Five Stories Read online

wrapped it in a salami slice.

  “Mark,” the red-haired woman said. “Mark, you've changed many ways, but you still wrap your peppers in salami.”

  Mark turned and looked at the woman. He felt a surge of fear in his knees, causing them to tremble. He was glad he was sitting. He cleared his throat to keep it from trembling.

  “Anna,” was all he managed to say. His throat would not emit any other words.

  “Yes, Mark, it's me.”

  He took a deep breath. “I don't know what to say, Anna,” he got out.

  “Do you want me to leave you alone?” Anna's voice was flat, as if she were carefully being neutral. It was an old habit of hers when she very much wanted a specific outcome to make her voice as neutral as a robot's. He remembered it with bitterness; she had often used it to trap him. He chewed on the salami-wrapped pepper to cover his confusion.

  “I don't know what to say to that, either; I didn't want you to leave me alone when you left the last time I saw you, but I've gotten used to being without you. It's been a long time. It's been ten years.” Mark kept his tone as flat as he could.

  “If I'm bothering you, I'll ask for another table.” He turned and looked at her.

  “No. Stay. I'm just shocked to see you. I didn't ever think I'd see you again. I've buried a lot of old feelings. Seeing you stirred them up for a moment.”

  “I was surprised to see you, too.”

  “I came here tonight to remember a friend I lost recently. He and I used to meet here for dinner on Friday nights a lot. My mind was on him.”

  “I'm sorry I intruded. I lost someone close to me, recently.”

  “Oh.” Mark wrapped another slice of salami around another pepper. He was racing through a list of things to say, and discarding them; she spoke first.

  “I'm just in the City on business. I live in the Islands, now.” She sounded tentative, as if she were uncertain he would be willing to continue the conversation. He was still turned in her direction, staring down at his salami-wrapped pepper.

  “I live on the East side,” he said, to make conversation, “in a house too big for me, with a large yard to keep me occupied.”

  “You still garden, then?”

  “Yes. Things grow well on the East side. More sun, away from the Bay.” Verna brought Mark his spaghetti. Mark studiously wrapped the strands of his spaghetti around his fork. He ate several mouthfuls.

  “What do you do in the Islands?” Mark asked her.

  “I work for a coffee plantation. I manage their offices and watch over the accounting.”

  “Is it something you enjoy?”

  “It's okay, the pay's okay, for the Islands. I like it there. I've had a good life there.”

  “I've had a good life, too.” Mark heard that his sentence might sound as if he were measuring his success against hers. He decided that he wasn't, and it didn't matter how he sounded. “I work for the phone company. I operate their computer division. It's interesting work, and the pay is good.”

  Anna smiled a secretive sort of smile. Rather like the Mona Lisa contemplating sado-masochism, Mark had once described it to himself. Now he recognized it, from this decade of distance, as simply a rueful look inward. Anna dipped her fork into the small bowl of three bean salad on her antipasto plate.

  “All these years, if I thought about you, I thought you had gone back to preaching.” She raised her fork and lowered it. Mark was acutely conscious of her gestures. Half-remembered caresses tingled on his spine, half-remembered conversations rang in his memory. Hastily he took a swallow of Zinfandel and twirled more spaghetti onto his fork.

  “I don't know why,” she said. “It just seemed likely, somehow.”

  “I didn't feel right, after I thought it all through, going back to preaching as a divorced man. I guess I'm old-fashioned, in some ways. Maybe it's because I could make double the money or even triple the money with computers. And, I was tired of taking care of people. Machines are fascinating for me. Maybe it was because everything else had changed and I was ready to start everything over.” Mark said this more to the tablecloth than to Anna. Verna brought Anna her veal.

  “Funny how you change and don't change,” she said. “I don't remember your ever thinking so much about money. It was always something else or somebody else first. Some impractical something, usually. And yet you're too old-fashioned to go back to preaching as a divorced man. You still wrap your peppers in the salami.” Her voice shook a little. Mark suspected that something, maybe the peppers in the salami, had triggered a similar reaction in her that her gestures had triggered in him.

  “I'm not sure I'd have recognized you, with your beard and your haircut, if you hadn't wrapped your peppers.” She was carefully cutting her veal. Mark began to eat his spaghetti steadily. The silence went on for a while.

  “Did you ever marry?” The intimacy of the question startled him.

  “No,” he said quietly. “Once was enough.” He looked at her. “I don't mean to be vicious. I simply discovered I like singleness better than marriage.”

  “I remarried. Odd, isn't it, that you were the one who wanted to stay married, and I was the one who couldn't wait to be free.” She shook a drop of cheese sauce from her fork. Mark finished his glass of Zinfandel and poured the second.

  “I was married again, a week after the decree was final.” She smiled a weak smile. He wondered if she expected him to be surprised.

  “I married Gary. I insisted on it. Two years later he left me for a young man that took his fancy. He left me with a child. By then I was involved with Steve, myself. Steve was my husband until a few days ago.” Mark could tell she was on the point of open weeping.

  “I know it must sound sordid, or something. I was pretty disorganized for a couple of years. Steve brought me out of it.”

  “You said you'd lost someone close, recently. Was it Steve?” Mark said as sympathetically as he could.

  “Don't sound so damned pastoral! I don't want grief counseling!” Another troublesome bitterness between them. She had always disliked his way of being sympathetic.

  “I apologize for the intrusion. Excuse me.” Mark's face was stiff; he could feel the wall he built with his cheek muscles and mentally berated himself for it. Anna had taken a handkerchief from her pocket and was dabbing at her eyes.

  “You always were too damned polite.” She put the handkerchief back in her purse. “Yes. Steve died a couple of weeks ago. I flew over to settle up some business affairs he hadn't had time to take care of.”

  Verna came and offered them dessert. They both declined. Verna left their checks. Anna began to gather her coat and purse. Mark picked up his coat.

  “Can I--” Mark began to say.

  “I'll pay my own check!” Anna said angrily.

  “I was about to offer to stand with you while you waited for a cab; I wasn't going to offer to pay your check.” Mark was angry, too, and let it sound in his voice. She looked closely at him.

  “Sometimes I have trouble recognizing kindness. Steve told me that more than once.” She held her arm for him to take. “Can the lady buy you a drink?”

  Mark grinned at her. “I'd be delighted. But just one, though; mustn't overdo. The ladies of the parish might be upset if the preacher's drunk.” It was an old joke between them, one they had never played in a public place before.

  “Fancy your remembering that!” She took his arm and squeezed it gently. He felt a tremor in his arm.

  “I remember some good things.” She took her hand from his arm to reach in her purse. She took out money and paid for her meal.

  “You said you were here to remember a friend,” she said as he took out his credit card. “A close friend?” Mark signed the slip Verna put in front of him and bid her goodbye.

  “Yes,” he said, looking into a distance that was beyond the room. “Jay and I came here just about once a month. We even lived in the same apar
tment for a while. He was the closest friend I had.” They went into the bar. There was no one on the stools. She ordered white wine, and he ordered Scotch and soda.

  “Steve was good to me,” she said, “very patient with me, and very good to Maria, my daughter.” Mark could hear the tears in her voice, trembling on the edge. She was staring into her glass, seeing what Mark could not guess. He stared into his own.

  “It's the loneliest thing that ever happened to me,” he said, “losing someone who's the most important person in my life. Jay came along, and filled a lot of the emptiness I had. He even filled some hollows I didn't know I had, like my lack of business sense. He was somebody I shared my gloomiest thoughts with, and my happiest. He shared his gloom and good times with me. I miss him.” Mark swallowed some of his drink. The soda rasped at the tightness in his throat.

  “I thought I was immune all my life from that kind of loss. I chose to leave you, and I was relieved when Gary left; he was just an excuse, a way out. God! How I needed to get out! Get away from you and all those old women with the endless gory details about their operations and their fifty year old scandals!” Her hands were