The Old Man(19)

Still, the whole episode had brought on terrible danger. Living in the same apartment as a pleasant and pretty female acquaintance wasn’t terribly hard. Living in an apartment with a woman who was intimate with him, free to ask all the questions she wanted, and had a right to expect direct answers, was almost impossible to do safely.

His clothes were draped neatly over the back of a chair. He put them on. He opened the bedroom door expecting to see the dogs waiting impatiently for him to reappear, but the hallway was unoccupied. He heard faint sounds from the kitchen, things rattling, and smelled coffee. He walked to the kitchen doorway.

He saw Zoe at the dishwasher, taking out clean dishes and putting them away in cupboards. Dave and Carol were in the kitchen too, eating the last of the crunchy dry food they ate for breakfast. They both stopped and looked up at him, and then stood and trotted toward him. The sound of their metal tags made Zoe turn her head to look, and then straighten to face him. She was wearing a bathrobe that hung nearly to her insteps. It was cinched around her waist and cut in a style that made it look like a gown. “Good morning,” she said.

Her smile reassured him—no resentment, no reserve. He said, “Good morning. You look positively regal.”

“Now and then my noble pedigree shows. I take it you slept well.”

“Great,” he said. “How about you?”

She closed the dishwasher with her hip and stepped closer to him. She put her arms around his neck and gave him a small, gentle kiss, affectionate instead of erotic.

He said, “Does that mean you slept well?”

“It didn’t make me feel like a new woman. Refurbished, maybe, with the odometer turned back a few miles.” She hugged him and stepped back to look in his eyes. “I guess we need to talk again, don’t we?”

“Only if you think so.” The tests he had feared were about to start. He wasn’t ready for an hour with a skilled interrogator. He had to persuade her that all his feelings were positive. That was essential. But somehow he had to slow this down.

“Not a thirty-minute talk. Maybe five. I loved last night. I have no regrets. None. But now, as you tried to warn me last night, things are different. We jumped across that chasm, and now we’re on the other side of it, and can’t go back. We have to live—or learn to live—over here, where we’ve been naked together and everything. Your turn.”

“We are in a different place,” he said. “At the moment I’m pretty comfortable over here. It may just be morning afterglow, but I’m glad it happened. I propose that we try very hard to keep being friends.” He smiled. “We made a really good start.”

This time they both came together at once, and their kiss was a longer, deeper one. She said, “Friends who just know each other better, or friends with benefits?”

“With benefits, by all means,” he said.

“Then the ayes have it,” she said. “With benefits it is.” They kissed again.

“Want to take a shower together, or is that too much me in eight hours?”

“Only one way to find out,” he said. “We’re kind of testing the waters.”

“And saving the planet.”

He pulled the belt of her bathrobe so it came loose. She didn’t close it, just leaned on him as they walked back toward her bathroom. “One thing, though,” she said. “If one of my kids comes for a visit, don’t walk in and slap me on the ass, or fiddle with my apparel like that, okay?”

“That goes for you too,” he said.

“I’ll try to restrain myself.”

They spent some time in the shower, dried each other off, and then went out together to walk the dogs in the park. They stopped at a café to buy coffee and croissants, and ate them on a park bench while the dogs chased squirrels into the trees.

As he looked out over the park, he thought about Anna. Several times they had the same conversation about dying. He had told her that she should prepare herself to outlive him by many years.

One time Anna said, “You always assume you’ll die first. Did you get a bad fortune cookie or something?”

“I’m five years older. I’m male. And there’s a lot of wear and tear on me. Look at an actuarial table. There are also people trying to find me and kill me, which kind of adds to the odds. Remember that I’ve gotten you several false identities, and hidden money for you.”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” she said, and invented something that she needed to be doing—dusting some books he remembered. “It makes me depressed, and we don’t know any more about the future than we did the last time.”

He persisted. “I also want you to remember that when I die I want you to find a man again. Get married. Preferably to somebody better than I am.”

“Of course,” she said. “And I want you to do that too, if I die. I don’t expect you to be celibate. That’s just stupid.”

“You’re right,” he said. “Maybe I’ll start scouting the talent out there just in case you’re no longer with us.”

“You do,” Anna said, “and I guarantee you’ll be the first to die.”

He could see the expression on her face as she punched his arm. He wondered what she’d say about Zoe. He thought he knew, but he wondered if he was just telling himself to believe what made him happier. Zoe was exactly the sort of woman Anna always admired—pretty, elegant, accomplished but not overly proud about it. He frowned. The one thing that would have disgusted Anna was that he had not slept with Zoe for some straightforward reason—a crush, or even simple sexual attraction. He’d been using her as a blind, for his own protection.