“Mercedes?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he replied. “He’d driven Louise here a few days before, to the station—outbound, her train to New York. But this is the thing: she really hadn’t told him exactly, precisely, where she was going or why she was going, details and reasons, this girlfriend of his. He hadn’t really asked. She did this sometimes, anyway, the years they’d been together—three, I think. Yes, three it is. But this last time she’d looked so sad, so slumped, he thought, so thin, her long curls spilling into her face, her eyes sad and desolate . . . She’d worn a blue coat. A color like cobalt. Going away . . . and of course he had a car; he had driven her here, to the station. He knew he hadn’t wanted to look at her sadness. It angered him slightly. And he, too, was sad—yes, he was, because he knew he had to end it.”
He waited for the question, begging for it.
“Why?”
“Why?” he said, as if surprised she had asked. “Because for all that he loved her, for all that she knew him—you know, knew that he wanted, for instance, to act, to be an actor, and not to be the, let’s see, the lawyer his father expected—for all they had shared and done and dreamed, he knew it couldn’t last. His parents would insist, of course, subtly, but still . . . His father, his mother, the family name . . . Louise was inappropriate . . . smart and ambitious, but still, there was a matter—let’s say religion, and, well, ilk.”
“Ilk?”
“Don’t sulk,” he said. “You know what I mean. And this is in the past, I said. Didn’t I say? Late ’70s. I had to have mentioned that, no?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“It wasn’t so easy for him,” he said, becoming defensive.
“Really? In the ’70s?”
“Little you know. You know, hippies—post-hippies, whatever they were, free love and all that, the way the world was changing, all of it changing—sure, of course. But not for him. Louise had to go. Louise could not last. He knows that, accepts that, the way it has to be, and he knows that it ought to end sooner than later, and also he knows that she knows that too. Of course she does. She’s smart, Louise. And now at the station, he is waiting for her, and he is filled with trepidation and lost in his thoughts; he is waiting and waiting, and so upset—the train is delayed, the station looks strange, looks wrong, transformed, not the way he remembered it, not how he thought of the place at all. Nothing’s as it used to be. He’s shaking. And also, despite that it’s terribly crowded—the station is not that big to begin with, round, domed, and now it is packed full of families and students, the art kids with sketchpads, women in pairs, the men in suits, you know—everyone gives him a sort of berth, as if maybe they don’t want to brush up against him. As if he smells. As if, he thinks, it’s the sadness he feels, the strangeness he feels. He is tired too. He goes to get coffee but doesn’t remember the coffee being expensive like this, fancy like this, and he doesn’t have cash, or not enough. He doesn’t have it on him. The girl behind the register is looking at him, as if he doesn’t belong there. He doesn’t much like that. And so he walks away again. He sits on the floor, against a wall, that wall, that one over there—the seats, every one of them, taken, you see. The board keeps rolling, more delays. Coming in increments. Later, later. Snow keeps falling, thicker now, according to the chatter of the people around him, muffled as it is. He, from where he is, cannot see the snow fall. He starts to sleep. He falls asleep. He starts to dream in his sleep. He is possibly even snoring a little, there on the floor. And this is the dream: The dream is the future. His future self. And he is entering a house like the house he grew up in, similar in stateliness, silver and oak, the predictable children—a girl and a boy. He has a briefcase in hand. There is a weight in his heart, and from another room he can hear a woman speaking, maybe on the telephone—yes, on the telephone—and then he sees the woman, the one who is his wife. And she is not, of course, Louise, of course she’s not, and he is suddenly flooded, there in the dream, with a bone-chilling sadness, a wave of emotion that makes him ache. He wakes up on the floor.”
“Are you sure you don’t want a bite of this?”
“No,” he says, peevish. “Listen. As I was saying . . . Well, maybe. A taste.”
“What happens next?”