“Why did you come back here? What happened?”
A brief smile flitted over her mouth and then disappeared. Her eyes looked away and then peered into mine, and then looked away again. She bit her lip, tried to smile, but could not. For a long time she stared down at her hands, and when she finally raised her eyes there was a distance there that I had not seen before.
“Seven years ago I got sick, very sick. I couldn’t do anything.
I couldn’t work, I couldn’t function.” She sighed and then turned her face up to me with the kind of trusting smile that once made me feel we were the only two people alive. “I had a breakdown.
I was in a hospital for months. I’m a manic-depressive. I used to sit in my room for days, staring at the walls. Sometimes I couldn’t even get myself dressed. For a long time I thought I was just depressed, the way everyone gets depressed about things once in a while. But then I started to have these strange thoughts, things that did not make sense, delusions really. I thought people were following me. If someone looked at me on the street, I thought they were letting me know they were watching me. I thought things that were said on television were secret messages being sent to me.”
She saw the look in my eye and, instinctively, reached across and ran her hand over the side of my face. “I’m all right now.
When they finally figured out what it was, a chemical imbalance in the brain, they put me on lithium.”
A thoughtful expression on her face, she sipped some coffee and then, very slowly, put the cup back in the saucer. With her middle finger she traced the edge all the way around to the beginning.
“I got a divorce four years ago. I told you that I’d felt sorry for him-because I never loved him. And I never did, not the way you think you will, not the way I loved you; but we had a child together-it doesn’t matter why we had a child-and we had a life together. It hurt-it hurt a lot. He did what he could, he handled it the best way he knew how, and I think he always thought it was somehow his fault-that I got sick like that-but it made him as crazy as I was. It really did. He was depressed, and angry, and nothing seemed to be going right in his life, either, and… Well, that’s what happened. I went crazy and now I’m better, and I was married and now I’m not.” Struggling with herself, she managed to force a smile. “See how much trouble I would have been.”
It was like seeing her again for the very first time, and falling even more in love with her than I had before. There was no place else I wanted to be, no one else I wanted to be with, nothing else I wanted except to do whatever I could to make sure she was never afraid or unhappy again.
She took my hand when we left the restaurant and walked to the end of the block where she had parked her car. The night was cool and clear and there was no one else on the street. I pulled her toward me, and felt her free hand slip around my neck.
We kissed the way I think we must have kissed the very first time, a brief, awkward trembling touch, and then she snuggled against my shoulder and I felt her warm breath on my neck and the smell of her hair was like the morning breeze that floats through the window when you are only half awake.
“I have to go,” she whispered.
“It’s early,” I said. I held on to her hand as she let go of my neck.
“I told you I had an early flight tomorrow.” She kissed the side of my face, and we walked the last few steps to her car. I would not let go of her hand. She fumbled with her key ring until she found the one she needed. Laughing, she managed to unlock the door, and as soon as she did I pulled her back into my arms.
“Wouldn’t you like to go somewhere and dance?”
She was still laughing, softly. “I’d love to, but not tonight.”
I let go of her and held the car door open while she got in.
“How long are you going to be gone?”
She switched on the ignition and turned on the headlights.
With one hand on the convertible top and the other on the window of the door, I watched her buckle herself in. She looked up and tugged playfully on my tie. “Just a week. I’ll call as soon as I get back.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little curious that even now, at our age, you still have to leave me because of your mother?”
At first she did not understand, but then it came back to her and her eyes gleamed with that same schoolgirl seduction she had used on me that night on the doorstep of her parents’ home.
Then it was gone, and I bent down and we kissed each other on the side of the face like the two old friends we were. As I watched her drive off, I felt empty and alone, and the self-sufficiency of my solitary life suddenly seemed pretentious and false.
It was still early and the last place I wanted to be was in that strange place I called home. For a long time I wandered aimlessly through the streets, in a neighborhood I did not know. My leg began to hurt, and I thought it was funny, because I thought it must be psychosomatic. That leg had not bothered me in years.
The bullet had passed right through, without doing any real damage at all. There was no reason for it to hurt now.
Everything seemed to be conspiring to bring back the past; more than that, to make the past seem more real than the present. I kept switching back and forth, looking back at the past and then going back to the very beginning of things, when I first fell in love with Jennifer, when I first started to despise Calvin Jeffries, when Elliott pointed that gun in my face; going back to the beginning to then watch the way things happened, watching them as if I were seeing them for the first time, like someone who had been given the gift of clairvoyance and could see the future and everything that was going to happen.
The leg hurt like crazy. I passed the open door of a crowded restaurant full of friendly noise. I went inside and found one last place at the bar. The bartender removed a crumpled napkin and a glass of melting ice, wiped the bar with one pass of a towel, and then flung it over his shoulder. He looked at me just long enough to let me know he was ready for the answer to the question he did not need to ask.
“Scotch and soda,” I said in a whispered shout.
I laid a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and watched the bartender take it with one hand while he set the drink in front of me with the other. While the bartender rang up the sale on a refurbished bronze cash register just a few feet away, I was hunched over the bar, running my fingers along the base of the glass. He stacked the change in front of me, and with the same silent question took another order from someone else. Lifting my eyes, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the other side of the bar. All around me people seemed to be having a good time, talking, telling stories, making jokes, and laughing every chance they got. I was older than most of them, and much older than some.
I felt out of place and alone.
After I finished the drink, I ordered another, and then one after that. It had been a long time since I had come to a bar by myself and done nothing but drink. I had almost forgotten the wonderful self-indulgence of self-pity, the free fall into the full enjoyment of every felt emotion, the pure untrammeled luxury of caring nothing for what might happen next, the fervent belief that you could tell the world to go screw itself in one breath and have everyone love you in the next. I had another drink, and another, and I was almost there, the lucid madness of intoxi-cation.
I saw my reflection in the mirror, and I seemed older than I had just a few minutes before, and everyone crowded all around seemed even younger. It used to make me pause, the sight of a middle-aged man, drinking alone at a bar, when I was still young and certain nothing like that would ever happen to me. Looking down at the half-finished drink in front of me, I shoved it away with the back of my hand.
I reached inside my coat and pulled out my brown leather wallet and thumbed through the bills until I found another twenty.