Margaret looked up at him, torn between suspicion and relief.
"Department meeting," he said. "Multiculturalism in Literature—Too Little Too Late? I shouldn't think so, but then I have been wrong before. Ah well, the more the merrier. Bring on the cultures, let graduate students at 'em, a new supply of obscure works to grind into obscure theses, the new dry dust of new classics, sprinkled pitilessly upon innocent undergraduates. Perhaps my poets can survive. I can pass them off as homosexuals, or closet homosexuals, or protohomosexuals. Parahomosexuals!"
"Don't be bitter."
"No. You're right. It's ludicrous, what goes on, and I quite enjoy it. 'Me imperturbe ... aplomb in the midst of irrational things.' Did you offer the man a drink, darling?"
He pulled two beers from the refrigerator and walked out.
"Tea," Margaret said to his back. "I offered him coffee, and he wanted tea."
But Edward didn't hear. He was already back in the living room with his new pal. Margaret listened to them. Her husband talking to her lover. Well, her lover in theory. Her husband in fact. She would sleep on the stove. In perpetuity.
Margaret and Martin Court ended up going out to dinner. Margaret took him to the least romantic, noisiest restaurant she could think of, a sports bar with six large-screen television sets. Here I can think, she said to herself, and decide what I must do. Without any music or soft lights to cloud my judgment. Just flashing scoreboards and the din of an angry mob.
Martin drank a beer, and Margaret watched.
"I am happy to get to know you," he said.
He ran his hand through his hair, and Margaret remembered the smell of it and the feel of it against her face.
"My father and mother like you so much. My father say you are so knowledgeable about prison reform in the United States."
His hands rested on the polyurethane-coated table. His fingers were long and all nearly the same length, his nails rounded and regular. He wore no wedding ring.
"Your husband has a good taste in music," he said.
"Are you married?"
"Divorced."
Martin had a polished, elegant manner that occasionally burst into boyishness. Through the cheers, boos, grunts, and squeaks of large sneakers on the televised basketball courts that surrounded them, he remarked that the sports bar was "really something!" He mentioned ways the establishment could upgrade both the video equipment and the audio equipment. He told her he had thought about her many times since their meeting on the plane.
"Your laryngitis is better," she said:
Martin stared around him at the young lawyers and stockbrokers and smiled. "America!" he said.
Several times he refilled her glass of mineral water with as much courtly solicitude as if she had been drinking champagne. At her coronation.
When her hamburger came, Margaret looked at it with distaste. She was too nervous to eat. Martin watched her with concern.
"Marguerite, you are not well."
"I don't look well?"
"You look very well! Very, very well."
"Oh."
"But you look as though you don't feel well, you see?"
Margaret saw. She saw a beautifully dressed, beautifully mannered, beautiful-faced man with a sexy belly and a kind disposition. No wonder I look as though I feel sick, she thought.
"My daughter loves New York," Martin was saying. "We have been here together." His daughter was twenty-four.
"Why, she's almost my age!" Margaret said. The dirty old man. No, no, that didn't fit him at all. The lecherous roué. That didn't fit him either, but it suited Margaret's sense of romantic propriety much better.
"Yes," he said. "She's very much like you."
He kissed her good night on both cheeks. Margaret put her hand on his arm, on his cashmere-covered arm.
"You have the softest clothes," she said.
He looked at her quizzically. A lock of hair had fallen between his glasses and his left eye. Margaret thought to push it away, but he did it himself first.
"Good-bye, my friend, my old friend," Martin said. He raised his hand for a taxi.
Margaret panicked. Was he going? Just like that? Would she never see him again, never again see Martin Court, the man obviously fated to become her lover?
"I have something for your father," she said quickly. Good thinking, Margaret! "A gift. A book. I'm so grateful. Are you free tomorrow? I'll give it to you then. I'll take you sightseeing. If I don't get lost. I won't get lost. That was a joke."
"Yes, I know," he said.
Her hand was still on his sleeve. She pulled it away.
He reached in his pocket for a datebook. "Friday," he said. "That is good?"
"That is good."