The New Yorker Stories (19 page)

For dinner Bea fixes beef Stroganoff, and they all sit on the floor with their plates. Bea says that there is honey in the Stroganoff. She is ignoring Matthew, who stirs his fork in a circle through his food and puts his plate down every few minutes to drink Scotch. Earlier Bea told him to offer the bottle around, but they all said they didn’t want any. A tall black candle burns in the center of their circle; it is dark outside, and the candle is the only light. When they finish eating, there is only one shot of Scotch left in the bottle and Matthew is pretty drunk. He says to Bea, “I was going to move out the night before Christmas, in the middle of the night, so that when you heard Santa Claus, it would have been me instead, carrying away Zero instead of my bag of tricks.”

“Bag of
toys
,” Bea says. She has on a satin robe that reminds Robert of a fighter’s robe, stuffed between her legs as she sits on the floor.

“And laying a finger aside of my nose . . .” Matthew says. “No, I wouldn’t have done that, Bea. I would have given the finger to you.” Matthew raises his middle finger and smiles at Bea. “But I speak figuratively, of course. I will give you neither my finger nor my dog.”

“I got the dog from the animal shelter, Matthew,” Bea says. “Why do you call him your dog?”

Matthew stumbles off to bed, almost stepping on Penelope’s plate, calling over his shoulder, “Bea, my lovely, please make sure that our guests finish that bottle of Scotch.”

Bea blows out the candle and they all go to bed, with a quarter inch of Scotch still in the bottle.

“Why are they getting divorced?” Robert whispers to Penelope in bed.

They are in a twin bed, narrower than he remembers twin beds being, lying under a brown-and-white quilt.

“I’m not really sure,” she says. “She said that he was getting crazier.”

“They both seem crazy.”

“Bea told me that he gave some of their savings to a Japanese woman who lives with a man he works with, so she can open a gift shop.”

“Oh,” he says.

“I wish we had another cigarette.”

“Is that all he did?” he asks. “Gave money away?”

“He drinks a lot,” Penelope says.

“So does she. She drinks straight from the bottle.” Before dinner Bea had tipped the bottle to her lips too quickly and the liquor ran down her chin. Matthew called her disgusting.

“I think he’s nastier than she is,” Penelope says.

“Move over a little,” he says. “This bed must be narrower than a twin bed.”

“I
am
moved over,” she says.

He unbends his knees, lies straight in the bed. He is too uncomfortable to sleep. His ears are still ringing from so many hours on the road.

“Here we are in Colorado,” he says. “Tomorrow we’ll have to drive around and see it before it’s all under snow.”

The next afternoon he borrows a tablet and walks around outside, looking for something to draw. There are bare patches in the snow—patches of brown grass. Bea and Matthew’s house is modern, with a sundeck across the back and glass doors across the front. For some reason the house seems out of place; it looks Eastern. There are no other houses nearby. Very little land has been cleared; the lawn is narrow, and the woods come close. It is cold, and there is a wind in the trees. Through the woods, in front of the house, distant snow-covered mountains are visible. The air is very clear, and the colors are too bright, like a Maxfield Parrish painting. No one would believe the colors if he painted them. Instead he begins to draw some old fence posts, partially rotted away. But then he stops. Leave it to Andrew Wyeth. He dusts away a light layer of snow and sits on the hood of his car. He takes the pencil out of his pocket again and writes in the sketchbook: “We are at Bea and Matthew’s. They sit all day. Penelope sits. She seems to be waiting. This is happening in Colorado. I want to see the state, but Bea and Matthew have already seen it, and Penelope says that she cannot face one more minute in the car. The car needs new spark plugs. I will never be a painter. I am not a writer.”

Zero wanders up behind him, and he tears off the piece of sketch paper and crumples it into a ball, throws it in the air. Zero’s eyes light up. They play ball with the piece of paper—he throws it high, and Zero waits for it and jumps. Finally the paper gets too soggy to handle. Zero walks away, then sits and scratches.

Behind the house is a ruined birdhouse, and some strings hang from a branch, with bits of suet tied on. The strings stir in the wind. “Push me in the swing,” he remembers Penelope saying. Johnny was lying in the grass, talking to himself. Robert tried to dance with Cyril, but Cyril wouldn’t. Cyril was more stoned than any of them, but showing better sense. “Push me,” she said. She sat on the swing and he pushed. She weighed very little—hardly enough to drag the swing down. It took off fast and went high. She was laughing—not because she was having fun, but laughing at him. That’s what he thought, but he was stoned. She was just laughing. Fortunately, the swing had slowed when she jumped. She didn’t even roll down the hill. Cyril, looking at her arm, which had been cut on a rock, was almost in tears. She had landed on her side. They thought her arm was broken at first. Johnny was asleep, and he slept through the whole thing. Robert carried her into the house. Cyril, following, detoured to kick Johnny. That was the beginning of the end.

He walks to the car and opens the door and rummages through the ashtray, looking for the joint they had started to smoke just before they found Bea and Matthew’s house. He has trouble getting it out because his fingers are numb from the cold. He finally gets it and lights it, and drags on it walking back to the tree with the birdhouse in it. He leans against the tree.

Dan had called him the day before they left New Haven and said that Penelope would kill him. He asked Dan what he meant. “She’ll wear you down, she’ll wear you out, she’ll kill you,” Dan said.

He feels the tree snapping and jumps away. He looks and sees that everything is okay. The tree is still there, the strings hanging down from the branch. “I’m going to jump!” Penelope had called, laughing. Now he laughs, too—not at her, but because here he is, leaning against a tree in Colorado, blown away. He tries speaking, to hear what his speech sounds like. “Blown away,” he says. He has trouble getting his mouth into position after speaking.

In a while Matthew comes out. He stands beside the tree and they watch the sunset. The sky is pale-blue, streaked with orange, which seems to be spreading through the blue sky from behind, like liquid seeping through a napkin, blood through a bandage.

“Nice,” Matthew says.

“Yes,” he says. He is never going to be able to talk to Matthew.

“You know what I’m in the doghouse for?” Matthew says.

“What?” he says. Too long a pause before answering. He spit the word out, instead of saying it.

“Having a Japanese girlfriend,” Matthew says, and laughs.

He does not dare risk laughing with him.

“And I don’t even
have
a Japanese girlfriend,” Matthew says. “She lives with a guy I work with. I’m not interested in her. She needed money to go into business. Not a lot, but some. I loaned it to her. Bea changes facts around.”

“Where did you go to school?” he hears himself say.

There is a long pause, and Robert gets confused. He thinks he should be answering his own question.

Finally: “Harvard.”

“What class were you in?”

“Oh,” Matthew says. “You’re stoned, huh?”

It is too complicated to explain that he is not. He says, again, “What class?”

“1967,” Matthew says, laughing. “Is that your stuff or ours? She hid our stuff.”

“In my glove compartment,” Robert says, gesturing.

He watches Matthew walk toward his car. Sloped shoulders. Something written across the back of his jacket, being spoken by what looks like a monster blue bird. Can’t read it. In a while Matthew comes back smoking a joint, Zero trailing behind.

“They’re inside, talking about what a pig I am.” Matthew exhales.

“How come you don’t have any interest in this Japanese woman?”

“I do,” Matthew says, smoking from his cupped hand. “I don’t have a chance in the world.”

“I don’t guess it would be the same if you got another one,” he says.

“Another what?”

“If you went to Japan and got another one.”

“Never mind,” Matthew says. “Never mind bothering to converse.”

Zero sniffs the air and walks away. He lies down on the driveway, away from them, and closes his eyes.

“I’d like some Scotch to cool my lungs,” Matthew says. “And we don’t have any goddamn Scotch.”

“Let’s go get some,” he says.

“Okay,” Matthew says.

They stay, watching the colors intensify. “It’s too cold for me,” Matthew says. He thrashes his arms across his chest, and Zero springs up, leaping excitedly, and almost topples Matthew.

They get to Matthew’s car. Robert hears the door close. He notices that he is inside. Zero is in the back seat. It gets darker. Matthew hums. Outside the liquor store Robert fumbles out a ten-dollar bill. Matthew declines. He parks and rolls down the window. “I don’t want to walk in there in a cloud of this stuff,” he says. They wait. Waiting, Robert gets confused. He says, “What state is this?”

“Are you kidding?” Matthew asks. Matthew shakes his head. “Colorado,” he says.

The Lawn Party

I
said to Lorna last night, “Do you want me to tell you a story?” “No,” she said. Lorna is my daughter. She is ten and a great disbeliever. But she was willing to hang around my room and talk. “Regular dry cleaning won’t take that out,” Lorna said when she saw the smudges on my suede jacket. “Really,” she said. “You have to take it somewhere special.” In her skepticism, Lorna assumes that everyone else is also skeptical.

According to the Currier & Ives calendar hanging on the back of the bedroom door, and according to my watch, and according to my memory, which would be keen without either of them, Lorna and I have been at my parents’ house for three days. Today is the annual croquet game that all our relatives here in Connecticut gather for (even some from my wife’s side). It’s the Fourth of July, and damn hot. I have the fan going. I’m sitting in a comfortable chair (moved upstairs, on my demand, by my father and the maid), next to the window in my old bedroom. There is already a cluster of my relatives on the lawn. Most of them are wearing little American flags pinned somewhere on their shirts or blouses or hanging from their ears. A patriotic group. Beer (forgive them: Heineken’s) and wine (Almaden Chablis) drinkers. My father loves this day better than his own birthday. He leans on his mallet and gives instructions to my sister Eva on the placement of the posts. Down there, he can see the American flags clearly. But if he is already too loaded to stick the posts in the ground, he probably isn’t noticing the jewelry.

Lorna has come into my room twice in the last hour—once to ask me when I am coming down to join what she calls “the party,” another time to say that I am making everybody feel rotten by not joining them. A statement to be dismissed with a wave of the hand, but I have none. No right arm, either. I have a left hand and a left arm, but I have stopped valuing them. It’s the right one I want. In the hospital, I rejected suggestions of a plastic arm or a claw. “Well, then, what do you envision?” the doctor said. “Air,” I told him. This needed amplification. “Air where my arm used to be,” I said. He gave a little “Ah, so” bow of the head and left the room.

I intend to sit here at the window all day, watching the croquet game. I will drink the Heineken’s Lorna has brought me, taking small sips because I am unable to wipe my mouth after good foamy sips. My left hand is there to wipe with, but who wants to set down his beer bottle to wipe his mouth?

Lorna’s mother has left me. I think of her now as Lorna’s mother because she has made it clear that she no longer wants to be my wife. She has moved to another apartment with Lorna. She, herself, seems to be no happier for having left me and visits me frequently. Mention is no longer made of the fact that I am her husband and she is my wife. Recently Mary (her name) took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. She broke in on me on my second day here in the room, explaining that she would not be here for the croquet game, but with the news that she had visited New York yesterday and had taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. “And how was the city?” I asked. “Wonderful,” she assured me. She went to the Carnegie Delicatessen and had cheesecake. When she does not visit, she writes. She has a second sense about when I have left my apartment for my parents’ house. In her letters she usually tells me something about Lorna, although no mention is made of the fact that Lorna is my child. In fact, she once slyly suggested in a bitter moment that Lorna was not—but she backed down about that one.

Lorna is a great favorite with my parents, and my parents are rich. This, Mary always said jokingly, was why she married me. Actually, it was my charm. She thought I was terrific. If I had not fallen in love with her sister, everything would still be fine between us. I did it fairly; I fell in love with her sister before the wedding. I asked to have the wedding delayed. Mary got drunk and cried. Why was I doing this? How could I do it? She would leave me, but she wouldn’t delay the wedding. I asked her to leave. She got drunk and cried and would not. We were married on schedule. She had nothing more to do with her sister. I, on the other hand—strange how many things one cannot say anymore—saw her whenever possible. Patricia—that was her name—went with me on business trips, met me for lunches and dinners, and was driving my car when it went off the highway.