"You're very kind, Marguerite," he said as he got into a cab. "Kind to foreigners."
Margaret walked home thinking that the cheers of sports fans would never be the same for her. The lock of hair that had fallen over Martin's left eye remained, tantalizing, in her mind, a veil she must push aside. Martin. Divorced. One twenty-four-year-old daughter. Forty-nine himself. Mathematics and music, he said, are the same; they are the laws of the universe. Would she care to listen to his electronics sometime? She would be astounded. They were really something!
Oh yes! she had wanted to say. I'll listen to your electronics. Just plug them in.
Across the table, bathed in the flickering light of the six TVs, he was irresistible, his face undeniably, obviously, foreign, his voice high-pitched and glamorously out of context.
Edward was already home. I've been hypnotized, she thought. Don't break my spell. Tall and familiar as a tree in the dark hallway, he put his arms around her, but Margaret thought again of Martin, the man on the plane, in the sports bar, on the sidewalk, a face in a cab.
"'Not to be in love with you,'" said Edward. "'I can't remember what it was like. It must've been lousy.'" He kissed the top of her head. "Schuyler," he said.
Guilty, and angry that she felt guilty—for absolutely nothing!—she said, "Why do you always quote other people? Don't you ever have anything to say for yourself?"
Edward jumped, he was so startled. He looked at her questioningly, then walked away, silent, into the study and closed the door behind him.
Margaret thought, He will never forgive me. He quotes things out of love and excitement, like a boy rattling a box of shiny pebbles, opening and closing it, then opening it again. I've insulted his pretty stones. I threw them in the river.
And Margaret had the feeling she had just crossed a line, a line of civility that was required for love. When in love, one felt free and safe to reveal the deepest, most secret truths about oneself. But there were truths about the other person that one never revealed, not because of fear or shame, but out of acceptance—out of love.
I have been capricious and thoughtless, she realized. Like a child who calls a fat man fat. But she couldn't apologize. Her mouth refused to form the words. She formed so few words for him these days.
Edward was too courteous to stop speaking to her altogether. But it seemed to her that after this he stopped taking any pleasure in his words. Margaret sometimes waited for him to try to speak to her about their not really speaking, but their silence only grew in authority, a strict and overbearing mother. It never quite let the two of them out of its sight. Edward, the booming Walt Whitman scholar, singing of "Life immense in passion, pulse, and power," lived his life with vigor and joy. It was the only way he knew how. But Margaret had withdrawn vigor and joy, leaving a vacuum, an absence, and he backed away from her uncertainly, like a cat from a puddle. They existed cautiously, new neighbors in their old life.
Lily sat on the grass in the park, where they now met quite regularly for lunch. She had taken off her shoes, black pointy pumps that lurked, stark and sinister, beside her bare feet on the bright spring grass. She had small, even toes (to match her teeth) dabbed with pearly nail polish.
Edward was with them, and Margaret was annoyed. She wanted to talk to Lily about Martin. She wanted Lily to herself. Disgruntled, she lay back in the grass, ignoring both of them. They ate their sandwiches and chatted about gardening. Gardening! Well, Edward was to be forgiven, being English and all. But Lily had no excuse. Lily was a garden, didn't she realize that? She tended to herself with such care. What interest could she have left for a patch of dirt with some plant life that required constant nursing and had names impossible to remember, and then, after months of being coddled, died?
"Gardens are depressing," Margaret said. "Everything dies. Right in front of your eyes."
"Margaret, you are an absolutist," Edward said.
"Just don't quote Whitman at me."
"Oh, Margaret," Lily said.
Margaret sat up. Lily was looking at Edward with her lavender eyes.
"Anyway, I like Whitman," Lily said. "He took on the bourgeoisie."
"He was the bourgeoisie," Margaret said.
That night, as Margaret watched Edward load the dishwasher and wondered if Dr. Lipi had a girlfriend, Martin called.
"Marguerite? You are ready? You still wish to be my guide?"
The thought of her being someone else's guide was appalling. She was the guided. She was very good at being the guided.
"Yes," she said. What would she show him? What did people do in New York, anyway? "Is there anything in particular you want to do?"
"Already I have visited to Harlem. On the bus, the touring bus. Ah, that was really something! I saw United Nations and SoHo and East Village and World Trade Center and Brooklyn."
"Really?"
"And Statue of Liberty from Staten Island ferry."