“You mean it?”
“Do you mean it?”
“Lois, I’m asking you to marry me,” he said.
“I know, Peter,” she said, looking at him out of the corner of her eye, like a child. “I know. I’ve already accepted.” When he looked at her closely he saw that she was wearing a black veil, the same one as before.
He awoke in a sweat, terrified. And what was he afraid of?
| 4 |
It was a tricky business, looking forward to something. After months of anticipation, the day before Phil was scheduled to arrive, Peter came down with a bad back. Its cause was obscure. He had merely, it seemed—perfectly all right when he went to sleep—awakened with the back, barely able in the morning to get out of bed; the pains, like thieves, taking him by surprise. Peter chose to not think about his back, on the theory that the pains would go away if he pretended they weren’t there, but intead of going away they got worse. It got so that almost every movement, even the slightest turn of the head was an agony—the torment at times so great that he had to hold on to something until it passed. In the afternoon he went to a back specialist Lois had recommended to him—a man who had once, some years before, treated her father.
“The only cure for what you have is rest,” the specialist told him after a rather cursory examination, which consisted of poking him a few times in different parts of the back and asking if it hurt. “I could strap that back for you, but I won’t guarantee a hundred percent that it will relieve the pain. For something like what you have, in my experience the best thing is rest.” The specialist was a remarkably vigorous man of about seventy, pot-bellied and tough, with a slightly bent-over walk, as though he had some kind of chronic back condition.
“How long will I have to rest?” Peter asked. “You’ll have to rest until the pain is gone,” the specialist advised him.
“How long should the pain last?”
“How long?” the specialist queried himself. “It’ll last,” he said philosophically, “until it’s not there any more. Does the pain tell me how long it’ll last? When you reach a certain age, my friend, you got to learn to slow down.”
“You don’t really think I’ve reached that age, do you?” Peter said, and had the notion for the moment that his back was much better. He moved his shoulder gingerly as an exploratory gesture. “It no longer hurts,” he started to say when the pain took him (revisited him), bending him over with the fierceness of its assault.
The specialist shook his head. “Don’t tempt fate,” he said.
“I have to pick up my son at the airport tomorrow,” Peter explained, “and I don’t want him to see me like this.” He was ready to show the doctor a picture of Philly he had just gotten in the mail, but as it was painful for him to reach into his pocket, he decided against it. “Aren’t there some pills you could give me to ease the pain a little?”
“I could give you a hundred pills,” the specialist said. “Would you like a hundred pills?” He removed his glasses, contemptuous of any man who wanted a hundred pills. “You’ve consulted me,” he said, “and I’ve told you all I know. Now do exactly what you like. I’ll tell you this: if you run around with a back like that, I won’t be responsible for what happens.”
Though a little doubtful about the specialist’s competence—his office, except for a television set opposite the examination table, twenty years out of date—Peter was worried. “What can happen?” he asked.
“What can’t?” the specialist said.
“Is it all right for me to go to the airport tomorrow?” Peter asked.
The specialist put his glasses back on, considered the question. “What do I know from airports?” he said. “I know backs. If you were an airplane, I’d say not to fly with a back like that.”
The fee for this advice was fifteen dollars. “I’m retired,” the specialist explained. “I don’t practice much. If it’s not better in two weeks, come back. To tell you the truth, I don’t expect to see you again. That’s my professional judgment. No heavy lifting. No sex. It’ll be better before you know it.”
The back got worse before it got better. In the evening every move he made seemed to break him in half—the pains, never quite the way he expected them, sharper and more frequent than before.
In the only comfortable position he could find, Peter was sitting, immobilized, in a high-backed leather armchair, his feet propped up on an ottoman while Diane, who was in love with him (another responsibility), waited on him as though she were his private nurse.
“Do you want me to hold your coffee for you while you drink it?” she asked, a big, handsome girl, overgrown and ingenuous, a beauty in her way—her way long-legged, small-breasted, a girl with beautiful eyes.
“I can hold it myself,” he said, a little oppressed by her dedication.
“Please let me do it,” she said, and overriding his refusal, held the cup to his lips. “If it’s too hot, let me know.” Peter protested silently and drank, the coffee a little warmer than he liked it.
Their relationship puzzled and flattered him, and only now was beginning, for all its pleasure, to worry him a little. Why was she treating him as if he were breakable? From their first dinner together he had acted toward her as if their being together was some kind of game, a joke they were playing on the adults. Even after they had become lovers—some jokes more involved than others—he had assured them both that it wasn’t serious. They liked each other, liked the game of liking each other—her interest in him no more, he believed, than that of a young girl for an older man, a stage of growth. No more? Who had been kidding whom? He thought to send her home, but instead finished his coffee at her hand. And how could he be sure, after all, that she wasn’t just playing at playing house?
After coffee she washed and dried the dishes. “Is there anything else I can get you, jerk?” she called from his kitchen.
“I have a little ironing that needs to be done, some socks to be washed. Do you do laundry?”
Diane returned to the living room, a shadow of pain in her large eyes—the first he had seen there. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” she said solemnly. “You know that.”
“Who’s kidding who?” he asked, turning his head inadvertently, the knives in his back taking him by surprise.
Diane winced in commiseration. “I’m sorry it pains you,” she said, sitting on the ottoman by his feet. “I know what it’s like.” They suffered together.
“How does it feel?” she asked after a while—the sound of a voice, even her own, better than nothing at all. “Would you like me to give you a back rub, Peter?”
“No,” he said. “It’s all right.”
He was worrying again, as he had all week, about Phil’s arrival—what would he say to the boy when he actually showed up? He had a picture of the two of them sitting glumly around the living room, unable, for all the effort of their need, to talk to each other. They would end up, he was afraid, hating each other. On top of it, he had his back to worry about now.
“Would you like me to read to you?”
He shook his head, unaware of her, oppressed. “You don’t have to stay,” he said. “The old man’ll be all right.” “Are you angry at me?” she asked.
‘Who could be angry at you?” he said easily, looking at her, touched despite himself by her beauty, and for the flicker of a moment felt that he might be in love with her—it was not impossible. He resisted it, a man with a back and a son to worry about. “Who do you think you’re looking at, wise guy?” he said, a kidder from way back.
A generous audience, Diane laughed. “You, old man,” she said. “If you don’t like it, you know what you can do about it.”
‘What?” He had a premonition that Lois was going to drop in on them—though she almost never came over without calling first—and wondered, more curious than concerned, what would happen if she did.
“Nothing,” she said. The joke was over. “Is it true …” she started. “It’s really none of my business.
”
“What do you want to know?” When he moved to change his position in the chair, his back seemed less painful than before, though it may have been only that in anticipating the pain he was less vulnerable to it.
“Peter, there’s a rumor around the office, which I’ve done my best to squelch—I’ve denied it about five times already—to the effect that you and Lois Black were once married.” She studied his face for an answer—her lovely brown eyes like undiscovered countries—as ingenuous and cunning as a child. (A daughter at her father’s feet—who needed sons?)
“Where did you hear that?”
“Oh, it’s just a rumor that’s been floating around. I think one of the secretaries started it. It’s not true, is it?” Her tone betrayed her concern.
A wry patriarch, Peter issued a benign smile from the throne of his chair, wondered himself at the facts of his own past. “Does it seem unlikely that Lois and I could have been married?” he said.
“Well, you’re such different types,” Diane said. “Yes, it seems unlikely. To me it does, though I’m not the most objective person in the world for you to ask.” She shrugged. “You really were married to her, weren’t you?”
“I really was,” he admitted. “But it was a long time ago,” he felt constrained to add.
“I’m sorry if I said anything against Miss Black,” Diane said—a straight-faced irony, “but I really didn’t know. I had no idea.” She hung her head, a penance for her ignorance.
“You haven’t said anything against Lois.”
She put her head against his foot. It was a special game of hers, part of the style of her charm, to pretend not to understand the implications of what she would say. “I’m sorry anyway,” she said.
“In what ways are Lois and I so different?” he wanted to know.
Diane raised her head, a child asked something beyond the comprehension of innocence. “It was presumptuous of me to say that, wasn’t it? I really don’t know Miss Black well enough to say this, but it seems to me”—she glanced at Peter for approval before continuing, withholding the insinuation of a smile; the knowledge of her pretense, the joke of it, a secret she shared with him—“that Miss Black is nice, in fact I think she’s very nice. I really think so, but in some ways kind of petty and self-concerned. You’re much nicer than she is.”
“That’s not true at all,” he said angrily. “You obviously don’t know Lois very well.” It was a lame defense for a lover to make, a former husband—but why should Lois have to be defended? “She’s a hundred times better than I am,” he added, which, as he didn’t quite believe it, only made him feel more disloyal. And Diane saw through him—to the flattered pleasure behind the gesture of protest.
“I don’t claim to know her very well,” Diane said. “From what I’ve seen, she can be very nice when things are going well for her—as nice as anybody—but when they’re not, when something’s bothering her or if she’s made a mistake about something, she takes it out on whoever’s around.”
“She’s only human,” Peter said, struck by it as though it were an insight.
“I know,” Diane said. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”
The phone went off, a minor explosion in the room. Trained to reflex, Peter got up in a hurry—the pains of the flesh as nothing to the anxieties of the spirit.
“Your back,” Diane warned him.
His back hardly bothered him. What could he do? He groaned a little in commemoration, pained at the fickleness of his ailment.
Lois’s voice on the phone, even when he anticipated it, had a way somehow of taking him by surprise. It seemed each time like a voice from the past, and he associated it not with the Lois he saw almost daily, but the one he hadn’t seen, hadn’t talked to, in fourteen years. It took only a minute or so for the illusion to die.
Lois asked how his back was getting along, though it was clear from the tone of her inquiry that she didn’t take his pains very seriously.
“You don’t think it hurts, do you?” he said, turning to look at Diane, who was standing, her face averted, at the other side of the room. His back throbbed dully, a justification of itself. “You’ve been in publishing so long you don’t take anything seriously any more.”
“Oh, come on. You know yourself that as soon as Phil shows up, your back will stop hurting.” She lowered her voice: “I take everything about you seriously, Peter. You know that. The fact is, I take you much more seriously than you take yourself.”
“You see right through me,” he said.
“Your jokes haven’t gotten any better in fourteen years.”
“Is that what you called to tell me?”
“No, I called … Is there someone there with you?”
He looked over to Diane, surprised to discover that she was watching him, her face impassive. “Why should anyone be here?” he said.
“I don’t know. I just had the feeling that there was. You sound as if you have an audience.”
“No,” he said. The lie hurt him, but what else could he say?
“Peter, I’ve been thinking about tomorrow …” she said. “My going to the airport with you—it’s not really a very good idea.”
“All right.”
“You can take a cab if your back hurts too much for you to drive, Peter. I really think you ought to meet him alone. Really. Think of how the boy will feel about someone else being there. He’s coming all this distance, over five hundred miles, to see his father. He’s not going to want someone else there to have to share him with.”
“I said, all right.”
“My dinner offer for Saturday night still holds good. Don’t be angry with me, Peter. Please.”
“I’m not angry,” he said, restraining his irritation. “I just don’t like to be lectured at, Lois.”
“I’m not aware that I was lecturing you,” she said coldly. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she repeated, her voice making the effort of meaning it. “Should I come over,” she said softly, “or are you too disabled to want company?”
“Too disabled,” he said without hesitation.
“Oh!” A swallowing sound. Then, contrite: “Are you angry with me?”
He said he wasn’t, looking at Diane, who seemed, her back to him, to be reading the titles of his books. He sensed her unhappiness, distracted by it. “If I am,” he said, “I’ll get over it.”
“Remember, he’s not my son.”
“I remember,” he said, aggrieved at Lois for mentioning it, depressed. “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said.
“What way did you mean it?”
She chose to ignore his question. “You haven’t told me yet whether you’re coming to dinner with Phil on Saturday.” She laughed irrelevantly. “Will you come? I promise to make a good showing.”
“I’ll let you know,” he said. Then added: “If Phil wants to, we’ll come.”
“Good night, Peter,” she said in an injured voice.
“Good night,” he said, and waited, resisting the obligations of remorse, for Lois to hang up.
“Forgive me?” she said.
“For what?” he said, wanting to make it right, yet for some reason compelled not to be able to.
“I don’t know,” she said. ‘For whatever you’re holding against me.”
“If you do the same for me,” he said.
“You know I forgive you everything,” she said, which left him even more depressed than before—his back cramped, a little numb, under the burden of her forgiveness.
“Then we’re even. I’ll call you tomorrow, Lois.”
“Wait. Is there someone there with you?”
He hesitated, worried for a moment that he had given himself away. “Good night, Lois,” he said finally, refusing to lie to her again, a liar only to himself.
“I’m sorry,” she said dully. “You know, I worry about you. Even your psychosomatic back worries me.”
“I know,” Peter said.
“My tr
ouble is I still love you,” she said in a low, almost threatening voice and without waiting for an answer, without wanting one, she hung up.
Holding the dead receiver in his hand, Peter thought seriously for a moment or two of pulling the cord out of the wall, but the new Becker, less rash than the old, decided against it. He needed the phone like he needed a bad back. Yet he discovered—all knowledge a penance for loss—that he needed them both.
The operator cut in. “Can I help you?” she asked.
He wondered what she had in mind, hung up without answering, with the nagging sense—like old times—that he had lost something irreplaceable.
Walking as though his spine were glued together, anticipating pain, Peter returned to his chair. “Hey,” he said, “what are you doing?”
“Nothing,” Diane said, leafing through the pages of one of his books, her back to him.
“I’m sorry about being on the phone so long,” he said.
“I’m sure you are,” Diane said quietly, and with sudden vehemence threw the book she was holding at him, hitting the leg of his chair. Was it a joke? “I’m sorry I missed,” she said tonelessly, staring at the floor. “Why did you lie to me?”
“I haven’t lied to you,” he said lamely, a defense against unknown charges—at the moment, for all he knew, the father of lies. “You knew Lois and I were friends. I never told you we weren’t, did I?”
“That’s the truth,” she said. “You never told me you weren’t, because you never mentioned it at all.” She remained almost motionless, staring at the rug. “I’m sorry if I’ve been presumptuous. Oh, Peter!” she screamed at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?” She took another book from the shelf, swung it over her head as though she were about to throw it, then put it back, laughing.
Unable to think of anything to say—could he tell her things he didn’t know?—Peter worried about the complications of his life, envied himself the lonely days of his freedom. ‘You haven’t been presumptuous,” he said, all he could say, hoping without much hope that it would ease the tension in the room, that the girl would see that he was fond of her, that he was extremely grateful for her affection, but that he was a man already—whether he liked it or not—committed to a future.
A Man to Conjure With Page 25