Was it two or three times now that she had called him “darling”?
“Do you know what I discussed with Gabe last week?”
He looked up to see that her face had subsided to its everyday shade. Her lovely skin … “What?”
“I didn’t tell you. The night he brought the present for the baby — don’t you think he’s changed, Paul?”
“Who? I’m having trouble keeping up with you martini-ized.”
“He seems very crushed, Gabe does. He’s lost a lot of his, I don’t know … air.”
“He’s had some bad luck with his father.”
A moment passed. “Did he tell you that?” Libby asked.
“You told me that.”
“Oh yes …” she said. “You forget about other people’s troubles when you have your own.” For a moment he felt as though she were judging him. Until she added, “Suddenly I’m aware of him in a new way. I asked him to baby-sit out of sympathy, really.”
“Glenda didn’t go home to Milwaukee then?”
“Yes, she did go away. But I needn’t have thought of Gabe, you see.”
“I wondered …” He did not mean to sound like Othello, never having felt like him before. “I wondered how you decided on him.”
“Then — why didn’t you ask?”
“I thought you’d arranged it,” he began to explain, somewhat flustered, “arranged it all beforehand.”
“Well, you should have asked. I think he gets a lot of pleasure out of Rachel. He asked if you believed in God.”
He was not jealous; he was annoyed. “How did that come up?” He had never in his life been jealous, a fact of his character which he had long ago absorbed. It contributed to his picture of himself as a man who did not have all the human fires. He had come to think of himself as less special than he once had.
Nevertheless, it seemed that what he had just tried was to make Libby think that he was jealous! He wondered if he could be feeling under attack only because of the woman at the other table, who brought to his mind old failures, misunderstandings of his youth. It was a youth that he himself saw as long past; having ceased to excuse himself for what he was, he no longer needed it as a crutch. It was a help to him too that others, seeing that he was half bald and wore old clothes, did not even mistake him for a young man.
“We were talking about religion,” his wife said. “His family, you know, was very German Jewish and removed. I would have liked to have met his mother — you know, I once — I think she had a great effect on him.”
“You once what?”
“We were talking about Chanukah. I didn’t know what to say, Paul. There are some things we haven’t discussed a lot lately. You and I.”
“I think we’ve probably become a little used to each other by now.” Smiling.
“We just don’t talk as much, though. That’s a fact. That’s all. We do hardly talk.”
“I think if we feed you a martini every night—”
“And you?” she said quickly.
“You see, it doesn’t take on me.”
“I know,” she said lugubriously.
Dinner might have been finished and the check paid without any further conversation, had not the blond woman and her party walked over to their booth. “Excuse me, aren’t you Paul Herz?”
“Yets—” Trying to rise, he got caught between the table and the seat. Half standing, taller than Libby but shorter than his visitor, he said, “Yes — you look very familiar—”
“My name”—he saw Libby looking back and forth as the woman spoke—“is Frankland. I’m Marge — Howells.”
“I thought that’s who you might be—” And then both rushed so to introduce their mates that no one heard anyone else’s name, and they all had to be introduced a second time. The other couple, friends of the Franklands’, stood back and watched. Slowly Marge Howells began to look like herself, or as much of her as he could remember. He had never really taken a long look at her, even back in Iowa; that had not been the nature of their meeting. Here, across the room, she had looked older, haughtier. Paul asked Marge, and Marge Paul, what each was doing in Chicago. It turned out that the Franklands lived in Evanston.