What he really wanted was to know where Bennis was, and what she wanted from him. Here was why he didn’t like to go without sleep, and why he didn’t like to spend much time in this apartment by himself. When he did either, he found himself thinking obsessively about Bennis’s mood the last time they had really talked, and all the times since then, when conversation had seemed impossible. He tried to remember if he had ever had the experience of a love affair gone wrong, or come apart, and he didn’t think he had. The only woman he had ever loved before Bennis had been his wife. He had loved her and married her and then stayed by her while she died, but there had never been any suggestion, even during the worst of his days on kidnapping detail, that there could be a divorce. Of course, Bennis hadn’t suggested anything like divorce, either, and couldn’t, since they weren’t married. There had to be a word for what happened when a relationship broke in the absence of matrimony. If there wasn’t, somebody should invent one.
He didn’t really know if the relationship was broken. It wasn’t from his side, or he didn’t think it was. It might be from hers, but if it was he didn’t know why it was, and she wouldn’t tell him. Sometimes he understood the people who wanted desperately to return to the fifties, when rules were more rigid than they were now and there were fewer choices to make and fewer confusions to get lost in. When he got saner, he realized that that had to be an illusion. It could not have been so wonderful in the middle of Red Scares, McCarthy witch-hunts, and illegal abortions staged in back alley “clinics” where the “doctor” drank nonstop and nobody ever cleaned the floors.
He’d sounded like Bennis just then. It was the kind of thing she’d say. He’d tell her she was simplifying, and she was. It would all be good-natured, except that nothing had been good-natured those last few weeks before she’d left. The tension had been so thick it had been as if the air between them in the room had turned into mayonnaise. And he still had no idea why.
Right now, he just wanted her to come home. What bothered him— what had been bothering him for days—was the possibility that she wouldn’t, or at least not really. She’d call from Seattle and say she’d decided to move out West. She’d ask Donna Moradanyan to box up her things and send them up. She’d come back only to pack a suitcase for a four-month trip to India and the Far East. She’d call one night and talk to him, but it would be as if what had been between them had never happened. She’d talk to him the way she talked to Donna, or Tibor—or, worse, to the people she didn’t know very well, the ones she was friendly with because not to be friendly would be to be rude, but to whom she never revealed anything important.
Of course, Gregor thought, you could say she had never revealed anything important even to him, because she was like that. There was always something about Bennis that was just one step away, inviolate. Men were supposed to like that in women. He didn’t know if he liked that in her. Men were supposed to have women figured out by the time they were thirty. He didn’t have this one figured out at all, and to prove it he could stand here under this streaming hot water and not know whether she was angry at him or not, in love with him or not, missing him or not. He didn’t even know where she was on this book tour.
What he did know was that the water in the shower seemed to be getting hotter, and if he didn’t get out from under it he was going to look as red as Dilbert in that episode from the television show. He had no idea what had made him remember the Dilbert television show, but there it was.
He had no idea what had made him fall in love with Bennis, either, or whether he still was in love with her.
He not only didn’t have women figured out by the time he was thirty, he hadn’t done a very good job on himself.
2
Forty-five minutes later, Gregor was standing on Fr. Tibor Kasparian’s doorstep, ringing the bell and stamping one foot and then the other the way he’d seen people do in old movies when they were supposed to be cold. He really was cold. No matter how bad the apartment had felt, it had been as nothing compared to the real weather on the outside, and he found himself again wishing he’d bought a hat, or earmuffs, or something. Then he thought he couldn’t imagine himself with earmuffs, and Bennis probably couldn’t, either, since she’d never bought him a pair. On the other side of the door, Tibor was fumbling with locks and other things. Gregor thought he heard something fall over. The door shuddered on its frame and then pulled inward. Tibor was standing there in good slacks and two sweaters, but no shoes.