Forlesen said, “Don’t you know who I am?”
She looked at him more closely. He said, “I’m your husband, Emanuel.”
She seemed uncertain, then smiled, kissed him, and said, “Yes you are, aren’t you. You look different. Tired.”
“I am tired,” he said, and realized that it was true.
“Is it lunchtime already? I don’t have a watch, you know. I haven’t been able to keep track. I thought it was only the middle of the morning.”
“It seemed long enough to me,” Forlesen said. He wondered where the children were, thinking that he would have liked to see them.
“What do you want for lunch?”
“Whatever you have.”
In the bedroom she got out bread and sliced meat, and plugged in the coffeepot. “How was work?”
“All right. Fine.”
“Did you get promoted? Or get a raise?”
He shook his head.
“After lunch,” she said. “You’ll get promoted after lunch.”
He laughed, thinking that she was joking.
“A woman knows.”
“Where are the kids?”
“At school. They eat their lunch at school. There’s a beautiful cafeteria—everything is stainless steel—and they have a dietician who thinks about the best possible lunch for each child and makes them eat it.”
“Did you see it?” he asked.
“No, I read about it. In here.” She tapped
“Oh.”
“They’ll be home at one hundred and thirty—that’s what the book says. Here’s your sandwich.” She poured him a cup of coffee. “What time is it now?”
He looked at the watch she had given him. “A hundred and twenty-nine thirty.”
“Eat. You ought to be going back soon.”
He said, “I was hoping we might have time for more than this.”
“Tonight, maybe. You don’t want to be late.”
“All right.” The coffee was good, but tasted slightly oily; the sandwich meat, salty and dry and flavorless. He unstrapped the watch from his wrist and handed it to her. “You keep this,” he said. “I’ve felt badly about wearing it all morning—it really belongs to you.”
“You need it more than I do,” she said.
“No I don’t; they have clocks all over, there. All I have to do is look at them.”
“You’ll be late getting back to work.”
“I’m going to drive as fast as I can anyway—I can’t go any faster than that no matter what a watch says. Besides, there’s a speaker that tells me things, and I’m sure it will tell me if I’m late.”
Reluctantly she accepted the watch. He chewed the last of his sandwich. “You’ll have to tell me when to go now,” he said, thinking that this would somehow cheer her.
“It’s time to go already,” she said.
“Wait a minute—I want to finish my coffee.”
“How was work?”
“Fine,” he said.
“You have a lot to do there?”
“Oh, God, yes.” He remembered the crowded desk that had been waiting for him when he had returned from the creativity meeting, the supervision of workers for whom he had been given responsibility without authority, the ours spent with Fields drawing up the plan which, just before he left, had been vetoed by Mr. Freeling. “I don’t think there’s any purpose in most of it,” he said, “but there’s plenty to do.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that,” his wife said. “You’ll lose your job.”
“I don’t, when I’m there.”
“I’ve got nothing to do,” she said. It was as though the words themselves had forced their way from between her lips.
He said, “That can’t be true.”
“I made the beds, and I dusted and swept, and it was all finished a couple of ours after you had gone. There’s nothing.”
“You could read,” he said.
