What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories

once. There were times when I felt like it and had the chance. I tell you, you don't know your mother like I do." I said, "You don't have to say anything in that direction." "I took her her coffee, and she's taken off her coat by now. I sit down on the other end of the sofa from her and we get to talking more personal. She says she's got two kids in Roosevelt grade school, and Larry, he was a driver and was sometimes gone for a week or two. Up to Seattle, or down to L.A., or maybe to Phoenix. Always someplace. She says she met Larry when they were going to high school. Said she was proud of the fact she'd gone all the way through. Well, pretty soon she gives a little laugh at something I'd said. It was a thing that could maybe be taken two ways. Then she asks if I'd heard the one about the traveling shoe-salesman who called on the widow woman. We laughed over that one, and then I told her one a little worse. So then she laughs hard at that and smokes another cigarette. One thing's leading to another, is what's happening, don't you see.
    "Well, I kissed her then. I put her head back on the sofa and I kissed her, and I can feel her tongue out there rushing to get in my mouth. You see what I'm saying? A man can
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    go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore. His luck just goes, you know?
    "But it was all over in no time at all. And afterwards she says, 'You must think I'm a whore or something,' and then she just goes.
    "I was so excited, you know? I fixed up the sofa and turned over the cushions. I folded all the newspapers and even washed the cups we'd used. I cleaned out the coffee pot. All the time what I was thinking about was how I was going to have to face your mother. I was scared.
    "Well, that's how it started. Your mother and I went along the same as usual. But I took to seeing that woman regular."
    The woman down the bar got off her stool. She took some steps toward the center of the floor and commenced to dance. She tossed her head from side to side and snapped her fingers. The bartender stopped doing drinks. The woman raised her arms above her head and moved in a small circle in the middle of the floor. But then she stopped doing it and the bartender went back to work.
    "Did you see that?" my father said.
    But I didn't say anything at all.
    "SO that's the way it went," he said. "Larry has this schedule, and I'd be over there every time I had the chance. I'd tell your mother I was going here or going there."
    He took off his glasses and shut his eyes. "I haven't told this to nobody."
    There was nothing to say to that. I looked out at the field and then at my watch.
    "Listen," he said. "What time does your plane leave? Can
    What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
    you take a different plane? Let me buy us another drink, Les. Order us two more. Ill speed it up. Ill be through with this in a minute. Listen," he said.
    "She kept his picture in the bedroom by the bed. First it bothered me, seeing his picture there and all. But after a while I got used to it. You see how a man gets used to things?" He shook his head. "Hard to believe. Well, it all come to a bad end. You know that. You know all about that."
    "I only know what you tell me," I said.
    "Ill tell you, Les. Ill tell you what's the most important thing involved here. You see, there are things. More important things than your mother leaving me. Now, you listen to this. We were in bed one time. It must have been around lunchtime. We were just laying there talking. I was dozing maybe. It's that funny kind of dreaming dozing, you know. But at the same time, I'm telling myself I better remember that pretty soon I got to get up and go. So it's like this when this car pulls into the driveway and somebody gets out and slams the door.
    " 'My God,' she screams. 'It's Larry!'
    "I must have gone crazy. I seem to remember thinking that if I run out the back door he's going to pin me up against this big fence in the yard and maybe kill me. Sally is making a funny kind of sound. Like she couldn't get her breath. She has her robe on, but it's not closed up, and she's standing in the kitchen shaking her head. All this is happening all at once, you understand. So there I am, almost naked with my clothes in my hand, and Larry is opening the front door. Well, I jump. I just jump right into their picture window, right in there through the glass."
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    "You got away?" I said. "He didn't come after you?"
    My father looked at me as if I were