“Steve?”
It was Marie calling from downstairs, but I couldn’t answer. I stood, as if transfixed by the misty glass of the bathroom mirror.
“Steve, the pizza’s here.”
The pizza had arrived, and moving as if on automatic pilot, I went downstairs, paid the delivery boy, and brought the large square box into the kitchen.
Peter and Marie gathered around, and I methodically gave each of them a slice, then got one of my own, eating it silently with them at the kitchen table.
Across from me, I could see Peter’s blond head lowered over his plate, but I didn’t think of him, or of Marie. Instead, I returned to my father.
I saw him in his long silences, in the lair he’d made for himself in the gray basement. I saw him as he watched each of us go through our daily, unexalted lives, and I wondered at the process by which we had been reduced to nothing in his eyes. Nothing, at least, beyond profound intrusions. Had he spent night after night in the house on McDonald Drive, listening mutely to our squabbling, and thought only of how he might be released from us, set free, at last, to go to … what?
Was it to his own, still undiscovered version of Rebecca?
Was it the pain of not being with her that he had, at last, found impossible to bear?
It was hard to imagine, and yet I had no choice. I wondered if during the long, drab dinners at our kitchen table, my father had dreamed of a “someone else” while he’d listened absently to our quarreling or our dull school day gossip. Had he dreamed of spiriting her away to his own dream house, a cottage in the hills, perhaps? And each time, had that rapturous vision foundered on the banks of our daily bickering and mundane pettiness?
I remembered that as a child, I’d noticed moments when my father had stared vacantly out the window or sat in isolation in the little, vine-draped solarium. Perhaps, on those occasions, he’d let himself be carried away by the intensity of his need.
I also saw him in his van, staring at my mother as she crouched over her flower bed, and I marveled at how easily I could put Marie in the place of “poor Dottie,” how easily I could shrink her down to a small, dry pebble.
Later that same night, as I walked out into the backyard, my feet trudging through the dry, steadily accumulating leaves, I thought again of how lost my father had looked as he’d sat alone in the brown van. I saw his face, deep-lined and webbed in misery, but with a terrible edge of purpose within it, his eyes shining through the smoke, cold and without pupils, mere round, ice-blue orbs.
After a time, I returned to the house. I watched television with Peter, then chatted with Marie for a few minutes after he had gone to bed, a dull conversation which appeared to annoy her after a while, so that she finally marched up the stairs and went to bed.
I went to my office, sat down at my desk, and began to add a few passionate but unreal lines to my “dream house.” The house had become even more vague and insubstantial during the last few weeks, with turrets and towers and unsupported balconies, a house that could exist only in a world that had forsaken gravity, along with all the other laws that govern earthbound things.
It was the phone that finally interrupted me. I picked it up, and to my immense surprise, it was Rebecca.
There was something urgent in her voice, and for a moment I allowed myself the fantasy that she had been seized by the same deep yearning for me that I had so long felt for her.
“It’s me,” she said.
“Yes, I know.”
“I won’t be able to meet with you on Wednesday afternoon. I have to check on a few things.”
I could clearly hear her reluctance to say more. I could also hear the sound of engines in the background, the rustle of passing voices.
“You’re at the railway station,” I said.
“No, the bus station,” she said. “I’m going to Somerset. To see Swenson.”
“When will you be back?”
“By Saturday.”
“So we can meet at the usual time that day?”
“Maybe a little later, if that’s all right,” she said. “I’ll let you know.” I heard a pneumatic door as it opened. The strain returned to Rebecca’s voice. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “My bus is leaving.”
Then she hung up.
The phone was still in my hand when Marie came to the door. She was dressed in a sleek, white sleeping gown, her hair in disarray.
“Who was that?” she asked drowsily.
I said the first name that occurred to me. “Wally,” I told her.
She seemed to awaken suddenly, the veil of sleep dissolved. She looked at me, puzzled. “So late?” She glanced at the clock which hung on the wall to her left. “It’s past midnight.”
I shrugged. “He just wanted to talk about a problem we’d run into earlier today.”
She smiled, but distantly. “I didn’t think Wally ever cared that much about anything at work.”
She knew him well, and she was right. Wally had never been the type to give his work a second thought once he’d left the office. He’d been a bad choice, but I was stuck with him.
“He’s been a little more concerned with things lately,” I said. “Maybe he’s a little worried, too.”
