Glass Houses(43)

Bennis and Gregor looked at each other across the breakfast table. Then both of them sighed at once.





3


It was, Gregor was sure, the single most uncomfortable moment of his life. In one way or the other, all his moments with Bennis were uncomfortable, but this was—there was no word for what this was. He would have had an easier time dealing with a situation where his own mother found a condom in his wallet. Bennis was on one side of the table. He was on the other side. The coffee tasted wrong.

“Well,” he said.

Bennis looked at the ceiling. “It was true,” she said, “what I told Donna. If you overheard it, I really wasn’t doing anything.”

Gregor could have denied that he’d heard her talking to Donna, but he didn’t see the point. “You were doing one thing, you were not being here,” he said.

“True enough.”

“And you don’t think that requires an explanation?”

“It’s just that I don’t have an explanation,” she said. “I just wanted not to be here.”

“Away from me.”

“Not really. Or not principally, which might be the better point.”

“You wanted to be away from Donna, and Lida, and Hannah Krekorian,” Gregor said.

“Not really,” Bennis said again. She wasn’t looking at the ceiling again. She was looking at her hands. “In the beginning I thought it was because I wanted to go back to smoking. And I couldn’t do that here. I couldn’t do that with you. You’d already made that clear.”

“Did you go back to smoking?”

“No. I tried a cigarette once in Florence, and I gagged on it. So I didn’t do that again.”

“But you still stayed away. Or was that at the end, last week or something like that?”

“No, it was at the beginning,” Bennis said. “I don’t know. It just turned out that I didn’t want it.”

“What did you want? What do you want? Do you honestly think that you wouldn’t have been able to tell me that you wanted to go off by yourself for a while—”

“But I did tell you.”

“I mean really tell me,” Gregor said. “Give me some idea of where you were. Drop a postcard every once in a while. Call. Something.”

“I did call, once,” Bennis said. “I called your cell phone.”

“I must have had it off.”

“No,” Bennis said. “You had it on. I called and you picked up, and then I felt struck stone dumb and I just didn’t say anything. I did try not to be a heavy breather.”

Gregor stood up. He had to stand up, or he was going to break the table. The coffeemaker was still sitting on the counter, shooting little jets of coffee into its glass bubble. “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound?” he said. “You take off for months, for nearly a year. You don’t tell anybody where you’re going or why. You don’t contact anybody in all the time you’re away. You disappear like the victim in a kidnaping case. And when you come back and I ask you why you went, you say you don’t know except that maybe you wanted a cigarette, except that it turns out that wasn’t what you wanted either. And you found that out in the first week or so, but you still didn’t come back.”

“I didn’t finish my book either, if it’s any consolation,” Bennis said. “I never miss deadlines, but I just couldn’t finish it. To tell you the truth, I haven’t even started it. Maybe I’m past the point of caring about Zed and Zedalia. Did you ever wonder why I started all the names with the letter Z? I keep telling myself I must have had a reason at the time, but I can’t remember one. I don’t seem to have reasons for anything lately.”

Gregor had the coffeepot in his hand. He didn’t need coffee. His cup was sitting on the table, mostly full. He put the coffeepot down again. He was sweating. She should have been the one who was sweating, but instead it was him.

“You have to understand,” he said, so carefully he felt as if he were emitting separate syllables protectively surrounded by air, “just how insane this all sounds. Or how insane it sounds to me. I don’t know. Maybe you’ve done this before, with other people, at other times in your life—”

“No, I haven’t,” Bennis said. “I’ve left people behind in my life before, but I’ve never gone away and come back.”

“I’m saying I’m not being unreasonable to think you should have talked to me about it before you went,” Gregor said. “Or if you really couldn’t have done that, then you should have sent those postcards, just so that I knew where you were and that you were at least thinking about coming back.”