I hoped that I was not, as I told her.
“I know—do that again—who you are! You’re Larry.”
I was happy to hear it; I had tired of being myself a good many years ago.
“He was the smartest boy in school—in the high school that my husband and I graduated from. He was valedictorian, and president of the chess club and the debating team and all that. Oh, my!”
“Did you go out with him?” I was curious, I confess.
“Once or twice. No, three times. Times when there was something I wanted to go to—a dance or a game—and my husband couldn’t take me, or wouldn’t. So I went with Larry, dropping hints, you know, that I’d like to go, then saying okay when he asked. I never did this with him, though. Just with my husband, except that he wasn’t my husband then. Could you sort of run your fingers inside my knees and down the backs of my legs?”
I complied. “It might be less awkward if you employed your husband’s name. Use a false one if you like. Tom, Dick, or Harry would do, or even Mortimer.”
“That wouldn’t be him, and I don’t want to say it. Aren’t you going to ask if he beat me? I went to the battered women’s shelter once, and they kept coming back to that. I think they wanted me to lie.”
“You said that you left home yesterday, and I’ve seen your face. It isn’t bruised.”
“Now up here. He didn’t. Oh, he knocked me down a couple times, but not lately. They’re supposed to get drunk and beat you up.”
I said that I had heard that before, though I had never understood it.
“You don’t get mean when you’re drunk.”
“I talk too much and too loudly,” I told her, “and I can’t remember names, or the word I want to use. Eventually I grow ashamed and stop talking completely, and drinking as well.”
“My husband used to be happy and rowdy—that was before we got married. After, it was sort of funny, because you could see him starting to get mad before he got the top off the first bottle. Isn’t that funny?”
“No one can bottle emotions,” I said. “We must bring them to the bottles ourselves.”
“Kiss me.”
We kissed. I had always thought it absurd to speak of someone enraptured by a kiss, yet I knew a happiness that I had not thought myself capable of.
“Larry was really smart, like you. Did I say that?”
I managed to nod.
“I want to lie on top of you. Just for a minute or so. Is that all right?”
I told her truthfully that I would adore it.
“You can put your hands anyplace you want, but hold me. That’s good. That’s nice. He was really smart, but he wasn’t good at talking to people. Socially, you know? The stuff he cared about didn’t matter to us, and the stuff we wanted to talk about didn’t matter to him. But I let him kiss me in his dad’s car, and I always danced the first and last numbers with him. Nobody cares about that now, but then they did, where we came from. Larry and my husband and I. I think if he’d kept on drinking—he’d have maybe four or five beers every night, at first—he’d have beaten me to death and that was why he stopped. But he used to threaten. Do you know what I mean?”
I said that I might guess, but with no great confidence.
“Like he’d pick up my big knife in the kitchen, and he’d say, ‘I could stick this right through you—in half a minute it would all be over.’ Or he’d talk about how you could choke somebody with a wire till she died, and while he did he’d be running the lamp cord through his fingers, back and forth. Do you like this?”
“Don’t!” I said.
“I’m sorry; I thought you’d like it.”
“I like it too much. Please don’t. Not now.”
“He’d talk about other men, how I was playing up to them. Sometimes it was men I hadn’t even noticed. Like we’d go down to the pizza place, and when we got back he’d say, ‘The big guy in the leather jacket—I saw you. He was eating it up, and you couldn’t give him enough, could you? You just couldn’t give him enough.’
“And I wouldn’t have seen anybody in a leather jacket. I’d be trying to remember who this was. But when we were in school he was never jealous of Larry, because he knew Larry was just a handy man to me. I kind of liked him the way I kind of liked the little kid next door.”
“You got him to help you with your homework,” I said.
“Yes, I did. How’d you know?”
“A flash of insight. I have them occasionally.”
“I’d get him to help before a big quiz too. When we were finishing up the semester, in Social Studies or whatever, I wouldn’t have a clue about what she was going to ask on the test, but Larry always knew. He’d tell me half a dozen things, maybe, and five would be right there on the final. A flash of insight, like you said.”
“Similar, perhaps.”
“But the thing was . . . it was . . . was—”
She gulped and gasped so loudly that even I realized she was about to cry. I hugged her, perhaps the most percipient thing I have ever done.
“I wasn’t going to tell you that, and I guess I’d better not or I’ll bawl. I just wanted to say you’re Larry, because my husband never minded him, not really, or anyhow not very much, and he’d kid around with him in those days, and sometimes Larry’d help him with his homework too.”
