When she dissolved their two-year-old affair and would only talk to him
on the telephone, she had still called him twice a month to see how he
was getting along. Of course, she had stopped calling eventually. She
had forgotten him completely.
“Oh,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road, “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.” Her voice was faraway, hollow, only slightly
like her real voice. Yet there she was, sitting lieside him in broad
daylight.
“I’m doing very well,” he assured her.
“You’ve lost weight.”
“I needed to lose some.”
“Not that much, George.”
“It can’t hurt.”
“And you have bags under your eyes.”
He took one hand from the wheel and touched the discolored, puffy flesh.
“Haven’t you been getting enough sleep?”
she asked.
He did not respond. He did not like this conversation. He hated her
when she badgered him about his health and said his emotional problems
with other people must come from a basic physical illness.
Sure, the problems had come on suddenly. But he wasn’t at fault. it
was other people. Lately, everyone had it in for him.
“George, have people been treating you better since we last talked?”
He admired her long legs. They were not transparent now. The flesh was
golden, firm, beautiful. “No, Courtney. I lost another job.”
Now that she had stopped nagging him about his health, he felt better.
He wanted to tell her everything, no matter how embarrassing.
She would understand. He would put his head in her lap and cry until
he had no tears left. Then he would feel better . .
.
He would cry while she smoothed his hair, and when he sat up he would
have as few problems as he had had more than two years ago, before this
trouble had come along and everyone had gotten nasty with him.
“Another job?” she asked. “How many jobs have you held these last two
years?”
“Six,” he said.
“What did you get fired for this time?”
“I don’t know,” Leland said, genuine misery in his voice. “We were
putting up an office building-two years of work. I was getting along
with everyone. Then my boss, the chief engineer, started in on me.”
“Started in on you?” she asked, flat and faraway, barely audible above
the buzz of the wide tires. “How?”
He shifted uneasily behind the wheel. “You know, Courtney. Just like
all the other times. He talked about me behind my back, set the other
men against me. He countermanded my job assignments and encouraged
Preston, the steel foreman, to-”
“He did all this behind your back?” she asked.
“Yes. He-”
“if he said all this behind your back, how do you really know he said
anything at all?”
He could not tolerate the sympathy in her voice, for it was too much
like pity. “Did you hear him? You didn’t hear him yourself, did you,
George?”
“Don’t talk to me like that. Don’t try to say it was my imagination.”
She was quiet, as ordered.
He looked to see if she was still there. She smiled at him, more solid
than she had been a few minutes before.
He looked at the setting sun, but did not see it. He was now only
minimally conscious of the highway ahead. Unsettled by her magical
presence, he no longer handled the Chevrolet van as well as he could.
It drifted back and forth within the right-hand lane, now and then
running onto the gravel shoulder.
After a while he said, “Did you know that after I called you that day
just to ask for a date, after I found you were already three weeks
married-I almost went out of my mind? I followed you for a week, day in
and day out, just watching you. Did you know?
You had said you were flying to Frisco, that this man Doyle and your
brother would follow in a week, and you said you didn’t think you’d ever
come back to Philly again. That nearly killed me, Courtney.
Everything was going so badly for me. I remembered how good we had it
once . . . So I called to see if maybe we could get together again.