Part 6 (2/2)

”Oh, I don't know.” Of course she would like it; what's the matter with her? Look how frightened she's become, afraid to admit even to herself that she wants something. ”Yes, that would be wonderful,” she says.

Two days later, she and the photographer have lunch with the publisher in The Oak Room at The Plaza. Getting there is a big production: Malcolm lifting her into the taxicab, where the photographer steadies her while Malcolm collapses the wheelchair and loads it into the trunk; the two of them wedged on either side of her, holding her upright while the driver maneuvers his cab with that terrified reverence that never fails to amuse her; waiting in the cab as Malcolm carries the wheelchair into the hotel; enduring the conspicuous melodrama of being carried in after it.

”I hope you'll have lunch with us,” she said to him earlier. She had thought carefully about how to phrase this. There's no right way. Posing it as a question-Would you like to join us?-would have seemed like mere politeness, something said in the hope of being met with refusal. But the other way, the way she said it, has a kind of white-lady or at least n.o.blesse-oblige condescension to it, which she hoped Malcolm would forgive as awkwardness. She would really like him to be at the lunch, but not if being there would make him uncomfortable. So when he did refuse, gently-he said he'd get a hot dog and walk in the park for an hour-she didn't press it.

But now again, in the lobby, as he settles her in the wheelchair, she has the impulse to ask him to stay. She scrambles to think of some therapeutic pretext that might make it easier for him to say yes, but there really isn't one; and the photographer's hands are already reaching out to grasp the handles of the chair, and then the chair is moving across the lush, dizzying carpet, the vast chaotic s.p.a.ce, the unfamiliar clamor, so she ends up not saying anything.

Only during lunch, as they're eating their salads, does it register with her that beneath his overcoat he was wearing a suit. She's never seen him in a suit before. He might have put it on just to carry her into this posh lobby, but maybe he was hoping that she would repeat the invitation. She wishes she had. The cat idea is his, too; or at least he is its great champion, and hers. She misses him.

The publisher is a plump, red-faced man who loves the idea. ”What a lark! What a lark!” he keeps saying, and she wants to say, What do you mean, a lark? Get off it, you're not even English; but she sees that he is nervous-the wheelchair, or whom she's married to, or her old fame, or her perhaps famously rumored reclusiveness, or some combination of these things, or maybe he is just a nervous guy. After lunch he offers her a cigarette (she looks to see if they're Larks, but no, they're Pall Malls), and the three of them sit and smoke and talk business. And then they're out in the lobby again, shaking hands; and Malcolm is there, with his soft rea.s.suring smile; and she's going home in a big Checker taxi, with the promise of a book contract, but even with the excitement she has a momentary pang, remembering how in these cabs she used to love the precarious feeling of riding in the little fold-down jump seat.

5.

She asks Malcolm, hesitantly, if he'd be willing to change his hours-to work some nights instead of, or in addition to, the days he's working now. She's having even more than the usual trouble sleeping, and it would make her feel better to have him in sometimes at night, easier than with some of the other aides. ”The writing keeps me busy during the day now,” she says, ”so Miss Soap Opera or the Fraulein, they're fine, I can sort of tune them out. But at night, right now-”

”Sure.” Malcolm nods.

He is touched that she would ask him, and happy about the extra money. Since that brief confusing jolt from Tim-Feel free to stay here while I'm away-he's been worrying about money, looking at apartment listings in the cla.s.sifieds, calculating whether he could afford to rent a place of his own, if it came to that. He is soberly aware of the fragility of his qualifications to do reliable, well-paying, interesting work. When things got so fraught with her, a few weeks back, over those letters-of course he could see what was wrong with them, of course he could-he was frozen with fear that saying the wrong thing (sympathizing too little, or sympathizing too much and implicitly criticizing her husband) might cost him his job. If he did lose it, would he be lucky enough to get another one that he loved? And would she ever forgive him, would he see her again? Sometimes, he imagines telling her by way of apology, I am so worried about putting a foot wrong that I'm afraid to put a foot anywhere.

So now, after they've cooked and had dinner and watched television or listened to music and gotten her into her nightgown, Malcolm sits in the orange tweed armchair next to her bed and they talk. ”I figured out who he's in love with,” she tells him one night.

”What?” he asks, startled. It's late, after midnight. It's been a rough evening. She's had some pain, which he tried to rub away; and then there was an unscheduled clean-up that required more than a sponge bath, so he had to put her in the contraption (something an aide had rigged up for her in the early days: a beach chair set on a rubber mat in the bathtub, where she sat gripping the rickety metal armrests while you sprayed her with a hose). She is exhausted, and not sleepy, and trying not to take a pill.

”Our boy,” she says; and Malcolm relaxes. Oh. The cat. ”I know who his femme fatale is.”

”Who?”

”Well, it's the Infant's little cat, of course.”

He doesn't know what to say.

She goes on. ”You've never seen her, have you? Devastating. So innocent and so sleek. b.u.t.ter wouldn't melt in her mouth. It's no wonder that when he saw her, the thought of every other feline just left his head.”

He lets her keep spinning the story. How they met, how they fell in love, how they parted.

But you haven't seen her either, he wants to say. How does she even know the Infant has a cat? Her husband must have mentioned it. Or maybe that was all she and the Infant had found to talk about, those times when the Infant came to dinner. He could weep for this new ingenious, doomed invention, for the frantic, gallant gaiety of it.

She says she's written to her husband about the whole thing-the book, the photographer, the contract. She's gotten a telegram back, congratulating her. Now she's written again to tell him this newest idea, about the Infant's cat. ”He'll like that,” she tells Malcolm.

There's a silence. ”Those letters finally stopped coming,” she says.

And he, after a moment, takes a quiet, small risk. ”I'm glad.”

Another card has come from Tim, from Rome. A picture of the Colosseum. More noncommittal tourist-talk, about the Vatican and the Spanish Steps, and looking forward to getting back to New York.

Malcolm goes through it all again: the initial exalted flaring leap of happiness, the irritation, the a.n.a.lysis, the unease, the longing. He props this card against the other candlestick and sets it next to the Paris one; but then when he walks by and sees them both he says aloud, ”f.u.c.k you.”

6.

Two days later, Malcolm goes down in the morning to check his mail and there's an aerogram. Upstairs, in Tim's apartment, he slits it open carefully so as not to tear the message inside. The thin blue paper is shaking, crackling in his hands. He knows even before he reads it that a sealed message will be different from words written openly on a postcard.

Listen. The tour is wrapping up. Two more nights in Madrid, then Barcelona for three nights, and then back to Paris. What about coming over to meet me? We can have a couple of Paris days (I'll show you the Eiffle Tower) and then figure out where to go from there. I have three weeks off and we could have fun. I'll wire money for a plane ticket. I'll be in Paris again by the time you get this, so send a telegram to the hotel there and let me know. But I hope you'll say yes.

T.

He sits at the living room table, holding the letter, not needing to reread it, looking at the familiar, loved room. Faded old rugs, the long curved sofa with a b.u.t.ton-dimpled back, the old honey-colored chest of drawers that had belonged to Tim's great-grandmother, the hi-fi cabinet with its shelves of records, the gla.s.s-fronted bookcase filled with Tim's photographs and Malcolm's books, the blue mat in the corner with the dumbbells lying around. Slowly he allows himself to feel happy. It seems to him a beautiful letter, filled with the things the postcards lacked-well, maybe not filled with them, but unmistakably implying them. He has never been to Europe-never traveled at all, except for his move to New York. (He does wonder, nervously, about their traveling together. How are these things viewed in Europe? But Tim wouldn't have asked him if it couldn't be made to work; people check into hotels all the time, friends, rich men with Negro servants, maybe no one thinks anything of it. Tim has traveled a lot; he'll know how to do it.) And the money for the plane ticket. He allows himself to enjoy that too. And it has nothing to do with the money, he tells himself, scrupulously (and not entirely accurately). It's the feeling of being planned for, sent for.

There is nothing to be disappointed about.

He is fixing his lunch, laying slices of bologna on bread, when it occurs to him that he'll have to ask for leave from work, and that this might be difficult. Not because she would refuse, but because it feels like the wrong time to go away. She is so unhappy now, beneath all the busy, vivid, energetic wit of the cat book. (”Guess what, Malcolm, I've figured out his family tree. He can trace his ancestry all the way back to ... Catullus!” and then, the next night, ”I've dropped the Catullus idea-I figured out something better.”) And whenever she gets going, with sly, apparently detached amus.e.m.e.nt, on the subject of the Infant's cat, he wants to tell her to stop working so hard. He is glad to see her occupied, but it seems to him that there's a panicky, confected feeling to the project, that in fact it has the same quality she objected to, and was so hurt by, in that elaborate letter scheme of her husband's. It's as if, to guard against being humored in the future, she's decided to get in there first and humor herself.

Later, he walks to work in the snappy, deep blue late-winter afternoon, trying to figure out how he might bring up the subject of Europe. He's just gotten his key into the lock when the door is pulled open by Miss Soap Opera. Her face is somber and thrilled. ”Something's happened.”

”What?” he asks coolly. Her fervors automatically make him austere.

”I don't know what,” she pants. ”She made me put her back in the bed; she didn't want any lunch.”

”Maybe she's sick. Did you call the doctor?”

”She wouldn't let me. Just wanted to be left alone, she said. I'm really worried. Would you like me to stay?”

”No, thanks, I'll be fine,” he says, wondering as he has wondered before if this woman ever does or says anything that is not in character. He waits until she's actually out of the apartment-she is capable of lurking around, full of sympathy and meaning-before he goes and knocks gently at the bedroom door.

”Malcolm?”

The bedside light is on, and there are books scattered on either side of her. She looks fine. ”Are you okay?”

”Oh, you mean ...” She rolls her eyes at the doorway.

So does he. ”Yeah.”

”She drove me absolutely bananas today. I just wanted to scream. She's just this big, damp, hovering, clucking-I don't know what-giant chicken. Giant hen. I don't want to be under her wing-ugh, who could breathe under there?”

He smiles. ”But did something happen?”

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