“Mrs. Barber?” says his secretary. There is a question in her voice, and Matthew focuses on that detail. She’s new, and she has never had any contact with Liz. Matthew can imagine her disbelief when the woman on the phone claimed to be his wife, a wife she never knew existed.
“The former Mrs. Barber,” he says, in just the way he would have corrected any other small error, the mispronunciation of the name of a colleague, for example. “I’ll speak to her.”
“Hello, Matthew.”
Suddenly he shifts to the big picture. It’s Liz! Liz is calling him! She must be miserable without him! She must want to get together to see if she can’t talk him into forgiving her for not understanding her own heart! He breaks out in a smile. “Hello, Liz,” he says. He hopes that she can’t tell from his voice that he’s smiling.
“How are you, Matthew?” She sounds lighthearted, relaxed, pleasant, not the way he would expect her to sound if she were going to beg him to take her back. He goes on the alert for any sign that she’s teasing him or wants something from him.
“I’m all right,” he says. “How are you?”
“Oh, okay,” she says. “I’m in town.”
“You are?” He would like to ask her if she’d like to get together. They could have a drink. They might even have dinner. Matthew would be happy to see her, quite happy. He finds it easy to admit this to himself but couldn’t begin to admit it to her. He lets the silence hang for a moment.
“Just for some shopping,” she says. “And a check-up.”
A check-up? he thinks. Cancer. Oh, my God, cancer. A mastectomy. A hysterectomy. Death. “Everything all right?”
“Sure.”
“Sure?” Does she mean it? Or is she hiding something? He’s terrified for her at once. His heart accelerates, his tongue tastes of metal, and that reminds him of the time, one fall, years ago now, when she fell in the bathroom. She was wearing panty hose for the first time since the previous spring, she wasn’t used to the slipperiness of them, and she slipped on the tile floor. When he heard her fall and she cried out, he was so afraid for her that he began to sweat and shake, and all the time he was tending to her, cradling her in his arms, she couldn’t stop laughing at her clumsiness, exclaiming h ow funny she must have looked when her feet whooshed out from under her and repeating, “Well, it’s fall, so I fell,” but he was crying from terror and relief, and he had had the same metallic taste of fear in his mouth that he has now.
“Yes, sure,” Liz says. “Look, um, how would you like to have dinner with me?”
“I’d — ” He almost says what is true, that he’d love to have dinner with her, but he catches himself and puts some distance in his voice, trying to make himself sound as if he were speaking to a pal, the way he would have spoken to Belinda before he began having sex with her on the living room floor. “I’d be delighted to have dinner with you. Where would you like to go?”
“How about the Black Hole?”
“Sure! The Black Hole it is. Do you want to have a drink somewhere first?”
“I’m meeting someone.”
“Oh,” he says. Was she smiling when she said that? What does she mean, exactly? Who is she meeting? Should I ask? No. You’re indifferent, he tells himself. You’re a pillar of indifference. “Why don’t we just meet there, then?”
“Okay. Seven?”
“Good.”
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 483, Mark Dorset considers Name, What’s in a: “Black Hole” from this episode.
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🎧 483: “Mrs. Barber?”