With the droning sound of another question fading into the background, the anchorwoman appeared on screen and, with a cursory five-second summation of what everyone had just seen, turned to the other day’s news. The murder of Calvin Jeffries had now been relegated to the vast obscurity of a homicide finally solved and quickly forgotten.
I flicked the button on the remote control. Helen stuck her head in the doorway to say good night. “Someone named Jennifer called to tell you that it was not too late if you wanted to have dinner.” Helen arched her painted black eyebrows. “Well?”
she asked when I did not say anything. “Are you going to have dinner with her or not?”
“I was waiting for you to tell me.”
Her mouth turned down at the corners. “It’s after five, and after five you can do whatever you like.” She thought of something as she turned to go. “Just make sure you’re here on time in the morning.”
“Thank you,” I said after I heard the outer door shut behind her.
I picked up the phone to call Jennifer, started to dial, and then hung up. I had been fretting about it all day. I still did not know what I wanted to say. One minute I was certain I wanted to see her again; the next minute I was not sure about anything. It had taken me years to get over her. There had been times, especially that first year, when I was certain there was nothing else to live for. Sometimes I think the only thing that kept me alive was the knowledge that I would not have to live forever. It gave me a kind of detachment about myself, and I became, as it were, an observer of my own desperation. Eventually, the pain went away, but what had happened had changed me forever. I understood, and I accepted, what I was, a permanent stranger, someone who passes through other people’s lives without leaving a mark.
I picked up the telephone again, and saw myself back in college at a pay phone, dropping in quarters, deciding as the last coin rattled in that I could not do it. I told myself it was a matter of pride, but knew it was because I was too scared to hear her voice again, afraid of how much it would hurt if I did, especially because I knew what she would say. I did hear her voice, once.
It was just before Christmas, and the snow was falling thick and heavy outside in the freezing night air. She answered the phone, and I listened to her say hello, and then I listened to her voice go quiet, and then I heard her say my name, like a question, and then I hung up. I went back to my dormitory room and lay on the bed and hoped I would fall asleep and never wake up.
I dialed the number and, when she answered, felt for just an instant that same fear of being hurt again.
“Joey?” she asked, when I did not respond.
I stared down at the desk. “Yes,” I said, clearing my throat.
“It’s me. Do you still want to have dinner?”
We met at an obscure little restaurant on the west side of town and spent the next two hours trying to remember who we had been. She asked about law school and about being a lawyer, and I found I was talking about things that happened years apart as if they had taken place at the same time. I asked her about what she had done after she got married and she was talking about her life as a fashion designer before I knew she had once lived in New York. We would start on one thing and come back to another. The history of our lives became a vast circle which could be traced from any place you cared to begin.
“I called my mother after you dropped me off last night.”
She looked alarmed. “You shouldn’t have done that.” Reaching across the table, she wrapped her hand around my wrist. “What good would it do?”
“I was angry, but as soon as I heard her voice, I knew she would not remember. She would not have remembered a week after she did it,” I added. “Do you know how often I had to listen to her tell me she only wanted the best for me?”
She drew her hand away from my wrist and placed it in her lap.
“I think that’s one of the reasons I became a lawyer. She wanted me to be a doctor.”
“Like your father.”
“No, not like him. She didn’t want me to become a general practitioner who loved being a doctor. She wanted me to be someone she could think of as successful, a surgeon, the chief of staff of a hospital. My mother didn’t know a damn thing about medicine, but she could take one look around a country club dance floor and know immediately where each couple stood on the social scale.”
A woman who had grandchildren was sitting across from me, and I was telling her things about myself that I had never told anyone. I leaned over my plate and lifted my fork to my mouth, and then put it down before it reached my lips.
“The worst part is how much like her I am.”
She looked at me with those wonderful oval-shaped eyes that had once inspired so many romantic thoughts and erotic dreams, and a moment later began to laugh.
“I have a very hard time imagining you at a country club dance.
And I don’t believe for a minute that you ever gave a thought to someone’s social standing or even if they had any. You didn’t even like to dance,” she said, taunting me with her eyes.
“I remember I liked to dance with you,” I said, grinning.
The color deepened in her cheeks. “That wasn’t dancing. We were just necking, standing up.” She dared me to deny it, but I just looked at her as if I had no idea what she was talking about.
“You still do that, don’t you?” she asked, a glimmer in her eye.
“You get that look, that really extraordinarily larcenous expression on your face, like a thief announcing at the door that you’ve come to rob them blind, and it all seems so honest no one thinks twice about trusting you completely. That’s right, isn’t it?”
I issued every false-faced denial I could think of that would let her know that I hoped she was right about me and that I was still the boy she remembered.
“I remind myself of my mother sometimes when I hear myself giving advice to a client. I never have any doubt that I’m right.”
It was too flippant, and it was not true. “No, it’s when I catch myself going crazy because something isn’t quite perfect. Everything always had to be just right for her. Nothing out of place; nothing that might cause a complete stranger to notice you for the wrong reasons. Sit straight, walk straight, pronounce each word properly, always be polite, never lose your temper. I can still feel her fingers picking away a piece of lint from my slacks, or pushing a strand of hair back from my forehead. She was always fussing over me. She still does it.” I caught myself. With an embarrassed laugh, I tried to explain.
“She came out last summer. She stayed a week. Every morning when I got up,” I admitted with a sheepish grin, “I made my bed, put everything away, made damn certain my room was all cleaned up before I went downstairs for breakfast.” With a frown, I added, “She still wants to know when I’m getting married.”
There was something I wanted to know, something I wanted to hear her talk about, but I sensed a reluctance on her part to discuss it. Finally, over coffee, I asked.