Ray sticks out his tongue and makes a noise, sits beside me and puts his arm around my shoulder and shakes me lightly toward him and away from him a couple of times. “Look at that sunshine,” he says. “Finally. I thought the rain would never stop.” He hugs my shoulder and takes his arm away. “It depresses me, too,” he says. “I don’t like what I sound like when I keep saying that nobody cares.” Ray sighs. He reaches for a cigarette. “Nobody cares,” he says. “Two-hour lunch. Four. Five.”
We sit silently. He picks up the book, leafs through. “Pretty,” he says. “You eat already?”
I look behind me at the screen door. Hugo is not here. No sound, either, when the car came up the driveway and the truck left.
“Yes,” I say. “But there’s some cheese in the house. All the usual things. Or you could go to the market.”
“Maybe I will,” he says. “Want anything?”
“Ray,” I say, reaching my hand up. “Don’t go to the market.”
“What?” he says. He sits on his heels and takes my hand. He looks into my face.
“Why don’t you—There’s cheese in the house,” I say.
He looks puzzled. Then he sees the stack of mail on the grass underneath our hands. “Oh,” he says. “Letter from John.” He picks it up, sees that it hasn’t been opened. “O.K.,” he says. “Then I’m perplexed again. Just that he wrote you? That he’s already in Berkeley? Well, he had a bad winter. We all had a bad winter. It’s going to be all right. He hasn’t called? You don’t know if he hooked up with that band?”
I shake my head no.
“I tried to call you yesterday,” he says. “You weren’t home.”
“I went into New York.”
“And?”
“I went out for drinks with some friends. We went to the fireworks.”
“So did I,” Ray says. “Where were you?”
“Seventy-sixth Street.”
“I was at Ninety-eighth. I knew it was crazy to think I might run into you at the fireworks.”
A cardinal flies into the peach tree.
“I did run into Bobby last week,” he says. “Of course, it’s not really running into him at one o’clock at Le Relais.”
“How was Bobby?”
“You haven’t heard from him, either?”
“He called today, but he didn’t say how he was. I guess I didn’t ask.”
“He was O.K. He looked good. You can hardly see the scar above his eyebrow where they took the stitches. I imagine in a few weeks when it fades you won’t notice it at all.”
“You think he’s done with dining in Harlem?”
“Doubt it. It could have happened anywhere, you know. People get mugged all over the place.”
I hear the phone ringing and don’t get up. Ray squeezes my shoulder again. “Well,” he says. “I’m going to bring some food out here.”
“If there’s anything in there that isn’t the way it ought to be, just take care of it, will you?”
“What?” he says.
“I mean—If there’s anything wrong, just fix it.”
He smiles. “Don’t tell me. You painted a room what you thought was a nice pastel color and it came out electric pink. Or the chairs—you didn’t have them reupholstered again, did you?” Ray comes back to where I’m sitting. “Oh, God,” he says. “I was thinking the other night about how you’d had that horrible chintz you bought on Madison Avenue put onto the chairs and when John and I got back here you were afraid to let him into the house. God—that awful striped material. Remember John standing in back of the chair and putting his chin over the back and screaming, ‘I’m innocent!’ Remember him doing that?” Ray’s eyes are about to water, the way they watered because he laughed so hard the day John did that. “That was about a year ago this month,” he says.
I nod yes.
“Well,” Ray says. “Everything’s going to be all right, and I don’t say that just because I want to believe in one nice thing. Bobby thinks the same thing. We agree about this. I keep talking about this, don’t I? I keep coming out to the house, like you’ve cracked up or something. You don’t want to keep hearing my sermons.” Ray opens the screen door. “Anybody can take a trip,” he says.
I stare at him.
“I’m getting lunch,” he says. He is holding the door open with his foot. He moves his foot and goes into the house. The door slams behind him.
“Hey!” he calls out. “Want iced tea or something?”
The phone begins to ring.
“Want me to get it?” he says.
“No. Let it ring.”
“Let it ring?” he hollers.
The cardinal flies out of the peach tree and onto the sweeping branch of a tall fir tree that borders the lawn—so many trees so close together that you can’t see the house on the other side. The bird becomes a speck of red and disappears.
“Hey, pretty lady!” Ray calls. “Where’s your mutt?”
Over the noise of the telephone, I can hear him knocking around in the kitchen. The stuck drawer opening.
“You
I look back at the house. Ray, balancing a tray, opens the door with one hand, and Hugo is beside him—not rushing out, the way he usually does to get through the door, but padding slowly, shaking himself out of sleep. He comes over and lies down next to me, blinking because his eyes are not yet accustomed to the sunlight.
