“Forget it.”
“No, I’m not forgetting it.”
“Tracy, stop. You and I—right now—are about to act out one of the oldest stories in the book. And I don’t care to. I know all the lines, I know all the background music. I don’t want”—he opened his palm—“to do it, that’s all. And I won’t.”
The pain that moved briefly across her face gratified him; he had always felt she loved him, as he did her. But there was suddenly a refreshing simplicity that seemed to move into the room, an unexpected and huge relief, a straightening out of—things. Go home and get your things in order, a doctor would say. No. Affairs. Go home and get your affairs in order. That clarification—he couldn’t help it—struck Charlie as funny. He was, in the tiniest way, delighted, as though all those people whose lives had occurred long before he’d been born had known these things, phrases used for years: Go home and get your affairs in order.
Inside his pocket his phone vibrated again, and he brought it out to see. Marilyn was printed in blue across the screen.
“Want me to step out?” The question was intimate because it had been asked so many times in the past. The tone was conversational, familiar.
He nodded.
She slipped her coat back on, and he gave her a room key.
He said, “They have that tiny lobby—” But she said her car was fine, she’d listen to the radio, really, it was no problem. She had always been pretty wonderful that way. It was her job to be wonderful that way. But even after the day she’d told him her real name—sitting fully dressed in the chair by the desk, “I want to tell you my real name”—and brought out her driver’s license to prove it, she was still wonderful that way. After the day she showed him her license, she’d insisted that he not offer her money again. Perhaps she’d been mulling this over, and now figured she was owed. Perhaps she was. The door closed quietly behind her. He resisted the urge to look through the blind slats and watch her get into her car.
The peculiar hopefulness had not left him, the pleasing understanding that the situation would be over soon, was—essentially—over already. And it felt quite survivable, which he had somehow not known.
His wife was crying on the phone. “Charlie? Oh, I’m sorry to bother you, really I am. You’re supposed to be having fun—well, I know it’s not fun, but I mean I know it’s your time, and—”
“What’s happened?” He felt no alarm.
“Oh, Charlie, she was mean to me again. I called, you know, to see if the girls were all set with their Thanksgiving dresses, and Janet said to me, she said, ‘Marilyn, I’m asking you, no, I’m telling you, I’m just going to come right out and tell you, Marilyn, that you call here too much. This is my house and Stevie is my husband, and we need some space.’ That’s what she said, Charlie. And Stevie, who even knows if he was home, does he have any spine, our son—”
Charlie stopped listening. He was absolutely and silently on the side of his children, and on the side of his son’s wife. He sat down on the bed.
“Charlie?” she said.
“I’m here.” Inadvertently he glanced at himself in the mirror. He had long ago stopped looking like anyone familiar.
In a few minutes he had calmed his wife enough to hang up. She’d apologized once more for disturbing him, and said he had made her feel better. He’d answered, “Okay then, Marilyn.”
Alone in the room with silence he understood the previous hiatus, which had now returned to him, that spaciousness of calm: Long ago he’d assigned a private name to it. The hit-thumb theory. On his grandfather’s roof as a child one summer, hammering tiles down hard, he’d discovered that if you hammered your thumb by mistake, there was a split second when you thought: Hey, this isn’t so bad, considering how hard I was hit…And then—after that moment of false, bewildered, and grateful relief—came the crash and crush of real pain. In the war this had happened so often, in so many forms, he’d sometimes thought he was brilliant—the analogy was that apt. In the war he had learned many things, and not one of them had he heard any psychologist mention during any of the meetings that Marilyn now thought he was attending.
Charlie stood up. He felt the itch of desire that was carnal, corporeal; it included much and was not a stranger to him. Arms crossed, he walked back and forth in front of the queen-size bed with its spread that was made of fibers—he knew from having felt it many times—meant to endure all things. Back and forth he walked, back and forth. He had sometimes walked back and forth for hours. A warmth of emotion came to him.