“We’l manage. As long as you have an elevator.”
“Yes, we do,” he said.
Like al couples, we discussed cheating. “What would you do if I cheated on you?” Daniel asked one evening, as we relaxed on the sofa.
“I don’t know. I can’t imagine it. What would you do?”
“I’d leave you.”
“Real y?”
“Yes. It would ruin things forever, I’d never be able to trust you, there wouldn’t be any point.”
“Are you warning me?” I asked, curious.
“Of course not. If you sleep with someone else it’s because I’ve failed you somehow. I hope you’l tel me rst if you’re ever that unhappy
—not that I can imagine it. But if you sleep with another man it wil be my fault.”
“But you’d stil leave me?”
“Yes, because there wouldn’t be a way to fix things.”
“It won’t happen, of course.”
“I know … Both my parents had lovers,” Daniel said.
“Real y! You never told me.”
“It’s no big deal. But I hated it. I hated that whole scene, and I almost lost my respect for them.”
“Why? Why did they do it?”
“I don’t know. They got along, but they were at racted to other people and they gave in to their at raction, I guess. They didn’t talk about it, of course, but we knew. My mother would come home with her eyes red from chlorine; she must have had a rich lover with a swimming pool in the building. My father would come home and go straight to the shower with this guilty look on his face. Then there were phone cal s, private cal s, which they would take in the bedroom, and they’d shut the door and put on the radio so no one could hear. They must have thought they had retarded kids. I think they real y had no idea how obvious they were.”
“But did they know about one another?”
“I don’t know. They must have. I mean, I can’t imagine them not knowing, if it was so obvious to us, but maybe they were so absorbed in their own a airs that they didn’t notice that their spouse was cheating too. They were bored, I think. They were bored with their lives, with their horrible clerical jobs.”
“My parents were the exact opposite. They had this twosome that was almost impenetrable, because they felt they had shared so much that other people didn’t understand. As if everyone was an outsider, except maybe for my uncle and his wife. For one thing, their experiences in South Africa bound them together, what they went through there when they were fighting apartheid.”
“What exactly did they go through?”
“I don’t real y know. They never told me about it, except for hints here and there. They risked their lives and they were in prison for a while. They had a rough time in prison, but it was only for a few months, I think. I should ask my father one of these days. And then when they got here, most of the people they knew weren’t as radical as they were. They were a good match.”
“I trust you, Dana.”
“I trust you, of course.”
“Wel , you—you trust a lot of people.”
“It makes life more pleasant,” I said.
“Riskier.”
“No, less risky. You’d see that if you tried it.”
“I can’t.”
“Try it sometime. Try trusting people more. You’l see, it works out. It protects you. You think it makes you more vulnerable but it doesn’t.”
“No, I just can’t see that. I think you have to be on the lookout or you’l get stabbed in the back.”
“I don’t believe that. Most people are nice.”
Daniel burst out laughing. “Yes, and history proves it.”
“People just get led astray.”
“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” Daniel said.
On the way back to my flat I knocked on Volvo’s door. “Anyone home?” I cal ed out.
On the way back to my flat I knocked on Volvo’s door. “Anyone home?” I cal ed out.
“Enter.”
I opened his door and peeked in. He was stil in bed, lying on his back. He had been over six feet tal when he had his legs and now he lifted weights to keep his torso and arms in shape. He looked solid and sturdy, lying there on the bed, his stumps protruding from pajama shorts. I had painted the wal s of his lit le room sand white and had decorated them with prints of van Gogh’s Sidewalk Cafe and Matisse’s Window: the cafe was a compromise, gently suggesting to Volvo an alternative to his rigid outlook while relenting partial y on the question of sorrow, but the
