Leaving Lucy Pear by Anna Solomon Page B

her? He didn’t even know what he meant: living alone. Everyone was always living alone, if you wanted to get depressing about it. If he didn’t live here alone, he would live somewhere else alone. If he lived with another man, as he allowed himself to imagine in the narrow crawl spaces that intersected rational thought, he would: (a) still be alone, because everyone was; (b) perhaps cease to exist, because he didn’t know any men who lived in this way; and (c) be miserable, because theman he wanted to live with had just last week told Albert he didn’t want to see him ever again.
    Dear Bea, I’m so sorry
    Dear Bea, I’m not sure exactly what I’m writing to say
    Dear Bea, I’m not even sure that this will upset you, what I have to say, which makes it all the more confusing—to know how to say it, or even to know why I should bother saying it
    Albert was hungry. This was another problem; he hadn’t left the house all week and was very, very hungry. He rubbed his calf. He traced the ridges the table leg had left in his skin. He was asking for a divorce, he supposed. But the word was so dramatic, and final; it seemed to belong to another marriage than theirs. He could imagine Bea reading it and bursting into laughter.
    He released his calf, winced, took up another piece of stationery, made for Bea’s confirmation ceremony fourteen years ago. Lillian had chosen the shade of pink, and the embossed initials:
BTH.
Beatrice Theodosia Haven, Theodosia for Feigel, who had been Lillian’s or Henry’s grandmother, Albert couldn’t remember which. He also couldn’t remember how they’d gotten Theodosia out of Feigel (they had drawn the
T
from the Hebrew equivalent of Feigel, Tsipporah) but the distance between the words represented for him part of the problem. Bea was so attached, on the one hand, and so utterly unattached, on the other.
    Even when they met, at Congregation Adath Israel’s Purim Ball, where Albert played one of Vashti’s handmaidens with such gusto and so much chest hair that he found himself attacked afterward by a herd of young women, Bea was not among them. It wasn’t until the party was winding down and Albert, having extracted himself, was walking toward the men’s room, that he felt a hand on his elbow and found himself being steered toward an out-of-the-way window by Beatrice Haven, who wasn’t known to bat her eyelashes at a man, let alone touch him. She started tointroduce herself, but Albert smiled and said, “I know who you are. No Booze Beatrice. I’m Albert Cohn, who likes to drink.”
    Bea did not blink. “But do you like women, Mr. Cohn?”
    He unhooked himself from her arm. “Excuse me?”
    â€œDo you prefer us?”
    â€œThat depends on the context.”
    â€œIn the context of marriage, Mr. Cohn.”
    â€œI don’t prefer to be married.”
    â€œAnd what if the woman, hypothetically, didn’t want to be married either?”
    Albert, looking around the room, lowered his voice. “And why wouldn’t this hypothetical woman want to be married?”
    â€œLet’s say she was strange. Or lonely.”
    â€œIf she were lonely, wouldn’t she want to marry?”
    â€œThat would depend on the nature of her loneliness.”
    â€œI see.” Albert nodded, trying to look sober, but he’d drunk a lot of whiskey and the conversation was so far from anything he’d ever participated in. A kind of giddiness swept through him.
    â€œForget loneliness,” Bea said. “Let’s say she’d simply had enough of men.”
    â€œShe’s a man hater.”
    â€œIf we must call her that.”
    â€œShe hates men. Except for a man like me.”
    Bea didn’t answer.
    â€œBut her mother wants her to marry,” he said. “Her mother has wanted her to marry since she could walk.”
    â€œHer mother must be like his mother,” she