I dropped off the Claysons, who were slowly turning to stone, and told them again that I was sorry.
“We’ll be expecting a bill, Mr. Griffin,” Mrs. Clayson said, handing over a scrap of paper with their home address penciled on it.
They wouldn’t be getting one, though. I drove uptown with my thoughts in tow. The rain had run most drivers off the streets; only good ones, and the fools, remained. One of the latter had just tried sliding into home under a trolley. He didn’t make it.
I was remembering all the women I’d loved or thought I would. Thinking how that felt at first, how the feelings declined, how they stayed around for a while like locust husks on a tree and then one day just weren’t there anymore.
LaVerne met me at the door in what could not possibly have been the gown she was wearing when we first met but looked just like it. She said nothing. On the coffee table inside sat chilled scotch, a pitcher of martinis, a plate of cheese and fruit, mixed nuts in a round silver bowl.
I pointed to the pitcher and she poured martini into a glass of ice. She poured herself one as well, without ice, and we sat there, two lonely people together for however long it would last. I thought of lines by Auden: “Children afraid of the night/Who have never been happy or good.”
Verne leaned against me and shut her eyes.
“Why do things always have to change, Lew? When I was a kid my mother’d have a new man around the house every few months-wasn’t that often, but seemed like it, you know how it is when you’re a kid-and I kept wondering why she couldn’t just find one she liked and leave those others alone. Never occurred to me that she didn’t have much to say about it. That the world wouldn’t be the way she wanted it, the way any of us want it, just because we want it so bad.”
She sipped at her drink and we sat there quietly for a while, each with his own thoughts.
“I used to ride trains a lot. Mama’d put us on one and give the conductor fifty cents to look out after us. And I’d sit in the end car and watch everything pass by, all those places and people I’d never get to know, gone for good-and so quickly.”
She looked up at me.
“I’m still on that train, Lew, I’ve always been. Watching people I’ve loved go away from me, for good.”
She looked into my eyes for a long time and then made an odd, choked sound. I don’t know if she had tried to make a train sound or if it was a sob, but I reached for her there on the couch as, outside, the storm began to quieten.