'And of course you told her yes, she should accept,' Susan said. 'Because that was the honorable thing to do.'
'I said yes, that she should accept.'
'Now that you are sophisticated and no longer shy with girls, I assume you understand that she was asking you if you were going to ask her to the dance, and was telling you that if you were, she would turn your friend down and go with you.'
'I now understand that,' I said. 'But consider if I had been different.
What if I had not panted after the sweet sorrow of renunciation? What if
I'd gone to the dance with her, and we'd become lovers and married and lived happily ever after? What would have become of you?'
'I don't know,' Susan said. 'I guess I'd have wandered the world tragically, wearing my polka dot panties, looking for Mister Right, never knowing that Mister Right had married his high school sweetheart.'
Paul put his hands over his ears.
'Polka dot panties?' he said.
Susan smiled. She transferred the refreshed couscous from the bowl to a cook pot. Neither Paul nor I asked her why she had not refreshed it in the cook pot in the first place. She put the cook pot on thestove and put a lid on it and turned the flame on low.
I rested my hand on Pearl's head. 'I think,' I said, 'that even had Dale and I gone to the dance and lived happily ever after, we wouldn't have lived happily ever after. Any more than you were able to stay with your first husband.'
'Because we'd have been looking for each other?'
I nodded.
'That's what you think, isn't it?' Susan said. She was no longer teasing me.
'Yes,' I said. 'That's what I think. I think your marriage broke up because you weren't married to me. I think neither one of us could be happy with anyone else because we would always be looking for each other, without even knowing it, without knowing who each other was or even knowing there was an each other.'
'Do you think that's true of love in general?'
'No,' I said. 'I only believe that about us.'
'Isn't that kind of exclusionary?' Paul said.
'Yes,' I said. 'Embarrassingly so.'
The room was silent now, not the light and airy silence of contentment, but the weighty silence of intensity.
Paul was choosing his words very carefully. It took him a little time.
'But you're not saying I couldn't feel that way?'
'No,' I said. 'I'm not.'
Paul nodded. I could see him thinking some more. 'Do you feel that way?' I said.
'I don't know,' he said. 'And I feel like I ought to, because you do.'
'No need to be like me,' I said.
'Who else, then?' he said. 'Who would I be like? My father? Who did I learn to be me from?'
'You're right,' I said. 'I was glib. But you know as well as I do that you can't spend your life feeling as I do, and thinking what I think. You don't now.'
'The way you love her makes me feel inadequate,' Paul said. 'I don't think
I can love anyone like that.'
Susan was chopping fresh mint on the marble countertop.
'One love at a time,' she said.
'Which means what?' Paul said. 'My mother?'
Susan smiled her Freudian smile. 'We shrinks always imply more than we say.'
'There's nothing necessarily bizarre in wanting to find my mother.'
'Of course not, and when you do it will help clarify things, maybe.'
'Maybe,' Paul said.
I sipped a little more of my Catamount Gold and thought about Dale Carter, whom I hadn't seen in so long. It wasn't the first time I'd thought about her. I looked at Susan. She smiled at me, a wholly non-Freudian smile.
'We'd have found each other,' she said.
'In fact,' I said, 'we did it twice.'
CHAPTER 13
HAWK, wearing white satin sweatpants and no shirt, was hanging upside down in gravity boots in the Harbor Health Club, doing sit-ups. He curled his body up parallel with the floor and eased it back vertical without any
