Bradley’s gaze looped all around her without alighting on her. “Marion,” he said.
The Jake looked at his watch. “It’s all right.”
“No, no.” Bradley placed a hand on her back and turned her away. “You need to wait,” he told her, as if speaking to a child.
“Is that not what I’ve been doing?”
“Just—wait. All right?”
She waited, prominently, smoking a cigarette, on one of the leather couches for customers. The inside of her mouth was chalky, too. Her lack of sleep had broken the formerly continuous world into sharp fragments. The worried looks of Anne and Mr. Peters, at their desks, glanced off her like arrows off a thing of chalk.
Without knowing how she got there, she found herself outside with Bradley, on the sidewalk around the corner from Lerner. The tops of the street-shadowing buildings blazed in the setting sun. The air was acrid with motor exhaust.
“Oh, honey,” he was saying. “You look so tired.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t mean it in a bad way. Just—have you been eating enough?”
“I eat eggs. I like eggs. I’m sorry.”
“You keep saying you’re sorry when it’s me who should be sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
Bradley squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, God.”
“What?” she said eagerly.
“It’s killing me to see you again.”
“Will you come home with me?”
“It’s better if I don’t.”
“You don’t have to stay long.”
He sighed. “There’s a PTA meeting I promised Isabelle I’d go to.”
“Is it an important meeting?” she said, genuinely curious.
The long wait was over. She stood patiently outside a phone booth while he lied to his wife. She was patient in his car with him, too. It was he who was impatient—as soon as they were inside her building, he pushed her against the wall by the mailboxes and kissed her savagely. She still felt chalky, but apparently to him her flesh was pliable, and that was enough.
Except that it wasn’t. The goal of her waiting had been achieved, but the waiting had stretched the connection between her obsession and its object past the breaking point. Their lovemaking, repeated several times before he left her apartment, delighted her only in what it signified. The actual person on top of her, the panting car salesman with coffee breath, was a stranger to the world she lived in now. Although she clearly signified something to him, too, she was beyond trying to imagine what it was.
Later, in Arizona, she couldn’t remember why she’d told him he didn’t need to be careful. Maybe, being confused about so many things, she’d been confused about her time of month. Maybe, knowing that Bradley didn’t love the alternative to being careful, and not daring to diminish his pleasure in their reunion, she’d simply hoped for the best. Or maybe, although she definitely didn’t remember wanting to be pregnant, her feral intelligence had disastrously miscalculated without her being aware of it. But there was also the fact that, despite her obvious unwellness in the head, Bradley had believed her when she said he didn’t have to be careful. Was it possible that he, too, without being aware of it, had wanted to make a baby? In Arizona, in the absence of any clear memory, she concluded that her pregnancy had been God’s plan for her, His way of testing her: that His will manifested itself in the actions of His children, regardless of their reasons. This settled the question.
When she told the story of her crack-up to Sophie Serafimides, it wasn’t hard to omit the pregnancy, because more than enough other things had happened to explain her landing in a locked ward. There was the late night, a week after the first reunion, when Bradley showed up at her door with a half-emptied whiskey bottle. There was the second night of that sort. There were the two weeks in which she didn’t see him, and then the dreadful letter he sent her. There was her second visit to Lerner Motors, which didn’t go well, and her third visit, when she tried to make Bradley smell her hand, with which she’d touched herself privately, and was hustled out the door by Mr. Peters. There was her ensuing catatonia at the property-management company, which resulted in her being fired. There was the stretch of days that she mostly couldn’t account for, interminable days in an apartment on which rent would soon be due. Finally, there was the warm November afternoon when she went to Bradley’s house, whose address she’d found in the phonebook, to have a word with his wife.