XLVIII

Mitch comes back. He comes back from the hunt. He comes back in the middle of February, having phoned first; having booked himself a time slot, like any client or petitioner. He turns up on Roz’s doorstep in his sheepskin coat, looking like an empty sack. In his hand he holds a plaintive bouquet of flowers.

For that, Roz would like to kick him—does he think she’s such a cheap date?—but she’s shocked by his appearance. He’s rumpled like a park-bench drunk, his skin is grey from travel, dark hollows ring his eyes. He’s lost weight, his flesh is loose, his face is starting to cave in, like some old guy without his false teeth, like the kids’ Hallowe’en pumpkins a few days after the holiday is over and the candles inside have burned out. That softening, that subsiding inwards towards a damp central emptiness.

Roz feels she should stand in the doorway, a barrier between the cold outside air he brings with him and her own warm house, blocking him, keeping him out. The children need to be protected from this leftover, this sagging echo, this shadowy copy of their real father, with his sinkhole eyes and his smile like crumpled paper. But she owes him a hearing, at least: Wordlessly she takes the flowers—roses, red, a mockery, because she does not delude herself, passion is not what he feels. Not, at least, for her. She lets him in.

“I want to come back,” he tells her, gazing around the high, wide living room, the spacious domain that Roz has made, that was once his to share. Not Will you let me come back? Not I want you back. Nothing to do with Roz, no mention of her at all. It’s the room he’s claiming, the territory. He is deeply mistaken. He thinks he has rights.

“You didn’t find her, did you?” says Roz. She hands him the drink she’s poured for him, as in days of yore: a singlemalt scotch, no ice. That’s what he used to like, long long ago; that’s what she’s been drinking these days, and more of it than she should. The gesture of handing the glass to him softens her, because it’s their old habit. Nostalgia for him seizes her by the throat. She fights against choking. He has a new tie on, an unfamiliar one, with grisly pastel tulips. The fingerprints of Zenia are all over it, like unseen scorch marks.

“No,” says Mitch. He won’t look at her.

“And if you had,” says Roz, hardening herself again, lighting her own cigarette—she won’t ask him to do it, they are way beyond such whimsical courtship gestures, not that he’s leaping forward with arm outstretched—“what would you have done? Beat the shit out of her, or sicked the lawyers onto her, or given her a big sloppy kiss?”

Mitch looks in her direction. He can’t meet her eyes. It’s as if she’s semi-invisible, a kind of hovering blur. “I don’t know,” he says.

“Well, at least that’s honest,” says Roz. “I’m glad you aren’t lying to me.” She’s trying to keep her voice soft, to avoid the bitter cutting edge. He isn’t lying to her, he isn’t doing anything to her. There is no her, as far as he’s concerned; she might as well not be here. Whatever he’s doing is to himself She has never felt so non-existent in her life. “So, what do you want?” She may as well ask, she may as well find out what’s being demanded of her.

But he shakes his head: he doesn’t know that, either. He isn’t even drinking from the glass she’s poured. It’s as if he can’t take anything from her. Which means there’s nothing she can give him. “Maybe when you figure it out,” she says, “you could let me in on it:”

Now he does finally look at her. God knows who he sees. Some avenging angel, some giantess with a bared arm and a sword—it can’t be Roz, tender and feathery Roz, not the way he’s staring at her. His eyes are frightening because they’re frightened. He’s scared shitless, of her or of someone or something, and she can’t bear the sight. Whatever else has been going on, all those years he played In and Out the Bimbos and she raged at him and wept, she’s always depended on him not to lose his nerve. But now there’s a crack in him, like a crack in glass; a little beat and he’ll shatter. But why should it be Roz’s job to sweep up?

“Just let me stay here,” he says. “Let me stay in the house. I could sleep downstairs, in the family room. I won’t bother you:’

He’s begging, but Roz hears this only in retrospect. At the moment she finds the idea intolerable: Mitch on the floor, in a sleeping bag, like the twins’ friends at group sleepovers, demoted to transience, demoted to adolescence. Locked out of her bedroom, or worse, not wishing to go into it. That’s it—he’s rejecting her, he’s rejecting her big, eager, clumsy, ardent, and solid body; it’s no longer good enough for him, not even as a feather bed, not even as a fallback. He must find her repellent.

But she does have some pride left, though God knows how she’s managed to hang onto it, and if she’s going to let him come back it has to be on full terms. “You can’t treat me like a rest stop,” she says. “Not any more.”

Because that’s exactly what he’d do, he’d move in, she’d dish out the nourishing lunches, feed him, build him up again, and he’d get his strength back and be off, off in his longboat, off in his galleon, scouring the seven seas for the Holy Grail, for Helen of Troy, for Zenia, peering through the spyglass, on the watch for her pirate flag. Roz can see it in his eyes, which are focused on the horizon, not on her. Even if he came back, into her bedroom, in between her raspberrycoloured sheets, into her body, it wouldn’t be her underneath him, on top of him, around him, not ever again. Zenia has stolen something from him, the one thing he always kept safe before, from all women, even from Roz. Call it his soul. She slipped it out of his breast pocket when he wasn’t looking, easy as rolling a drunk, and looked at it, and bit it to see if it was genuine, and sneered at it for being so small after all, and then tossed it away, because she’s the kind of woman who wants what she doesn’t have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets.

What is her secret? How does she do it? Where does it come from, her undeniable power over men? How does she latch hold of them, break their stride, trip them up, and then so easily turn them inside out? It must be something very simple and obvious. She tells them they’re unique, then reveals to them that they’re not. She opens her cloak with the secret pockets and shows them how the magic trick is worked, and that it is after all nothing more than a trick. Only by that time they refuse to see; they think the Water of Youth is real, even though she empties the bottle and fills it again from the tap, right before their very eyes. They want to believe.

“It won’t work,” Roz tells Mitch. She isn’t being vindictive. It’s the simple truth.

He must know it, because he doesn’t plead. He subsides into his crumpled clothing; his neck gets shorter, as though there’s a steady but inexorable weight pushing slowly down on the top of his head. “I guess not,” he says.

“Didn’t you keep the apartment?” says Roz. “Isn’t that where you’re living?”

“I couldn’t stay there,” says Mitch. His voice is reproachful. as if it’s crass of her, cruel of her even to suggest such a thing. Doesn’t she realize how much it would hurt him to be in a place he once shared with the fled beloved, a place where he would be reminded of the dear departed at every turn, a place where he was so happy?

Roz knows. She herself lives in such a place. But he obviously hasn’t thought of that. Those in pain have no time for the pain they cause.

Roz sees him out, into the front hall, into the overcoat, which almost does her in because it’s her overcoat too, she helped him buy it, she shared the life he led in it, that goodtaste leather, that sheepskin, one-time container of such a rascally wolf. No longer, no more; he’s toothless now. Poor lamb, thinks Roz, and clenches her fists tight because she won’t let herself be fooled like that again.