Who Do You Think You Are

orchestra. She would have to convince policemen and doctors, be written about in the newspapers. Oh, where was Clifford, why had he abandoned her, could there have been an accident on the road? She thought she should destroy the piece of paper in her purse, on which she had written his instructions. She thought that she had better get rid of her diaphragm as well.
    She was going through her purse when a van parked outside. She thought it must be a police van; she thought the old men must have phoned up and reported her as a suspicious character.
    Clifford got out and came running up the sunporch steps. It took her a moment to recognize him.
    T HEY HAD BEER and hamburgers in one of the hotels, a different hotel from the one where the orchestra was staying. Rose’s hands were shaking so that she slopped the beer. There had been a rehearsal he hadn’t counted on, Clifford said. Then he had been about half an hour looking for the bus depot.
    “I guess it wasn’t such a bright idea, the bus depot.”
    Her hand was lying on the table. He wiped the beer off with a napkin, then put his own hand over hers. She thought of this often, afterwards.
    “We better get you checked in here.”
    “Don’t we check in together?”
    “Better if it’s just you.”
    “Ever since I got here,” Rose said, “it has been so peculiar. It has been so sinister. I felt everybody knew.”
    She started telling him, in what she hoped was an entertaining way, about the limousine driver, the other passengers, the old men in the Loggers’ Home. “It was such a relief when you showed up, such a terrible relief. That’s why I’m shaking.” She told him about her plan to fake amnesia and the realization that she had better throw her diaphragm away. He laughed, but without delight, she thought. It seemed to her that when she spoke of the diaphragm his lips tightened, in reproof or distaste.
    “But it’s lovely now,” she said hastily. This was the longest conversation they had ever had, face to face.
    “It was just your guilt-feelings,” he said. “Which are natural.”
    He stroked her hand. She tried to rub her finger on his pulse, as they used to do. He let go. Half an hour later, she was saying, “Is it all right if I still go to the concert?”
    “Do you still want to?”
    “What else is there to do?”
    She shrugged as she said this. Her eyelids were lowered, her lips full and brooding. She was doing some sort of imitation, of Barbara Stanwyck perhaps, in similar circumstances. She didn’t intend to do an imitation, of course. She was trying to find some way to be so enticing, so aloof and enticing, that she would make him change his mind.
    “The thing is, I have to get the van back. I have to pick up the other guys.”
    “I can walk. Tell me where it is.”
    “Uphill from here, I’m afraid.”
    “That won’t hurt me.”
    “Rose. It’s much better this way, Rose. It really is.”
    “If you say so.” She couldn’t manage another shrug. She still thought there must be some way to turn things around and start again. Start again; set right whatever she had said or done wrong; make none of this true. She had already made the mistake of asking what she had said or done wrong and he had said, nothing. Nothing. She had nothing to do with it, he said. It was being away from home for a month that had made him see everything differently. Jocelyn. The children. The damage.
    “It’s only mischief,” he said.
    He had got his hair cut shorter than she had ever seen it. His tan had faded. Indeed, indeed, he looked as if he had shed a skin, and it was the skin that had hankered after hers. He was again the pale, and rather irritable, but dutiful, young husband she had observed paying visits to Jocelyn in the maternity ward.
    “What is?”
    “What we’re doing. It’s not some big necessary thing. It’s ordinary mischief.”
    “You called me from Prince George.” Barbara Stanwyck had vanished, Rose heard herself begin to whine.
    “I know I did.” He spoke like a nagged husband.
    “Did you feel like this then?”
    “Yes and no. We’d made all the plans. Wouldn’t it have been worse if I’d told you on the phone?”
    “What do you mean, mischief?”
    “Oh, Rose.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know what I mean. If we went ahead with this, what good do you think it would do anybody? Rose? Really?”
    “Us,” Rose said. “It would do us good.”
    “No it wouldn’t. It would end up in one big mess.”
    “Just