Chapter 6

The operator waited. Collect was the expensive way to call, and for a second I actually thought about that.

"I'll accept," I said.

There was a click and a long hum, and then my wife, breathing, for the first time in nine months.

"I didn't think you'd take it," she said.

"You're costing me a dollar ninety."

"I know. I wanted to see if you'd pay."

It was past midnight in New York. I asked how she was. She said the super had finally fixed the radiator, and then she said, in the same voice, that Spencer had quit calling in October.

"He was very nice about it. Flowers came. Miss Tuttle has lovely taste."

I laughed, God help me, and so did she.

That was the trouble with Joanna. She was still the funniest person I knew.

She called on Sundays after that, all through December, collect, and I accepted every one.

We talked about nothing, her mother, the super, whether I was eating. I started turning down Sunday plans I didn't have.

On the twenty-sixth of January, a Friday, she came herself.

A year to the day. Neither of us ever said so.

Lois had gone home. It was clear out and ten above, and I knew the step on the stairs before I saw the coat.

It was bottle green. She was twenty-seven now, with her long chestnut hair down over the collar and her face rosy from the cold, and the boy from the candle shop had carried up her overnight bag and stood there holding it until she took it away from him.

We both looked at that bag.

She looked at the two rooms, the hot plate and the folding chair.

"It smells like a church that's given up," she said.

She opened her purse and laid a pack of Luckies on my drafting table. It had gone soft at the corners.

"You left these. There are eleven. I counted them. I don't know why you'd count a thing like that."

I didn't touch it.

She sat down in the client chair and crossed her ankles, and I saw what was coming, because she'd learned how to do this from the two best men in the business.

It was a pitch.

"The review's March seventh. Everybody knows. So I come to Peoria. I walk into that boardroom in this coat, in front of the old man and his board and Meredith Talbot, and I tell them what I did and who with and where you were standing. I'm a witness too. You wouldn't have to say a word, Russ. You'd sit there with your hands folded. Your rule stays clean."

"Who says I've got a rule?"

"Nobody says. That's how I know. It's been a year, and nobody says."

She leaned forward.

"He's finished by Friday, you've got fourteen million dollars' worth of soap, and I give up the lease on Seventy-fourth Street. I'd be a scandal for about a month. Then I'd be your wife."

The radiator knocked.

I want it understood how much I wanted that. I'd have paid the two million a year just to have her go on sitting in that chair. Nobody had finished a sentence for me in a year.

"No," I said.

"You'll want to think about it."

"I've thought about it. Every night around eleven."

"Then tell me why. To my face. You owe me the-"

"The reason," I said.

I'd gotten up and gone to the window. I made myself turn around.

"I want him beaten by a bar of soap. I want him across a table from me, losing to the plainest thing in the world and knowing that's what he lost to. If you stand up in that room, he didn't lose. He got caught. He'd dine out on that till he's ninety."

"That's the headline," Joanna said. "What's the copy?"

She always could do that.

"You're here because the phone stopped," I said. "If he called you tonight, I don't know that you'd be in that chair."

It had taken her a year, but she looked right at me.

"I don't either," she said.

She picked up her gloves and studied them.

"You never asked me why. Do you know that? A whole year, and you asked me if I was coming to Chicago."

I knew that.

"I was at the dentist on Seventy-ninth Street in October, with a magazine, the week after he stopped calling. And there was my kitchen floor. I sat there with a bib on and my mouth open, reading myself." She smoothed one glove. "That was the fifth one I'd found. My aunt's funeral was a life insurance ad. You want to know what Spencer did? It wasn't much. He was the first man in two years who asked me a question and didn't write down the answer."

The bayberry was very strong that night.

"You never used it. Fine. You used everything else. You used my knees, Russ."

I had a matchbook in my shirt pocket. I kept both hands on the windowsill, and I want credit for that.

I wrote it down that night.

She carried the overnight bag down herself. I drove her to O'Hare in a used Falcon with no heater, and neither of us was funny.

At the gate she looked at my neck. She took hold of both ends of that terrible scarf from Sheboygan and tucked them into my coat, the way she used to.

"I told him to tell you that," she said. "I meant it."

She went down the ramp in the green coat and she didn't look back. I hadn't expected her to.

I stood at the big window with my hands in my pockets. The night was clear and black, and every light on the field was as sharp as a pin.

For the only time in my life, I stood in an airport and prayed for snow.

The board clicked over.

The nine-forty left at nine-forty.