in high school. Wondering what happened to them, where they went. I was almost in a daze. And Tad’s closet door swung open and . . . I screamed and ran out of the room. I don’t know why . . . except I guess I do. I thought for just a second there that Joan Brady would come out of Tad’s closet, and her head would be gone and there would be blood all over her clothes and she would say, ‘I died in a car crash when I was nineteen coming back from Sammy’s Pizza and I don’t give a damn.’ ”
“Christ, Donna,” Vic said.
“I got scared, that’s all. I got scared when I’d start looking at knickknacks or thinking about taking a pottery course or yoga or something like that. And the only place to run from the future is into the past. So . . . so I started flirting with him.”
She looked down and then suddenly buried her face in her hands. Her words were muffled but still understandable.
“It was fun. It was like being in college again. It was like a dream. A stupid dream. It was like he was white noise. He blotted out that wind sound. The flirting part was fun. The sex . . . it was no good. I had orgasms, but it was no good. I can’t explain why not, except that I still loved you through all of it, and understood that I was running away. . . . ” She looked up at him again, crying now. “He’s running too. He’s made a career of it. He’s a poet . . . at least that’s what he calls himself. I couldn’t make head or tail of the things he showed me. He’s a roadrunner, dreaming he’s still in college and protesting the war in Vietnam. That’s why it was him, I guess. And now I think you know everything I can tell you. An ugly little tale, but mine own.”
“I’d like to beat him up,” Vic said. “If I could make his nose bleed, I guess that would make me feel better.”
She smiled wanly. “He’s gone. Tad and I went for a Dairy Queen after we finished supper and you still weren’t home. There’s a FOR RENT sign in the window of his shop. I told you he was a roadrunner.”
“There was no poetry in that note,” Vic said. He looked at her briefly, then down again. She touched his face and he winced back a little. That hurt more than anything else, hurt more than she would have believed. The guilt and fear came again, in a glassy, crushing wave. But she wasn’t crying any more. She thought there would be no more tears for a very long time. The wound and the attendant shock trauma were too great.
“Vic,” she said. “I’m sorry. You’re hurt and I’m sorry.”
“When did you break it off?”
She told him about the day she had come back and found him there, omitting the fear she’d had that Steve might actually rape her.
“Then the note was his way of getting back at you.”
She brushed hair away from her forehead and nodded. Her face was pale and wan. There were purplish patches of skin under her eyes. “I guess so.”
“Let’s go upstairs,” he said. “It’s late. We’re both tired.”
“Will you make love to me?”
He shook his head slowly. “Not tonight.”
“All right.”
They went to the stairs together. At the foot of them, Donna asked, “So what comes next, Vic?”
He shook his head. “I just don’t know.”
“Do I write ‘I promise never to do it again’ five hundred times on the blackboard and miss recess? Do we get a divorce? Do we never mention it again? What?” She didn’t feel hysterical, only tired, but her voice was rising in a way she didn’t like and hadn’t intended. The shame was the worst, the shame of being found out and seeing how it had punched his face in. And she hated him as well as herself for making her feel so badly ashamed, because she didn’t believe she was responsible for the factors leading up to the final decision—if there really had been a decision.
“We ought to be able to get it together,” he said, but she did not mistake him; he wasn’t talking to her. “This thing—” He looked at her pleadingly. “He was the only one, wasn’t he?”
It was the one unforgivable question, the one he had no right to ask. She left him,