Secrets & Surprises (4 page)

“This doesn’t sound like you, Sammy, to give advice.”

He waited for Sammy’s answer.

“You think I ought to leave New York?” Nick said.

“Both. Karen
and
New York. Do you know that your normal expression shows pain? Do you know how much Scotch you drank the weekend you visited?”

Nick stared through the grimy plastic window of the phone booth.

“What you just said about my hanging up on you,” Nick said. “I was thinking that you were going to hang up on me. When I talk to people, they hang up on me. The conversation just ends that way.”

“Why haven’t you figured out that you don’t know the right kind of people?”

“They’re the only people I know.”

“Does that seem like any reason for tolerating that sort of rudeness?”

“I guess not.”

“Another thing,” Sammy went on. “Have you figured out that I’m saying these things to you because when you called I was already drunk? I’m telling you all this because I think you’re so numbed out by your lousy life that you probably even don’t know I’m not in my right mind.”

The operator came on, demanding more money. Nick clattered quarters into the phone. He realized that he was not going to hang up on Sammy, and Sammy was not going to hang up on him. He would have to think of something else to say.

“Give yourself a break,” Sammy said. “Boot them out. Stephanie included. She’ll see the light eventually and come back to the farm.”

“Should I tell her you’ll be there? I don’t know if—”

“I told her I’d be here when she called. All the times she called. I just told her that I had no idea of coming to get her. I’ll tell you another thing. I’ll bet—I’ll
bet
—that when she first turned up there she called you from the airport, and she wanted you to come for her, didn’t she?”

“Sammy,” Nick said, staring around him, wild to get off the phone. “I want to thank you for saying what you think. I’m going to hang up now.”

“Forget it,” Sammy said. “I’m not in my right mind. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” Nick said.

He hung up and started back to his apartment. He realized that he hadn’t told Sammy that Stephanie had had the abortion. On the street he said hello to a little boy—one of the neighborhood children he knew.

He went up the stairs and up to his floor. Some people downstairs were listening to Beethoven. He lingered in the hallway, not wanting to go back to Stephanie and Karen. He took a deep breath and opened the door. Neither of them looked too bad. They said hello silently, each raising one hand.

It had been a hard day. Stephanie’s appointment at the abortion clinic had been at eight in the morning. Karen had slept in the apartment with them the night before, on the sofa. Stephanie slept in his bed, and he slept on the floor. None of them had slept much. In the morning they all went to the abortion clinic. Nick had intended to go to work in the afternoon, but when they got back to the apartment he didn’t think it was right for him to leave Stephanie. She went back to the bedroom, and he stretched out on the sofa and fell asleep. Before he slept, Karen sat on the sofa with him for a while, and he told her the story of his second mugging. When he woke up, it was four o’clock. He called his office and told them he was sick. Later they all watched the television news together. After that, he offered to go out and get some food, but nobody was hungry. That’s when he went out and called Sammy.

Now Stephanie went back into the bedroom. She said she was tired and she was going to work on a crossword puzzle in bed. The phone rang. It was Petra. She and Nick talked a little about a new apartment she was thinking of moving into. “I’m sorry for being so cold-blooded the other night,” she said. “The reason I’m calling is to invite myself to your place for a drink, if that’s all right with you.”

“It’s not all right,” he said. “I’m sorry. There are some people here now.”

“I get it,” she said. “Okay. I won’t bother you any more.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. He knew he had not explained things well, but the thought of adding Petra to the scene at his apartment was more than he could bear, and he had been too abrupt.

She said goodbye coldly, and he went back to his chair and fell in it, exhausted.

“A girl?” Karen said.

He nodded.

“Not a girl you wanted to hear from.”

He shook his head no. He got up and pulled up the blind and looked out to the street. The boy he had said hello to was playing with a hula hoop. The hula hoop was bright blue in the twilight. The kid rotated his hips and kept the hoop spinning perfectly. Karen came to the window and stood next to him. He turned to her, wanting to say that they should go and get the Thunderbird, and as the night air cooled, drive out of the city, smell honeysuckle in the fields, feel the wind blowing.

But the Thunderbird was sold. She had told him the news while they were sitting in the waiting room of the abortion clinic. The car had needed a valve job, and a man she met in Bermuda who knew all about cars had advised her to sell it. Coincidentally, the man—a New York architect—wanted to buy it. Even as Karen told him, he knew she had been set up. If she had been more careful, they could have been in the car now, with the key in the ignition, the radio playing. He stood at the window for a long time. She had been conned, and he was more angry than he could tell her. She had no conception—she had somehow never understood—that Thunderbirds of that year, in good condition, would someday be worth a fortune. She had told him this way: “Don’t be upset, because I’m sure I made the right decision. I sold the car as soon as I got back from Bermuda. I’m going to get a new car.” He had moved in his chair, there in the clinic. He had had an impulse to get up and hit her. He remembered the scene in New Haven outside the bar, and he understood now that it was as simple as this: he had money that the black man wanted.

Down the street the boy picked up his hula hoop and disappeared around the corner.

“Say you were kidding about selling the car,” Nick said.

“When are you going to stop making such a big thing over it?” Karen said.

“That creep cheated you. He talked you into selling it when nothing was wrong with it.”

“Stop it,” she said. “How come your judgments are always right and my judgments are always wrong?”

“I don’t want to fight,” he said. “I’m sorry I said anything.”

“Okay,” she said and leaned her head against him. He draped his right arm over her shoulder. The fingers sticking out of the cast rested a little above her breast.

“I just want to ask one thing,” he said, “and then I’ll never mention it again. Are you sure the deal is final?”

Karen pushed his hand off her shoulder and walked away. But it was his apartment, and she couldn’t go slamming around in it. She sat on the sofa and picked up the newspaper. He watched her. Soon she put it down and stared across the room and into the dark bedroom, where Stephanie had turned off the light. He looked at her sadly for a long time, until she looked up at him with tears in her eyes.

“Do you think maybe we could get it back if I offered him more than he paid me for it?” she said. “You probably don’t think that’s a sensible suggestion, but at least that way we could get it back.”

Distant

Music

O

n Friday she always sat in the park, waiting for him to come. At one-thirty he came to this park bench (if someone was already sitting there, he loitered around it), and then they would sit side by side, talking quietly, like Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in
Notorious
. Both believed in flying saucers and health food. They shared a hatred of laundromats, guilt about not sending presents to relatives on birthdays and at Christmas, and a dog—part Weimaraner, part German shepherd—named Sam.

She was twenty, and she worked in an office; she was pretty because she took a lot of time with make-up, the way a housewife who really cared might flute the edges of a piecrust with thumb and index finger. He was twenty-four, a graduate school dropout (theater) who collaborated on songs with his friend Gus Greeley, and he wanted, he fervently wanted, to make it big as a songwriter. His mother was Greek and French, his father American. This girl, Sharon, was not the first woman to fall in love with Jack because he was so handsome. She took the subway to get to the bench, which was in Washington Square Park; he walked from the basement apartment he lived in. Whoever had Sam that day (they kept the dog alternating weeks) brought him. They could do this because her job required her to work only from eight to one, and he worked at home. They had gotten the dog because they feared for his life. A man had come up to them on West Tenth Street carrying a cardboard box, smiling, and saying, “Does the little lady want a kitty cat?” They peered inside. “Puppies,” Jack said. “Well, who gives a fuck?” the man said, putting the box down, his face dark and contorted. Sharon and Jack stared at the man; he stared belligerently back. Neither of them was quite sure how things had suddenly turned ominous. She wanted to get out of there right away, before the man took a swing at Jack, but to her surprise Jack smiled at the man and dipped into the box for a dog. He extracted the scrawny, wormy Sam. She took the dog first, because there was a veterinarian’s office close to her apartment. Once the dog was cured of his worms, she gave him to Jack to begin his training. In Jack’s apartment the puppy would fix his eyes on the parallelogram of sunlight that sometimes appeared on the wood floor in the late morning—sniffing it, backing up, edging up to it at the border. In her apartment, the puppy’s object of fascination was a clarinet that a friend had left there when he moved. The puppy looked at it respectfully. She watched the dog for signs of maladjustment, wondering if he was too young to be shuttling back and forth, from home to home. (She herself had been raised by her mother, but she and her sister would fly to Seattle every summer to spend two months with their father.) The dog seemed happy enough.

At night, in Jack’s one-room apartment, they would sometimes lie with their heads at the foot of the bed, staring at the ornately carved oak headboard and the old-fashioned light attached to it, with the little sticker still on the shade that said “From home of Lady Astor. $4.00.” They had found the lamp in Ruckersville, Virginia, on the only long trip they ever took out of the city. On the bed with them there were usually sheets of music—songs that he was scoring. She would look at the pieces of paper with lyrics typed on them, and read them slowly to herself, appraisingly, as if they were poetry.

On weekends they spent the days and nights together. There was a small but deep fireplace in his apartment, and when September came they would light a fire in the late afternoon, although it was not yet cold, and sometimes light a stick of sandalwood incense, and they would lean on each other or sit side by side, listening to Vivaldi. She knew very little about such music when she first met him, and much more about it by the time their first month had passed. There was no one thing she knew a great deal about—as he did about music—so there was really nothing that she could teach him.