The note was in blue pen, stroked in her neat teacher's handwriting. It said simply that she wanted to see Nudger late this afternoon or tonight, and asked him to come by her apartment anytime after four. She needed to talk about something important, she said. It was signed 'Love, Claudia.'
Nudger didn't know quite how to feel about that. But then he didn't have a choice about how he felt. Nobody did. That was what caused so many knotty problems for so many people and kept him in business.
There was another message from Eileen on Nudger's answering machine. He listened to it only long enough to learn why she'd been trying to talk with him. He had indeed paid her only half of last month's alimony. Not only that, her lawyer had a file on the dates of all the late payments made by Nudger, and used some kind of sliding formula to calculate the interest Eileen claimed she was owed. The interest rate was several points higher than the prime rate, which Nudger always thought was really the rate banks charged their worst customers. But then there was little doubt that First National Eileen considered him to be her very worst customer.
Nudger knew he'd better pay Eileen the other half of the alimony soon. The demand for accumulated interest was probably a bluff, engineered to aggravate, and could be ignored. He wished she'd leave him alone. She had more money than he had. She could afford her pistol of a lawyer.
He folded Claudia's note and slid it into his shirt pocket. Life could be infinitely complicated. Mother hadn't told him there'd be years like this.
XXX
The apartment on Wilmington was neat and smelled of lemon-scented furniture wax, as if Claudia had just a moment ago finished cleaning and everything was still precisely in place. Maybe she wanted to talk to Nudger in surroundings as orderly as possible, so that their conversation would take on the same symmetry and manageability.
She was wearing her plain navy-blue dress and had her dark hair pulled back and pinned behind her ears, from where it was allowed to fall to below her shoulders. She looked startlingly beautiful to Nudger, her lean features made perfect by the late-afternoon light. It was four o'clock exactly. Nudger needed to see Claudia as early as possible in order to get to the Right Steer when Candy Ann got off work.
Candy Ann was on Claudia's mind, too. When Nudger had sat down on the sofa, she said, 'Someone at the school was kind enough to show me your photograph in the paper. The one of you stepping down out of a trailer, wearing an expression that must have been a lot like Lancelot's when he left Guinevere's room.' A crisp, almost reprimanding tone had crept into her voice.
'I don't think Camelot reads quite like that.'
'I was striving for effect.'
'This someone who showed you the photograph, was his name Archway?'
She shrugged with feigned nonchalance. 'It doesn't matter.' She was nervous. She took a few steps left, a few right, and wound up standing again in front of Nudger. 'Since you spent the night with that girl, I thought maybe we could find some common ground, come to an understanding.'
'You don't object that I saw her?'
'I don't have the right to object. Not to anyone you see. And vice versa. That's what I keep trying to get across to you.'
'How do you know I spent the night with her?' Nudger asked.
Claudia seemed slightly surprised. 'The newspaper said so.'
'Oh, I didn't know; I only looked at the photographs, then threw my copy away. I haven't believed anything in that paper since the crippled-UFO story. The one where aliens broke into a Shell station and stole an ordinary automobile battery-'
'Are you going to tell me you didn't sleep with her?' Claudia interrupted. Nudger thought he picked up a note of jealousy in the question. Yes, he was sure of it.
'I slept with her,' he said. He watched Claudia wince ever so slightly. 'But without sex. Her fiance was ritualisti- cally toasted to death that day; she needed somebody with her. That was what all our time together was about. She needed consoling.'
'And you happened to be the one to console her. All night.'
'That's how it went,' Nudger said.
Claudia sat down in the chair near the window. The filtered light streaming through the sheer curtains made her look ten years younger, softened her features yet lent them the intensity of youth. He recognized the bloodless, pale tightness at the corners of her lips, the subtle flare of her nostrils. She was feeling plenty ornery now, mad that she was put in the position of having made love to Archway while here was Nudger saying he'd been chaste since their argument, a saint of a guy. This was embarrassing and infuriating.
'I've always heard that men's consciences didn't apply below the belt line,' she said.
'That's true about us only up to around age forty.'
'It isn't important. The thing is, you spent the night with that woman. I confess I suffered some of the jealousy you must have felt when you found me with Biff. Some of the pain.'
'Jesus, Claudia, a guy named Biff.'
Her dark eyes narrowed. 'Are you making a joke of this?'
'No.'
'I want us to start seeing each other again, under different circumstances. I want to see other men occasionally, and you can see other women.'
'By 'other men,' do you mean Archway?'
She shook her head. 'No. He doesn't really matter. Never did. Besides, he's dating the girls' field-hockey coach, and has been for the past several months.'
'She might be more his type. Does she crush the can after she drinks her beer?' 'Ease up, Nudger.' A warning, not issued lightly.
'If Biff is out of the picture, and you want me back in, why do you have to go out with other men? Are you suddenly becoming nymphomaniacal?'
Her voice rose; she was strung even tighter than Nudger had thought. 'Sex has nothing, or at least not everything, to do with it. Dr. Oliver told me you'd been to see him, that he'd explained things to you. Can't you understand and accept this independence and freedom in our relationship?'
'It will take some getting used to,' Nudger said. He got up, walked into the kitchen, and got a can of beer from the refrigerator, making himself at home. Miller Lite was in there, not his brand. Whose, then? Biff's and the hockey coach's? He returned to the living room, wiping foam from his chin. 'I'm not sure I can get used to it.'
'I don't want to hurt you,' Claudia said. 'That's the thing I've never wanted in all of this. But the marriage with Ralph, what happened to end it… I need to break out of the box that put me in. Completely out. I need to discover who I really am.'
That kind of talk made Nudger mad. 'That's college- sophomore rhetoric, Claudia. What next? Are you going to tie a bandana around your head and hitchhike cross-country? It's the wrong decade for that. The people who did that kind of thing are living in condos and driving Volvos now, or playing Vegas. If you want to find out who you really are, check your driver's license.'
She stood up, her fists clenched. Uh-oh! He knew he'd gone too far. Maybe way too far.
'Damn it, Nudger! If you don't care about me, the hell with you! That's how trapped I am in myself; the only way I can try to express it is in cliches and stilted sixties dialogue. If I could understand and articulate it, do you think I'd be suffering from it?'
'Probably not, according to Oliver,' Nudger said.
'Don't criticize Dr. Oliver. He saved my life.'
Which was more or less true.
She was calmer now. She didn't want to admit that Nudger had also saved her life, but she realized it and it sobered her. Right now, he didn't want her gratitude.
He took a swig of beer, walked over, and kissed her on the mouth. That felt good. Throw a little unexpected machismo on her, like in the movies. Gets 'em every time.
