The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [109]
She shrugged. “Bradley doesn’t like a lot of people around,” she said.
“Bradley likes you, and if she’s your friend I don’t think he’d mind.”
She looked at me with an expression I didn’t recognize; perhaps she thought I was a little dumb, or perhaps she was just curious to see if I would go on. I didn’t know how to go on. Like an adult, she gave a little shrug and changed the subject.
At ten o’clock Milo pulls into the driveway and honks his horn, which makes a noise like a bleating sheep. He knows the noise the horn makes is funny, and he means to amuse us. There was a time just after the divorce when he and Bradley would come here and get out of the car and stand around silently, waiting for her. She knew that she had to watch for them, because Milo wouldn’t come to the door. We were both bitter then, but I got over it. I still don’t think Milo would have come into the house again, though, if Bradley hadn’t thought it was a good idea. The third time Milo came to pick her up after he’d left home, I went out to invite them in, but Milo said nothing. He was standing there with his arms at his sides like a wooden soldier, and his eyes were as dead to me as if they’d been painted on. It was Bradley whom I reasoned with. “Louise is over at Sarah’s right now, and it’ll make her feel more comfortable if we’re all together when she comes in,” I said to him, and Bradley turned to Milo and said, “Hey, that’s right. Why don’t we go in for a quick cup of coffee?” I looked into the back seat of the car and saw his red Thermos there; Louise had told me about it. Bradley meant that they should come in and sit down. He was giving me even more than I’d asked for.
It would be an understatement to say that I disliked Bradley at first. I was actually afraid of him, afraid even after I saw him, though he was slender, and more nervous than I, and spoke quietly. The second time I saw him, I persuaded myself that he was just a stereotype, but someone who certainly seemed harmless enough. By the third time, I had enough courage to suggest that they come into the house. It was embarrassing for all of us, sitting around the table—the same table where Milo and I had eaten our meals for the years we were married. Before he left, Milo had shouted at me that the house was a farce, that my playing the happy suburban housewife was a farce, that it was unconscionable of me to let things drag on, that I would probably kiss him and say, “How was your day, sweetheart?” and that he should bring home flowers and the evening paper. “Maybe I would!” I screamed back. “Maybe it would be nice to do that, even if we were pretending, instead of you coming home drunk and not caring what had happened to me or to Louise all day.” He was holding on to the edge of the kitchen table, the way you’d hold on to the horse’s reins in a runaway carriage. “I care about Louise,” he said finally. That was the most horrible moment. Until then, until he said it that way, I had thought that he was going through something horrible—certainly something was terribly wrong—but that, in his way, he loved me after all. “You don’t love me?” I had whispered at once. It took us both aback. It was an innocent and pathetic question, and it made him come and put his arms around me in the last hug he ever gave me. “I’m sorry for you,” he said, “and I’m sorry for marrying you and causing this, but you know who I love. I told you who I love.” “But you were kidding,” I said. “You didn’t mean it. You were kidding.”
When Bradley sat at the table that first day, I tried to be polite and not look at him much. I had gotten it through my head that Milo was crazy, and I guess I was expecting Bradley to be a horrible parody—Craig Russell doing Marilyn Monroe. Bradley did not spoon sugar into Milo’s coffee.