The New Yorker Stories (49 page)

“Why be upset?” I said. “It’s not your fault. We both feel the same way.”

“When are you going to stop taking everything so casually?” he said. “As if you didn’t matter. You’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever known, and you made a really bad choice about me, way back. I feel guilty that I lived with you and let you assume that I loved you.”

“You did love me,” I said.

“Honey, I’m telling you the truth,” he said sadly. “Don’t forget what good Southern manners I have. You used to make fun of that. I
wanted
to love you. I acted as if I loved you.”

When I left, I walked to the restaurant and sat at the bar, waiting for Wyatt to get off work. Jason didn’t love me the time he said that on Saturday nights he never wanted to go out but only wanted to listen to Keith Jarrett’s “The Mourning of a Star” and make love? Not when I read him Firbank’s
The Flower Beneath the Foot
and he laughed until he had to cover his face and then wipe tears away with the palms of his hands? Not at Thanksgiving, when we were doing the dishes and he kept putting his arm around my waist and raising my soapy hand out of the water to waltz me out of the kitchen?

I saw Jason one more time after that night—when I went there on a Sunday afternoon in February, after I’d moved. I wanted us to be friends. I climbed to the fourth floor, certain, for the millionth time, that the ancient stairs were going to cave in. I sat in one of the canvas director’s chairs and let him pour me a cup of coffee from the Melitta coffeepot. It was my pot, and I’d forgotten to pack it. Jason didn’t offer to give it back. He told me about the Garrison house; he had put it up for sale, and a television producer and his wife had made an offer. They were negotiating. As we talked, my eye caught the bright-pink spine of the Firbank book on the topmost bookshelf across the room. Maybe he was harboring secret grudges. Maybe there were things I had taken home with me inadvertently. He got all the Keith Jarrett records. My down vest. The Firbank. Before I moved, he had helped me by separating my books and records from his and putting mine in cartons. I didn’t unpack for weeks, so it took a while to realize how many were missing. If he’d done it deliberately, one other thing he did threw me off: at the bottom of one of the cartons of books he had put his gray corduroy shirt, which I had always pulled over my nightgown on cold winter mornings.

This weekend Corky told me, in the bedroom, that since Jason and I broke up I had begun to shut myself off from everyone—she was trying to be supportive, she said, and I wouldn’t even talk about my anger or my sadness. I told her that I thought about it a lot—that when people weren’t in love they had a lot of time to think; that’s why there weren’t very many surprises, or the surprises didn’t have the same intensity they had when you were in love. What happened when I’d been waiting for her to come to my apartment the day before, for example: A bee flew into the bedroom, bumped against the skylight, buzzing. I dismissed my other options right away: hiding under the blanket all day; rolling the
Times
into a club and trying to kill it. I decided to do nothing, and when it flew lower, out of the skylight, it did the last thing I would have predicted—it flew in a straight line to the inch-wide crack in the screen, almost filled in by the lush vines that covered the building, and disappeared through the leaves. I waited for it to be perverse and fly back in, but it didn’t. Then I got up and tore the leaves away from the screen and put masking tape over the crack where the screen had separated from the frame.

It’s logical that everyone wants to be in love. Then, for a while, life isn’t taken up with the tedium of thinking everything through, talking things through. It’s nice to be able to notice small objects or small moments, to point them out and to have someone eager to pretend that there’s more to them than it seems. Jason was very good at that—at convincing me that somehow, because we were together, what we saw took on an importance beyond itself. The last autumn we were together, we drove over to Cold Spring, late one afternoon. We drove to the far side of the railroad tracks, past the gazebo, to the edge of the paved area where cars park at the edge of the Hudson. How could he have tried to convince me, later, that he didn’t love me? We were young lovers then, getting out of the car and throwing stale bread to the black ducks on the river. We sat on a bench, looking at the high cliffs across the water and tightening our hold on each other’s waist as we imagined, I suppose, the voyage we’d have to take to get there, and the climb to the top. Or maybe we squeezed each other tighter because we were safe where we were: no boat, no possibility we’d swim, no reason to make such an effort anyway. It was October, and the wind was so strong that it nearly knocked us off the bench; tears came to my eyes long before Jason whispered to me to look: such strong wind—it made it seem that the water was being blown downstream, instead of flowing.

Coney Island

D
rew is sitting at the kitchen table in his friend Chester’s apartment in Arlington. It’s a bright day, and the sun shining through the kitchen curtains, patterned with chickens, gives the chickens an advantage they don’t have in real life; backlit, they’re luminous. Beautiful.

Drew has been at Chester’s for a couple of hours. The light is sharp now, in late afternoon. Between them, on the table, the bottle of Jack Daniel’s is half empty. Chester pours another half inch into his glass, wipes the bottle neck with his thumb, licks it. He twirls the cap back on the bottle, like people who replace the cork after they’ve poured a glass of wine. Chester likes wine; his wife, Holly, converted him, but he knows better than to offer wine to Drew. Holly is in the hospital now, and will be there overnight; his tests for infertility were negative, and now the doctors are doing some kind of minor exploratory surgery on her. Maybe he would have gotten loaded today even if Drew hadn’t shown up.

Drew is tapping the salt and pepper shakers together. The shakers are in the shape of penguins. What a sense of humor his friends Ches and Holly have! One penguin looks like a penguin, and the other has on a vest and top hat. Probably they were manufactured as jokes.

Chester’s radio needs new batteries. He holds it in his right hand and shakes it with the motion he’d use to shake a cocktail shaker. Earlier, he thought about shaking up some Manhattans, but Drew said he preferred his bourbon straight.

Today, Drew drove across the mountains from Waynesboro to come to his nephew’s christening in Arlington. The party afterward was at his mother’s. Before the party he had pruned some bushes, fixed the basement door so it wouldn’t stick. Afterward, when everyone had gone and his mother was in the bathroom, he used the phone and called his old girlfriend, Charlotte. That was unexpected, even to Drew. The month before, Charlotte married a man who managed a trendy hardware store in some mall outside of Arlington. Drew’s mother cut the wedding announcement out of the paper and sent it to him at work, with “Personal” written on the envelope. Now when he has this affair with Charlotte, his secretary will know. What else would a secretary think about a boss getting a letter marked “Personal”?

It’s less than an hour until Drew will go to meet Charlotte for a drink. Charlotte Coole, now Charlotte Raybill. Charlotte Coole Raybill, for all Drew knows. Chester has agreed to go along, so that if they’re seen people may at least assume it’s just some friends having a drink for old times’ sake. Everybody knows everybody else’s business. A cousin of Drew’s, Howard, had a long affair with a married woman when he lived in New York. It lasted four years. They always met in Grand Central. For years, people hurried around them. Children were tugged past. Religious fanatics held out pamphlets. It was so likely that they’d see somebody one of them knew that of course they never did, and, to their knowledge, nobody ever saw them. They drank at Windows on the World. Who would ever find them there? Howard had a way of telling the story for laughs—the two of them holding each other beside the gate of the Mount Kisco local, kissing until their mouths felt burned, and then, downtown, sitting beside the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty. When Drew was a little boy, he went to New York with his family. They climbed up the statue, and for years he still believed what his father told him—that he’d climbed into the thumb. Howard’s lover divorced her husband but married someone else. Howard got bitter and took it out on everybody. Once, he told Drew and Chester that they were nowhere, that they’d never examined anything for a moment in their lives. What did Howard know, Drew thinks. Howard used to look out high windows and he ended up in another skyscraper, in a shrink’s office, with the blinds closed.

Drew says, “Charlotte’s elbows were pointy, like a hard lemon. I used to hold on to her elbows when I made love to her. What a thing to be sitting here remembering.”

“Drew, she’s meeting you for a drink,” Chester says sadly. “She’s not going to leave her husband.”

Chester taps the radio lightly on the table, the way he’d tap a cigarette out of a pack. Drew and Chester don’t smoke. They haven’t smoked since college. Drew met Charlotte and fell in love with her when he was a sophomore in college. “She’s a
kid
,” Howard had said to him back then, in one of those late-night fraternity-house rap sessions. Howard always took a fatherly tone, although he was only two years ahead of them. “Let’s call Howard,” Drew says now. “Ask him what he thinks about Holly.” Howard is a surgeon in Seattle. They track him down sometimes at the hospital, or through his answering service, late at night. A couple of times, drunk, they disguised their voices and gave garbled panicky accounts of what they thought Howard would recognize as a heart attack or a ruptured appendix.

“I met the doctor Holly’s been going to,” Chester says. He points at the kitchen ceiling. “If
that
God Almighty and her God Almighty gynecologist think there’s no reason why she can’t have a baby, I’m just going to wait this one out.”

“I just thought we might call him,” Drew says. He takes off his shoes.

“No point calling about this,” Chester says. Chester pours himself another drink. He rubs his hair back off his forehead, and that feels good. He does it again, then once again.

“Call the hospital and see how she made out,” Drew says.

“I’m her husband and you think I wasn’t
there
? I saw her. They wheeled her out and she said that she didn’t care if she never had a kid—that she couldn’t stand to feel like ice. That was the, you know . . . anesthetic. I held her feet in my hands for an hour. She was asleep and the nurse told me to go home. In the morning, when Dr. High and Mighty shows up, I guess we’ll know something. How come you’re so full of advice?”

“I didn’t give any advice. I said to call her,” Drew says.

Drew holds the bottle against his forehead for a second, then puts it back on the table. “I’m hungry,” he says. “I ought to do everything before I see Charlotte, shouldn’t I? Eat so there’ll be time to talk. Drink and get sober. Do it all beforehand.”

“How come you decided to call Charlotte today?” Chester says.

“My nephew—”

“I mean why call
Charlotte
? Why call her?”

This time, Drew fiddles with the radio, and a station comes in, faintly. They both listen, surprised. It’s still only October, and the man is talking about the number of shopping days left until Christmas. Drew moves the dial and loses the station. He can’t get it back. He shoves the radio across the table. A penguin tips over. It rests there, with its pointed face on the radio.

“I’ll have another drink and stand her up,” Drew says.

“Oh, I can do it for you,” Chester says, and sets the penguin upright.

“Aren’t you a million laughs,” Drew says. “
Charlotte
—not the penguin. Charlotte, Charlotte—Charlotte who isn’t going to leave her husband. Does that get her name into the conversation enough?”

“I don’t want to go with you,” Chester says. “I don’t see the point of it.” He rubs his hands across his forehead again. He cups one hand over his eyes and doesn’t say anything else.

Drew puts his hand over his glass. The gesture of a person refusing a refill, but no one’s offering. He looks at his hands.

Chester reaches in his shirt pocket. If the missing laundry receipt isn’t there or in his wallet, where is it? It has to be somewhere, in some pocket. He puts his index finger in the neck of the bottle. He wiggles it. There is a little pile of salt where the penguin tipped over. Chester pushes the salt into a line, pretends to be holding a straw in his fingers, touches the imaginary straw to the inch of salt, closes off one nostril, inhales with the other as he moves the straw up the line. He smiles more widely.

“Be glad you don’t have that problem,” Drew says.

“I am,” Chester says. “I tell you, I’m glad I don’t even remember being gassed when I had my tonsils out when I was a kid. Holly was so cold and sleepy. But not nice sleep—more like she’d been hit.”

“She’s O.K.,” Drew says.

“How do you know?” Chester says. Then he’s surprised by how harsh his voice sounds. He smiles. “Sneaking around to see her, the way you make arrangements to see Charlotte?” he says.