Free If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black Page B

Their bed. Maybe they will make love, and if so, they will see each other forgivingly, as she and George did. Eyebrows and all.
    Harold orders steak and the waiter smiles, teasing that someday they’ll get him to change his predictable ways. Someday. She orders lamb. They’ll both have Caesar salads, an afterthought. Each of them already has a hefty scotch on the rocks, not an afterthought at all.
    “Health,” Harold says, lifting his glass.
    “Health,” she responds, and they clink. It sounds a little bleak, she thinks. The bar has surely been lowered, if health is now the most for which one can ask.
    “This last one was the worst,” he says, and she has no idea what he means. She raises her own brows in a question. “George,” he says, then takes another sip. “Jesus, I’m seventy-four years old. I should be used to people dying. But I’ll miss him, that’s all. And it was so fucking sudden. Now you see ’em, now you don’t. Hell of a game we’re in.”
    Clara looks down at her drink, and at her hand wrapped around it. There’s a speck of light blue paint on the knuckle of her index finger, a trace of John Parker’s tie. The ice cubes, hollow cylinders, are melting quickly, the whiskey near them at the top lighter in color than that below. “I had no idea that you and George were in touch,” she says, as she shakes the glass gently, so the amber of the liquid evens out.
    “George and I? Oh, yes. For some years now. We were close, I’d say. I suppose that after enough time, all that ancient business, well…”
    She had kept the Coopermans in the divorce, but apparently something else happened after that. “And Janet?” she asks, looking up. “Are you and she also close?”
    He shakes his head. “No. No. No, indeed. Janet would never have a thing to do with me. I attained permanent pariah status, there. Loyalty to you, I suppose. I was never welcomed back. Didn’t even go to the funeral. Didn’t think she’d want me there. You?”
    “No,” she says. “I didn’t go. She and I haven’t spoken in years.”
    The waiter has appeared with their salads. It takes some time for him to leave, as Harold decides on a glass of wine, and Clara declines one.
    It’s ridiculous for her to feel anger at George, she knows, to feel betrayed. But she does. How could he have rekindled a friendship with Harold, after what Harold had done to her? She wants to ask him—to ask George. How could he have said nothing to her? She wants to dial him up and have him explain this, have a fight about it, if it comes to that.
    “They make a good Caesar here,” Harold says. Lifting her fork, Clara forces herself to take a bite. “The thing about George,” he says, “the thing I’ll really miss, is that clarity of his. You remember? That way he had of just seeing a thing for what it was.” He’s chewing as he speaks, wipes a bit of dressing off his lip with the back of his hand. “Maybe I’m just a grouchy old man, but it seems to me there’s even more bullshit around than there used to be. But not with George. Clear thinker. Straight shooter. It always surprised me, because in general I think of psychoanalysts as slippery characters. But not George.”
    It is unbearable.
    “Harold,” she says, putting down her fork. “There are things you don’t know.” He is looking directly at her. “Things about George.” she says. “He and I were…”
    We were lovers. Twenty-six years ago, after I threw you out. And then, again, for the past five years. He was, he is, the love of my life. He was, he is, the only possible reason a woman of my cynical nature would ever think to use a phrase like that .
    “He was a good man, Clara. Wasn’t he?” Harold lifts his wineglass. “To George Cooperman.”
    “We were lovers.”
    And so. It is done. She sees that Harold’s face has stilled. He is as still as a portrait, as though she has painted him with this news. Seconds pass.
    “When?” he finally asks.
    When? It is