He took a deep breath, then said in a steadier voice, “I think it’s time to take a little break, P.W.”
A girl at a table behind Rudy burst out laughing. For a minute, Pru thought the girl was laughing at them. She was having trouble working out what was happening.
“What did you say?”
Rudy shrugged a little, scrunching up the skin on his jaw so that she could see the wrinkles that would one day be etched there permanently. “Not be so dependent on each other,” he said. “Give each other some breathing room. Some space.”
Pru frowned, and adjusted her glasses. Rudy wanted space? She didn’t want Rudy to want space. She wanted him to want to marry her.
“If we do this,” she said, “it’s hard to see how we’d go back.”
“I realize that.”
She tried again. “To being a couple, I mean,” she said. She lowered her voice. “To sleeping together. I don’t know how we’d go back to that.” He’d been so naïve when she’d first met him, surprised that she would go out with him, then grateful when she’d slept with him. She used to tell him to go easy on that gratitude. The rocky shoals of sexual etiquette were ones only dimly perceived by Rudy. He knew so little about it. She’d had to teach him everything.
“I know, Pru.” He said it gently, almost . . . condescendingly.
“A break, that sounds like you want to”—she couldn’t believe she was even saying it—“break up?”
“Yeah. I guess that’s right. I’m really sorry, P.W.”
She was still holding his hand, and it was sweaty. Or maybe it was her hand that was sweaty. Rudy reached over and put his other hand on top, sandwiching her hand between both of his. She did not like how this made her feel, like deli meat, like cheese. His hands were not much bigger than her own, but the move was accompanied by a power shift so real she could feel it. She had the wild thought to shift it back again by covering up the pile of hands with her free one. But it was all too easy to picture this game going on forever, each of them pulling out the bottom hand to place it on top, over and over. She tried to slow her breathing, and ease her hand back into her lap in a non-horrified way. She looked at the cardigan folded in her lap. I’m really sorry. Her boss had said that, too. He’d also said, Your services are no longer required. What was she, a garbageman? A hooker?
She tried to steady her voice. “You know, Rudy, when I tried to break up with you, two months ago, you said your therapist didn’t think it was a good idea.”
“Do you want to be the one to break up? That’s fine. You can be the one. I don’t care.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
She couldn’t come up with anything. Maybe it was the point, after all. Goddamn it, she wanted that lamp!
“I just don’t understand why. This is all coming out of nowhere.”
“You’re still trying to change me,” Rudy said, putting his cup down so roughly that it clattered in its saucer. “I’m sick of feeling not good enough. I’m sick of feeling like, if I wear the wrong pants, we’re back to square one.”
She was so relieved that she almost smiled at him. She’d been afraid he was going to tell her she’d become too desperate, too— just thinking about the word made her cringe—needy. “Come on, you haven’t done that in a long time.”
“Not funny, Pru.”
She looked at him. He wasn’t really here, she realized. He could barely sit still while she slowly digested what he’d said. “This is crazy. What we have is bigger than all this, right?”
“I don’t think so. I think this is all we’re about, actually. Me working my ass off to try to please you, who is never satisfied.”
Working his ass off? Really. How hard was it to let her choose his clothes, direct his haircuts? But at least it sounded more like the old Rudy. She knew how to talk to this Rudy—the petulant, almost whiny one. They’d had this same discussion a hundred times.
Her voice softened. “But I thought you wanted to change. I thought you liked changing.”
He nodded. “Then I realized that I’m okay, just the way I am.”
“Rudy.” She leaned forward. “Who told you that?”
But she knew. The damn therapist.
Just then, his cell phone rang. He turned a little in his chair, but he was shouting so it wasn’t hard to hear what he was saying, even above the racket of the café’s espresso machine. What were those kids doing with that damn thing, banging it with wrenches? It was like being in a machine shop. “Yeah,” he yelled, “I just told her. What? No, of course not.”
Pru leaned forward. Of course not what? What hadn’t she done?
“Who was that?” she said, after he hung up.
“Just Dr. Schwaiger,” he said, as if it was a perfectly normal thing for your shrink to call you up at eleven o’clock on a Friday night. He closed the phone with a sharp snap, not looking at her. “I better go.”
What a mistake that damn therapist had been. And it was all her fault! She had persuaded him to go into therapy in the first place, had even found Andrea Schwaiger for him. For the first month, he’d referred to her as “the rapist”—of course, from a TV skit. But then he’d gotten into it. Way into it. Dr. Schwaiger made him feel validated and confirmed. She told him everything he felt and did and wanted was okay. For Pru, Rudy’s therapy had been a bitter disappointment, making him more Rudy-like, not less.
“Is this about the stupid list?” Pru said.
“It’s not about the list. Listen, I have to go. Are you going to be all right?”
Pru straightened up in her chair. She smoothed her skirt with her hands. It was a very
