One or Two Steps Behind

It was a gift for the impossibly beautiful young woman.

It was a kitten of some, he was told, rare and desirable breed. It had cost him over $200.

He planned to take it to her in the evening when the office closed.

The girl had been his lover over the last month. They had made love in her shared flat and in his hotel room.

Each time he woke up next to her he thought her the most lovely thing he'd ever seen, and he never ceased feeling the gap between them was unbridgeable, and never could determine the source of the feeling or judge its truth.

She'd come once to his hotel room exuding winter: Her coat breathed cold, her face was cherry red over the cheekbones and her hair was brittle after the half-hour walk down to him.

She was a Norse goddess in a shearling coat. Masses of her heavy, honey-blonde hair hung outside the coat as she stood in the doorway of the hotel room, and he saw she was angry and indignant.

"What's the matter?" he said.

"Everyone's looking at me," she said.

Well, of course they are, he thought. And I am looking at you.

But I cannot love you. And I wonder why.

He wondered again later. When they broke up, at her instigation, and she'd said, "I'm sorry we weren't everything to each other that I'd hoped we would be."

One night she had said, "You are a lazy lover," when he'd refused to come out to her, to quit his warm hotel. And she had come down to him, in that ammoniac cold, and all her skin was cold, the first minutes in bed, with that blunt Chicago cold.

It didn't get in your bones, it seemed it was your bones, and your life become the smells of winter: the dull heat on the buses, the stink of piss in the warming sheds on the IC platforms, the iron of the old steam radiators and, always, the back-of-the-nostrils ice pick of that lake cold, North Side cold.

Well, she was a Northern girl--a Nordic beauty--tall, broad at the shoulders, long thighs, a hard gaze and perfect features. A beautiful woman, finally, and nothing like a girl about her except her age.

What a phrase, he thought, that we had not been everything to each other I hoped we would be. So direct, he thought, so of another-culture, so pure, finally.

Much purer than I am, or than I could ever be.

The little kitten was boxed in a thick cardboard contrivance, a carrying case from the pet shop.

They had cautioned him repeatedly about the cold, and he had pledged to speed the cat from the store to the office, and from the office to her flat. He would not take the bus, he'd call a cab at the end of the day. It would be expensive, the long trip thorough the slush down to her neighborhood. But he'd paid the $200 for the pet, and that would put the $15 cab ride in perspective, he thought--as if it were (concluded on page 257) One or Two Steps Behind(continued from page 187) someone else who'd have to pay for it.

Who would have thought any pet could be so expensive?

At the end of the day the cab came. He bundled the cat-in-the-box in his muffler and into the cab, and the cab crawled southward, slowly southward, the box on his lap.

The cabdriver was silent. The early night--you couldn't call it evening--shut down cold and final. He was going to the beauty whom he did not love, with a gift to propitiate her after no quarrel or outward break but the assurance that she, as he, knew that it did not work.

He gave the cat to her. He marveled at her ability, her honesty, it seemed to him--at their ability to face the issue.

She looked at the gift and looked at him.

"Thank you," she said. "I'm sorry that we were not everything to each other that I'd hoped we'd be." At that instant he almost regretted and was sorry and a bit frightened that he could not regret the break.

He left her with the cat. Afraid, in the last moments, that she would return it to him--he didn't want the thing, he couldn't live with it at the hotel, and he did not want to attempt to ask the store to take it back and meet, he was sure, their refusal to do so.

He was comforted by the penance of the gift's expense. Well, he thought, that's something. . . .

He nodded at her, and, as there seemed nothing more to say, he left.

•

Years later, in New York, he saw her again.

He had been married to a woman he did not love, and had, since the first moments of marriage, been "making it work."

He'd gone for a walk to get out of the house, and on his walk he saw her.

She came over to him and smiled. She lived, it seemed, right in the neighborhood. She asked him to come up to her flat for a cup of tea.

He said he heard she had a fellow; were they still together?

"Yes," she said. "Now he's out of town."

It was a small bright apartment, looking down the avenue; so neat and pleasant. Naturally resembling her room in the other flat.

Simple and spare and clean. Like her.

She said, as it was Sunday, would he like a drink? She thought she'd make a daiquiri; would he prefer that to tea?

All right, he said, and she made daiquiris. She said, of her man, that they were not getting along so well these days, and she made some reference--he could never, as he thought back, recollect exactly what--to the man's shortcomings as a lover.

No, he was away, she said.

She asked after him. "I heard you were married," she said.

"Yes."

He drank the drink and felt mature and self-directed--two adults, accountable only to their senses of the fitting, having the unusual daylight drink. They drank the pitcher of drinks and then another.

"This is a beautiful apartment," he said.

"Yes. I like the light. Do you know why, though," she said, "the people across the way--can you see, where the shade is up? Most mornings, almost every morning, they're in there, he is in there, and making love. Almost every morning."

He looked out across the narrow street to the window that she seemed to indicate.

"Making love," she said. And they had another drink.

After a while he looked at his watch.

"Well," he said. "Well, I suppose. . . ."

They talked a short while more, and she made some reference to their affair. He left feeling adult and pleased with himself, and somewhat sorry for his friend, who had, it seemed, an unhappy time with her lover.

Such a lovely woman, he thought. Never saw a lovelier.

And he went back to his wife.

•

Years later, once again in Chicago, he was being bright and jovial at some dinner of friends, trading jokes, warm and familiar at some restaurant--in for the evening, out of the cold.

One joke prompted another and he was reminded of the old man and the way he'd broken his hip.

"Well," the old man said, "I was on the library ladder, and some book must have made me think back to my first trip to France. I was just a boy. There I was, in the hotel. And this pretty young chambermaid came in. A lovely little thing, and turned down the bed, and asked me was there anything else she could do. And I said, 'Thank you, no.'

"Well, she dusted and fussed, and asked was there anything else that I'd want. And I said no.

"And she plumped up the pillows and asked was I sure that there was nothing else she could do for me, and I said, 'Thank you, no.' And she left.

"Then," the old man said, "there I was on the ladder, and it finally dawned on me what she had been talking about the whole time, and I fell off and broke my hip."