Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen Page B

side of my double bed, whose shorts I’d folded in a plastic basket for fifteen years. It was like there were two Bobbys, two Frans, two couples, and one was sitting at that table, knee nudging knee, breathless with love for our child and so, by some process of osmosis, for each other. The other Bobby and Fran stayed home, waiting for nightfall, she afraid of saying the wrong thing, he—well, I never knew what he felt.
    Sometimes when I went to Cindy’s house I looked at the pictures of her and her husband, Craig, and wondered whether there were two of them, too, the daytime and the nighttime couple, like masks of comedy and tragedy. And Mrs. Levitt and Irving. Andstrangers I saw in cars, sitting next to each other at stoplights, looking straight out the windshield, never at each other, living parallel lives.
    “That princess and prince now?” Mrs. Levitt said. “There’s a marriage that spelled trouble from the very beginning. And now, all of a sudden, here’s the girlfriend and who knows what else.”
    “Remember how wrinkled her wedding dress was when she got out of the coach?”
    “The princess?” Mrs. Levitt raised her hands to the sky in mute entreaty to some greater power. “I said to my friend Flo in Chicago, I said, Flo, you sit on silk and look what happens.”
    If Irving hadn’t had his stroke only three weeks after they’d moved into the Lakeview, if she’d had time to make friends with the other women in the building, Mrs. Levitt would have gossiped about the super and the single woman on the ground floor, the dry cleaner and his nasty wife. Instead she talked about the people in the papers: the princess and her divorce, Streisand and Sinatra—“not a happy woman,” Mrs. Levitt said about one, and “not a happy man” about the other—the president and the first lady. Mrs. Levitt got the tabloids when Mrs. Winkelman down the hall left them with her recycled newspapers; she would listen on Tuesday evenings for the sound of the Winkelman door and then sneak down to the incinerator and ease the Star and the Enquirer out from the twine bundle. “Look, Irving, here’s that one you liked from Dallas ,” Mrs. Levitt would call across the room. “She’s not holding up too good.”
    “Irving,” she would say as she smoothed the blankets, “you remember how you lost all our vacation money in Vegas on half an hour at the blackjack?”
    “You think I didn’t see you that time with Mamie in the wet bar of their place?” she said as his mouth gaped.
    “You were always cheap, Irving,” she mused as she went into the drawer and took out fresh pajamas, laundered so often they were soft as silk. “Twelve years it took me to get a decent stove. And even then I had to hear about it for the next twelve.”
    Sometimes Mr. Levitt made a sound like a groan or a wheeze, and she would say, “Yes, yes, yes.” And something in the way she said it made me believe she had been saying it for years, that she had said it when her husband said, “Look at how fast that crazy man in the Chevy is driving,” or “It’s gonna pour any minute,” or “This is one tough piece of meat,” that Mrs. Levitt had replied “Yes, yes, yes” just as she did today. I hate to say it, but the two of us ignored Mr. Levitt, paid him less mind than the television set or the coffeemaker. But I had the feeling Mrs. Levitt had been doing that for quite awhile.
    “You listening, Fran, or am I talking to myself?” Bobby would say sometimes, late at night. God, how I wanted to say, you’re talking to yourself, Bobby. But I wouldn’t have dared.
    “He was a good worker,” Mrs. Levitt said as I irrigated and then reconnected Irving’s catheter, both of us looking dispassionately at her husband’s slack penis. “He made a good living. Sales. He sold automobile parts. I never even learned to drive. Too busy to teach me, right, Irving?” She smiled. “Something like that,” she said. “You want tuna on toast for