The park light over them, a metal drop at the top of a metal stalk, blinked erratically. William sat for a minute with the engine going, pushed the pads on the seat down with his hands. In his rearview mirror he saw the Beetle pulling out of the lot. The radio was on the same station it had been on that afternoon, but the program had changed from talk to music, gentle jazz whose effect, paradoxically, was to make the anger rising in him even hotter and sharper. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.
Louisa had made her admission matter-of-factly, responding, William figured, to some internal train of thought: maybe something Gloria Fitch had said about errant spouses, meaning Graham Kenner, who had been drummed out of the house when Cassandra had discovered him with Helen Hull; or maybe she was thinking about the cover of Tom’s book, Graph Zeppelin, and how it had a line that sloped diagonally downward and ended in a fiery crash; or perhaps she was simply observing how Tom put his arm around Annika like he was keeping his distance from her and lamenting the way that unhappiness could bloom between people like a black flower. She hadn’t taken a deep breath before speaking, or told William he should brace himself, or done anything at all in prelude or preparation. She had just clicked the clasp of her purse closed and then open and put her hands flat on the dash and told him the news. As the light flickered above, she elaborated slightly: the man was a lawyer working for the museum on a lawsuit brought by a woman whose son had been injured when part of an exhibit had fallen on him. The man had come by the office, which seemed entirely necessary given the case. Louisa thought nothing of it until he invited her to coffee. They had flirted for six months or so. “This was a while ago,” she said. “Last spring.”
“Before I went to the trade show?”
She squinted. “I had met him, yes. It wasn’t why I sent you to Chicago, though when you were gone the thought did occur to me. Nothing happened then, though. Then he went away on another job and I didn’t see him for a while, and then one day he came by for lunch, and one thing led to another.” William asked where; Louisa said a motel. “It happened one time after that,” she said. “Two total. That was all. He didn’t keep after me to continue, and I was relieved because I wasn’t interested at all. At some point I felt that I had never been so uninterested in anything in my whole life.”
William rolled down the window. It was colder outside now, which seemed to focus the noises of the night. William put his hand down on the fabric of the seat and started to make a fist. At first it was purely theatrical; he wanted Louisa to see his hand clenching and unclenching. But the more he did it, the more he thought maybe it was accurately reflecting what he felt inside: the anger, the confusion, the need to hold tight to something certain. He believed he should speak, and probably with a question. She had told him who, and how long. Should he ask why?
He must have, because Louisa turned toward him, her expression now opened up. Silence slowly closed it. She crossed and uncrossed her ankles and laughed, or made a noise close to it — not nervous, he didn’t think, but more in the fashion of a tipsy wife. “Well,” she finally said. “Are there ever real reasons?” This question didn’t seem rhetorical, and so William started to answer her, but he managed only a few words before she interrupted him. “I wasn’t running toward him, not for a second. I was running away from my life.” Again, William started to speak, and again, she interrupted. “Maybe that’s the wrong way to say it. I needed to know that I existed. Was I even casting a shadow? John was a nice man, but weak.” She cocked her head to one side. “In fact, I think you met him once. In the mall.” William did not remember. “An older guy, kind of gaunt.” William thought suddenly of long, bony hands, which he did his best not to picture sliding up his wife’s leg, or worse. “Before him, I wasn’t sleeping well for a while, and then I wasn’t sleeping at all. I started to drink more than I wanted. Remember the mail? I was afraid I might vanish and I started setting it aside as proof that there was something only I knew. This was just a version of that.”
A light shone in the rearview mirror. It was a car coming into the lot, the kind of full-size station wagon William didn’t see much anymore. It lurched heavily into a parking spot a few spaces down from William and Louisa, and three teenagers piled out noisily. The girl walked around to the hood, looking angry, and leaned against it. Two boys followed her at a delay; one seemed to be pleading with her, the other mocking her, both slightly, and as William watched he wasn’t sure he didn’t have it reversed, because she seemed to be receptive to the one who was mocking and dismissive of the one who was pleading. Both boys produced cigarettes and started to smoke them, or were they joints? The car radio was on too loud, playing a song William had loved when he was their age. Louisa noticed it too. “It’s like we’re watching a time machine,” she said.
“Which one am I?” William said.
Louisa did not answer. Something in William’s tone held her silent. And then William was silent again, also, and the girl put her arms around the neck of the mocking boy and then hooked a finger through one of the belt loops of the pleading boy and then took his cigarette from him and flicked it an impressive distance across the parking lot. It went like a shooting star through the darkness and sent off a shower of sparks when it landed. Then the mocking boy got back into the car and changed the radio and the girl started to kiss the pleading boy and the pleading boy clasped his hands at the lower part of her back and the two of them went at an angle against the edge of the hood.
“Is this for our benefit?” Louisa said.
“Doesn’t seem so,” William said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just needed my strength back. Do you know what that feels like? I was doing it for us, in a strange way, for you and me. I wanted to be better. For the first time in years, I felt like we were building toward something.”
“We sure were.”
She winced, her face childlike and mournful. “I didn’t mean the house.”
“I know what you didn’t mean,” William said, and turned the key to start the engine. But before he backed the car out of the space, he lifted his right hand, as if he were indicating the height of something or someone, and then brought the flat of his palm down as hard as he could on the top of the steering wheel. It juddered and for a second he thought he had broken something.
“Jesus,” Louisa said.
“I hate this car,” he said. He said it like the assault was purposeful. But the act had surprised him, and when he went to back up he bumped the lower half of the wheel and the horn honked, once, for a fraction of a second at most. The girl and the pleading boy turned toward them and turned away just as quickly and that’s when William thought he recognized her: she looked like the cashier at the Red Barn, the daughter of the owner. But then she stared defiantly at William and Louisa as if she could see them, though he didn’t think she could, and this time she didn’t look like that girl at all, and William backed out and left the parking lot. The boy in the car shouted something at them, and William waved good-bye with his hand, which was beginning to hurt.
Louisa started to speak a few times. She asked him if she’d made a mistake by saying anything. She told him that it had been less than nothing. She reassured him that she was happy with how things were, now that all the trouble between them had evaporated. William was hardly driving anymore, just resting his left hand on the wheel as they rolled onto their street. The Brookers were hosting a small gathering in warm light and everyone was smiling. The Morgan place looked just like William’s but wasn’t. Stevie and Emma’s house was dark, and was no longer theirs at any rate. They had moved to Arizona, baby in tow, so that Stevie could oversee corporate creative. On the day the moving truck had come to cart their things away, William had walked across the street and given Stevie a handshake and a pat on the back, feeling as though the two of them had shared something, even if he was the only one who knew it. “Hold down the fort,” Stevie had said. William had saluted, just as he had at the garage door, not feeling as idiotic about it this time.