The Risk Pool

explained, motioning to the drawn shades and drapes.
    I did not want to appear stupid, but I couldn’t help blinking. Clearly, Claude’s mother did not consider her remark a non sequitur, but I did. Maybe it was the heat, but I was very close to asking her to experiment by opening the window directly behind me a few inches to see if any pornographic pamphlets flew through with the breeze.
    “Filth,” Claude’s mother repeated. “You should hear what streams in. Both sides. The way they treat each other. The things they say. You know what it makes me want to do?”
    I thought I did, but I said I didn’t.
    “Bathe,” she said, surprising me. “I’d rather swelter than listen to filth. Close the windows,
I
say. Pray for winter. Then at least they have to close
their
windows.”
    In fact, I was hearing noises, but they sounded like they were coming from the rear of the apartment. Another door slammed.
    Mrs. Schwartz started to get up, then sat down again. “Actually, we’re having something of a domestic crisis of our own today,” she admitted.
    I said I was sorry to hear it, that perhaps I shouldn’t have come, a possibility Claude’s mother appeared too abstracted to protest.
    “It’s been suggested that there are other places where I might be content …” Mrs. Schwartz said, though it was clear that she considered this radical notion malicious nonsense, her own recent protestations of discontent notwithstanding. “As if the very bed she’s lying on in there were not my own. Given freely, you understand, I’m no Indian giver. After all, what do
I
need with a king-size?”
    Claudine Schwartz appeared to give the question much consideration.
    “You men,” she continued. “How I envy you. The way you can just pack a suitcase when things go wrong. Walk, as they say. Imagine.” She looked around the dark flat as if for an exit sign. “Do you know what my husband took with him when he abandoned us?”
    I said I didn’t.
    “Nothing,” she said. “Underwear. Socks. A few shirts. His shaving kit.”
    That sounded a lot like my own hasty departure from Tucson, and it made me feel guilty, as if I’d left a girl there, one I hadn’t known about.
    “Do you know what I took from our house on Third Avenue when we moved to this … this … place?” she said, and waited long enough for me to raise my eyebrows. “Everything. I took every living thing. Furniture. Dishes. All of it. Half is in storage. What I kept it all for I couldn’t tell you, I’m sure. But I have it, and I’ll keep it.”
    She nodded, taking inventory of the room, her expression saddening. “We had such nice things, didn’t we? For the longest time I thought after a while he’d remember all our nice things and get lonesome for them. But I guess men don’t.”
    “I doubt he’s very happy,” I said, trying to cheer her up. In fact, I’d occasionally thought of Claude Sr. and wondered what might have become of him. There were two or three scenarios I’d toyed with. In one he was a guilt-ridden, grief-stricken wanderer, tormented by recurring dreams from which he would scream awake. In another he’d changed his name, found himself a long stretch of warm beach, and forgotten all about his previous life. But the one I leaned toward had him managing a small factory in a nearby state, married again, his new wife cheerfully bearing him sons through wide, good-natured hips. Big, slow boys he’d engage in foot races until they were old enough to beat him, or until they despaired and withdrew into defeat.
    I continued to think about him even after Claude’s mother got on to more pleasant topics, until we heard Claude’s hurried feet on the stair and he burst, out of breath, into the room with a huge, hot cardboard box. It was just what we needed. Steam.
    * * *
    Somehow, we got through it.
    I was far too uncomfortable to be hungry, but I ate two slices anyway—no toppings, double cheese—each bite pulling long sheets of swaying mozzarella toward vulnerable chins. In the center of the table was a sweating pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid, which made me wonder whether the Claudes customarily drank Kool-Aid with their meals or if this was a special occasion, a nostalgic gesture designed to remind Claude and me of the good old days when we’d drunk pitchersful on the big redwood picnic table in the backyard of their old house. Maybe it was a matter of money. Claude couldn’t have been getting rich at the post office, and there