In deference to the meal, Hector was drinking beer instead of whiskey, and he was taking it with some gusto but with a different rhythm than the usual flooding pace he’d get into with Connelly and Big Jacks at the bar when it was a warm evening like tonight; no, he was drinking instead for the good crisp sensation in his throat, for the feeling of being cleaned out and restored, he was drinking for the reason that to sit down to a home-cooked meal with a kind and reasonable woman and not want to sprint away out of fear of disappointing her or trashing her already fragile life was a thoroughly bracing kind of pleasure. Before, when he didn’t normally remain in one place for more than six months, it didn’t matter, but once he saw he would be staying around in Fort Lee he had not allowed himself to slip into the saddle of anything resembling a domestic calm.
But now here he was, focused on finishing off the steak and gathering the peas and carrots in a pile on his fork like a man come rightly home. Was he finally getting old? His body was as ever mysteriously impervious, but his mind was, like anybody else’s, encumbered with time’s accruals, and if over the years he’d disappeared on more than a few women at this very point, excusing himself from a table at a restaurant or from a bench in the park in the middle of a conversation and never returning, never calling again, never offering a single indication that he was even still alive, he was feeling none of that weakness now. He cleaned his plate, and while Dora got him another can of beer he topped her glass with the last of the bottle, of which he was glad he’d bought two.
“Leave room for dessert,” she said. “I have a cherry pie.”
“You made it?”
“Oh, goodness, no. Who do you think I am, Julia Child?”
“You’re not doing too bad from where I’m sitting.”
Dora didn’t answer but was clearly pleased with how things were turning out. This morning when they awoke she had dressed quickly and muttered she’d see him “around” but Hector sensed she was lingering and uncharacteristically replied that they ought to have a real meal together and that’s when she offered to make them dinner. Again she was slightly testy and defensive when she appeared later with grocery bags in hand and before he could stop himself he’d kissed her for the dignity on her face and right after she put away the perishables they made love, with Dora turning her back to him while holding the creaky rusted handle of the old refrigerator, the door opening and closing a couple of times before she called out his name and he hers and they swooned to the floor. Afterward she was always sweet-mouthed and proper, and he would never have imagined how uninhibited she could be, with her language and her body and her outright aggression, her pinching and scratching at his thighs, his buttocks, even his privates. It was clearly unconscious on her part, but she was thorough, each time raising small welts and marks all over him, today just as the other days, the hot water of the shower mapping a dozen good stings.
“Would you like coffee?” she asked him.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll make us a pot. I can do that.”
“I prefer tea,” she said. “Coffee makes my heart race.”
“I can make tea, then.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
But he couldn’t make tea, for he had none, and he’d run out of coffee as well. The cupboard was barren, save for a few sugar packets and take-out cups of jelly, a rusty tin of oatmeal. The oatmeal was the only thing he ever made for himself these days, and a sorry sight, but only because he wanted now to do something for her. Perhaps he’d not been exactly selfish all these years, but when was the last time he’d gone out of his well-rutted way for the sake of another? Hector knocked on the door of his neighbor, who was as unsociable as he, but the crabby fellow actually answered, and, though suspicious, eventually gave him two bags of Lipton, not waiting for Hector’s thank-you to slam shut his door. Hector put the water on and while it boiled he brought their chairs outside to the cracked patio, as the small apartment had become quite warmed from the cooking. It was balmy outside but still cooler than the kitchen, and he set a folding TV table between them and brought out their plates and tea. He opened the second bottle of wine for Dora and another beer for himself and they ate their slices of pie while watching some children playing hide-and-seek in the weedy courtyard of the complex.
A girl of five or six ran over and crouched behind the low brick wall that marked the border of the patio, theatrically shushing them with a finger to her lips. The seeker ran over to them immediately and found her out and the little girl must have believed herself betrayed because she made a sour face to Hector. He made one back, but with silliness, his eyes crossed, his front teeth bared. The two girls ran off, giggling.
“We’re like an old married couple,” Dora said, careful to mock the idea in case he took it wrongly. Hector didn’t reply but in fact he had thought it, too, recalling how his folks in their best times would enjoy sitting together on the porch of their house, wryly and good-naturedly commenting on the children’s games and pouring gin-spiked lemonade for each other into tall glasses of chipped ice. Among the children there was a competition to get a sip from Jackie’s glass, which he’d offer to the winner of whatever game they were playing, every now and then letting one of them down the rest of it, which inevitably turned into a competition unto itself. It was an age of such things, when they were all together during the war, his father 4-F, and at least in the private realm of the house at ease in his skin as he never was at the factory or in the pubs. His mother was in her prime beauty then, as lovely as any woman in town, but too young and naïve to know its measure, and she wore her splendor like an ill-fitting crown, half-embarrassed by the effect she’d have on perfect strangers on the street or at the green market.
“Dinner was real good,” he said to Dora.
“You’re being charitable. My mother certainly wouldn’t have thought it up to snuff. I bet you have women cooking for you all the time.”
“Yeah? How many have you seen hanging around here?”
“Well, you’ve just asked them to be scarce, I’m sure. At least for these couple weeks, right?”
“I suppose,” Hector said, going along with her. “And maybe next week, too.” And while this clearly pleased her plenty he also immediately wished to take the utterance back. He’d promised himself not to speak with her of anything outside a day in the future, even as he caught himself thinking more and more of times ahead, picturing some nice places they could escape to, some rustic fantasy, how they might drive in her car to a cold clear lake in the woods and hole up in a cabin like a pair of fugitives, eating whatever they could catch, drinking from a stream, feathering their bed with garlands of young ferns.
She clinked her wineglass to his beer and for a while they drank without talking as evening began to descend. It was an almost gracious feeling, as if they were taking the air in a park, as if he were a decent man and she a more than decent woman and the next day was a prospect they neither feared nor dreaded nor were already trying to forget. Perhaps they were even drinking for the sheer pleasure of it, for the easy communion and ritual, though they had little prior experience and were likely confusing the good feeling with the gentle weather and peachy light that was a world distant from the sorry pit that was Smitty’s.
In fact, Hector was thinking how they might not go back there for a while; they’d already skipped a couple of nights in the last week, which was noted by the fellows with mentions of how they’d gone AWOL, and also a few unmistakably pitying looks, and it had struck him on entering that being with Dora had reanimated his sense of shame. He could see the old picture of himself at his spot at the bar, vainly stuck in the hard amber of his gruffness, his solitude, his strangely sound physical being, these integuments only momentarily breached whenever he was called out to fight (or, more rarely, fuck). Conversely, it was no surprise that he was feeling a little vulnerable again, as though there were a rent in his chain-mail vest, a newly opened seam along the underbelly that neatly paired with a very real scar of Dora’s, a shiny inset line where she’d torn herself in youth, slipping through a deer fence. Whenever he brushed or touched her there she flinched and somehow he’d feel a nervy tickle of phantom pain and be renewed in his resolve that he would try his best not to bring her any heartache.