I did my David Frye impression. ”I am not a crook,“ I said and looked shifty.
”Oh, hell, I don’t know,“ she said. ”I don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore. I just know it hasn’t worked. None of it, not Harv, not the kids, not me, not the house and the business and the club and growing older, nothing.“
”Yeah,“ I said, ”but we’re working on it, my love.“
She nodded her head and began to cry.
Chapter 16
I couldn’t think of much to do about Pam Shepard crying so I cleared the table and hoped that Susan would come up with something. She didn’t. And when we left, Pam Shepard was still snuffling and teary. It was nearly eleven and we were overfed and sleepy. Susan invited me up to Smithfield to spend the night and I accepted, quite graciously, I thought, considering the aggravation she’d been giving me.
”You haven’t been slipping off to encounter groups under an assumed name, have you?“ I said.
She shook her head. ”I don’t quite know why I’m so bitchy lately,“ she said.
”It’s not bitchy, exactly. It’s pushy. I feel from you a kind of steady pressure. An obligation to explain myself.“
”And you don’t like a pushy broad, right?“
”Don’t start up again, and don’t be so goddamned sensitive. You know I don’t mean the cliche. If you think I worry about role reversal and who keeps in whose place, you’ve spent a lot of time paying no attention to me.“
”True,“ she said. ”I’m getting a little hyped about the whole subject.“
”What whole subject? That’s one of my problems. I think I know the rules of the game all right, but I don’t know what the game is.“
”Man-woman relationships, I guess.“
”All of them or me and you.“
”Both.“
”Terrific, Suze, now we’ve, got it narrowed down.“
”Don’t make fun. I think being middle-aged and female and single one must think about feminism, if you wish, women’s rights and women vis-a-vis men. And of course that includes you and me. We care about each other, we see each other, we go on, but it doesn’t develop. It seems directionless.“
”You mean marriage?“
”I don’t know. I don’t think I mean just that. My God, am I still that conventional? I just know there’s a feeling of incompleteness in us. Or, I suppose I can only speak for me, in me, and in the way I perceive our relationship.“
”It ain’t just wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.“
”No, I know that. That’s not a relationship. I know I’m more than good tail. I know I matter to you. But…“
I paid my fifteen cents on the Mystic River Bridge and headed down its north slope, past the construction barricades that I think were installed when the bridge was built.
”I don’t know what’s wrong with me,“ she said.
”Maybe it’s wrong with me,“ I said.
There weren’t many cars on the Northeast Expressway at this time of night. There was a light fog and the headlights made a scalloped apron of light in front of us as we drove.
”Maybe,“ she said. Far right across the salt marshes the lights of the G.E. River Works gleamed. Commerce never rests.
”Explaining myself is not one of the things I do really well, like drinking beer, or taking a nap. Explaining myself is clumsy stuff. You really ought to watch what I do, and, pretty much, I think, you’ll know what I am. Actually I always thought you knew what I am.“
”I think I do. Much of it is very good, a lot of it is the best I’ve ever seen.“
”Ah-ha,“ I said.
”I don’t mean that,“ Susan said. The mercury arc lights at the newly renovated Saugus Circle made the wispy fog bluish and the Blue Star Bar look stark and unreal across Route 1.
”I know pretty well what you are,“ she said. ‘It’s what we are that is bothersome. What the hell are we, Spenser?”
I swung off Route 1 at the Walnut Street exit and headed in toward Smithfield. “We’re together,” I said. “Why have we got to catalogue. Are we a couple? A pair? I don’t know. You pick one.”
“Are we lovers?”
On the right Hawkes Pond gleamed through a very thin fringe of trees. It was a long narrow pond and across it the land rose up in a wooded hill crowned with power lines. In the moonlight, with a wispy fog, it looked pretty good.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. We’re lovers.”
“For how long?” Susan said.
