same place, with the same hard look around her onyx eyes. Her face and throat were dewy with the heat, and she had faint dark circles just beneath her eyes where her mascara was smudging onto her skin.
“The answer is no,” she said finally, breaking the silence, and there was a certain something in her voice that told him that the question had been neither unexpected nor unreasonable.
But it never occurred to Tommy that she might not be telling the truth. She was that sort of person, black and white, who would not lie about what she had done simply because facts were facts and you had to acknowledge them. “I never would have thought this of you,” he said slowly. He could think of nothing else but clichés, and he drank his beer to stop from talking.
“Thought what of me, Tommy?” she said, raising her hands in the air. “That I would get tired of not fitting in? That I would want to do the things that other people do? I don’t always want to be the strange one. I want to be happy.”
“What’s happy?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said, dropping her hands. “But I know I haven’t been it, whatever it is.”
Oddly enough, he felt happy now, with just the two of them in their own living room, with his stomach full of beer. He remembered how, one evening in the hospital, his father had asked him to play a game of pinochle, beating Tom as he did all his sons. Then he had fallen back into the pillows, his collarbone like a wooden yoke beneath his pajamas, and said, “There’s nothing like a game of cards to make you feel alive.”
Tommy looked at his wife now and he loved her, loved how the veins showed blue around her neck just above the little collar of her shirt, how her hair fuzzed out uncontrollably in the heat, how she had joined him to make a life of their own, however flawed, however constraining. He loved all the little things. He did not want her to be like other people. He would never have loved her if she had been. He thought of her pulling into the driveway with such assumed competence, but with her bottom lip caught between her front teeth as she turned the wheel. He began to cry.
“No, Tom, no,” she whispered, going to kneel in front of him and cradling his head on her shoulder. “No, no, no. It’s all right. It’s all going to be all right.” Tommy started to choke on it, the hot salt, the booze, the grief, the loss of the father he wished he had had, the death of the world he loved.
“I was afraid …” he began, but she didn’t let him finish.
“I know,” Connie said. “I know. But there was nothing to be afraid of.”
Tommy pulled away and looked at her and she smiled, inscrutable and wise. He couldn’t tell her that somehow the driving seemed like a great infidelity all by itself, the separation, the pulling away. There was nothing to be done about that now, and he couldn’t afford to lose her. He realized that she was the closest he would ever get to not being alone. His parents would die, and the children would change and leave, and there the two of them would be, in their living room, perspiring and talking in fragments.
“I love you,” he said, and he started to cry again.
“Yes, honey. Yes, I know.”
“Don’t go away.”
“Where would I go?” Connie said, and she held him for a long time. Slowly, almost in a dream, he began to undress her, there in the living room. It made him remember the first Friday night they had spent in this house, after they had moved from her aunt Rose’s. Maggie and Terence were babies, and they had stayed behind in the Bronx while he and Connie came to arrange the furniture, put away the dishes, make up the bare beds. They had had dinner that night on the floor, on a blanket, with a bottle of Rose’s Chianti for a kind of celebration, and by the time it was dark they were both drunk. They had pushed everything to one side—he could still feel the scratch of the wool blanket on his bare skin—and fell on each other right next to the dirty plates. Connie’s bra had stayed looped around her neck throughout, as if she were a corpse in a Daily News