Free Do They Know I'm Running? by David Corbett Page A

tea didn’t help. “It wasn’t like that.”
    “I know it wasn’t. But it wasn’t all loving kindness, either.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Stop saying that, please. You’re being sorry isn’t much help, frankly.” She sat back, glancing out at her dormant garden. “I haven’t much wanted to get into this, but things haven’t been so great for me the past year or so. The drinking tells you that much. That’s new, trust me. I never used to drink, not like now, not till after my divorce.”
    She’d been married to an air force captain. “Your husband didn’t love you.”
    She made a face, like he’d missed the point entirely. “Yes, he did, Roque. Just badly.”
    “Talk like that, anything passes for love.”
    “Oh please, just once, try to realize that things are going to look very different to you in a few years, all right?”
    He blanched from the scolding. Gradually, anger brought his color back.
    She said, “I can tell you’re taking that the wrong way.”
    “There’s a right way?”
    “Yes, actually.” Beyond the steam-fogged window a crow rustled the branches of the tangerine tree. “I’m trying to make you understand what middle age is like.”
    He slumped in his chair. “That’s all you ever talk about.”
    “Please, listen. You get to where I am, see all the things you wanted that never showed up and realize, finally, they never will. This time of year just makes it worse. I’m feeling all bitter and Brahmsian and bored with myself.” She shivered. “God, that sounds like the line from a song. What I mean is, this thing, here, between you and me? It’s just an attempt to pretend I’m not really getting older. There. That simple, that stupid, that sad. As for you—”
    This part wasn’t new. “You think I’m needy.”
    “I think you need, yes, a kind of love I can’t promise or provide.”
    “And what about the love I can provide?”
    “I’m more concerned about what you can’t promise, actually.”
    “Which is?”
    “Please, stop being so angry, so—”
    “You think you know how I feel. So why do you get so scared when I try to tell you what I’m actually feeling?”
    “I was your age once, remember. I had passion and confidence and exuberance, all that lovely stuff. I envy you. But I can’t recover what I’ve lost through you.”
    Roque was floored. You think I don’t understand despair, he thought. You think I don’t know what it means to be lonely and desperate for something to justify the hassle of getting through the day. You think I don’t see what Tía Lucha and Tío Faustino and you and everybody else your age goes through, that I don’t get it, I don’t care.
    “I can give you back your hope.”
    She looked chastened. Then: “No, you can’t.”
    “I can make you happy.”
    “You do make me happy. You infuriate me and, I’m sorry, bore me sometimes, but yes, I’m mostly happy when we’re together. But—here again, the age factor comes in—happiness isn’t as important as I once thought. It’s a pretty slim commodity, actually.”
    “You’d rather be unhappy?”
    “Happiness comes and goes, is what I’m saying. A little sunlight on a gray day, poof, my spirits lift. A melody in my head. On the street, a dog wags its tail—”
    “That’s not happiness,” he said. In fact, what it sounded like was boredom.
    “Yes, it is. That’s the sneaky truth about happiness. It’s pretty ho-hum stuff. As for hope, it’s just a way to trick yourself into thinking the future can’t go wrong.”
    “What I mean by happiness is how we feel when we’re together.”
    “That will change.”
    “Yeah. It’ll get better.”
    “You can’t know that. Trust me.”
    “If you really believe that, why live?”
    Her eyes met his. “The question I ask myself several times a day.”
    “Don’t talk like that.”
    “‘Death is like the falling of a petal from a rose. No more. No less.’” She turned her cup in its saucer, as though it were a sort of