Glistening, altogether revived, he came out of the bathroom, and found an arrangement: a shaker of satisfactory martinis, on the phonograph “Fun to Be Fooled,” at the glass doors sunset fireworks and a postcard view. “I can’t enjoy this for long,” he said, falling among the hassock cushions. “It’s stupid, but I’m having dinner with someone who may give me a job: in radio, of all things,” and so they made a toast that wished him luck. “It isn’t necessary, I’m lucky anyway, wait, by the time I’m thirty I will have had the worst kind of success, be able, organized, someone who laughs at people that want to lie under a tree,” which was not a frivolous prophecy, as Peter, sipping his drink, wisely knew, knowing, too, that it probably was the happiest thing that could happen to him, for the man described he secretly, irrevocably admired.
And the lady with a flower garden, this was Grady, the wife worthy of pearls for Christmas, who entertains at an impeccable table, whose civilized presence recommends the man, that is what she seemed in his expectations, and, watching her pour him another cocktail, just as she might some dusk five years hence, he thought of how the summer had gone, not seeing her once, never calling, all days dragging toward the day that, having exhausted herself with whoever he was, she would turn to him, saying Peter, is it you? And yes. Passing him his drink, Grady noticed with dismay an unwarranted apprehension in Peter’s eyes, a greediness about the mouth very foreign to the exuberant plan of his face; as their fingers touched around the glass stem, she had a sudden preposterous notion: is it possible, are you in love with me?
And this skimmed like a gull, which presently she shooed out of sight, it was such a silly creature, but it came back, kept coming back, and she was forced to consider what Peter meant to her: she wanted his goodwill, she respected his criticisms, his opinions mattered, and it was because they did that she sat now half-listening for Clyde, more than dreading that he should arrive, for Peter, passing judgment, would make her reckon with what she’d done, and she had no heart for it, not yet. They let the room darken, and the surface of their voices, soft, yielding, stirred and sighed around them, what they talked of seeming not to matter, it was so much enough that they could use the same words, apply the same values, and Grady said, “How long have you known me, Peter?”
Peter said, “Since you made me cry; it was a birthday party, and you dumped a mess of ice-cream and cake all over my sailor suit. Oh, you were a very mean child.”
“And am I so different now? Do you think you see me as I really am?”
“No,” he said, laughing, “for that matter, I wouldn’t want to.”
“Because you might not like me?”
“If I claimed to see you as you really are, it simply would mean that I dismiss you, that I think you shallow and a bore.”
“You could think much worse of me.”
Peter’s silhouette moved against the deepening green doors, his smile flickered, like the lights across the park, for, feeling her dishonesty, a sense of ghostly struggle had seized him: it was as if they were two figures pummeling around in wrapped sheets: she wants to excuse herself from blame without confessing why it is I might have cause to blame her. “Much worse than being a bore?” he said, jacking up his smile. “In that case, you were right to wish me luck.”
He left soon afterwards, leaving her alone in the dark room, illuminated time to time by shocking leaps of heat-lightning, and she thought, now it will rain, and it never did, and she thought, now he will come, and he never did. She lighted cigarettes, letting them die between her lips, and the hours, thorned, crucifying, waited with her, and listened, as she listened: but he was not coming. It was past midnight when she called downstairs and asked the doorman to have her car brought around. Lightning jumped from cloud to cloud, a sinisterly soundless messenger, and the car, like a fallen bolt, streaked through the outskirts of the city, through humdrum night-dead villages: at sunrise she glimpsed the sea.
Leave me the hell alone, he told Ida when she came hunting him out at the parking lot, and Ida said: you’re a fine one, aren’t you? Hit your own mama, and there she is in bed with a broken heart, not to mention Becky, and she says her brother says he’ll kill you, so listen, I’m just warning you, that’s all. But he hadn’t hit his mama, Ida was only saying that to make it worse; or had he? He’d gone blind there a minute, seeing those tricksters in the hall, and oh how he’d fixed them: this is my wife, he’d said, and after the way they’d carried on by Jesus if he’d ever set foot in that house again. As if he didn’t know why they held on to him; sure, an extra paycheck was a good thing to have around: love, had they loved Anne? except he was sorry if he’d hit his mama, please God, he hoped he hadn’t hit his mama.
All his boyhood he’d stolen Baby Ruths and taken them to her; and Milky Ways that they put in the icebox and cut into little slices: my Clyde is an angel, he buys his mama candy bars. My Clyde will be a famous lawyer. Did she think he liked working in a parking lot? That he was doing it just to spite her, when all the time he could be a famous lawyer, a famous anything? Things happen, Mama. And Grady McNeil was part of the things that happen. But what of Grady? She’d walked out the door, and that was the last time he’d seen her. Bubble said: lay off that phone, save your nickels, she’s just sore.
Only she hadn’t been sore, so it didn’t make sense, unless it was because he hadn’t shown up that night: well, so he had gone to the bar where Bubble worked and had one helluva time: sometimes you got to be by yourself, right? And if she was going to stay married to him, then they’d have to find a new way of living. For one thing, he wanted her to get out of that apartment. He knew a house on Twenty-eighth Street where they could get a couple of rooms. Now where was she? Aw, sit still, said Bubble. Bubble was over thirty, he worked as a bartender in an out-of-the-way nightclub; he was a friend from army days, and he was like his name, round, bald, thin-skinned.
One morning, it was the fourth day of the heat wave, Clyde woke up and felt an arm around him; he thought he was waking up with Grady, and his heart began to kick: honey, he said, snuggling deeper, gee baby, I missed you. Bubble let out a big snore, and Clyde pushed him away. He was living in Bubble’s place, a furnished room far uptown; there was a Chinese laundry downstairs, in the street summer-wilted children were always crying chink! chink! and some mornings there was an organ-grinder, he was there now, his penny tunes clinking like the coins housewives tossed to the pavement.
He missed her, colored balloons, flower wagons reminded him of that, and he rolled to the far side of the bed; he lay there, nursing an image of her, and with a gliding hand he stroked his parts. Cut it out, said Bubble, leave a guy get his sleep, and Clyde moved his hand away, ashamed, but Grady remained, wavering, unfulfilled, and he remembered another girl, one he’d seen in Germany: it was a spring day, clear, cloudless, he was walking in the country and, crossing a bridge that spanned a narrow crystal river, he looked down and saw, as though they were riding below the surface, two white horses attached to a wagon, their reins twisted around the arms of a young girl, whose drowned broken face glimmered under the dancing water; he took off his clothes, thinking he would cut her loose, but he was afraid, and there she remained, wavering, unfulfilled, beyond him in death as Grady seemed in life.
He gathered his clothes on tiptoe, then crept out the door; there was a pay-phone in the hall, he dialed her number, as usual no one answered. A swarm of kids buzzed around him on the stoop downstairs, hey, mister, give me a cigarette, and he barged through them, swinging his elbows, and one smart aleck, a skinny girl in a moth-eaten bathing suit, said hey, mister, button up your fly, and she ran after him, pointing. Jesus, he said, and grabbed her by the shoulders: her hair flared, floated, her face, pasty with terror, seemed to undulate, like the face of the girl in the river, to blur, as Grady’s did when he tried to see her hard, whole, as his own, and his hands went limp, he ran across the street, the kids hollering: pick on somebody your own size. And who would that be, somebody his own size, when he felt so small and mean?
Seating himself at the counter of a White Castle, he ordered
