Beverly was eager to get the conversation away from her. Bill wasn’t all that eager to speak about himself. He’d already told her how ugly he thought he was when he was younger, how he hadn’t had any woman success until he was in the kitchens when all of a sudden all the women wanted him. Irony of irony of course was that he was married.
“Tell me about you,” Beverly said. “About your life, about what you really want.”
“My life,” Bill said. “Not much to tell about my life. About what I want, that’s easy. If I had my way, I mean if I really could have my way, I’d just stay at home all day long and write. That’s all I care about.”
“You don’t care about your wife?”
“Course I do. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is the only thing I love doing is writing. I’ve always loved it and I don’t know about the future, but I can’t imagine not loving it forever.”
“Writing now?” Beverly asked.
“Short stories.”
“When?”
“Well, that’s the rub. Working all the hours I do, it’s hard. See, when I went to that party I wasn’t looking for a girl. I wasn’t looking to pick anyone up, to meet anyone. I was living alone and happy at it. I went to school, I wrote, poetry then, and that was my day, every day, every day the same.”
“Were you happy?”
“I don’t know what happiness is,” Bill said. “And I don’t trust happiness. I feel it every now and then, and then it goes away. Every time I’ve come to let myself be happy, or so I think, something takes it away from me.”
“That’s sad,” Beverly said. “I think I was happy until my baby died. I think if I start to measure out what’s been in my life, like on a scale, I was happy until that day. Mostly. You know. Not every day or every moment of every day can be happy.”
“At least when I’m writing I don’t think of anything else,” Bill said. “I’m totally lost in what I’m doing. When I’m not writing, I don’t mean like today or yesterday, I mean like for long periods, I get miserable. Then something always brings me back to it.”
“I think you’re lucky to have something like that in your life.”
“Me too.”
“Now what about your marriage?”
“Well I surely wasn’t looking for it. I wasn’t looking for anything and I had my whole life planned out in like one sentence, which was that I wasn’t gonna do anything but write. Course that all changed. She’s a dancer and dancers have to dance while they’re young.
“So I decided that I’d work to support her and then she’d kind of do the same for me. That’s where we’re at. But honestly, we didn’t decide that. I volunteered, and to this day I don’t know why the hell I did that. I do know that she eagerly and unhesitatingly accepted my proposal for things to go that way.”
“I understand deals,” Beverly said. “We made the deal to have the baby and for him to support us. Shit happens.”
“Happened to us, to me,” Bill said. “Before I got busted, I thought I’d be like a social worker or a teacher or something using my BA. Never thought I’d be a cook. Never thought I’d be around all these girls who wanted me, or, really, wanted something from me and were happy to do me so they could get what they wanted.”
“Tell me about it. You know how many waiters been trying to get in my pants?”
“Not really,” Bill said.
“No,” Beverly said. “I guess you wouldn’t know.”
“Except for Mary, I never initiated anything with anyone,” Bill said. “Maybe it was cause I’m missing something. I always feel that way,” Bill said, “like there’s something missing, like there’s an emptiness in me I can’t fill.”
“Tell me about it,” Beverly said.
