He went down the hall to his bedroom and looked inside. Bennis was asleep under both his blankets and all three of his quilts. The blankets were Hudson Bay Point king-size at three hundred and fifty dollars a pop. The quilts were down-filled from L. L. Bean and cost more than Gregor wanted to think about. Bennis had bought them all when she’d realized that he liked to sleep under nothing but a top sheet, “as if,” as she put it, “you didn’t have anything on yourself at all.” Then she’d gone out and bought eight thick, hard foam pillows to go with them.
At the moment, Bennis was not only sleeping under his blankets and his quilts, she was sleeping in his pajama tops as well. His pajama bottoms were draped over the back of the chair in front of the computer. Gregor got a clean set of clothes out of the wardrobe, considered putting on his robe, and decided against it. If Bennis woke up, she would want the robe. He had never met another woman who so disliked wearing her own clothes, and so much insisted on wearing his. Of course, his experience with women was somewhat restricted. There had been a few girls in college and the Army, and then he had married Elizabeth and stayed married to her for almost thirty years. Maybe it was a generational thing. Maybe women of Bennis’s generation always wore their lovers’ clothes. He rolled the word around in his mouth a couple of times—lover, lovers, love—and wished it didn’t feel so out of place. Then he decided that it might have been worse. He was so big and Bennis was so small, there was only so much she could get away with borrowing. If she’d been a larger woman, he might not have had any clothes left at all.
He took a shower, came out, and shaved. In the mirror he looked tired, but he always looked tired. He had one of those Armenian faces that looked as if it had seen everything on earth, twice. It was Tibor who ought to look like that. He got into slacks and a shirt and a sweater, but he was very careful not to put on a tie. Bennis’s nagging was finally getting to him. He had become embarrassed about wearing a suit when he was only going down the street to have breakfast at the Ararat. He came out of the bathroom and walked back down the hall to his bedroom. Bennis was still asleep, and now that he gave the room more attention he could see that she would probably stay that way for some time. There was a stack of new paper next to the computer. Either she was working on a book, or she had some other project that required her to work late into the night. Bennis being Bennis, even if she had nothing to do, she would find something that required her to stay up most of the night. Gregor put on socks and shoes and thought about leaving her a note. He walked out of the bedroom without doing it because he couldn’t think of a thing to say. It was too bad he hadn’t been willing to let Bennis buy him that leather jacket she saw at Brooks Brothers. His long coat felt much too formal. The leather jacket, though, had cost almost as much as a small car. He had no idea how people could buy things like that without feeling guilty.
Going downstairs, he stopped on the first floor at old George Tekemanian’s apartment and knocked, but there was no answer. Old George was probably already down at the Ararat. Gregor went out onto the stoop and looked around. His own building was just about decorated, but Donna’s town house was wrapped solidly in red and white crepe paper and hearts. The lights were on in front of the church. Tibor wouldn’t turn them off until he got back from breakfast. If Tibor wasn’t back from breakfast, Gregor couldn’t be too late.
Gregor went down the block to the Ararat. There was a newspaper dispenser on the street next to Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Foods. He stopped there and got a copy of the Inquirer , which had managed to get a picture of last night’s riot into print, although not the one of the man burning up. He winced a little and folded the paper under his arm. Ohanian’s was open, to the extent that Mary Ohanian was running the cash register in case anybody needed to pick up gum or lottery tickets on the way to work. Gregor sometimes thought Armenians were bigger gamblers than anybody in the world except the Hong Kong Chinese, but that might just have been his skewed perception from living on the street. He went past Ohanian’s to the Ararat and inside. Old George Tekemanian and Tibor were sitting together in the long booth built into the wall next to the window, doing something with sock balls.
Gregor waved to Linda Melajian and went to sit down. “What’s that?” he asked them. “Is that new? You had another machine for making sock balls, didn’t you?”
“This is new, yes,” old George Tekemanian said. “From my nephew Martin. I had another one he gave me, but this one is digital.”