He pulled away from me, finally, and yet all too soon. I had almost forgotten that we were in public, that we were in the rain. “I’m sorry,” he said, putting his thumb to the blood on his lip.
“No,” I said, taking a tissue out of my jacket and dabbing his lip myself. “I’m sorry.” He put his hand on my wrist and moved my hand away from his lips. He kissed me again, gently.
“You’re very sexy,” he said to me, as he fished his phone out of his jacket pocket. He pressed a few numbers and said finally, “Hi, you’ve reached the voice mail of Ben Ross. Please leave a message and I’ll call you back. If this is about what I’m doing later tonight, I am busy. Don’t bother asking because the answer is that I am busy. From now on, I will always be busy.” He hung up the phone and looked at me.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said. Ben smiled at me.
“No,” he said, taking the valet ticket out of his pocket. “I really do hope she stops calling. It’s not going to happen. I have a huge crush on someone else.”
I laughed at him as he handed the ticket to the valet.
“It’s you, by the way,” he said plainly, as he pulled his jacket up over my head to protect me from the rain.
“I figured,” I said.
“So are you still starving?” he asked. “Because I am and we certainly can’t go back in there.”
JUNE
Hi, you’ve reached the voice mail of Ben Ross. Please leave a message and I’ll call you back. If this is about what I’m doing later tonight, I am busy. Don’t bother asking because the answer is that I am busy. From now on, I will always be busy.”
“Hi, you’ve reached the voice mail of Ben Ross. Please leave a message and I’ll call you back. If this is about what I’m doing later tonight, I am busy. Don’t bother asking because the answer is that I am busy. From now on, I will always be busy.”
“Hi, you’ve reached the voice mail of Ben Ross. Please leave a message and I’ll call you back. If this is about what I’m doing later tonight, I am busy. Don’t bother asking because the answer is that I am busy. From now on, I will always be busy.”
I listen over and over again until I know the inflections and pauses by heart, until I can hear it even when it’s not playing. And then I dial again.
This time I don’t get to the message. Susan picks up.
“Elsie! Jesus! Just stop it, okay? Leave me alone. I can’t take it anymore! He’s going to be buried! Just like you wanted. Now stop.”
“Uh . . . ” I say, too dumbfounded to even know how to respond.
“Good-bye, Elsie!”
She hangs up the phone.
I sit there stunned, simply staring straight ahead, eyes unfocused, but resting on one spot on the ceiling. She could have turned off the ringer, I think. She could have turned off the phone. But she didn’t. She wanted to scream at me instead.
I dial Ben’s number again and she picks up. “Damn it!” she says.
“You want to sit there and pretend you knew everything about your son, you go ahead. Live the lie if you want to. But don’t try to bring me down with you. I am his wife. He had been scared to tell you about me for six months. Six months of him going to your house with the intention of telling you that he had fallen in love and six months of him not doing it because he thought you were too distraught to handle it. So yes, he hid it from you. And I let him because I loved him. You want to be pissed at him. Go ahead. You want to be in denial about what happened. Go right ahead. I really don’t care anymore, Susan. But I lost my husband and I will call his fucking phone over and over and over if I want to because I miss his voice. So turn it off if you have to, but that’s your only option.”
She’s quiet for a minute, and I want to hang up but I also want to hear what she has to say for herself.
“It’s funny to me that you think six months is a long period of time,” she says. And then she hangs up.