Pay the Piper (40 page)
Authors: Joan Williams
“You seemed lonely there,” Edward answered.
“I was lonely there.”
“I don't know what I was doing there either. I wasn't really interested in my friends.”
“I was using it as a singles club,” she said.
They agreed they would not talk about their divorces; then, as always happened to divorced people, they began to talk about them. They gave what reasons they could, as vague as some of them sounded. Maybe she shouldn't tell him Hal flat out left her: “An abandoned woman,” her mother called her. But, she thought, Edward wasn't going to invite someone her age out again. She looked down to the city street and around the restaurant and thought, Enjoy.
After she started her story about Hal, Edward interrupted. “Why did you marry him in prison?”
“That's too long to tell now.”
“You rolled the dice.”
“I never thought of it like that. I suppose so.”
“I've been doing that all my life.” Edward lifted a finger and signaled for more drinks. She reminded herself not to drink too much; she had been cutting down, but this was a celebration.
“Maybe Hal's inevitable end is, he'll end up with a woman more evil than he is.”
“That's exactly what happened.” She finished her story.
“He sounds like a sociopath. Someone who doesn't think or feel the way ordinary people do. Someone incapable of guilt. There's a book about them.”
“I think I'll read it.”
Edward ordered wine. “So you didn't enjoy your sojourn in mid-America.”
“I never thought of Delton as that. I suppose now it is. Condos, shopping malls, fast-food chains. Every place is becoming the same. Only the heat makes you know it's the South.”
Then, while they were eating, he said, “I don't plan to get married again. I don't see any reason to at our ages, do you?”
“Not at all,” she lied.
“How were the sales of your last novel?” Edward eventually turned the wine bottle upside down in its bucket.
“What sales? Publishers publish my books because they feel sorry for me.”
“How many copies did you sell?”
“I don't know.”
“You don't read your royalty statements?”
“I open them. But I don't know what they're talking about. There are just a lot of red numbers.”
“Authors I know, today, are vitally interested in how many copies of their books are printed.”
“What difference does it make? They're not going to print more or less copies because I know how many they print.”
“Most writers are pretty business-minded now. They know all about their contract, reprint rights, translations.”
“I'm lucky. I don't have to worry about those things. My agent's never made enough money off me to pay for postage for sending my things out. Maybe I'll write a bestseller.”
“You're never going to write a best-seller.”
“I think you're right. I've just always expected to have a man to take care of me. Now I'm wandering around on alimony.”
“You should try to become independent.”
“I don't want to be independent. I hate it. I've never wanted anything in life but to be married, have children, and lean on some nice man. And I still want to lean on one. Life would have been simpler if nobody had published what I wrote. Why have I messed things up so much?”
“Oh, Laurel, nobody could feel sorry for you.”
“Rats,” Laurel said.
“The women I know don't take alimony.”
“Well, damn you,” she said. Tears sprang up. “What else could I do? I'm going to graduate school.”
“Why are you doing that?”
“I think it's going to help me get a better teaching job. I've gone beyond the number of years you're supposed to finish a Master's in. They gave me a special extension. I get what jobs I can. In Delton, I taught the grammar section of Freshman English. That was terrible. Gerunds, Edward. How was I supposed to remember what they were? Next semester, I'm teaching writing in the adult education division of the local high school.”
They waved away the dessert cart. Edward looked at his watch. “What train are you taking?”
“There's only one more now. At midnight. The last train to Soundport. How does that grab you as a title?”
They collected their coats and headed to the door, while she told Edward she was ready to at least live with someone, even with a man who was only a platonic friend, that she did not much think she'd like living with a woman this late in life.
They came up steps from the restaurant onto the street and Laurel thought, Well, here I am again in Greenwich Village. A gray cat was huddled on the fender of a car, fluffing itself against the weather. She touched its ears, and the cat twittered and bounded away. “Sorry, cat,” she said. She went on through the rain, making an indrawn, soft, sucking sound.
“What am I with, the whistler?” Edward said.
“Oh, sorry. I didn't even realize I was whistling.” As they walked across Washington Square park and along Fifth Avenue, she looked about for a cab. She would take a bus if she had to. Edward was then laughing, and she said, “What are you laughing at?”
“Now you're singing to yourself.”
“I was? I never sing in front of people. I can't carry a tune.”
“I know what that's a sign of. Someone who's lived alone too long.”
She was glad Edward could have this perception, but she must be careful around people. They passed by two young girls who had their arms wound about one another and were kissing deeply. The rain was harder. They stood at a corner and looked hopefully up and down each way for a taxi. Then suddenly Edward put his arms around her and kissed her, his hat brim shading her from the rain. “You don't have to take the last train to Soundport, do you?”
“No. As a matter of fact, my mother worries about me coming home late at night, getting off the train alone.”
“I don't want your mama to worry. I'd be worried about you too, this late. You can stay at my place.”
“All right. Any port in a storm.” She linked her arm into Edward's, hoping to spare his aching knee.
“Sleep in your makeup. You'll look better in the morning.” Laurel spoke to herself in Edward's apartment. She stood with one of his pajama tops over her like a tent, slipping off her bra beneath it.
“Take off your goddamned clothes and let me see you naked,” Edward said.
“I can't. I haven't worked my way up yet to walking around without any clothes on. Anyway, this is like a first date again.”
Edward was leaning against a bureau and singing a rhyming ditty, a ribald song. He stood with no clothes on and had forgotten to take off his hat. Laurel suddenly heard a faint and strange sound. She almost began to look around for it. Then she realized it was the sound of her own laughter, a sound she had not heard in so long. My God, I'm laughing! she said to herself. She thought she was laughing, not only because of Edward but because the time had come. She liked Edward with gray hair. He was cute. But something had passed from her that was never going to come again. She would never again have the ability to fall wildly in love, completely and trustfully and with all her heart. Maybe that was a good thing.
“We had a lot to drink tonight,” Edward said.
“I know. But I refuse to feel guilty.”
When he got into bed, she reminded him about his hat, and he was nearly asleep before she got in beside him. “How late can you stay tomorrow?” He took her hand.
“Late enough.” She covered his hand with her own. She could stay till time to teach her class next week, but she must play this cool, Laurel thought. “I have a busy schedule.”
He began to breathe in a different way, and she knew he was asleep. She turned over into her best sleeping position, her back to him, putting herself close enough to know someone was in bed with her, someone she wanted to be there.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for its support during the writing of this novel.
About the Author
Joan Williams (1928â2004) was an acclaimed author of short stories and novels, including
The Morning and the Evening
, a finalist for the National Book Award, and
The Wintering
, a roman à clef based on her relationship with William Faulkner. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated at Bard College in upstate New York, Williams was greatly influenced by the legacy of her mother's rural Mississippi upbringing and set much of her fiction in that state. Her numerous honors included the John P. Marquand First Novel Award, a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1988 by Joan Williams
Cover design by Angela Goddard
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9468-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
EBOOKS BY JOAN WILLIAMS
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
