by Belva Plain
The women talked about unimportant things, another fifteen minutes passed, and the end came as Randi said brightly, “Well, this certainly was an unexpected meeting, wasn’t it? Who would imagine it, right in the center of New York?” It was agreed that no one could have imagined it. “If you people ever get to L.A., look me up. I’m still living there, I’ll be in the phone book.”
And does she really think we would? Adam wondered.
Margaret said politely, “Thank you. Perhaps someday.”
“Well, I guess I’ll run along. I’ve had a long day. Do you happen to know whether there’s a bookstore around here? I need a couple of paperbacks.”
The question had been directed to Margaret, who answered that there was one a few blocks distant and that it was open all evening.
“Good. That’s what I’ll do, then. It was good seeing you. Enjoy the rest of your stay.”
“Randi,” Margaret said. “And she had a crush on you.”
“The way Fred had on you.” He thought he understood that Randi’s mention of a crush was an absurdity in Margaret’s eyes. Her tone had had a faintly scornful ring, as if it were inconceivable to match him with someone so different from himself. And in fact, from the distance of fifteen years, it did seem inconceivable.
“She’s striking, in a way, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know. I suppose so. It’s probably the clothes.”
“I thought you never noticed women’s clothes.”
Irritated, he cried, “For Pete’s sake, Margaret, what is this?”
“I’m only curious to know why she is upsetting you so much.”
“Upsetting me? What are you talking about? Upsetting me!”
“You were acting so stiff and uncomfortable, shifting around in your chair. It was noticeable.”
“I was shifting because it was a damned uncomfortable chair, and I wanted to go have some dinner.”
After dinner they strolled. The wind had died, the city flashed its lights, and there were chrysanthemums in shop windows.
“A nice evening, cold or not,” Margaret said, “but I’m suddenly sleepy. Shall we go in?”
“It’s too early for me, but you go. I’ll just walk up as far as the park and come right back.”
He walked slowly, missing nothing as he went. Here was probably the liveliest bazaar in the world; all the glittering arts were concentrated in this city. He wouldn’t want to live here, for he was comfortable in Elmsford. Nevertheless, he was enjoying the change of scene. It had been a good day, up to a point, up to the shock of seeing Randi. Out of all the millions in New York, he’d had to encounter her!
He walked on toward the bookshop. It was brightly lit and fairly crowded. In the window there was a display of a new biography that he had planned to read, so he decided to go in and buy it to read tonight. There was something homelike about having your own book with you when you were staying in a hotel.
Then he remembered that Randi might be in the shop, although there was little likelihood that they would each have chosen the same few minutes out of a long evening. Yet it was possible. Undecided, he stood in front of the window staring at the biography. It had a red jacket with embossed gold lettering and the author’s name in a running script. A man came out of the shop lighting a cigarette. He was wearing a camel-hair coat and weighed close to three hundred pounds. A taxi stopped with squealing brakes. Shall I or shall I not go in? he asked himself. It might be interesting to know what has been happening to her in all these years. Not that it’s any business of mine. I’m only curious. It’s natural to be curious in the circumstances, isn’t it? Anyway, she isn’t there.
He went in. Randi was standing at the first counter facing the door.
“I had an idea you’d come,” she said. “I’ve been here almost an hour, waiting.”
“You actually thought I wanted to see you?” he retorted.
“Well, didn’t you? Don’t tell me you aren’t the least bit curious.”
“For your information I came here to buy that book”—and he pointed to the pile on the counter.
“Buy it, then.”
While he handed his credit card to the clerk, Randi waited. When he started toward the door, she went with him.
“I’ll walk back with you,” she said. “I waited in there so long that they must have thought I was planning to shoplift.”
“I don’t know why you did. We have nothing special to say to each other.”
She was almost running, her heels clacking on the sidewalk, to keep up with his purposely long, rapid strides.
“You could slow up a little,” she said nicely, “even if you do hate me.”
He looked down at her. She was such a little thing! He was used to walking with Margaret, whose face was almost on a level with his own. It occurred to him that he was behaving badly, and so he said, “I don’t hate you. I’m long past all that. I just don’t want to talk about anything.”
“About what happened, you mean?”
“Yes,” he said, and would have sprinted the remaining few yards to the hotel if it had been seemly.
“All right, we won’t. You won’t mind if I tell you that I hear how well you’re doing? One of those people you said you never hear from or see told me about you.”
Adam said shortly, “Very kind of him, whoever he was.”
“It was Tommy Barnes.”
“I met him in an airport about five years ago. He doesn’t know the first thing about me.”
Three thousand miles across and two hundred sixty million population in this country, he thought, and still a person can’t keep himself to himself.
“He said you have a pretty wife, and so she is.”
“Thank you.”
By now they were in the hotel lobby, approaching the elevator.
“Well,” he said, “good night. I’m going up.”
She caught his arm. “Can you wait a minute?”
“What for?”
“I need to talk to you. I won’t take long”—and she looked at him appealingly.
“Randi, you don’t need to talk to me.” He spoke not unkindly. “I don’t understand what you’re doing, waiting for me in that shop, and now—what do you expect?”
“I don’t expect anything. I only want to tell you something.”
“Then tell me.” They were in the way, and people had to brush past them impatiently. “Then tell me.”
“Not here. We have to sit down. I’ll be quick.” And again she appealed, “We can go where we had tea this afternoon. Please.”
He followed her, and they ordered coffee. Since she was across from him with only a very small table between, they had nowhere else to look but at each other. Warm air enveloped them in a velvet, perfumed atmosphere. The room might have been scented or else the fragrance was hers. He remembered—what tens of millions of trivial, seemingly forgotten things can resurrect themselves from our stored memories—that she used to put perfume behind her ears. He found himself glancing at her ears, on each of which there sparkled a tiny spray of diamonds.
For a minute nothing happened. And he was angry at himself for being there, for having let himself be led.
She was staring straight into his eyes, “fixing” him, he thought, with a deep, penetrating look. He felt a shiver.
“Don’t you even want to know what happened—afterward?”
“You said—” he stammered, “you said you were going to have an abortion and get married.”
“I didn’t get married to him, and I didn’t have the abortion.”
“What?”
He became aware that he had been holding the coffee cup; when he put it down, the liquid sloshed onto the saucer and soaked his cuff.
“I got as far as the front door of the clinic and then wasn’t able to go through the door. The idea shocked me through and through. I think it was because it had been so shocking to you. ‘It’s wrong, it’s wrong,’ you said. I remember how you looked when you said it.”
; He was too numb to say anything but “And then?”
“I left for California. I told him I was pregnant, but he didn’t mind. He liked kids. But then I had a miscarriage. It was just as well, because we only lived together for two years, and the kid wouldn’t have had a father after all. He wasn’t the marrying kind. He wasn’t even the staying kind. So when he left I went to work for my brother, who had come out to L.A. and became a big-time real estate broker. After a while I met a man, much older, who wanted to marry me. That’s how I got the name Bunting. We lived in an enormous house with pink marble bathrooms, statues on the lawn, two tennis courts—never saw anything like it.”
Adam, recovering speech, made a sharp comment: “It sounds like a racketeer’s house.”
“Maybe he was one. But he was nice. Then he died. He left me a little money, not much at all; he had nine grandchildren. So I went back to work with my brother, and then his son joined the business, things didn’t go as smoothly as they should, and here I am.”
“Why are you telling me all this? It’s no business of mine!”
“I thought you might have been wondering all this time whether there was a kid of yours running around anywhere. I guess it was just an impulse. The same as I had that day when I said good-bye to you.”
“Impulse!” he cried, loudly enough to cause people to turn and stare. “A casual impulse! Just like that!”
“It wasn’t casual. It was painful.”
“Bitch,” he muttered. “You bitch.”
“If I hadn’t met you, I would be able to sleep tonight. Now I know I won’t sleep.”
“What do you mean? What do you want? Come out with it, Randi, and don’t try playing cat and mouse with me.”
“I don’t want anything from you, and I never will. You’ve nothing to fear from me. I’m just so terribly sorry that I hurt you, that’s all. I’ve been thinking about it all these years, and wishing I could tell you.”
Cat and mouse. She is too complicated for me, he was thinking as he watched her now. Fundamentally, I am a simple man. Or am I? Am I just not as clever as I think I am?
When she put out her hands to touch his, he drew his own away, demanding, “What’s your game? Whatever it is, I don’t want to play it. You’re the past, the dead, forgotten past.”
“Not entirely forgotten. Don’t you ever have moments when you wonder what it would be like if we had—”
He ejaculated: “No!”
“Ah, but you must have,” she insisted gently. “I do. It’s only natural. And it’s only speculation, after all, because I’m quite happy as I am. I hope you are too.”
“Very,” he said now.
First she says she won’t be able to sleep, and now she tells me how happy she is.
One hand, with its shell-pink nails, was playing with her pearls. She knows how pretty that gesture is, he thought with scorn. And raising his cup, he encountered her eyes: soft, dark, and glittering, they were, sloe eyes like the plumfruit.
“It would never have worked, you know. Even though I had been willing to live where you do, or you had been willing to go somewhere else, it wouldn’t. Even in spite of all our love, it wouldn’t. We’re too different, you and I.”
He flared up. “So why talk about it? What’s your point?”
“None, really, I guess. It was just seeing you again that’s brought things back.”
He didn’t want to be reminded of that gray morning, of his despair, of himself walking through that park alone.
There had been melting ice and ducks on the pond. He hadn’t thought about it all in years. Years. He didn’t want to think about it now.
“Well,” he said, “well, here we are. There’s enough material here to fill a book. But since I’ve no intention of writing one, I’d best go.”
Randi stood up. “Yes. Good-bye, Adam. Good luck.”
For a moment they stood looking at each other. Flower face, he thought. Then they shook hands and parted.
For about ten minutes he stayed outside in front of the hotel, just stayed there in the cold night air.
After a while a phrase from Shakespeare popped into his head, that business about life being a stage and all men players. So, briefly, he had played a part with Randi; then the show had closed, the actors dispersed, and everyone had gone home, where each belonged.
“Where have you been?” Margaret cried when he opened the door. “I was beginning to worry. All these muggings in New York—”
“I browsed through the bookstore. I would have bought half a dozen more if we had room enough in the luggage. Hey, what’s this?”
A tray with biscuits and a bottle of champagne in a bucket stood on the table.
“It’s a celebration,” she said.
“Of our holiday. What a nice idea!”
“No, of more than that. It’s the anniversary of the day you proposed.”
Women, he thought. They remember everything.
“It was the next-to-most wonderful day of my life. Next to our wedding day.”
Her face was illumined. Intensely moved, he took her into his arms and kissed her.
“Oh, Margaret,” he said.
Then he opened the bottle with a triumphant pop, poured two bubbling glasses full, and made a toast.
“To love!” he cried, raising his glass. “Bless it, and bless us always.”
FOUR
One morning in the middle of January, Adam, raising his eyes from a stack of charts on his desk to answer the telephone, heard an unexpected voice.
“Hello! This is Randi. Are you shocked?”
Actually he was, but he replied calmly, “Not shocked, but surprised. Are you calling from New York or California?”
“Neither. I’m here in Elmsford. I’ve taken a six-month sublet on a garden apartment in Randolph Crossing, and I’m in Elmsford for the day on business.”
He felt a stirring, an unwelcome sense of nuisance. He wished it were possible simply and crudely to tell her not to bother him.
“I’ve so much to tell you, Adam. I’m sure you’re busy right now—”
“Yes, I am,” he said.
“So I thought maybe we might have a sandwich together. Whenever that’s good for you. I’ll be in town all day.”
“I have an appointment, a business lunch.”
“Then how about a quick drink, twenty minutes of your time around five? Just for old friendship’s sake?”
“Randi, we were never ‘friends.’ ”
“But we can be friends now, or I hope we can. Nothing more than that, Adam, I assure you. I told you when we met in New York that I have no designs on you. You seem to be afraid that I have.”
She had perhaps not intended to provoke him with the remark, but to his ears she seemed to be making a fool of him, as though he were some sort of male spinster.
“I assure you that never entered my mind,” he retorted.
“Good. I was about to wish you well and hang up. So then, will the coffee bar at the Hotel Bradley be all right? It occurs to me that you might not want to go home with liquor on your breath.”
“I’m free to go home in any condition I please, Randi. What do you think I am?”
“Five-thirty, then?”
“Five-thirty.”
Before he went back to his charts, Adam passed a few minutes to contemplate a brief fall of thick, wet snow-flakes, settling and melting on the windowsill. The slow drift and the gray air were suddenly dispiriting; the energy that had pressed him to work so briskly only minutes ago had left him. What the devil had made him acquiesce to a pointless meeting this afternoon? There was no reason in the world why he should meet her, and there were several reasons why he should not. If there were any way of reaching her, he would call her now and cancel. And he stood there with his back to the room, staring into the snow.
Still, she did not seem to have had much luck with her life. You could certainly argue, he reflected, that it was her own fault, and you would be right, but where would that leave common
compassion? When you thought about it, a total rejection would really be too harsh, wouldn’t it? And he wondered curiously what she might possibly be planning for herself. An apartment in Randolph Crossing was very out of the way. And what was she doing here in the first place? She had been talking about a choice between California and New York. Perhaps she was about to be married?
Then he thought, I really was rough with her. And he remembered how agreeably she had spoken to him that time in New York, how she had admired Margaret and asked about their children. No, there could be nothing wrong in giving her a few harmless minutes of his time this afternoon.
“The last time I saw you, I’m afraid I bored you with my dreary troubles,” Randi said. “Now I can tell you that things are looking better.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
She seemed more familiar to him than she had seemed when they met in New York. She looked midwestern, dressed as small-town women are in the middle of a snowy winter with a thick woolen cap and a heavy windbreaker. But when these came off, he saw a coral choker and a silk scarf printed with cabbage roses.
“I don’t remember whether I mentioned that I once worked in real estate in California.”
“You told me.”
“Well, I’ve applied for a license here, and as soon as it comes through, I have a job waiting. It’s in a small agency run by half a dozen women, but the area’s being developed, and it’s a good opportunity for me, I think.”
“What brought you back to this area?” he asked.
“One of the women who run the agency knew my brother, and so the contact was made. Anyway, the Midwest is home, and I decided I wanted to come home. That’s all there is to it. There are two main areas opening up,” she continued with enthusiasm. “One has huge houses that remind me of California. But it’s the other that I would love to live in. Wonderful little houses in a wooded area with enormous yards.”
Adam was asking himself while she talked what she might want of him. He had in his field no contacts that could be of any use to a real estate broker. Actually, he was tired of the subject, having been too often bored by Fred Davis’s talk of malls and mortgages. Nevertheless, he listened and watched her. Randi’s voice had a mesmerizing effect, as did the way her fingers played with things. Not nervously, as high-strung women played with them, but lightly, touching the coral at her throat or pushing a strand of hair away from her cheek.