Promises by Belva Plain

wife, and so she is.”
    “Thank you.”
    By now they were in the hotel lobby, approaching the elevator.
    “Well,” he said, “good night. I’m going up.”
    She caught his arm. “Can you wait a minute?”
    “What for?”
    “I need to talk to you. I won’t take long”—and she looked at him appealingly.
    “Randi, you don’t need to talk to me.” He spoke not unkindly. “I don’t understand what you’re doing, waiting for me in that shop, and now—what do you expect?”
    “I don’t expect anything. I only want to tell you something.”
    “Then tell me.” They were in the way, and people had to brush past them impatiently. “Then tell me.”
    “Not here. We have to sit down. I’ll be quick.” And again she appealed, “We can go where we had tea this afternoon. Please.”
    He followed her, and they ordered coffee. Since she was across from him with only a very small table between, they had nowhere else to look but at each other.Warm air enveloped them in a velvet, perfumed atmosphere. The room might have been scented or else the fragrance was hers. He remembered—what tens of millions of trivial, seemingly forgotten things can resurrect themselves from our stored memories—that she used to put perfume behind her ears. He found himself glancing at her ears, on each of which there sparkled a tiny spray of diamonds.
    For a minute nothing happened. And he was angry at himself for being there, for having let himself be led.
    She was staring straight into his eyes, “fixing” him, he thought, with a deep, penetrating look. He felt a shiver.
    “Don’t you even want to know what happened—afterward?”
    “You said—” he stammered, “you said you were going to have an abortion and get married.”
    “I didn’t get married to him, and I didn’t have the abortion.”
    “What?”
    He became aware that he had been holding the coffee cup; when he put it down, the liquid sloshed onto the saucer and soaked his cuff.
    “I got as far as the front door of the clinic and then wasn’t able to go through the door. The idea shocked me through and through. I think it was because it had been so shocking to you. ‘It’s wrong, it’s wrong,’ you said. I remember how you looked when you said it.”
    He was too numb to say anything but “And then?”
    “I left for California. I told him I was pregnant, but he didn’t mind. He liked kids. But then I had a miscarriage. It was just as well, because we only lived together for two years, and the kid wouldn’t have had a fatherafter all. He wasn’t the marrying kind. He wasn’t even the staying kind. So when he left I went to work for my brother, who had come out to L.A. and became a big-time real estate broker. After a while I met a man, much older, who wanted to marry me. That’s how I got the name Bunting. We lived in an enormous house with pink marble bathrooms, statues on the lawn, two tennis courts—never saw anything like it.”
    Adam, recovering speech, made a sharp comment: “It sounds like a racketeer’s house.”
    “Maybe he was one. But he was nice. Then he died. He left me a little money, not much at all; he had nine grandchildren. So I went back to work with my brother, and then his son joined the business, things didn’t go as smoothly as they should, and here I am.”
    “Why are you telling me all this? It’s no business of mine!”
    “I thought you might have been wondering all this time whether there was a kid of yours running around anywhere. I guess it was just an impulse. The same as I had that day when I said good-bye to you.”
    “Impulse!” he cried, loudly enough to cause people to turn and stare. “A casual impulse! Just like that!”
    “It wasn’t casual. It was painful.”
    “Bitch,” he muttered. “You bitch.”
    “If I hadn’t met you, I would be able to sleep tonight. Now I know I won’t sleep.”
    “What do you mean? What do you want? Come out with it, Randi, and don’t try playing cat and mouse with