Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

clothes.
    Love is not in the least unavoidable, there is a choice made. It is just that it is hard to know when the choice was made, or when, in spite of seeming frivolous, it became irreversible. There is no clear warning about that. I remember sitting at lunch with you, and when you said, “I loved you. I love you now,” I looked past you at myself in the restaurant mirror, and I felt embarrassed for you. I thought, God knows why, that you were being gallant; I did not take the words seriously, and I thought that in a moment you would look at me and see that you had said this to the wrong person, to a woman who had abandoned the whole posture, the vocabulary, for dealing with such tributes. I had some time before this given up on intrigues, on anxious subplots. I had stopped using a dark rinse on my hair and I no longer put white of egg, or oatmeal-and-honey, or hormone creams, or blush stick, or anything much at all, on my face.
    Then I understood that you meant what you said and it seemed to me more than ever that you must be mistaken.
    “You’re sure you’re not remembering somebody else?”
    “My mind has not deteriorated so much as that.”
    Before this we had talked easily. I asked about your wife.
    “She doesn’t dance any more. She had an operation on her knee.”
    “It must be hard on her not to be active.”
    “She’s busy. She has a store. A bookstore.”
    You asked about Douglas and I told you that we were divorced. I told you the children were away, both away this year for the first time. You told me you had not had any children. I was a little drunk and I even told you how in the last couple of years Douglas talked all the time to himself. I would hide behind the curtains and watch him talkingto himself, and chuckling, making faces of recognition or distaste, while he cut the grass. And what a furiously interested private flow of conversation he would keep up while he was shaving, supposing his voice to be masked by the sound of the electric razor. I told you that I realized, finally, that I did not want to find out what he was saying.
    My plane left at four-thirty. You drove me out of town towards the airport. I was not unhappy at the thought of leaving you and never seeing you again, though I was very happy to be with you in the car. It was November, the day was dark soon after three o’clock, car lights were on.
    “You could take a later plane, you know.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You could come to a hotel with me and phone up and cancel, and get yourself booked onto a later flight.”
    “I don’t know. No, I don’t think I can. I’m too tired.”
    “I am not so strenuous.”
    “No.” We were holding hands all the way, in the car. I freed my hand and made a gesture meaning I was tired of something else—experience?—and easily put it back. I was not sure what I meant myself but expected, rightly, that you would understand.
    We made a turn on to a freeway north of the city. As we came off the access road we faced west. The streaks of sky between the clouds were a fiery pink. The lights of the cars seemed to stream together, mile after mile. It was all like the kind of vision of the world—a fluid, peaceful vision, utterly reassuring—that I used to get when I was drunk. It said to me, why not? It urged me to have faith, to float upon the present, which might stretch out forever. And I was not drunk. I had been drunk at lunch but I was not any more.
    “Why not?”
    “Why not what?”
    “Why not go to a hotel and phone up and get a later flight?”
    “I hoped it might be that,” you said.
    Was that when the choice was made, do you think, when I saw the sky and the car lights? It seemed light-hearted, nothing much. The hotel/motel was built of white blocks. The walls were the same on the inside as the outside, so that the rich-looking curtains and carpets, the heavy imitation-Spanish furniture, seemed to have been set up incongruously, in some temporary, barren sort of shelter. The picture we could see from the bed was of orange boats, dark and orange buildings, reflected in blue-black water. You told me a story of a man you knew who painted exclusively for motels. He painted boats, flamingoes, and brown nudes, nothing else; you said he made a lot of money at it.
    Planes screamed overhead. Sometimes I could not hear what you said, with your face pressed against me. I could not ask you to repeat, I would have felt ridiculous, and anyway such things are usually not