that he had a sense of slipping through something, of narrowly evading something. She closed the door behind him. She put her arms around him and hugged him.
“Every day I tell myself it’s time to be getting over this,” he said into the space above her head. “I know that people expect it of me. They used to offer their sympathy but now they don’t; they don’t even mention his name. They think it’s time my life moved on. But if anything, I’m getting worse. The first year was like a bad dream — I was clear to his bedroom door in the morning before I remembered he wasn’t there to be wakened. But this second year is real. I’ve stopped going to his door. I’ve sometimes let a whole day pass by without thinking about him. That absence is more terrible than the first, in a way. And you’d suppose I would turn to Sarah but no, we only do each other harm. I believe that Sarah thinks I could have prevented what happened, somehow — she’s so used to my arranging her life. I wonder if all this has only brought out the truth about us — how far apart we are. I’m afraid we got married
She drew him through a living room where shadows loomed above a single beaded lamp, and a magazine lay face down on a lumpy couch. She led him up a stairway and across a hall and into a bedroom with an iron bedstead and a varnished orange bureau.
“No,” he said, “wait. This is not what I want.”
“Just sleep,” she told him. “Lie down and sleep.”
That seemed reasonable.
She removed his duffel coat and hung it on a hook in a closet curtained with a length of flowered sheeting. She knelt and untied his shoes. He stepped out of them obediently. She rose to unbutton his shirt and he stood passive with his hands at his sides. She hung his trousers over a chair back. He dropped onto the bed in his underwear and she covered him with a thin, withered quilt that smelled of bacon grease.
Next he heard her moving through the rest of the house, snapping off lights, running water, murmuring something in another room. She returned to the bedroom and stood in front of the bureau. Earrings clinked into a dish. Her robe was old, shattered silk, the color of sherry. It tied at the waist with a twisted cord and the elbows were clumsily darned. She switched off the lamp. Then she came over to the bed and lifted the quilt and slid under it. He wasn’t surprised when she pressed against him. “I just want to sleep,” he told her. But there were those folds of silk. He felt how cool and fluid the silk was. He put a hand on her hip and felt the two layers of her, cool over warm. He said, “Will you take this off?”
She shook her head. “I’m bashful,” she whispered, but immediately afterward, as if to deny that, she put her mouth on his mouth and wound herself around him.
In the night he heard a child cough, and he swam up protestingly through layers of dreams to answer. But he was in a room with one tall blue window, and the child was not Ethan. He turned over and found Muriel. She sighed in her sleep and lifted his hand and placed it upon her stomach. The robe had fallen open; he felt smooth skin, and then a corrugated ridge of flesh jutting across her abdomen. The Caesarean, he thought. And it seemed to him, as he sank back into his dreams, that she had as good as spoken aloud.
twelve
“I don’t understand you,” Rose told Macon. “First you say yes, you’ll be here all afternoon, and then you say you won’t. How can I plan when you’re so disorganized?”
She was folding linen napkins and stacking them on the table, preparing her annual tea for the old people. Macon said, “Sorry, Rose, I didn’t think it would matter that much.”
“Last night you said you’d want supper and then you weren’t here to eat it. Three separate mornings these past two weeks I go to call you for breakfast and I find you haven’t slept in your bed. Don’t you think I worry? Anything might have happened.”
“Well, I said I was sorry.”
Rose smoothed the stack of napkins.
“Time creeps up on me,” he told her. “You know how it is. I mean I don’t intend to go out at all, to begin with, but then I think, ‘Oh, maybe for a little while,’ and next thing I know it’s so late, much too late to be driving, and I think to myself, ‘Well…’ ”
Rose turned away quickly and went over to the buffet. She started counting spoons. “I’m not asking about your private life,” she said.
“I thought in a sense you were.”
“I just need to know how much food to cook, that’s all.”
“I wouldn’t blame you for being curious,” he said.
“I just need to know how many breakfasts to fix.”
“You think I don’t notice you three? Whenever she’s here giving Edward his lesson, everyone starts coming out of the woodwork. Edging through the living room—‘Just looking for the pliers! Don’t mind me!’ Sweeping the entire front porch the minute we take Edward out for a walk.”
“Could I help it if the porch was dirty?”
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Tomorrow night I’ll definitely be here for supper. That’s a promise. You can count on it.”
“I’m not asking you to stay if you don’t want to,” she told him.
“Of course I want to! It’s just this evening I’ll be out,” he said, “but not late, I’m sure of that. Why, I bet I’ll be home before ten!”
Although even as he spoke, he heard how false and shallow he sounded, and he saw how Rose lowered her eyes.
He bought a large combination pizza and drove downtown with it. The smell made him so hungry that he kept snitching bits off the top at every stoplight — coins of pepperoni, crescents of mushroom. His fingers got all sticky and he couldn’t find his handkerchief. Pretty soon the steering wheel was sticky too. Humming to himself, he drove past tire stores, liquor stores, discount shoe stores, the Hot-Tonight Novelty Company. He took a shortcut through an alley and jounced between a double row of backyards — tiny rectangles crammed with swing sets and rusted auto parts and stunted, frozen bushes. He turned onto Singleton and drew up behind a pickup truck full of moldy rolls of carpet.
The next-door neighbor’s twin daughters were perched on their front stoop — flashy sixteen-year-olds in jeans as tight as sausage casings. It was too cold to sit outside, but that never stopped them. “Hey there, Macon,” they sing-songed.
“How are you, girls.”
“You going to see Muriel?”
“I thought I might.”
He climbed Muriel’s steps, holding the pizza level, and knocked on the door. Debbie and Dorrie continued to watch him. He flashed them a broad smile. They sometimes baby-sat with Alexander; he had to be nice to them. Half the neighborhood sat with Alexander, it seemed. He still felt confused by Muriel’s network of arrangements.
It was Alexander who opened the door. “Pizza man!” Macon told him.
“Mama’s on the phone,” Alexander said flatly. He turned away and wandered back to the couch, adjusting his glasses on his nose. Evidently he was watching TV.
“Extra-large combination, no anchovies,” Macon said.
“I’m allergic to pizza.”
“What part of it?”
“Huh?”
“What part are you allergic to? The pepperoni? Sausage? Mushrooms? We could take those off.”
