the future

After the event he will have his story and she will have hers. The event Lwill amount to little more than a brief, unwelcome scare. They’re the same people before and after the event, the mother and her twelve-year-old son, her "twelve-year-old." They are still there. They won’t go away. But he will have his story and she will have hers. After all, they never were the same. There they are at the end of the day, at seven-thirty, quarter to eight, when she swung open the front door and he was waiting for her and tonight not on the phone but right there in front of her standing in the entrance to their living room. He was sort of smiling, as if he had seen her coming. He was wearing the pale-orange collarless shirt she’d about decided he didn’t like, and his new, expensive sneakers. He had combed his hair wetly, having apparently taken a shower. Waiting for her there between living room and front hall, he made her think of times she had come home from the office thinking, What if he isn’t there?—aged ten, aged eleven. It was his sneakers that made her think of those times. And she knew now, in the instant before he said, "Can we go out to dinner?" that, getting in ahead of his mother, he was going to say what she was about to say. Her keys in one hand, in the other her shopping bag from the fruit-and-vegetable market, she went and kissed him and seemed to walk around him and into the apartment. "Shall we?" she said. She put the two pink grapefruit and the beautiful bluish-green broccoli and the watercress in the refrigerator and the bananas in the wooden salad bowl on the kitchen table. Had she really been about to say, "Let’s go out to dinner"? She remembered the large, unripe avocado in her leather shoulder bag on the chair, and she removed it and put it with the bananas, laid it within the curve. She had not paid for the avocado.

In the small, narrow restaurant are two rows of tables against either wall. At one end, the kitchen; at the other, the street window, maybe fifteen feet from their table. Tonight she was facing the street.

There was the door to the street, to the vestibule, actually, and between the door and the first table, across the aisle from where she and her son sat, was a nook for the cash register. This was an ornate, old-fashioned thing that, if you looked at it, maybe didn’t go with the fresh, elegant plainness of the place. It was a French restaurant, but it was cheap. A black man who she was sure wasn’t French worked in the kitchen and the owner, a tall, gray-haired, gently tense man who looked as if he had been in another profession for years, did much of the cooking. They served mainly crepes and quiches. The tables were set with green-rimmed butter plates and a flower in a cheap glass vase. All around was a composed look of care and economy. Her son usually faced the street window and she faced the rear of the room, which gave her a view of all the tables. Tonight he put his hand on her elbow as they entered, and she went first; so she was sitting with her back to the kitchen and to most of the restaurant.

She would see her son and herself before and after the event. The event itself will be in question, come and gone along the greater event of their life together, which is also in question, and she will know that she could have predicted this—she had the power, the experience; for a long time she let her power be.

They are quite content together. On several other visits here, they never once found this table occupied; it was their regular table. When she and Davey sat down together here at the end of a long day, she didn’t care about anything, not even—but in a good sense—the questions she asked him about his day, his friends Michael and Alex and the others, homework, the cleaning woman, a thank-you letter he was supposed to write. These questions he answered. Actually, tonight he had been talking since they left the apartment about his weekend arrangements. She always wanted him to tell her what he was feeling when she came home at night. It was important.

The waitress, a young Frenchwoman, who wore a white blouse and a black skirt, brought a glass of white wine and a Coke and the menus. The wine, like a lens, held a pale-saffron transparency, and for a minute it stood untouched between the butter plate and the flower in the vase while Davey drank his Coke and, changing the subject, told his mother about a new record. He had only three dollars left from his allowance. She smiled with skeptical indulgence. She liked reading the menu, which never changed.

Davey had it all planned. He laid out the weekend and she listened. She sipped her wine and thought about a cigarette. He would take his suitcase to school in the morning and he and his friend Alex would be picked up in the car by Alex’s mother. Alex’s father came out by train in the early evening. They were going horseback riding and deep-sea fishing, and Alex’s parents had a tennis court and a pool. The pool was empty until next month. The weekend was a fait accompli, Davey’s mother was going to point out to him, for she had not been consulted.

"I see we’re getting something for the money we’re shelling out on your tuition," she said.

"Yeah, Ann, you’ve got the weekend off," he said.

She liked him. He was surprising. "Yeah, Dave, I’m glad for you," she returned.

"For me?"

"For both of us."

"Are you going out?" he asked.

"Haven’t been asked," she said.

"You poor thing," he said.

"But I don’t need to be," she said.

"But you’ve got stuff to do around the house, right?"

"Don’t I ever surprise you?" she said.

The waitress came, and Davey had what he always had, cannelloni with meat sauce—not exactly French. His mother decided to have marinated celery roots first, and then a vegetable crepe. Davey asked the waitress if they had avocado. The waitress smiled and shook her head. He had developed a taste for avocado.

The waitress came back with the julienned celery roots. Ann tasted some; she held it in her mouth like wine, and her stomach seemed to contract. The taste swelled in three or four distinct waves.

Two couples came in together but sat at separate tables. The place was quiet and private. Davey asked his mother if that stuff was any good. She nodded. He broke off a hunk of bread.

She was feeling O.K., she thought. She let the marinade dilute along her tongue before she drank off her wine.

She told Davey he could have asked her before arranging his weekend. Call them, he said. She certainly would, she said; he would need money for the horseback riding. No, he said, the horses belonged to Alex’s aunt, who was in the hospital with arthritis. You don’t go to the hospital for arthritis, she said, and wondered if that was true. Alex’s aunt had to go, said Davey; she was having an operation. One horse was a palomino.

Davey looked at the bread he was nibbling, and kept an eye on the kitchen. His mother offered him the last forkful of the celery roots, but he pulled in his chin, shaking his head. The waitress paused to see if Ann was through and discreetly crossed to the cash register and wrote something down. She came back and took Ann’s plate.

"So Alex’s aunt has galloping arthritis."

"My God, that’s sick," said Davey, shaking his head and sort of smiling.

"You, my dear," said his mother, "mentioned the operation and the palomino in one casual breath."

"It’s what Alex said."

"It’s what you said."

"Well, ‘galloping arthritis’ is what you said."

"That’s true."

"You just don’t want me to go," her son concluded.

This wasn’t true, but she didn’t say so. For a moment they looked over each other’s shoulders.

The waitress came with Ann’s vegetable crepe and Davey’s cannelloni. She held her tray and with a napkin put Davey’s dish in front of him; it was an ovenproof dish with raised edges. "It’s hot," his mother and the waitress said.

A year of weekends, a future of learning the deep seas and the American trails. A back flip so slow above the blank tiles of an empty April pool that the diver holds virtually still among all his dreams of action within unlimited time, and before he finds the pool below him it has been filled.

She raised her empty glass and caught the waitress’s eye.

‘They have a diving board," said Davey. "I told Alex you were a champion diver."

‘That’s not true, dear," she said, startled.

"Well, you did it in college."

"For a while I did."

"We’re going to a drive-in movie Saturday night," said Davey. "They’ve got a drive-in right near this golf course, Alex said."

She’s already there, but it’s somewhere else, and she imagines a couple passing on an adjacent highway, and the giant heads of the two romantic leads stand high to the left at an angle like that of a door ajar. And she has arranged for this night highway to run in the opposite direction at a speed of fifty-five miles an hour, so that the couple can keep driving and still see their movie from that tall and curious angle all the way to the end.

"If I give you money for the movie, you won’t spend it on that record, will you?" said Ann.

"I was thinking of giving the record to Alex," said Davey. "You know, as a present. I know he wants it."

"Why don’t you give his mother something; she’s picking you up and driving you out there."

"I don’t know what she’d like," said Davey.

Ann did not care any more than he did. They were enjoying the advantage of the menu’s variety, as they would not be able to do at home, where an avocado was slowly ripening and watercress didn’t need to be bought for tomorrow night’s salad. Her hand dropped to feel her shoulder bag hanging from the back of her chair by its strap. She had enough money to fly to Boston and leave Davey in front of the TV set watching the game; the Yankees were on the road in a different time zone. She’d fly to a city that was part Boston, part San Francisco, and fly back before the game was over, as if Davey couldn’t put himself to bed. But, once begun, the picture would not stop, and something stirred in the kitchen of her dark apartment and she heard him get out of bed and go see what it was. She kept forgetting what it was that was in Boston and San Francisco, and she kept falling asleep when she knew he was in the kitchen alone with that sound that didn’t stop. It was the avocado sprouting from its pit—hard to believe but easy to hear—and he was having an educational experience in the middle of the night watching it, but she couldn’t keep awake she was so mad.

"I’ll give you fifteen dollars and that will be your allowance, and you can pay for your movie and you can buy them all ice cream Saturday night," she said.

"O.K., Mom, thanks. How’s your crepe?"

Her vegetable crepe was better than his cannelloni, she was sure.

While she listened to him volunteer a progress report on what was going on in school—what was going on in science—which he almost never did, the avocado pit kept shedding light by means of the tree that grew out of it. She was sure. The light opened up the apartment house and flattened it and spread it out to become something like land, but it was more like time, and time that there was no way any more of measuring. And the answer was that this new variety of avocado could either ripen or at its heart be totally and with unprecedented richness a pit, all pit—hence the tree, hence the light, and the apartment house turning into a land of new time. Picture all that, she thought.

She thought he was being nice to her, telling her what they were doing in science class. Yes, she knew about genes and she had heard of Mendel, but she had forgotten that it was pea plants he studied. It was about inheriting traits, and it was all about dominant and recessive. She thought of chins, she thought of personalities. Davey talked fast, looking over her shoulder, and she told him she thought he had it just slightly mixed up but she couldn’t remember for sure. He said that that was how Mr. Skull had explained it.

Mr. Skull?

Mr. Skull.

She hadn’t heard of Mr. Skull. Maybe they presented it differently now, she said.

Well, according to Mr. Skull, Mendel was a monk and a schoolteacher, and wasn’t known during his own lifetime, and eventually his eyesight started to go; but what mattered was that he took the next step. Nowadays, they knew that Mendel didn’t have the whole truth; there was a lot of stuff he hadn’t gotten up to.

"But you will," she said.

"But it won’t necessarily be true," said Davey, and as his mother reached in her bag for her cigarettes he opened a book of matches that had been lying in the ashtray, but she put her cigarette pack on the table and shook her head.

"True?" she said, remembering words. "Truth is just what two people are willing to agree on."

"It must be more than that," said Davey.

"Nope," she said.

"Who said?"

"Actually, your father. He said that."

"He did?"

"Yes, he did. I can assure you he said that."

She didn’t like her tone. Alone with her son, Ann had gotten used to being very alert, yet she lived also with this single-minded sense of hers that she wasn’t seeing everything. Yet she knew she was a good mother.

She hadn’t seen the door to the small vestibule open. She was mopping the last of the oil off her salad plate with the last crust of their bread. Then she saw the young man in the white doorway. He wore bluejeans and a leather jacket. He paused, she felt, to give a person he’d come to see time to see him. He was looking toward the far end of the restaurant, where the kitchen was—the far end of what was really just a room.

The young man passed their table, and she said, "He didn’t come here to eat."

"How do you know?" said her son. "He probably works here."

"Either he’s the dishwasher or his girlfriend works here," she said.

"Well, he’s talking to the waitress," said her son. "She’s sitting at the last table and he said something to her."

"You see?" she said, observing Davey, and chewing her bread and holding and gently tilting her wine glass. She knew that the man in jeans wasn’t the young French waitress’s boyfriend.

"She’s pointing," said her son, and his mother raised her finger to her lips in case they could hear Davey back there. "He’s going to the phone. There’s a phone on the wall right by the entrance to the kitchen."

"Well, that’s what he came in for," she said. "He’s not the waitress’s boyfriend."

"Isn’t he a little young for her?" said her son.

"I wouldn’t be surprised," she said. The young man had long ginger hair, lank but carefully combed, and eyes like those of some animal so rarely seen that its ordinariness is what is most striking during a brief moment of exposure; his short, light-brown leather jacket looked as if it had traveled, and there was a touch of color about him she didn’t identify at the moment. She looked into her son’s face and was tired for the first time today.

"That was a pretty quick phone call," he said. "That was a quickie."

"Maybe he was calling his girlfriend," she said.

"He just disappeared, if you want to know," said her son. "He must have gone to the bathroom."

"I bet that’s why he really came in here."

"But he asked the waitress for the phone."

"That was what he was thinking of when he first came in."

"Hey," her son remarked, looking toward the far end of the room, "that was quick. He came right out." Davey stared intimately or absently into her eyes, so she knew the man was approaching. She felt the vibrations in her feet and her chair.

As the young man in the leather jacket passed and she smelled a smell she couldn’t quite place, her son looked around over his shoulder and watched the man leave after pausing once more, as if the brass doorknob in his hand had made him remember something.

"Did he get through to the person he was calling?" she asked.

"I don’t think so," said her son, as the waitress came to their table and the man left.

The waitress told them what there was for dessert. The boy turned around in his chair to look at the table by the window, where there were some fruit tarts on two plates. His mother knew he would have mousse. The owner was standing by the cash register, and the waitress excused herself and turned to him. The owner raised his hand and pointed with a finger that seemed to have just pressed a cash-register key, and she went back toward another table. She returned with a twenty-dollar bill and a check.

Music got turned on and off. Ann knew Davey was aware of her mood; otherwise he’d have forgotten their little discussion about the weekend except as part of a general mulling-over that he probably didn’t spell out.

They were going to have chocolate mousse and apricot—no, strawberry—tart. The waitress went to the kitchen, the owner right behind her.

"Alex’s mother swam the English Channel," said Davey.

"She did not," said Ann. "That just isn’t true."

"All but two miles, coming from France; if she’d been swimming the other way, she would have made it."

"Where did you hear that?"

"Alex said so," said Davey.

"Well, I doubt it," his mother remarked.

Behind him, she thought, was her dessert, on a table; behind her was his dessert, in a refrigerator in the kitchen. The two of them might be having the littlest of fights; no outsider would be able to tell. The young man with ginger hair appeared again in the doorway and entered the restaurant.

"Here he is again," said Ann softly, looking Davey in the eye so that he turned around and stared at the man, who looked at Ann, who, when her son turned back and put his elbows on the table facing her, said to him as if she were talking about anything but the young man, "Maybe he’s suddenly developed an interest in the waitress."

"Atom," said Davey softly, embarrassed.

The young man was waiting for something to happen, she was sure, but it wasn’t clear what.

"Can I have a taste of your mousse?" she said.

"If it ever comes," said Davey.

The young man strode past them toward the rear of the restaurant.

"What’s he doing?" said Ann.

"He’s got his hand on the phone and the owner’s telling him not to keep coming in here using the phone."

"How do you know?"

"I can tell."

"Well, what’s he going to do about it?"

"It’s a free country," said Davey. "I’d call the police."

Ann laughed and for a moment found she couldn’t stop—it was all over her face and in spasms in her abdomen. Davey smiled with grudging modesty at his remark, keeping an eye on the far end of the room. Ann started up again and stopped. She drank some water as if she already had the hiccups. "You’re good for a laugh, kid," she said. Her impulse to laugh had passed.

"He’s talking to the waitress," said Davey.

"What is le patron doing?"

"You mean the owner?" said Davey. "He’s talking to the black guy in the kitchen."

"Where is our waitress?"

"She’s talking to the guy who came in. Or he’s talking to her. She smiled. At least, I think she did."

"She what?"

"She doesn’t have my chocolate mousse."

Ann felt the treads coming along the carpeted floor, and the waitress and the young man in bluejeans passed, and the waitress went to the cash register.

"You see?" said Ann, and Davey turned to look. "She is his girl." For the man, who had his back to them, had put his hand lightly on the waitress’s shoulder. The waitress wasn’t doing anything.

"You might just be right," said Davey, glancing back at them and seeing what his mother meant. He shrugged.

"Or his sister, maybe?" said Ann, who turned instinctively to see the owner, at the back of the restaurant, step out of the kitchen.

The ginger-haired man now brought his other hand up and gripped the waitress’s right arm just above the elbow, and she jerked her head around to the right, as if the street door were opening.

"No, I’m wrong," said Ann, and Davey, hearing her voice, turned to look and half rose in his chair as the man standing behind the waitress at the cash register drew her back and pivoted her away from the register and around to face back down the length of the restaurant, as if, breaking the restaurant’s privacy, she were going to announce that there was a call for someone—or no, that there was a fire, no problem, or something had been lost, or the place was being closed down and the money would be refunded. And as he spoke, sharply and low behind her, there was a close moment not of ventriloquism so much as intimate agreement, when his command seemed jointly to be hers: they were about the same height, he was the roughly dressed brother or consort, and the composed life of this pleasing place derived from his behind-the-scenes industry.

His information that they were to go into the bathroom was as clear as the angle Davey’s half-risen body cast in relation to his mother facing him and to the close pair on his right, three or four feet behind him.

She said, "Sit down"—was it that he was trying to be brave?—but the man, having spoken, looked away from the rest of the restaurant at the two of them and particularly at Davey, as if he could do more than speak. Ann felt the chill. And Davey was not sitting down. He had pushed his chair back and was standing up, turned to the waitress and the holdup man.

His mother had, she felt, received for them both the news that they were all going to the rear of the restaurant, into the bathroom, which was the place where you waited out this mandatory drill, which was to see how well it could be done. There must have been words; why they were so low she did not know, but what was happening was clear enough. Davey stepped away from the table and stood contemplating the young man and woman up against each other, the one somewhat hurried and scanning the room, the other rigid, and Ann for a moment didn’t reach for Davey, in case the man did something. The man was saying, Hurry, with his eyes.

In one movement she rose and stepped around the table, hearing others behind her moving—she couldn’t look back quite yet—and she got Davey by the elbow, his arm firm but not muscular, and drew him with her away from the waitress and the man. The man’s hand, his left hand, was definitely up against the waitress’s spine, and his forearm had seemed turned, as if a knife handle was gripped in his palm.

Ann had her leather bag on her shoulder. She was startled not to remember taking it. She had her arm around Davey’s shoulder. The five or six customers ahead of them moving politely, as if there had been a power failure to be patient about, were people she’d hardly noticed when she’d come in. Now, following them, she found them even less real to her—all except a blonde woman in her fifties with a lacquered bouffant—less real to her than they had obscurely been in the privacy of her dinner with her son. Tonight Davey had the view.

She remembered nothing and prophesied little, but she had seen finality in the alert glance the young man had given Davey. It didn’t matter who Davey was—he was a person who happened to be there and then, from out of a field of chances. And a sudden killing in self-defense followed their backs as, the last customers to file to the rear and turn right and crowd into the bathroom, she and Davey were followed in by the owner, who shook his head gently at her and the others and raised his palm—as if any of them were going to do anything.

The little bathroom was unexpectedly long. Davey’s hair was up against her nose and she put her arm around in front of him across his stomach, and she turned to look into the eyes of a short, bald man, who instantly frowned and turned away from her toward the toilet end, where there was a small, half-open window. "Where does that lead to?" he asked importantly, but the owner, whom he did not look back at, continued to shake his head. The bald man said, "Excuse me," and edged between the others and reached around them to the toilet, leaning over it. "Anyone else want to leave your wallet behind the toilet?"

A dark woman in a dark turtleneck sweater, whose shoulder was against a dark man, also in a dark turtleneck, with such firm tightness that you knew if you followed their arms downward you would find them holding hands, said, "What if he wants your wallet—what are you going to give him?"

"I got ten bucks in my pocket," the man said.

"Ten bucks," said the woman. "Are you kidding?"

The waitress had not appeared. The owner was shaking his head, but now to himself. They were close together in the narrow, longish lavatory, yet exposed by the peculiarly high ceiling. Ann didn’t count how many were crowded in here. Davey whispered huskily, so the others heard, "There are ten people in here."

The dark man in the dark turtleneck looked a bit scared. The blonde woman, whose lacquered bouffant seemed to be in the wrong restaurant, had pursed her lips, but she bent around and gave the bald man a kiss that just missed his mouth. The black man at the door turned on the basin faucet and turned it off. The two young men who were at the rear by the toilet and the window had given way for the bald man to stash his wallet. One of them now said, "Are your lunch receipts in that register?"

The owner hesitated. He seemed to have a clear sense of what was outside the room where they were. "There’s always a first time," he said, and his accent gave a poignance to his words. "Well, it’s too bad," said the other young man by the toilet. "It really is." His friend said,"My spinach quiche is getting colder by the minute," and the other said, "Remember Greece— they said you should never eat food piping hot."

Davey leaned the back of his head against his mother’s shoulder and growled softly, "Where’s my mousse?" He said to the owner, "Somebody ought to see what’s happened to the waitress."

The owner opened the door and seemed to hear something and slipped out.

Ann hugged Davey. Her arm came around his stomach. "Did he say, ‘Everyone into the bathroom’?" she asked and she looked down at her bag, its flap covering the top but not fastened down through its leather loop.

"No," Davey said, "he said, ‘Everyone get into the back into the bathroom’—that’s what he said."

"I guess he doesn’t want us," said the woman in the dark turtleneck.

"Beware of pickpockets," growled Davey in his mother’s ear.

A terrific sadness descended upon her. The black man eased himself out the door.

"I don’t think I want my mousse," said Davey.

"We’ll ask for the check," Ann said. She put both hands on Davey’s shoulders. When this is all over, she meant.

"Do you want your strawberry tart?" he asked.

The owner appeared and said the man had gone.

The man who had hidden his wallet asked one of the young men to pass it to him.

The restaurant, when they came out, seemed especially empty, because the waitress was at the far end by the window, sitting beside the pastry desserts, huddled in the chair, and the black man was comforting her. She was quietly hysterical; she was not quite sobbing. She looked as if she were waiting for someone. There were half-empty wineglasses and salad plates with forks across them and chairs pushed back. Someone said, "I wonder if he helped himself."

It had been over so soon that Ann couldn’t think, except that with a pistol the young man could have made them go with him. Or killed someone just like that, so the person wouldn’t be around to go through the mug shots at the local precinct. She didn’t know the address of the local precinct. She didn’t know the address of the local precinct or what number precinct it was.

The waitress sat in the window crying. People were sitting down again. Ann told the owner she would have her coffee later. This sounded as if they were having hot dogs and beans in a diner. The check included the chocolate mousse and the strawberry tart. The owner subtracted the desserts.

The waitress stood up and smiled. Now it was the waitress Ann was paying; the owner was outside in the street. Davey looked up into the waitress’s face. He didn’t say anything.

"Are you all right?" said Ann as the waitress put down on the table the change from a twenty. "Have you ever been in a holdup before?"

The woman shook her head. She had shining blue eyes and rather curly brown hair, and she was tall and had delicate shoulders.

Davey said, "Our money is all that’s in the cash register."

Ann, being a genial, alert parent in the waitress’s presence, said, "Then where did she get the change from?"

"That’s a good question."

"Have you seen him before?" Ann asked the waitress.

The waitress shook her head. "I hardly looked at him."

"I’d never forget him," said Davey.

Ann heard herself say, "He was wearing a turquoise belt buckle."

The waitress excused herself. Ann left two dollars and as they got up to leave, Davey asked what percentage that was.

"Something over fifteen percent."

It was the very same restaurant, except that the owner, like a neighborhood Parisian, was standing out front, looking contemplatively down the street. A cab turned into the street and came very slowly by with a passenger looking out the window.

"Do you think he was dangerous?" Ann asked.

"Mom," said Davey, embarrassed.

"I think so," said the gray-haired man, his eyebrows raised.

"How much did he get?" asked Davey.

The man looked down at Davey and smiled and shook his head, but it didn’t mean he didn’t know.

"Are the police coming?" said Davey.

The owner gestured toward the street. "That’s what they said."

When Ann and Davey said goodnight to the owner, the holdup was all his. At the next corner Ann looked back and he was gone. Some people seemed to be looking at the menu in the window.

"Why did you shush me when I asked if the man was dangerous?" Ann asked.

"Because of course he was dangerous. He had a gun."

"I think it was a knife."

"No, it was definitely a gun. I saw it."

"I don’t see how."

"I was even closer than you."

"But they were still behind you, and when he pulled her out into the aisle his arm, his forearm, was turned around the way it would be if he had a knife handle in his palm."

"I know I saw the metal of a gun."

"I’m sure you’re wrong."

"I saw it."

"You saw something."

They crossed another avenue as the light changed in the middle.

Ann took Davey’s arm. He didn’t crook it at the elbow.

"It’s going to be a good weekend," said Ann.

They walked in silence.

"I got to call Michael and Alex," said Davey.

"You’re going to see Alex tomorrow."

"I’m going to see them both tomorrow. I’ve got to tell them about the holdup."

"Listen, it was real, Davey, it was serious."

"You’re not kidding it was serious," said her son. "We could have gotten killed."

"Well, I doubt that," she said, "but I was afraid he might reach for you, Davey, and he might have if the police had arrived." But it wasn’t delayed-reaction fear that seemed now to be overtaking her.

"How could the police have arrived?" said Davey. "No one called them till after it was all over."

"You know what I mean."

"This was my first holdup. I want to tell Michael and Alex about it, O.K.?"

"We’re not even sure what happened."

"I know what I saw."

"In the bathroom?"

"In the restaurant."

"But before and after the holdup."

"And during."

"But we can’t even agree whether it was a knife or a gun."

"You can’t agree."

"Look, let’s go back and ask the waitress."

"Mom."

"Why don’t we phone them when we get home?"

"That’s fine with me. I don’t know why you don’t want me to phone my friends."

"It was my first holdup, too," she said, taking his hand and squeezing it.

But as soon as they got home she went and ran herself a bath. It was what she should have done in the first place this evening when she came home from work. She was so tired it had to be in her head. She stepped outside the bathroom and closed the door. The water pouring into the tub seemed larger at a distance.

She listened for a moment and went to the bedroom door. She knew Davey; she pictured him. She heard him open the refrigerator, and she was sure she heard the freezer door unstick. She did not hear the refrigerator door close, but she heard a plate rattle in the closet and a kitchen drawer open. He was looking for a spoon. She heard the voice of a baseball commentator come on, and a moment later she heard Davey’s voice, talking fast and excited.

She was sitting in the tub, leaning forward to turn off the water. The door was open a little, so she heard the voices in the living room.

Davey called. She called back that she was in the bathtub.

The voices continued.

Then it was only the baseball commentator’s voice, rising and falling. She let it stay where it was. Somewhere in the silence around that voice, an icepick was being hammered into a stolen, rock-hard avocado. The hot water was almost too hot to dream in. She’d had the money for that avocado but would rather shuttle herself by astral projection to Boston/San Francisco— not that anyone was there any more.

She heard Davey’s voice again; it didn’t sound the same. It sounded as if he were phoning the movies for the times, but the call went on longer.

Then there was only the TV again, then a knock on the bathroom door, which moved, but Davey didn’t come in. "You were wrong," he said. "It was a gun."

"Well what do you know," she said quietly from the still tub.

"No, I’m only kidding, Mom; they wouldn’t tell me."

"You spoke to the waitress?"

"No, he wouldn’t let me, and he said they weren’t discussing the matter."

"O.K.," she said very quietly.

"Hey, don’t go to sleep in there."

She thought she heard steps cross the carpet. In a moment she heard Davey on the phone again. Which friend would he have phoned first? The picture wasn’t clear. He was closer to Michael; their lives had some big similarities, like his father not living with him.

The bath seemed to become deeper and deeper. Her legs came up in a revolving jackknife and she did a two and a half, a three and a half, an unheard-of four and a half, the way she would do slow-motion somersaults underwater at the deep end of a pool in the summer while Davey would hold his nose and do underwater somersaults with her, though he couldn’t really stay down.

She didn’t want to go to sleep in the bath, but she was damn well going to. If she’d taken a bath when she’d gotten home from the office, they would never have had a holdup. They would have had broccoli and melted cheese, and green noodles, with garlic (which Davey now liked). And strawberry ice cream, which he had just been eating anyway.

She might have been asleep when she heard Davey call from the middle distance, "Are you asleep in there, Mom? Are you O.K.?" But she felt she had had her eyes open. She didn’t want to talk about the holdup, didn’t want to think about it. She closed her eyes. The water didn’t have quite the hot fixity it had when she first stepped cautiously in. But it was good to her and she let the questions called to her go unanswered. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t sleeping. She heard Davey come across the carpet, and though she heard the door move, she didn’t think he was looking at her. She felt the water stir subtly about her; she had willed it to move for her benefit. She knew he had gone away. She massaged her dry face, and her knees broke the surface.

She listened for a while. The TV was still on. She heard Davey’s voice, its quality of inquiring esteem for the other person, its habit of waiting humor. For a second she thought of her son’s, any kid’s, inspired account of a brush with violence—And then you know what happened?—and she smelled in her soap, melting somewhere near her leg, a sweeter apricot smell of freesias. (They had tried to charge her six-fifty for a small bunch last week at the supposedly wholesale flower market.) Within the scent of freesias there was a hidden, earlier, heavier vein of sweetness that she now identified as aftershave but didn’t want to think about. For some moments Davey hadn’t been speaking, or not so she could hear, but the TV was still on, so he hadn’t gone to bed. And yet the silence beyond the TV wasn’t quite silence. He would be getting away from all the city noise this weekend. A lot he cared about the noise.

She got herself out of the tub, and against the wash of the bathwater listened again. She ran her arms damply into the sleeves of her terry-cloth robe. She pulled open the door and put her wet foot down on her bedroom carpet.

Have a nice evening, lady, the flower man had said. Have a nice life, he said. The pale-apricot-colored freesias were doing pretty well on her bureau. The man had let her have them for six dollars.

Halfway to the door leading to the living room, she was on the point of calling to Davey that it was time for bed, when she heard his voice. "I don’t know whether I can," he was saying, and then there was a pause. "Maybe I’ll ask her." Then, "I will ask her; I definitely will." Then, "She’s O.K." Then, "Fifteen dollars, including my allowance." Then, "Yeah, I love you too." Ann knew the voice at the other end of the line without hearing it; but she owed Davey his privacy even after he said goodbye and hung up. The commercial between innings ended, and the deep-voiced, happy commentator was back on.

She stood in the living-room doorway. Davey was sitting over near the entrance to the front hall beside the phone. He could see the game only at the narrowest angle; he could hardly see the screen. The light gave her back herself naked on a rug and not alone and feeling upon her curved body the lunar radiance of the TV preserving her love.

Ann went to the set and turned it off. "Time for bed," she said. Davey just sat there by the phone. They had divided the evening between them.

She had to give them both a break, so she said, "You didn’t need to call collect." They both knew what she meant.

"How did you know I called collect?" Davey asked.

"I’ve known for a long time, but you really don’t have to."

"Thanks," he said, and stayed where he was, still dressed for the restaurant.

She didn’t tell him not to thank her. "You’re welcome," she said.

"So are you," he said.

"So are you," she said.