Secrets and Surprises Part 3

"I don't shop that infrequently," she says.

"Don't vegetables ... I mean, aren't they very perishable?"

"No," she says. She smiles sweetly.

"You always have fresh vegetables, don't you?"

"Sometimes I buy them fresh and parboil them myself. Later I steam them."

"Ah," he says. He does not know exactly what she is talking about.

"Today I was out for a walk," she says. No way he can prove she wasn't.

"It's a late spring," he says. "But today it was very nice, actually."

They are having a civilized discussion. Perhaps she can lure him into bed. Perhaps if that works, the phone will also ring. Hasn't he noticed that it doesn't ring at night, that it hasn't for nights? That's unusual, too. She would ask what he makes of this, but talking about the phone makes him angry, and if he's angry, he'll never get into bed. She fingers her pin. He sees her do it. A mistake. It reminds him of Robby.

She sips her wine and thinks about their summer vacation-the one they already took. She can remember so little about the summer. She will not remember the spring if she doesn't get busy and write in her book. What, exactly, should she write? She thinks the book should contain feelings instead of just facts. Surely that would be less boring to do. Well, she was going to write something during the afternoon, but she was feeling blue, and worried-about the telephone-and it wouldn't cheer her up to go back and read about feeling blue and being worried. Her crafts teacher had given her a book of poetry to read: Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath. It was interesting. She was certainly interested in it, but it depressed her. She didn't go out of the house for days. Finally-she is glad she can remember clearly some details-he asked her to go to the cleaners and she went out. She did several errands that day. What was the weather like, though? Or does it really matter? She corrects herself: it does matter. It matters very much what season it is, whether the weather is typical or unusual. If you have something to say about the weather, you will always be able to make conversation with people, and communicating is very important. Even for yourself: you should know that you feel blue because the weather is cold or rainy, happy because it's a sunny day with high clouds. Tonight she feels blue. Probably it is cold out. She would ask, but she has already lied that she was out. It might have turned cold, however.

"I was out quite early," she says. "What was the weather like when you came home?"

"Ah," he says. "I called this morning."

She looks up at him, suddenly. He sees her surprise, knows she wasn't out.

"Just to say that I loved you," he says.

He smiles. It is not worth seducing him to make the phone ring. She will shower, wash her hair, stand there a long time, hoping, but she won't make love to the man. He is a rotten liar.

In the morning, when he is gone, she finds that she remembers her feelings of the night before exactly, and writes them down, at length, in the book.

On Friday night he no longer picks her up after crafts cla.s.s. He has joined a stock club, and he has a meeting that night. The bus stop is only a block from where the cla.s.s meets; it lets her off five minutes from where she lives. It is unnecessary for the man ever to pick her up. But he says that the streets are dangerous at night, and that she must be tired. She says that the bus ride refreshes her. She likes riding buses, looking at the people. There is good bus service. He smiles. But it is not necessary to ride them; and the streets are dangerous at night.

Tonight her instructor asks to speak to her when the cla.s.s has ended. She has no interest in the thin silver filaments she is working with and says he can talk to her now. "No," he says. "Later is fine."

She remains when the others have left. The others are all younger than she, with one exception: a busty grandmother who is learning crafts hoping to ease her arthritis. The others are in their teens or early twenties. They have long hair and wear Earth shoes and are unfriendly. They are intense. Perhaps that's what it is. They don't talk because they're intense. They walk (so the ads for these shoes say) feeling clouds beneath them, their spines perfectly and comfortably straight, totally relaxed and enjoying their intensity. Their intensity results in delicate necklaces, highly glazed bowls-some with deer and trees, others with Mister Moon smiling. All but three are women.

When they have all left, he opens a door to a room at the back of the cla.s.sroom. It opens into a tiny room, where there is a mattress on the floor, covered with a plaid blanket, two pairs of tennis shoes aligned with it, and a high, narrow bookcase between the pipe and window. He wants to know what she thought of the Sylvia Plath book. She says that it depressed her. That seems to be the right response, the one that gets his head nodding-he always nods when he looks over her shoulder. He told her in November that he admired her wanting to perfect her bowls-her not moving on just to move on to something else. They nod at each other. In the cla.s.sroom they whisper so as not to disturb anyone's intensity. It is strange now to speak to him in a normal tone of voice. When she sees her son, now, she also whispers. That annoys the man and his mother. What does she have to say to him that they can't all hear? They are noisy when they play, but when they are in the house-in his room, or when she is pouring him some juice from the refrigerator-she will kneel and whisper. A gentle sound, like deer in the woods. She made the bowl with the deer on it, gave it to the instructor because he was so delighted with it. He was very appreciative. He said that he meant for her to keep the book. But he would lend her another. Or two: The Death Notebooks and A Vision. The instructor puts his foot on the edge of the second shelf to get one of the books down from the top. She is afraid he will fall, stands closer to him, behind him, in case he does. She has a notion of softening his fall. He does not fall. He hands her the books. The instructor knows all about her, she is sure. The man's mother visited his studio before she suggested, firmly, that she enroll. The man's mother was charmed by the instructor. Imagine what she must have said to him about her. From the first, he was kind to her. When he gave her Winter Trees, he somehow got across the idea to her that many women felt enraged-sad and enraged. He said a few things to her that impressed her at the time. If only she had had the notebook then, she could have written them down, reread them.

He boils water in a pan for tea. She admires the blue jar he spoons the tea out of. He made it. Similarly, he admires her work. She sees that her bowl holds some oranges and bananas. She would like to ask what false or unfair things the man's mother said about her. That would cast a pall over things, though. The instructor would feel uncomfortable. It is not right to blurt out everything you feel like saying. People don't live like that in society. Talk about something neutral. Talk about the weather. She says to the instructor what the man always says to her: it is a late spring. She says more: she is keeping a journal. He asks again-the third time?-whether she writes poetry. She says, truthfully, that she does not. He shows her a box full of papers that he doodled on, wrote on, the semester he dropped out of Stanford. The doodles are very complex, heavily inked. The writing is sloppy, in big letters that were written with a heavy black pen. She understands from reading a little that he was unhappy when he dropped out of Stanford. He says that writing things down helps. Expressing yourself helps. Her attention drifts. When she concentrates again, he is saying the opposite: she must feel these cla.s.ses are unpleasant, having been sentenced to them; all those books-he gestures to the bookcase-were written by unhappy people, and it's doubtful if writing them made them any happier. Not Sylvia Plath, certainly. He tells her that she should not feel obliged to act nicely, feel happy. He thumps his hand on the books he has just given her.

She tells him that the phone never rings anymore. She tells him that last, after the story about the summer vacation, how she and Robby set out to race through the surf, and Robby lagged behind, and she felt such incredible energy, she ran and ran. They got separated. She ran all the way to the end of the sand, to the rocks, and then back-walked back-and couldn't find Robby or the man anywhere. All the beach umbrellas looked the same, and so did the people. What exactly did Robby look like? Or the man? The man looked furious. He found her, came back for her in his slacks and shirt, having taken Robby back to the motel. His shoes were caked with wet sand, his face was furious. She is not sure how to connect this to what she really wants to talk about, the inexplicably silent telephone.

Shifting.

T.

he woman's name was Natalie, and the man's name was Larry. They had been childhood sweethearts; he had first kissed her at an ice-skating party when they were ten. She had been unlacing her skates and had not expected the kiss. He had not expected to do it, either-he had some notion of getting his face out of the wind that was blowing across the iced-over lake, and he found himself ducking his head toward her. Kissing her seemed the natural thing to do. When they graduated from high school he was named "cla.s.s clown" in the yearbook, but Natalie didn't think of him as being particularly funny. He spent more time than she thought he needed to studying chemistry, and he never laughed when she joked. She really did not think of him as funny. They went to the same college, in their hometown, but he left after a year to go to a larger, more impressive university. She took the train to be with him on weekends, or he took the train to see her. When he graduated, his parents gave him a car. If they had given it to him when he was still in college, it would have made things much easier. They waited to give it to him until graduation day, forcing him into attending the graduation exercises. He thought his parents were wonderful people, and Natalie liked them in a way, too, but she resented their perfect timing, their careful smiles. They were afraid that he would marry her. Eventually, he did. He had gone on to graduate school after college, and he set a date six months ahead for their wedding so that it would take place after his first-semester final exams. That way he could devote his time to studying for the chemistry exams.

When she married him, he had had the car for eight months. It still smelled like a brand-new car. There was never any clutter in the car. Even the ice sc.r.a.per was kept in the glove compartment. There was not even a sweater or a lost glove in the back seat. He vacuumed the car every weekend, after washing it at the car wash. On Friday nights, on their way to some cheap restaurant and a dollar movie, he would stop at the car wash, and she would get out so he could vacuum all over the inside of the car. She would lean against the metal wall of the car wash and watch him clean it.

It was expected that she would not become pregnant. She did not. It had also been expected that she would keep their apartment clean, and keep out of the way as much as possible in such close quarters while he was studying. The apartment was messy, though, and when he was studying late at night she would interrupt him and try to talk him into going to sleep. He gave a chemistry-cla.s.s lecture once a week, and she would often tell him that overpreparing was as bad as underpreparing. She did not know if she believed this, but it was a favorite line of hers. Sometimes he listened to her.

On Tuesdays, when he gave the lecture, she would drop him off at school and then drive to a supermarket to do the week's shopping. Usually she did not make a list before she went shopping, but when she got to the parking lot she would take a tablet out of her purse and write a few items on it, sitting in the car in the cold. Even having a few things written down would stop her from wandering aimlessly in the store and buying things that she would never use. Before this, she had bought several pans and cans of food that she had not used, or that she could have done without. She felt better when she had a list.

She would drop him at school again on Wednesdays, when he had two seminars that together took up all the afternoon. Sometimes she would drive out of town then, to the suburbs, and shop there if any shopping needed to be done. Otherwise, she would go to the art museum, which was not far away but hard to get to by bus. There was one piece of sculpture in there that she wanted very much to touch, but the guard was always nearby. She came so often that in time the guard began to nod h.e.l.lo. She wondered if she could ever persuade the man to turn his head for a few seconds-only that long-so she could stroke the sculpture. Of course she would never dare ask. After wandering through the museum and looking at least twice at the sculpture, she would go to the gift shop and buy a few postcards and then sit on one of the museum benches, padded with black vinyl, with a Calder mobile hanging overhead, and write notes to friends. (She never wrote letters.) She would tuck the postcards in her purse and mail them when she left the museum. But before she left, she often had coffee in the restaurant: she saw mothers and children struggling there, and women dressed in fancy clothes talking with their faces close together, as quietly as lovers.

On Thursdays he took the car. After his cla.s.s he would drive to visit his parents and his friend Andy, who had been wounded in Vietnam. About once a month she would go with him, but she had to feel up to it. Being with Andy embarra.s.sed her. She had told him not to go to Vietnam-told him that he could prove his patriotism in some other way-and finally, after she and Larry had made a visit together and she had seen Andy in the motorized bed in his parents' house, Larry had agreed that she need not go again. Andy had apologized to her. It embarra.s.sed her that this man, who had been blown sky-high by a land mine and had lost a leg and lost the full use of his arms, would smile up at her ironically and say, "You were right." She also felt as though he wanted to hear what she would say now, and that now he would listen. Now she had nothing to say. Andy would pull himself up, relying on his right arm, which was the stronger, gripping the rails at the side of the bed, and sometimes he would take her hand. His arms were still weak, but the doctors said he would regain complete use of his right arm with time. She had to make an effort not to squeeze his hand when he held hers because she found herself wanting to squeeze energy back into him. She had a morbid curiosity about what it felt like to be blown from the ground-to go up, and to come crashing down. During their visit Larry put on the cla.s.s-clown act for Andy, telling funny stories and laughing uproariously.

Once or twice Larry had talked Andy into getting in his wheelchair and had loaded him into the car and taken him to a bar. Larry called her once, late, pretty drunk, to say that he would not be home that night-that he would sleep at his parents' house. "My G.o.d," she said. "Are you going to drive Andy home when you're drunk?" "What the h.e.l.l else can happen to him?" he said.

Larry's parents blamed her for Larry's not being happy. His mother could only be pleasant with her for a short while, and then she would veil her criticisms by putting them as questions. "I know that one thing that helps enormously is good nutrition," his mother said. "He works so hard that he probably needs quite a few vitamins as well, don't you think?" Larry's father was the sort of man who found hobbies in order to avoid his wife. His hobbies were building model boats, repairing clocks, and photography. He took pictures of himself building the boats and fixing the clocks, and gave the pictures, in cardboard frames, to Natalie and Larry for Christmas and birthday presents. Larry's mother was very anxious to stay on close terms with her son, and she knew that Natalie did not like her very much. Once she had visited them during the week, and Natalie, not knowing what to do with her, had taken her to the museum. She had pointed out the sculpture, and his mother had glanced at it and then ignored it. Natalie hated her for her bad taste. She had bad taste in the sweaters she gave Larry, too, but he wore them. They made him look collegiate. That whole world made her sick.

When Natalie's uncle died and left her his 1965 Volvo, they immediately decided to sell it and use the money for a vacation. They put an ad in the paper, and there were several callers. There were some calls on Tuesday, when Larry was in cla.s.s, and Natalie found herself putting the people off. She told one woman that the car had too much mileage on it, and mentioned body rust, which it did not have; she told another caller, who was very persistent, that the car was already sold. When Larry returned from school she explained that the phone was off the hook because so many people were calling about the car and she had decided not to sell it after all. They could take a little money from their savings account and go on the trip if he wanted. But she did not want to sell the car. "It's not an automatic shift," he said. "You don't know how to drive it." She told him that she could learn. "It will cost money to insure it," he said, "and it's old and probably not even dependable." She wanted to keep the car. "I know," he said, "but it doesn't make sense. When we have more money, you can have a car. You can have a newer, better car."

The next day she went out to the car, which was parked in the driveway of an old lady next door. Her name was Mrs. La.r.s.en and she no longer drove a car, and she told Natalie she could park their second car there. Natalie opened the car door and got behind the wheel and put her hands on it. The wheel was covered with a flaky yellow-and-black plastic cover. She eased it off. A few pieces of foam rubber stuck to the wheel. She picked them off. Underneath the cover, the wheel was a dull red. She ran her fingers around and around the circle of the wheel. Her cousin Burt had delivered the car-a young opportunist, sixteen years old, who said he would drive it the hundred miles from his house to theirs for twenty dollars and a bus ticket home. She had not even invited him to stay for dinner, and Larry had driven him to the bus station. She wondered if it was Burt's cigarette in the ashtray or her dead uncle's. She could not even remember if her uncle smoked. She was surprised that he had left her his car. The car was much more comfortable than Larry's, and it had a nice smell inside. It smelled a little the way a field smells after a spring rain. She rubbed the side of her head back and forth against the window and then got out of the car and went in to see Mrs. La.r.s.en. The night before, she had suddenly thought of the boy who brought the old lady the evening newspaper every night; he looked old enough to drive, and he would probably know how to shift. Mrs. La.r.s.en agreed with her-she was sure that he could teach her. "Of course, everything has its price," the old lady said.

"I know that. I meant to offer him money," Natalie said, and was surprised, listening to her voice, that she sounded old too.

She took an inventory and made a list of things in their apartment. Larry had met an insurance man one evening while playing basketball at the gym who told him that they should have a list of their possessions, in case of theft. "What's worth anything?" she said when he told her. It was their first argument in almost a year-the first time in a year, anyway, that their voices were raised. He told her that several of the pieces of furniture his grandparents gave them when they got married were antiques, and the man at the gym said that if they weren't going to get them appraised every year, at least they should take snapshots of them and keep the pictures in a safe-deposit box. Larry told her to photograph the pie safe (which she used to store linen), the piano with an inlaid mother-of-pearl decoration on the music rack (neither of them knew how to play), and the table with hand-carved wooden handles and a marble top. He bought her an Instamatic camera at the drugstore, with film and flash bulbs. "Why can't you do it?" she said, and an argument began. He said that she had no respect for his profession and no understanding of the amount of study that went into getting a master's degree in chemistry.

That night he went out to meet two friends at the gym, to shoot baskets. She put the little flashcube into the top of the camera, dropped in the film and closed the back. She went first to the piano. She leaned forward so that she was close enough to see the inlay clearly, but she found that when she was that close the whole piano wouldn't fit into the picture. She decided to take two pictures. Then she photographed the pie safe, with one door open, showing the towels and sheets stacked inside. She did not have a reason for opening the door, except that she remembered a Perry Mason show in which detectives photographed everything with the doors hanging open. She photographed the table, lifting the lamp off it first. There were still eight pictures left. She went to the mirror in their bedroom and held the camera above her head, pointing down at an angle, and photographed her image in the mirror. She took off her slacks and sat on the floor and leaned back, aiming the camera down at her legs. Then she stood up and took a picture of her feet, leaning over and aiming down. She put on her favorite record: Stevie Wonder singing "For Once in My Life." She found herself wondering what it would be like to be blind, to have to feel things to see them. She thought about the piece of sculpture in the museum-the two elongated mounds, intertwined, the smooth gray stone as shiny as sea pebbles. She photographed the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living room. There was one picture left. She put her left hand on her thigh, palm up, and with some difficulty-with the camera nestled into her neck like a violin-snapped a picture of it with her right hand. The next day would be her first driving lesson.

He came to her door at noon, as he had said he would. He had on a long maroon scarf, which made his deep-blue eyes very striking. She had only seen him from her window when he carried the paper in to the old lady. He was a little nervous. She hoped that it was just the anxiety of any teen-ager confronting an adult. She needed to have him like her. She did not learn about mechanical things easily (Larry had told her that he would have invested in a "real" camera, except that he did not have the time to teach her about it), so she wanted him to be patient. He sat on the footstool in her living room, still in coat and scarf, and told her how a stick shift operated. He moved his hand through the air. The motion he made reminded her of the salute s.p.a.cemen gave to earthlings in a science-fiction picture she had recently watched on late-night television. She nodded. "How much-" she began, but he interrupted and said, "You can decide what it was worth when you've learned." She was surprised and wondered if he meant to charge a great deal. Would it be her fault and would she have to pay him if he named his price when the lessons were over? But he had an honest face. Perhaps he was just embarra.s.sed to talk about money.

He drove for a few blocks, making her watch his hand on the stick shift. "Feel how the car is going?" he said. "Now you shift." He shifted. The car jumped a little, hummed, moved into gear. It was an old car and didn't shift too easily, he said. She had been sitting forward, so that when he shifted she rocked back hard against the seat-harder than she needed to. Almost unconsciously, she wanted to show him what a good teacher he was. When her turn came to drive, the car. stalled. "Take it easy," he said. "Ease up on the clutch. Don't just raise your foot off of it like that." She tried it again. "That's it," he said. She looked at him when the car was in third. He sat in the seat, looking out the window. Snow was expected. It was Thursday. Although Larry was going to visit his parents and would not be back until late Friday afternoon, she decided she would wait until Tuesday for her next lesson. If he came home early, he would find out that she was taking lessons, and she didn't want him to know. She asked the boy, whose name was Michael, whether he thought she would forget all he had taught her in the time between lessons. "You'll remember," he said.

When they returned to the old lady's driveway, the car stalled going up the incline. She had trouble shifting. The boy put his hand over hers and kicked the heel of his hand forward. "You'll have to treat this car a little roughly, I'm afraid," he said. That afternoon, after he left, she made spaghetti sauce, chopping little pieces of pepper and onion and mushroom. When the sauce had cooked down, she called Mrs. La.r.s.en and said that she would bring over dinner. She usually ate with the old lady once a week. The old lady often added a pinch of cinnamon to her food, saying that it brought out the flavor better than salt, and that since she was losing her sense of smell, food had to be strongly flavored for her to taste it. Once she had sprinkled cinnamon on a knockwurst. This time, as they ate, Natalie asked the old lady how much she paid the boy to bring the paper.

"I give him a dollar a week," the old lady said.

"Did he set the price, or did you?"

"He set the price. He told me he wouldn't take much because he has to walk this street to get to his apartment anyway."

"He taught me a lot about the car today," Natalie said.

"He's very handsome, isn't he?" the old lady said.

She asked Larry, "How were your parents?"

"Fine," he said. "But I spent almost all the time with Andy. It's almost his birthday, and he's depressed. We went to see Mose Allison."

"I think it stinks that hardly anyone else ever visits Andy," she said.

"He doesn't make it easy. He tells you everything that's on his mind, and there's no way you can pretend that his troubles don't amount to much. You just have to sit there and nod."

She remembered that Andy's room looked like a gymnasium. There were handgrips and weights scattered on the floor. There was even a psychedelic pink hula hoop that he was to put inside his elbow and then move his arm in circles wide enough to make the hoop spin. He couldn't do it. He would lie in bed with the hoop in back of his neck, and holding the sides, lift his neck off the pillow. His arms were barely strong enough to do that, really, but he could raise his neck with no trouble, so he just pretended that his arms pulling the loop were raising it. His parents thought that it was a special exercise that he had mastered.

"What did you do today?" Larry said now.

"I made spaghetti," she said. She had made it the day before, but she thought that since he was mysterious about the time he spent away from her ("in the lab" and "at the gym" became interchangeable), she did not owe him a straight answer. That day she had dropped off the film and then she had sat at the drugstore counter to have a cup of coffee. She bought some cigarettes, though she had not smoked since high school. She smoked one mentholated cigarette and then threw the pack away in a garbage container outside the drugstore. Her mouth still felt cool inside.

He asked if she had planned anything for the weekend.

"No," she said.

"Let's do something you'd like to do. I'm a little ahead of myself in the lab right now."

That night they ate spaghetti and made plans, and the next day they went for a ride in the country, to a factory where wooden toys were made. In the showroom he made a bear marionette shake and twist. She examined a small rocking horse, rhythmically pushing her finger up and down on the back rung of the rocker to make it rock. When they left they took with them a catalogue of toys they could order. She knew that they would never look at the catalogue again. On their way to the museum he stopped to wash the car. Because it was the weekend there were quite a few cars lined up waiting to go in. They were behind a blue Cadillac that seemed to inch forward of its own accord, without a driver. When the Cadillac moved into the washing area, a tiny man hopped out. He stood on tiptoe to reach the coin box to start the washing machine. She doubted if he was five feet tall.

"Look at that poor son of a b.i.t.c.h," he said.

The little man was washing his car.

"If Andy could get out more," Larry said. "If he could get rid of that feeling he has that he's the only freak ... I wonder if it wouldn't do him good to come spend a week with us."

"Are you going to take him in the wheelchair to the lab with you?" she said. "I'm not taking care of Andy all day."

His face changed. "Just for a week was all I meant," he said.

"I'm not doing it," she said. She was thinking of the boy, and of the car. She had almost learned how to drive the car.

"Maybe in the warm weather," she said. "When we could go to the park or something."

He said nothing. The little man was rinsing his car. She sat inside when their turn came. She thought that Larry had no right to ask her to take care of Andy. Water flew out of the hose and battered the car. She thought of Andy, in the woods at night, stepping on the land mine, being blown into the air. She wondered if it threw him in an arc, so he ended up somewhere away from where he had been walking, or if it just blasted him straight up, if he went up the way an umbrella opens. Andy had been a wonderful ice skater. They all envied him his long sweeping turns, with his legs somehow neatly together and his body at the perfect angle. She never saw him have an accident on the ice. Never once. She had known Andy, and they had skated at Parker's pond, for eight years before he was drafted.

The night before, as she and Larry were finishing dinner, he had asked her if she intended to vote for Nixon or McGovern in the election. "McGovern," she said. How could he not have known that? She knew then that they were farther apart than she had thought. She hoped that on Election Day she could drive herself to the polls-not go with him and not walk. She planned not to ask the old lady if she wanted to come along because that would be one vote she could keep Nixon from getting.

At the museum she hesitated by the sculpture but did not point it out to him. He didn't look at it. He gazed to the side, above it, at a Francis Bacon painting. He could have shifted his eyes just a little and seen the sculpture, and her, standing and staring.

After three more lessons she could drive the car. The last two times, which were later in the afternoon than her first lesson, they stopped at the drugstore to get the old lady's paper, to save him from having to make the same trip back on foot. When he came out of the drugstore with the paper, after the final lesson, she asked him if he'd like to have a beer to celebrate.

"Sure," he said.

They walked down the street to a bar that was filled with college students. She wondered if Larry ever came to this bar. He had never said that he did.

She and Michael talked. She asked why he wasn't in high school. He told her that he had quit. He was living with his brother, and his brother was teaching him carpentry, which he had been interested in all along. On his napkin he drew a picture of the cabinets and bookshelves he and his brother had spent the last week constructing and installing in the house of two wealthy old sisters. He drummed the side of his thumb against the edge of the table in time with the music. They each drank beer, from heavy gla.s.s mugs.

"Mrs. La.r.s.en said your husband was in school," the boy said. "What's he studying?"

She looked up, surprised. Michael had never mentioned her husband to her before. "Chemistry," she said.

"I liked chemistry pretty well," he said. "Some of it."

"My husband doesn't know you've been giving me lessons. I'm just going to tell him that I can drive the stick shift, and surprise him."

"Yeah?" the boy said. "What will he think about that?"

"I don't know," she said. "I don't think he'll like it."

"Why?" the boy said.

His question made her remember that he was sixteen. What she had said would never have provoked another question from an adult. The adult would have nodded or said, "I know."

She shrugged. The boy took a long drink of beer. "I thought it was funny that he didn't teach you himself, when Mrs. La.r.s.en told me you were married," he said.

They had discussed her. She wondered why Mrs. La.r.s.en wouldn't have told her that, because the night she ate dinner with her she had talked to Mrs. La.r.s.en about what an extraordinarily patient teacher Michael was. Had Mrs. La.r.s.en told him that Natalie talked about him?

On the way back to the car she remembered the photographs and went back to the drugstore and picked up the prints. As she took money out of her wallet she remembered that today was the day she would have to pay him. She looked around at him, at the front of the store, where he was flipping through magazines. He was tall and he was wearing a very old black jacket. One end of his long thick maroon scarf was hanging down his back.

"What did you take pictures of?" he said when they were back in the car.

"Furniture. My husband wanted pictures of our furniture, in case it was stolen."

"Why?" he said.

"They say if you have proof that you had valuable things, the insurance company won't ha.s.sle you about reimbursing you."

"You have a lot of valuable stuff?" he said. "My husband thinks so," she said.

A block from the driveway she said, "What do I owe you?"

"Four dollars," he said.

"That's nowhere near enough," she said and looked over at him. He had opened the envelope with the pictures in it while she was driving. He was staring at the picture of her legs. "What's this?" he said.

She turned into the driveway and shut off the engine. She looked at the picture. She could not think what to tell him it was. Her hands and heart felt heavy.

"Wow," the boy said. He laughed. "Never mind. Sorry. I'm not looking at any more of them."

He put the pack of pictures back in the envelope and dropped it on the seat between them.

She tried to think what to say, of some way she could turn the pictures into a joke. She wanted to get out of the car and run. She wanted to stay, not to give him the money, so he would sit there with her. She reached into her purse and took out her wallet and removed four one-dollar bills.

"How many years have you been married?" he asked.

"One," she said. She held the money out to him. He said "Thank you" and leaned across the seat and put his right arm over her shoulder and kissed her. She felt his scarf bunched up against their cheeks. She was amazed at how warm his lips were in the cold car.

He moved his head away and said, "I didn't think you'd mind if I did that." She shook her head no. He unlocked the door and got out.

"I could drive you to your brother's apartment," she said. Her voice sounded hollow. She was extremely embarra.s.sed, but she couldn't let him go.