“I thought you were hungry,” Bradley said.
“I’m sorry. The salad looks delicious. I’m just—do you mind if I have a cigarette first?”
His expression told her that he minded. He’d really become quite the health nut.
“I can step out on the patio.”
“No, it’s fine. I have an ashtray somewhere.”
“I know,” she admitted. “I’m still the same mess. I was hoping I could fool you.”
A suspicion appeared to dawn on him. “Do you—you do have a family?”
“Oh, God, yes. That’s all real. I’ve got pictures I was going to show you. Here—”
She jumped up and went to the front hallway. There, uppermost in her purse, were her Lucky Strikes. It wasn’t as if one cigarette would ruin his curtains. As she returned to the dining room, smoking it, she saw that there was no telling what else she might do. The intention to be fucked, her pesky little obsession with it, was, however senseless, persistent.
Dropping a stack of snapshots on the table returned her to her senses. Invisible among the smiling faces of her children was the fetus she’d aborted. Bradley, too, no longer seemed sure he wanted her in his house. He went so far as to wave her smoke away from his nose. The pictures lay on the table unexamined. She asked him if he believed in God.
“God?” He winced. “No. Why do you ask?”
“God saved my life.”
“That’s right. You married a minister. It’s funny it didn’t occur to me.”
“That I have a relationship with God?”
“No, it makes sense. You were always…”
“Crazy?”
He stood up, with a sigh, and went to the kitchen. She had no reason to keep starving herself, but cigarettes had become part of her autonomy. Bradley returned with a yellow ceramic ashtray. On its side were the words LERNER MOTORS.
She smiled. “What ever happened to Lerner?”
“He sold out after the war. The dealerships were moving farther out, and nobody wanted custom bodywork. That was always where Harry’s margin was.”
She tapped the ashtray with her cigarette. “To Harry’s memory I dedicate this ash.”
Sadness made Bradley look even older. Talking about any subject but the two of them was all it took—all it had ever taken—to illuminate their unsuitability for each other. What was best and most essential in her had been wasted on him. The converse was probably also true. She’d been too disturbed in Los Angeles to even know what love was. The real love had come later, in Arizona, and she was pierced, now, by homesickness for New Prospect. For the dear, creaky parsonage. Daffodils in the yard, Becky steaming up the bathroom, Russ buffing his shoes for a funeral. It was worth it, after all, to have aged thirty years. It was worth it to have taken the arduous steps to arrive in Bradley’s house, because the reward was clarity: God had given her a way of being. God had given her four children, a role she was skilled at playing, a husband who shared her faith. With Bradley, there had really only ever been fucking.
She put out the cigarette and took a bite of salad. Bradley picked up his own fork.
Only when she was leaving, an hour and a half later, might something have happened. She’d showed him her few photos, noting how he lingered on a recent school picture of Becky, and suffered through an interminable showing of his own. She would happily have spent another hour in his garden to spare herself a minute of his grandson pictures; her boredom was so aggressive, it verged on loathing. But she played the role of pastor’s wife, fascinated by Bradley’s offspring, and said nothing further to provoke him.
At the front door, as she was leaving, he tried to revive her interest. To her loose farewell hug, he responded by gripping her fanny and pulling her into him.
“Bradley.”
“Please kiss me.”
She gave him a brisk peck, and his hands were all over her. There was a blindness to his pawing, his nuzzling of her throat, his squeezing of her breasts, and this was how she knew for certain. She felt invisible, not excited. She patted his head and said she needed to get back to Judson.
“You can’t stay another hour?”
“No.”
This wasn’t true. She’d told Antonio she might be out all evening. Bradley gripped her head and tried to make her look at him.
“I never got over you,” he said. “Even when you were crazy, I didn’t get over you.”
“Well. Maybe now is a good time.”
“Why did you write to me? Why did you come here?”