The New Yorker Stories (21 page)

“How’s it going?” Danielle asks, standing in the doorway.

“Come on in,” I say.

“I just came upstairs to go to the bathroom. The cook is in the one downstairs.”

She comes in and looks out the window.

“Do you want me to get you anything?” she says. “Food?”

“You’re just being nice to me because I kiss your piggies.”

“You’re horrible,” she says.

“I tried to be nice to Lorna, and all she wanted to talk about was money.”

“All they talk about down there is money,” she says.

She leaves and then comes back with her hair combed and her mouth pink again.

“What do you think of William’s wife?” I ask.

“I don’t know, she doesn’t say much.” Danielle sits on the floor, with her chin on her knees. “Everybody always says that people who only say a few dumb things are sweet.”

“What dumb things has she said?” I say.

“She said, ‘Such a beautiful day,’ and looked at the sky.”

“You shouldn’t be hanging out with these people, Danielle,” I say.

“I’ve got to go back,” she says.

Banks is here. He is sitting next to me as it gets dark. I am watching Danielle out on the lawn. She has a red shawl that she winds around her shoulders. She looks tired and elegant. My father has been drinking all afternoon. “Get the hell down here!” he hollered to me a little while ago. My mother rushed up to him to say that I had a student with me. He backed down. Lorna came up and brought us two dishes of peach ice cream (handmade by Rosie), giving the larger one to Banks. She and Banks discussed
The Hobbit
briefly. Banks kept apologizing to me for not leaving, but said he was too strung out to drive. He went into the bathroom and smoked a joint and came back and sat down and rolled his head from side to side. “You make sense,” Banks says now, and I am flattered until I realize that I have not been talking for a long time.

“It’s too bad it’s so dark,” I say. “That woman down there in the black dress looks just like somebody in an Edward Hopper painting. You’d recognize her.”

“Nah,” Banks says, head swaying. “Everything’s basically different. I get so tired of examining things and finding out they’re different. This crappy nature poem isn’t at all like that crappy nature poem. That’s what I mean,” Banks says.

“Do you remember your accident?” he says.

“No,” I say.

“Excuse me,” Banks says.

“I remember thinking of
Jules and Jim
.”

“Where she drove off the cliff ?” Banks says, very excited.

“Umm.”

“When did you think that?”

“As it was happening.”

“Wow,” Banks says. “I wonder if anybody else flashed on that before you?”

“I couldn’t say.”

Banks sips his iced gin. “What do you think of me as an artist?” he says.

“You’re very good, Banks.”

It begins to get cooler. A breeze blows the curtains toward us.

“I had a dream that I was a raccoon,” Banks says. “I kept trying to look over my back to count the rings of my tail, but my back was too high, and I couldn’t count past the first two.”

Banks finishes his drink.

“Would you like me to get you another drink?” I ask.

“That’s an awful imposition,” Banks says, extending his glass.

I take the glass and go downstairs. A copy of
The Hobbit
is lying on the rose brocade sofa. Mrs. Bates is sitting at the kitchen table, reading
People
.

“Thank you very much for the cookies,” I say.

“It’s nothing,” she says. Her earrings are on the table. Her feet are on a chair.

“Tell them we ran out of gin if they want more,” I say. “I need this bottle.”

“Okay,” she says. “I think there’s another bottle, anyway.”

I take the bottle upstairs in my armpit, carrying a glass with fresh ice in it in my hand.

“You know,” Banks says, “they say that if you face things—if you just get them through your head—you can accept them. They say you can accept anything if you can once get it through your head.”

“What’s this about?” I say.

“Your arm,” Banks says.

“I realize that I don’t have an arm,” I say.

“I don’t mean to offend you,” Banks says, drinking.

“I know you don’t.”

“If you ever want me to yell at you about it, just say the word. That might help—help it sink in.”

“I already realize it, Banks,” I say.

“You’re a swell guy,” Banks says. “What kind of music do you listen to?”

“Do you want to hear music?”

“No. I just want to know what you listen to.”

“Schoenberg,” I say. I have not listened to Schoenberg for years.

“Ahh,” Banks says.

He offers me his glass. I take a drink and hand it back.

“You know how they always have cars—car ads—you ever notice . . . I’m all screwed up,” Banks says.

“Go on,” I say.

“They always put the car on the beach?”

“Yeah.”

“I was thinking about doing a thing with a great big car in the background and a little beach up front.” Banks chuckles.

Outside, the candles have been lit. A torch flames from a metal holder—one of the silliest things I have ever seen—and blue lanterns have been lit in the trees. Someone has turned on a radio, and Elizabeth and some man, not recognizable, dance to “Heartbreak Hotel.”

“There’s Schoenberg,” Banks says.

“Banks,” I say, “I want you to take this the right way. I like you, and I’m glad you came over. Why did you come over?”

“I wanted you to praise my paintings.” Banks plays church and steeple with his hands. “But also, I just wanted to talk.”

“Was there anything particularly—”

“I thought you might want to talk to me.”

“Why don’t you talk to me, instead?”

“I’ve got to be a great painter,” Banks says. “I paint and then at night I smoke up or go out to some bar, and in the morning I paint . . . All night I pray until I fall asleep that I will become great. You must think I’m crazy. What do you think of me?”

“You make me feel old,” I say.

The gin bottle is in Banks’s crotch, the glass resting on the top of the bottle.

“I sensed that,” Banks says, “before I got too wasted to sense anything.”

“You want to hear a story?” I say.

“Sure.”

“The woman who was driving the car I was in—the Princess . . .” I laugh, but Banks only nods, trying hard to follow. “I think the woman must have been out to commit suicide. We had been out buying things. The back seat was loaded with nice antiques, things like that, and we had had a nice afternoon, eaten ice cream, talked about how she would be starting school again in the fall—”

“Artist?” Banks asks.

“A linguistics major.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“What I’m saying is that all was well in the kingdom. Not exactly, because she wasn’t my wife, but she should have been. But for the purpose of the story, what I’m saying is that we were in fine shape, it was a fine day—”

“Month?” Banks says.

“March,” I say.

“That’s right,” Banks says.

“I was going to drop her off at the shopping center, where she’d left her car, and she was going to continue on to her castle and I’d go to mine . . .”

“Continue,” Banks says.

“And then she tried to kill us. She did kill herself.”

“I read it in the papers,” Banks says.

“What do you think?” I ask.

“Banks’s lesson,” Banks says. “Never look back. Don’t try to count your tail rings.”

Danielle walks into the room. “I have come for the gin,” she says. “The cook said you had it.”

“Danielle, this is Banks.”

“How do you do,” Banks says.

Danielle reaches down and takes the bottle from Banks. “You’re missing a swell old time,” she says.

“Maybe a big wind will come along and blow them all away,” Banks says.

Danielle is silent a moment, then laughs—a laugh that cuts through the darkness. She ducks her head down by my face and kisses my cheek, and turns in a wobbly way and walks out of the room.

“Jesus,” Banks says. “Here we are sitting here and then this weird thing happens.”

“Her?” I say.

“Yeah.”

Lorna comes, very sleepy, carrying a napkin with cookies on it. She obviously wants to give them to Banks, but Banks has passed out, upright, in the chair next to mine. “Climb aboard,” I say, offering my lap. Lorna hesitates, but then does, putting the cookies down on the floor without offering me any. She tells me that her mother has a boyfriend.

“What’s his name?” I ask.

“Stanley,” Lorna says.

“Maybe a big wind will come and blow Stanley away,” I say.

“What’s wrong with him?” she says, looking at Banks.

“Drunk,” I say. “Who’s drunk downstairs?”

“Rosie,” she says. “And William, and, uh, Danielle.”

“Don’t drink,” I say.

“I won’t,” she says. “Will he still be here in the morning?”

“I expect so,” I say.

Banks has fallen asleep in an odd posture. His feet are clamped together, his arms are limp at his sides, and his chin is jutting forward. The melting ice cubes from the overturned glass have encroached on the cookies.

At the lawn party, they’ve found a station on the radio that plays only songs from other years. Danielle begins a slow, drunken dance. Her red shawl has fallen to the grass. I stare at her and imagine her dress disappearing, her shoes kicked off, beautiful Danielle dancing naked in the dusk. The music turns to static, but Danielle is still dancing.

Secrets and Surprises

C
orinne and Lenny are sitting at the side of the driveway with their shoes off. Corinne is upset because Lenny sat in a patch of strawberries. “Get up, Lenny! Look what you’ve done!”

Lenny is one of my oldest friends. I went to high school with Lenny and Corinne and his first wife, Lucy, who was my best friend there. Lenny did not know Corinne then. He met her at a party many years later. Corinne remembered Lenny from high school; he did not remember her. The next year, after his divorce from Lucy became final, they married. Two years later their daughter was born, and I was a godmother. Lenny teases me by saying that his life would have been entirely different if only I had introduced him to Corinne years ago. I knew her because she was my boyfriend’s sister. She was a couple of years ahead of us, and she would do things like picking us up if we got drunk at a party and buying us coffee before taking us home. Corinne once lied to my mother when she took me home that way, telling her that there was flu going around and that I had sneezed in her car all the way home.

I was ugly in high school. I wore braces, and everything seemed to me funny and inappropriate: the seasons, television personalities, the latest fashions—even music seemed silly. I played the piano, but for some reason I stopped playing Brahms or even listening to Brahms. I played only a few pieces of music myself, the same ones, over and over: a couple of Bach two-part inventions, a Chopin nocturne. I earnestly smoked cigarettes, and all one spring I harbored a secret love for Lenny. I once confessed my love for him in a note I pushed through the slats in his locker in school. Then I got scared and waited by his locker when school was over, talked to him for a while, and when he opened the locker door, grabbed the note back and ran. This was fifteen years ago.

I used to live in the city, but five years ago my husband and I moved up here to Woodbridge. My husband has gone, and now it is only my house. It is my driveway that Lenny and Corinne sit beside. The driveway badly needs to be graveled. There are holes in it that should be filled, and the drainpipe is cracked. A lot of things here need fixing. I don’t like to talk to the landlord, Colonel Albright. Every month he loses the rent check I send him and then calls me from the nursing home where he lives, asking for another. The man is eighty-eight. I should consider him an amusing old character, a forgetful old man. I suspect he is persecuting me. He doesn’t want a young person renting his house. Or anyone at all. When we moved in, I found some empty clothing bags hanging in the closets, with old dry-cleaning stubs stapled to the plastic: “Col. Albright, 9-8-54.” I stared at the stub. I was eleven years old the day Colonel Albright picked up his clothes at the dry cleaners. I found one of his neckties wound around the base of a lamp in an upstairs closet. “Do you want these things?” I asked him on the phone. “Throw them out, I don’t care,” he said, “but don’t ask me about them.” I also do not tell him about things that need to be fixed. I close off one bathroom in the winter because the tiles are cracked and cold air comes through the floor; the heat register in my bedroom can’t be set above sixty, so I set the living-room register at seventy-five to compensate. Corinne and Lenny think this is funny. Corinne says that I will not fight with the landlord because I did enough fighting with my husband about his girlfriend and now I enjoy peace; Lenny says that I am just too kind. The truth is that Colonel Albright shouts at me on the phone and I am afraid of him. He is also old and sad, and I have displaced him in his own house. Twice this summer, a friend has driven him from the nursing home back to the house, and he walked around the gardens in the front, tapping his cane through the clusters of sweet peas that are strangling out the asters and azaleas in the flower beds, and he dusted the pollen off the sundial in the back with a white handkerchief.