Going Down Fast (6 page)

To make amends she agreed. Though Rowley seldom ate there, she felt a great relief when she looked quickly over the sandwich shop. How long before she need not do that at every entrance?

He stared at his hands on the table as if they were something the waitress had neglected to clear. “Yeah, I hate to eat alone. Leftover from marriage. Got to have someone across the table to yell at.”

“You get out of the habit of being alone. I was married once myself.”

“Good experience for a woman. Makes her useful.” He grinned. His teeth were his best feature, strong and white. “What happened?”

“I met Rowley.”

“Oh.” His eyes, milky blue and arctic, studied her. “Like that.”

“He was a lever for prying myself loose.”

“How come you got stuck to begin with? Why so young?”

She played with her food. If she said she married Asher for his reform politics, because she had soured on the department? “Because at twenty-one I felt older than I do now. Because a couple of other people hadn't married me. Because I thought Asher—my husband—loved me, needed me. Because I was feeling a little shabby. I wanted to get out of the wind.”

“I got married because … it seemed the thing to do. Joye kept yakking about it. I was worn out with her thinking she was knocked up every month.” He grimaced, his face tight. “You know she's got my kid.”

“Your kid?” Vaguely she remembered Rowley arriving late, drunk and amorous from celebrating the birth. “I guess I did know you have a boy.”

“She's got Jimmy, not me. Because of a trick I pulled when we were fighting our way through the courts she doesn't have to let me see him for a year.” He tucked his chin into his ski sweater. “She's got the bit in her teeth these days and she's tearing around whining about how I treated her. I hear she tells some gory tales.” He stuck out his square jaw. “All of them true.”

“We had a quiet divorce. Asher's a gentleman. Once he'd given up trying to change my mind he wanted no more fuss than necessary to comply with the law. But I was the guilty party. And I felt like it.”

“But
you
would have anyhow.” His strange eyes lit with amusement.

“Too true.” She smiled. “That's the nicest thing anybody's ever said on the dreary subject. But it in no way detracts from the sense of guilt I keep polished.”

“Defense.”

“Guilt as defense? Against what?”

“Believing in anything the way you must have in your marriage. Getting cheated again.” He sighted along his finger at her. “When you talk about your marriage you get an expression on, like you're remembering a bad joke somebody played on you.”

She frowned. “Only myself. Yes, I'm scared of being taken in.”

He rubbed his cheek roughly, giving her that shy feral grin that was as close as he came to smiling: As if the shame of his awkward hairy body was too great to allow spontaneous gestures, only gashes through which his reactions could escape. He was not entirely ugly. He had remarkable eyes and good teeth, and a squat powerful build. But she remembered Joye, conventionally pretty and fluffy like a nice highschool girl. Blond-brown hair, turned up nose, okay legs. Joye had been crazy about him. At parties she had clung to him until he turned lowering and shook her off, when she would retreat to a corner and watch him with lonesome eyes. She could hear Joye talking, giving his name two full syllables: Leeyon doesn't like carrots, Lee-yon says opera is for Maggots, Lee-yon says I'm a masochist, do you think so? Joye would drink too much and end up passed out on the bed with the pile of coats or crying on a man's shoulder. He had punched someone's nose for comforting her, so Rowley had told her as proof Leon cared for his wife. Marriage was a three-legged race uphill. Foolish to blame Leon for Joye's unhappiness when all it meant was that they should never have agreed to bungle along under one roof trying to make each other's discomfort complete.

“Think there's a good chance of you making it up with old Rowley?”

“Not a chance.” She bit the words off.

“Why not? Unless he's shacked up with Caroline.”

“I have no idea—except there's sure to be someone warming that bed. We're both too proud. We won't put up with each other's demands, and neither of us will back down.”

“Ummmm. He's had an eye on Caroline for a long time.”

“I don't think so!”

“How would you know? I've seen him looking her over. It won't last—he won't care for her. But he was willing to toss you overboard to get hold of her.”

Her cheeks felt swollen. “It's just that he can't resist prancing around and proving himself.”

“Was it spontaneous when he took you away from your husband? Listen, I know Rowley. Didn't I share a pad with him for two years? Not that he means to be ruthless, but he's introspective as a bulldog and all he does is follow his nose—or his prick. When he wants something he wants it so bad he manages to make you think for a while, maybe a long while, that it means something. Then he can't be bothered. I used to get his girls crying on my shoulder.”

She had great difficulty meeting his gaze. He was unjust, jealous. Or did she want to protect her pride?

“I don't mean he's a bastard. Only he gets into situations and then loses patience and wants out.” When she did not answer he added harshly, “I suppose you think I'm a shit talking about him that way. Doesn't show much gratitude.”

“Gratitude?”

“Sure. For his big rescue.”

“What?”

“You know. His heroic bit.”

“What are you talking about?” she cried in irritation.

“Strong silent type. He saved my life. Big deal. I took an overdose of sleeping pills. The bungler's way. If you really mean it, you don't take pills and wait for somebody to stumble over you. You borrow a gun and blow your head off, you cut your throat. You jump out a tenth-floor window. You don't fuck around with pills.”

“He never mentioned it.” She was not sure how to react. “You must have been very depressed.”

“No more than usual.” He picked his nose.

“That was before you got married?”

“That's what I did to myself instead. Like the pills it didn't live up to expectations.” He reached for the check. “I half hoped she'd lead me out to green suburbs, but I was too strong for her.”

“You were involved with Caroline, weren't you?”

“Me?” He paid the cashier, turned and walked out. Under the blinking green neon sign he stood hunched as if against a wind. “While I was married. Shouldn't have mixed with her then, bad idea.” He shook his head mumbling, “A hard scene, all the way round.”

So he felt guilty about Caroline, hence the paternal concern. Another blondbrown girl with nice legs. He must collect them. She said, “I never use my head for anything useful. When I'm interested in a man my brain shuts off. Perhaps that's what you were saying about Rowley.”

“You're still soft on him.”

“Not true! But I don't dislike him.”

“Good.” He caught hold of a no parking sign and swung around the pole, stopped to face her. “If you mean I dumped her, you're dead wrong.”

“I know nothing about it.”

“People always think they do,” he said stubbornly but walked on with her. “I'm afraid that's how she sees it.”

She thought in surprise of their supper. She was not usually loosemouthed, but his harsh selfabusive honesty drew her open. More common ground than she would have guessed. They were both people who had become aware of the barbs in their own acts.

“Here's where I live.”

“Like last time.”

He showed no sign of saying goodnight. Reluctantly she asked him up for coffee.

“Your place is too small.” He slumped in a chair, still wearing his coat. “It depresses me.”

“Lately it depresses me too.”

He sat with his big head bowed, his hair the color of tomato soup under the overhead light. As he drank off his coffee and set down the cup he gave her a bleak grin. “You uh … want company tonight?”

“No!” She spoke without thinking, then got scared she had insulted him. He had asked with the grace of someone emptying a bucket of slops.

“Good,” he said heartily. “Better. Wouldn't pry either of us out of the muck.”

“Why ask then?”

“Never hurts. After all.” With a broader grin. He looked at his hand, made a fist and hit it on the table. “You're not going to get mixed up with someone right away. You're still in shock, like someone with a limb cut off. We just settled the issue between us. But we can be useful. You're low on bread, right? So I buy a couple of steaks and you fix them. Or we eat in Parks. Like I said, I hate eating alone. We pass the time,
go
ing
places
,
do
ing
things
.” His voice rose satirically but he watched. “See a flick, eat icecream, toss a ball around.”

Faintly possible that this was his oblique approach to bed but she was not committing herself to anything agreeing to see him now and then. He had found her a job, he had been interesting to talk to. She was as poorly equipped to endure loneliness as she ever had been: a few weeks in her rooms and she'd be across the street at Woody's bar seeking proof of her attractiveness, her existence, seeking relief from the pressure of walls and memory and anxiety. “By the way, was that your standard approach?”

“I have no approach. I let women do what they want to.”

She laughed. “I don't know if that's indifference or the cleverest trap of all.”

“The door's open. That's all. All the doors are open.”

Saturday, October 25

A clear racy day with the wind smelling of leaves. Even the grubby sparrows in the gutter showed not uniformly sooty but brown-capped and blackthroated. Content to be alone Anna walked toward the lake, a blanket over her arm and a book Leon had pressed on her—an interpretation of Blake he claimed was his theory of film—tucked in her cow of a purse. As she passed under the echoey railroad viaduct she wondered in which lakeside tower Leon was lunching with his mother, in these blocks almost entirely white and largely vertical. The managers, the lawyers, the middle echelon administration men lived over here in grandiose well kept apartment hotels or new glass walled skyscrapers. Cliffs of money on the lake.

The point was a crowded rookery of sunning students and neighborhood people sprawled under the small trees. She clambered down from rock to rock, folded her coat and leaned back. In a clean curve the lake arced away to the Loop's compact facade. Below her a man fished, clutching beer in a paper sack. Once an hour the fuzz patrolled. From daylight on men fished, old men joined on the weekend by young black guys. The old men fished with two or more poles, with pulleys, balls of stout line and bells to warn of a nibble. They muttered encouragement and chaff as if each was afraid the other would quit before he did.

She turned toward deep water, let her eyes close and the sun melt the muscles in her face. The noises grew discrete, each cry, bike chain, transistor or motor boat. Then they receded and she felt calmer than she had in a month and a half. If only she could live more gently. Her trouble was in overresponding to events, to people, to touch and words and the ordinary flotsam of living. Somehow her volume control had got turned too loud. A giant baby resided in her grabbing at things, then letting go with a clatter—responding hypnotically to stroking, clutching the penis like a breast for comfort. Time and again she saw clearly and acted irrationally, crying, Now what have I done?

Yes, these rocks. A mild April night with a damp wind lapping over the water. The evening had begun badly. Asher had agreed to take her to a Yeats play in which her friend Marcia was dancing. However, the Independents for Botts threw a party, and they must go there instead in order for Asher to talk to someone who'd be making an appearance. Then he did not like her dress and kept after her till she changed it. She had always suspected that the women Asher approved of were hipless girls with elegant bony shoulders. He had been under the impression the party was to be more political than alcoholic, and he was wrong. After he failed to persuade the man to vote for a park proposal, he wanted to go home. She said no. She did not like the group, she did not want to be at this party, but it was Saturday night and she was not going back to their apartment, not yet she wasn't.

Asher left, and she glared around the room waiting for one of those stuffed green olives to ask her what had happened. She got herself another drink and stood backed into a corner, a grimace of desperate malaise spreading over her face. The next morning she could count on Asher's voice regular and relentless as dripping water:

“Now let's try to understand why you did that. You'll agree, I think, that it was a strange thing to do? A little immature? What did you plan to say when someone asked you where I was?”

She swallowed her drink and went to get her coat, as Rowley came in with a group. He lagged behind to speak to her. “Where's Asher? Out there fighting for a cleaner Chicago?”

She felt silly enough to tell him. Smiling he took her arm. “I'd give you a ride, but I came with Cal. Come on and I'll walk you home.”

By the time they had gone the few blocks to the townhouse she and Asher were exorbitantly buying, they had come alive to each other and besides the night was mild with spring after the long craggy winter so that one or the other had suggested walking further. Eventually they had strolled out on the point and sat talking on a rock. She felt feverish: she thought she could feel the blood fizz through her veins, the hair growing in her scalp. She had told herself her joy was a freak of the thaw, but she felt a desolate loss when suddenly she saw the the east was turning gray and sat bolt upright remembering she was married.