talk, she always listened. Always.
He geared down the Volkswagen to take a sweeping curve in the road, then picked up speed, heading east. Behind him the mocking lightning danced wildly in the vast darkening sky.
XVI
Claudia was home. Nudger saw a light in her front windows as he parked across the street from her apartment on Wilmington.
Though dusk had crept into the city, it was still bright enough for some of her neighbors to be out mowing the small lawns in front of their squared-off brick houses or apartment buildings, or to be ritualistically polishing their cars. That was how they wiled away their time in this part of town. There was a Germanic sense of order that ran deep here. South St. Louisans had been known to cut down majestic trees for no reason other than that they didn't want leaves littering their lawns.
It had been one of Nudger's rougher days. He was tired, and he took the two flights of wooden stairs up to Claudia's apartment slowly. He was a bit surprised at the effort the climb required. Each year his legs seemed to weigh more. The stairwell was still hot from the afternoon, and the open window on the landing did nothing to dispel the heated air or to lessen the mingled cooking smells that seemed to be common to old apartment buildings.
When finally he stood in front of Claudia's door and had his fist drawn back to knock, the door suddenly swung open.
Claudia was dressed to go out. She was wearing her plain navy-blue dress, high-heeled shoes, and a double string of pearls around her neck. Unpretentious. Elegant. He liked her dressed like that. Her eyes widened wildly for an instant, then she stepped back gracefully and smiled.
But too late. He knew.
She'd been expecting someone else.
Nudger walked into the apartment and looked around. There were tracks of roughed-up nap on the carpet from the vacuum sweeper, and everything was exactly in place. Even the magazines on the coffee table were fanned out precisely like a hand of cards, the way they were in a doctor's waiting room in the morning, before the patients messed them up. Nudger hadn't seen Claudia's apartment this neat since right after she'd moved in.
'Were you planning to bring him back here after dinner?' he asked.
'Not dinner,' she said, 'a concert in the park.' She was defying him now, angry. And building on her anger. What right had Nudger to barge into her home and interrogate her, she was thinking, and she was close to saying it.
'Biff Archway?' Nudger asked.
She didn't answer, letting him know with her silence that, whomever she was going out with, it was none of his business. This was her apartment, her life. Her own.
'I thought we were honest with each other,' Nudger said. He felt his stomach knotting up, twisting, twisting.
Claudia slapped her hands lightly against her thighs. She was tense, drawn tight, not liking what was going on here any more than Nudger liked it. An ugly scene getting uglier. Only she hadn't forced a confrontation; he had.
'You knew about Biff,' she told him.
Nudger looked glumly at her, nodded. True enough.
Claudia swallowed, then breathed out hard through her nose. 'Look, Nudger, I'm going to ask you for something. It's something that isn't going to be easy for you; I realize that.'
He waited, then finally asked, 'What is it?'
'Understanding,' Claudia said simply.
Nudger gave her a to-hell-with-it shrug he didn't feel. 'I'll make an effort.'
'I do love you,' Claudia said. 'Or I think I do. Which is why I'm being honest with you. I don't talk about Ralph or the girls much… about what happened. But I still think about it too much.'
Nudger understood that. Thinking about Ralph just a little was thinking about him too much.
'You helped me when I needed it,' Claudia said. 'I'm grateful, and I'd be lying if I said that had nothing to do with why I'm fond of you.'
'If you're fond of me, why go out with Biff Archway?'
She moved closer, her dark eyes pleading with him to see her point of view. Her lips twitched nervously before she spoke. 'After my marriage to Ralph, even though I love you, I feel that to fully regain my identity, my wholeness, I need to see other men. I've felt that way for quite a while, but I didn't say anything about it.' She flexed her long-nailed fingers, eventually working them into tight, pale fists.
He stared at her. 'What is this? Kick Nudger therapy? Did Doctor Oliver put you up to this?'
'It was my decision.'
'Well, I don't agree with it.'
A few seconds passed. Something bright seemed to go out of her. She seemed to have made some decision about Nudger, to have withdrawn to a place behind some barrier in her mind where he couldn't hurt her. Then she shrugged as if to say the hell with what he thought. She seemed to mean it.
'We had what the books and talk shows call a relationship,' Nudger pointed out.
'We still do. Only it's changed somewhat.'
'Like the atomic bomb changed Hiroshima somewhat.'
She stepped over to stand next to him, rested a hand on his shoulder. He could feel a vibration running through her fingers. She was wearing his favorite perfume. Biff's, too? 'Don't feel that way, please!' she said softly. She wanted to come out from where Nudger had forced her.
He moved away from her hand and walked toward the door.
She let her arm fall limp. 'Nudger!'
'You wouldn't want me here when Biff arrives,' he said.
'I asked for understanding,' she told him, as if she were disappointed in him.
'Can't give it to you,' he said. 'I'm feeling too sorry for myself.'
'Damn you!' she said, turning unexpectedly angry. 'Don't you lay a load of guilt on me! Not you, too!'
'Maybe Ralph-'
'What?' she interrupted, furious and afraid. She stood waiting for him to finish what he'd begun to say, close to tears, close to something else. Scary.
'Forget it,' Nudger said, and went out the door.
His heart was pumping and his stomach was churning. He didn't feel at all tired going down the stairs.
He sensed that Claudia had followed him out into the hall and was standing above at the railing, watching him leave. That she might shout something after him.
But when he turned at the bottom of the stairs to look up at her, she wasn't there.
XVII
Nudger didn't feel like going home to his empty apartment and trying to tune out the silence. He didn't want to find out how sorry for himself he could feel.
His side was aching, throbbing with his heartbeat. First he'd been kicked around physically, then he'd taken his licks mentally. Some life. Maybe the TV evangelists were right and he was involved in some sort of celestial test. Maybe boils and locusts were next.
Women were certainly one of his life's tribulations.
No, not women generally. Claudia. She was primarily his woman trouble of the moment. It wasn't wise to generalize about people. About anything. Thinking that way could lead in wrong directions, and to more
