Crossroads (27 page)

For some reason, which in retrospect looks ludicrous to me, I tried to act as if meeting her were the most natural thing in the world. “Hi, Lila,” I said when she finally caught up with me. “How are you?”

She wore a brown raincoat that matched her hair. “Oh, look.” She fumbled for words. “Are you going anywhere now?”

“No, as a matter of fact, I've just been fired from my job.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. That's terrible, isn't it?”

I shrugged. I wasn't going to give her an inch. I have played many parts, but the martyr at that moment suited me best.

“Do you have a few minutes? Could we stop somewhere and have drinks? Or maybe eat something?” I didn't say anything. She sighed. “I'd like to talk to you.”

“I don't think there's really anything to talk about, do you?” I could not contain myself any longer. “I mean, a year and a half later, a year and a half after my husband tells me he's involved with you, you decide you want to talk. Do you have any idea how long that is, how much time has elapsed? Well, you're a little late. There isn't anything to talk about.”

She looked up at me. “Believe me, I understand how you feel . . .”

“Oh, you do? And how do you understand that? Do you know we come from the same home town? We went to the same high school? Do you know that you've never once had the nerve to come and say to me you were sorry? Do you know that I lived in dread and fear of running into you, like that night down in the Village? I don't know what to say to you. I wouldn't know how to greet you. How do you greet the woman you've known since solid geometry class, who broke up your marriage? I mean, I used to get on the 104 and say to myself, What'll I do if I run into Lila? What'll I say? ‘Have you seen any of the old gang?”'

For some reason, she was still listening, her head bowed, and I just went on. “All you had to do, just once, was come to me and say, ‘I'm sorry it worked out this way. I didn't plan it.' So what if I would have gotten angry, and screamed? You know what? I'll tell you something that you may or may not believe. There's no one in this world I have held a grudge against, no one in this world who's enraged me, the way you have. So I'll go to my grave with that grudge. And I hate it. I hate the grudge more than I hate you. It takes a lot of energy to hate
someone, to stay angry at someone. And I've spent months thinking about how to get back at you, because not only did you ruin my marriage, but you managed to get in the way of the next relationship as well . . . I'm sick of hating you, I'm sick of being afraid of running into you. So let's drop it. I don't have anything to say except if you'd been a halfway decent person, if you'd come to me months ago and told me you were wild about Mark and couldn't help yourself, I wouldn't have been walking around with this open wound . . . It's just something I'll never be able to forgive.”

I waited, my hands poised as if I could go for the throat. And then I heard the words come out of her mouth. “I'm sorry. I really am sorry . . .”

“I appreciate your saying that and I'm sure it wasn't easy for you to say that. But it's just a little late. You see, I don't really care anymore. It's this stupid thing about life. We always get the thing we would have given anything to have when we don't need it anymore. Anyway, I'm sure you haven't been following me around for the past few weeks to say you were sorry.”

She rubbed her eyes as if she had a sinus headache. “The first time I ran into you it was an accident. But this time, well, I was waiting for you. I called your switchboard and they said you were leaving.”

I couldn't believe her. “Why didn't you just call me? Why didn't you just get on the phone like a normal person and say you wanted to talk?”

“Why didn't you just call me all these months and tell me to drop dead?” She was raising her voice. “Do you know how many times I picked up the phone to talk to you? Do you think I've felt good about what happened? I didn't start seeing Mark until he told me you were going to split. Every time I asked if I should talk with you, he said there wasn't anything to talk about.”

I shouted back at her. “Do you need a man to make up your
mind for you? You can't figure out the right thing to do by yourself?”

She shook her head. “Please. There's a little Italian restaurant nearby. Couldn't we just go over and sit down?”

I was undecided. I was also curious about what she had to say, so I told her I'd go with her. We both ordered linguini with clam sauce and a bottle of white wine. Lila wore a dark suit with a red and white polka dot shirt. With her hair pulled back and in that suit, she looked like a flight attendant.

She ate her linguini daintily with a fork, twisting it into a spoon, and she managed to eat without so much as a slurp. By contrast, I just burrowed a hole and dug in, sucking in the strands I couldn't manage to twist onto my fork. “God,” I said, “how do you eat it like that? I make such a mess when I eat pasta.”

In the middle of that admiration, she dropped her fork and covered her eyes with her hands. “Oh, my God,” she moaned. “I'm so miserable.”

That came as a surprise. I thought it was guilt that had driven her to talk to me, but now I saw that she was as tormented and distraught about him as I'd ever been. “Is he acting that way again?” I asked softly.

She didn't need encouragement. “He says it's his caseload. Then he says it's you, then it's me. He goes into these funks. He'll stop talking for hours at a time. And then all he'll talk about is . . .”

“The Supreme Court decisions of the week.” I filled in the blank, and she nodded. This was no panther in heat, no queen of the Nile, none of the impossible things I'd imagined her to be. She had not beguiled Mark with incredible tales and Kamasutra-studied sex. She was just another person with all kinds of person-related problems, a Brownie from my own Brownie troop, a woman I'd learned to hate and now, suddenly, to pity.

“Yes.” She looked at me, puzzled, as if she'd just found me
sitting in her living room. “And sometimes he'll be walking across the living room and I'll ask him something and he'll just, well, stop.”

“You mean freeze, right? He's in the middle of doing something and suddenly he stops like a statue. That just means he's thinking. Lila, when you started seeing him, he was terrific in bed, right? A great lover. And then once you start to care, once you want to spend time with him, it all stops. He's very busy. He never comes to bed at night.”

She nodded numbly. “I left a man who really wanted me. I mean, Robert wasn't glamorous or dashing, but he was a good man, and now I don't know what to do. I don't know what I was hoping for, talking to you. It's just that things were so . . .”

“Passionate,” I said.

“Passionate when we started and now I just don't know. I know he spent a night with you. He told me. I was crushed. I couldn't believe it, and you know what he said? He said, ‘Why not?' It was legal. You're still his wife. And then he wanted to see you. He got crazy about it. He couldn't stop thinking about you. The minute you rejected him, he went nuts.”

“And so now he doesn't talk. He won't tell you anything. You feel like he's lying. He wants more space.”

“Yes, he does all of that.” She looked terribly defeated.

I'd finished eating all I was going to eat at that meal. “Lila, I don't know what to say. I know that when he left me, I didn't know how I'd go on, and now I'm doing just fine. I know I'll find a new job. I'm just not worried about things. You'll be all right, I'm sure.”

I started to put on my coat to leave. “Would you just tell me one more thing?” She seemed to be pleading with me. “I know he spent a night with you, but do you think he'd do it again?”

“He was faithful to me for a long time. At least I think he was. Now, I don't know. I don't think I'd trust him again.”

Lila nodded. I got up to leave. “Anything else?” She shook
her head. I picked up the bill but she snatched it away. “Please, Lila, let's not fight over the bill. Let's just split it, all right?”

She thought for a moment. Then she said, “All right.”

I buttoned my coat. “I hope it works out, whatever you want to work out.” The woman who had once seemed invincible now looked weak and small.

I held out my hand and she shook it. “Debbie,” she said, “I just want you to know. I really am sorry and I wish I'd come to talk to you sooner.”

“That's all you ever had to say to me,” I said, and I walked out the door.

 

A few days before I left the New York Center for Urban Advancement, my father called. “Hi, dear,” he said. “How's the weather?” I told him the weather was fine. “Well, let me tell you, we've got a terrific day in Chicago. Clear skies, a warm breeze. You'll get that weather tomorrow.” Chicago always gets New York's weather a day before New York, due, I believe, to a prevailing something-or-other. “You should be getting two nice spring days.'' I looked out at the freezing rain that fell on a gloomy Manhattan. “It's a good thing you don't live in California,” he went on. “You'd never know what the weather was going to be, unless your family lived in Waikiki or something.”

“What's up, Dad?”

He announced that he'd fainted the other day. Nothing serious, but his blood pressure was a little high. “So your mother and I are going to move down to the Everglades. Well, near the Everglades.”

“In the summer?” I asked. But they said they were sick of Chicago winters and arctic winds and they were going to check out now. He said he had a lot to talk to me about, but he just hemmed and hawed at the other end. “Dad, just say it.”

“I . . . I understand,” he stammered, “that you're looking for work.”

I had told Zap not to say anything, but obviously he had. “I'm looking,” I replied.

“Well, now Zap asked me to tell you it just sort of came up in conversation. I mean, he didn't make it a point to tell me, but I just mentioned that I was going to make some plans for the office, and Zap said you were looking.” It took my father about fifteen minutes of this garbled dialogue to ask me to come and run the office for them. “Not permanently. Just for a little while. The summer, six months. Long enough to get work off the drawing boards. Zap said you were thinking of going back to school. You could put the money away.” I was very quiet at the other end. “You can keep looking for work. Leave when you want. Stay here rent free, go to school at night. If something else comes up, you aren't under any obligation.”

I thought about it for five more seconds. “No strings?”

“None,” he assured me. “It's your show.”

“I'll do it,” I said.

It took me a little over a month to put my things in order. One of those things was divorcing Mark. When my lawyer got the papers in order, I called Mark, told him I'd sublet my place to a friend of Sally's, was going to Chicago, and that I wanted us to sign. He said he wanted to wait, but he finally agreed to meet me one Saturday morning at Didi's on Amsterdam Avenue.

“So you're going back west,” Mark said as he sat down. I told him it was just for a little while. He looked around him uncomfortably. Didi's was filled with homosexual couples having brunch and complaining in loud voices about the latest failure of the New York courts to legalize sodomy; it was, I had to admit, a strange place to sign divorce papers. Mark stared at me rather grimly, the same way he'd once stared at me in a library years ago when I fell in love with him, with that same look of inexplicable sadness which now wasn't quite so inexplicable.

I handed him the papers. “Why don't we get this out of the way and have lunch?”

He looked at me, stunned. “Debbie, this isn't so easy for me, you know. It's not my idea to do this now. I think we should wait. We've been together a long time.”

“Mark, I think you should understand something. There's no reason to wait. Nothing is going to change. Besides, I'm in love with someone else.” It was the first time I'd been able to really articulate that to myself. I suddenly felt much more clear-headed than I'd been before. I did love Sean. Not in some mad, passionate way, but in the way that lets you want what's best for him.

I was clear-headed, that is, until right there on Amsterdam Avenue, next door to a Chinese laundry and a funeral home, surrounded by homosexual couples, two tears formed in the corner of his eyes and rolled down his cheek, and that was more tears than I'd ever seen come out of him. “Can we go to the apartment?” he said.

Once we got inside the building where we'd lived together, married, I felt terrible, too. “God, I don't know what we should do,” I mumbled. “I was so sure.”

He wrapped his arms around me. “You should have left me years ago.”

“Oh, you were great in bed,” I said.

“Was that it?” He laughed.

“We liked the same causes. We had a lot of things in common.” Now I really was crying. “I guess I'll always love you.”

“Well,” he said, once he was certain I was miserable, “I guess we'd better sign these papers if you're going away.”

I gave him the coldest stare I knew how to give. “I thought you wanted to wait?”

“Well, I don't know. I guess we should.”

My fury at him welled. It had taken me years to stand on a diving board and take the plunge. Like Zap, I was born feet
first and have always had a fear of doing anything head first. My mother claims I had to be yanked from the womb. But at this moment I took the pen, and without batting an eye, I signed my name. Mark was stunned. “Oh, I don't know, Deborah. Maybe we should talk.”

“You,” I said as perfunctorily as I could as I signed the duplicates, “are confused.”