Augusta Played (38 page)

Norman watched her go. At first he was furious. What right had she to act as though she was rejecting him? He turned around and started to walk uptown toward Columbia.

It was a warm day but there was an edge to the air, a delicate hardening of the light that meant fall was on the way, that peculiar season in which hindsight and hope are so dolefully and stimulatingly joined, when the stars come out and promise everything and the ground turns as stubborn as ice, promising nothing.

Sunshine scintillated on the sides of buildings and lay deep on the tops of automobiles. Luggage racks glittered in the noonlight like jungle gyms. The street was crowded; peopie were back from summer vacations. Norman walked past a jewelry store, its folding gate pulled back for business; a shoe store; a newsstand; a grocery store; a hardware store, with a sign saying
GUARANTEED
LOCKS
:
IF
ONE
DOESN'T
WORK,
ANOTHER
ONE
WILL
; a store selling trusses and orthopedic shoes, corsets and backbraces; a store selling lingerie; and then the whole thing started over again, with another gated jewelry store. He passed a pizza parlor, the one in which he had met with Mario and Mario's mother. He remembered what Mario's mother had told him, and, thinking of the money in his billfold, decided she was right: there was always more where it came from in the first place. Where else
could
it come from? Money not only didn't grow on trees, it didn't spring spontaneously into being like hydrogen atoms in outer space. But what Mario's mother had neglected to say was that it was worthless. More of nothing was still nothing.

But as Norman walked, musing on marriage, money, music and redemption, the exhilaration of the city preparing for autumn began to seep into his own spirit, and he thought: Besides the money in his wallet, he had obtained something else from this lunch. He had successfully managed to let Gus think that he was not entirely content to be without her.

He had been worried about this, getting ready to go to lunch. If he looked too pleased with himself, she would go away feeling like a failure, and if she felt that about herself, Augusta being a girl for whom nonfailure meant being like a star, a center and a light-giver, he would have to carry for the rest of his life the knowledge that he was responsible for it. But he had not darkened her or her life. She had not gone away feeling like a failure. She had gone away wondering at the dampened fire in his gaze and the tremor of longing in his voice, and if it had cost him something in pride, he had gained from it—he knew that he had been willing to come through for Gus no matter how foolish it made him look, and that meant his conscience had no claims on him. He had acquitted himself like a gentleman…no easy accomplishment for a boy from Flatbush, and if Shulamith Firestone didn't like it, Shulamith Firestone could go screw herself.

And now as he walked, Norman began to feel positively good. It was a beautiful day, a day for stretching your legs and winking at girls, and the warm air with its coolish edge filled his lungs; he tasted the tang of autumn on his tongue and his body seemed to fill with anticipation like a balloon until he felt so light and lighthearted that he thought he might begin to ascend, like Christ.

And now as he walked, Norman began to think that for a
luftmensch
with his head in the clouds he didn't do half bad. He felt a huge surge of mental energy, as if the air was filled with philosophical power, a kind of metaphysical kilowat-tage, that he inhaled. Oh yes, oh Jesus yes, it would all come clear, the bulbs were flashing, the lights were coming on, and it seemed to him that his heart twitched almost galvanically with a certain long-known but never-wearied or -superseded excitement, the excitement that comes with having, at the last dangerous instant, escaped. It was a sensation that tingled delicately on his nerves, causing them to vibrate like the strings of a violin, the merest memory trace from some experience he couldn't quite call up to consciousness—a kind of secure happiness, like being in a candy store.

Norman began to whistle. By the time he reached Columbia, he felt terrific.

The Dzanc Books eBook Club

Join the Dzanc Books eBook Club today to receive a new, DRM-free eBook on the 1
^st
of every month, with selections being made from Dzanc Books and its imprints,
Other Voices Books
,
Black Lawrence Press
,
Keyhole
,
Disquiet
, and
Starcherone
. For more information, including how to join today, please visit
http://www.dzancbooks.org/ebook-club/
.