follow me to California, of course you wouldn’t want to marry me.”
“You’re already married,” she said. She felt that she had just said something very sensible. “Do you think it was right to—”
He started to walk ahead of her. She hurried to catch up. She wanted to call after him, “I would have gone!” She was panting.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m like Gus. I don’t want to hear it.”
“You mean we can’t even talk about this? You don’t think that I’m entitled to hear about it?”
“I love you and I don’t love Myra,” he said.
“Where is she?” she said.
“In El Paso.”
“If you don’t love her, why aren’t you divorced?”
“You think that everybody who doesn’t love his wife gets divorced? I’m not the only one who doesn’t do the logical thing, you know. You get nightmares from living in this sewer, and you won’t get out of it.”
“It’s different,” she said. What was he talking about?
“Until I met you, I didn’t think about it. She was in El Paso, she was gone—period.”
“Are you going to get a divorce?”
“Are you going to marry me?”
They were crossing Seventh Avenue. They both stopped still, halfway across the street, and were almost hit by a Checker cab. They hurried across, and on the other side of the street they stopped again. She looked at him, as surprised but as suddenly sure about something as he must have been the time he and his father had found the jewelry in the heart-shaped wooden box. She said no, she was not going to marry him.
It dragged on for another month. During that time, unknown to her, he wrote the song that was going to launch his career. Months after he had left the city, she heard it on her AM radio one morning, and she knew that it was his song, even though he had never mentioned it to her. She leashed the dog and went out and walked to the record shop on Sixth Avenue—walking almost the same route they had walked the night she found out about his wife—and she went in, with the dog. Her face was so strange that the man behind the cash register allowed her to break the rule about dogs in the shop because he did not want another hassle that day. She found the group’s record album with the song on it, turned it over and saw his name, in small type. She stared at the title, replaced the record and went back outside, as hunched as if it were winter.
During the month before he left, though, and before she ever heard the song, the two of them had sat on the roof of his building one night, arguing. They were having a Tom Collins because a musician who had been at his place the night before had brought his own mix and then left it behind. She had never had a Tom Collins. It tasted appropriately bitter, she thought. She held out the ring and the bracelet to him. He said that if she made him take them back, he would drop them over the railing. She believed him and put them back in her pocket. He said, and she agreed, that things had not been perfect between them even before she found out about his wife. Myra could play the guitar, and she could not; Myra loved to travel, and she was afraid to leave New York City. As she listened to what he said, she counted the posts—black iron and shaped like arrows—of the fence that wound around the roof. It was almost entirely dark, and she looked up to see if there were any stars. She yearned to be in the country, where she could always see them. She said she wanted him to borrow a car before he left so that they could ride out into the woods in New Jersey. Two nights later he picked her up at her apartment in a red Volvo, with Sam panting in the back, and they wound their way through the city and to the Lincoln Tunnel. Just as they were about to go under, another song began to play on the tape deck. It was Ringo Starr singing “Octopus’s Garden.” Jack laughed. “That’s a hell of a fine song to come on just before we enter the tunnel.” Inside the tunnel, the dog flattened himself on the back seat. “You want to keep Sam, don’t you?” he said. She was shocked because she had never even thought of losing Sam. “Of course I do,” she said, and unconsciously edged a little away from him. He had never said whose car it was. For no reason at all, she thought that the car must belong to a woman.
“I love that syrupy chorus of ‘aaaaah’ Lennon and McCartney sing,” he said. “They really had a fine sense of humor.”
“Is that a funny song?” she said. She had never thought about it.
They were on Boulevard East, in Weehawken, and she was staring out the window at the lights across the water. He saw that she was looking, and drove slower.
“This as good as stars for you?” he said.
“It’s amazing.”
“All yours,” he said, taking his hand off the wheel to swoop it through the air in mock graciousness.
After he left she would remember that as one of the little digs he had gotten in—one of the less than nice things he had said. That night, though, impressed by the beauty of the city, she let it go by; in fact, she would have to work on herself later to reinterpret many of the things he had said as being nasty. That made it easier to deal with his absence. She would block out the memory of his pulling over and kissing her, of the two of them getting out of the car, and with Sam between them, walking.
One of the last times she saw him, she went to his apartment on a night when five other people were there —people she had never met. His father had shipped him some 8mm home movies and a projector, and the people all sat on the floor, smoking grass and talking, laughing at the movies of children (Jack at his fourth birthday party; Jack in the Halloween parade at school; Jack at Easter, collecting eggs). One of the people on the floor said, “Hey, get that big dog out of the way,” and she glared at him, hating him for not liking the dog. What if his shadow had briefly darkened the screen? She felt angry enough to scream, angry enough to say that the dog had grown up in the apartment and had the right to walk around. Looking at the home movies, she tried to concentrate on Jack’s blunders: dropping an Easter egg, running down the hill after the egg, going so fast he stumbled into some blur, perhaps his mother’s arms. But what she mostly thought about was what a beautiful child he was, what a happy- looking little boy. There was no sense in her staying there and getting sentimental, so she made her excuses and left early. Outside, she saw the red Volvo, gleaming as though it had been newly painted. She was sure that it belonged to an Indian woman in a blue sari who had been there, sitting close to Jack. Sharon was glad that as she was leaving, Sam had raised his hackles and growled at one of the people there. She scolded him, but out on the street she patted him, secretly glad. Jack had not asked her again to come to California with him, and she told herself that she probably would not have changed her mind if he had. Tears began to well up in her eyes, and she