The New Yorker Stories (28 page)

He came to her door at noon, as he had said he would. He had on a long maroon scarf, which made his deep-blue eyes very striking. She had only seen him from her window when he carried the paper in to the old lady. He was a little nervous. She hoped that it was just the anxiety of any teen-ager confronting an adult. She needed to have him like her. She did not learn about mechanical things easily (Larry had told her that he would have invested in a “real” camera, except that he did not have the time to teach her about it), so she wanted him to be patient. He sat on the footstool in her living room, still in coat and scarf, and told her how a stick shift operated. He moved his hand through the air. The motion he made reminded her of the salute spacemen gave to earthlings in a science-fiction picture she had recently watched on late-night television. She nodded. “How much—” she began, but he interrupted and said, “You can decide what it was worth when you’ve learned.” She was surprised and wondered if he meant to charge a great deal. Would it be her fault and would she have to pay him if he named his price when the lessons were over? But he had an honest face. Perhaps he was just embarrassed to talk about money.

He drove for a few blocks, making her watch his hand on the stick shift. “Feel how the car is going?” he said. “Now you shift.” He shifted. The car jumped a little, hummed, moved into gear. It was an old car and didn’t shift too easily, he said. She had been sitting forward, so that when he shifted she rocked back hard against the seat—harder than she needed to. Almost unconsciously, she wanted to show him what a good teacher he was. When her turn came to drive, the car stalled. “Take it easy,” he said. “Ease up on the clutch. Don’t just raise your foot off of it like that.” She tried it again. “That’s it,” he said. She looked at him when the car was in third. He sat in the seat, looking out the window. Snow was expected. It was Thursday. Although Larry was going to visit his parents and would not be back until late Friday afternoon, she decided she would wait until Tuesday for her next lesson. If he came home early, he would find out that she was taking lessons, and she didn’t want him to know. She asked the boy, whose name was Michael, whether he thought she would forget all he had taught her in the time between lessons. “You’ll remember,” he said.

When they returned to the old lady’s driveway, the car stalled going up the incline. She had trouble shifting. The boy put his hand over hers and kicked the heel of his hand forward. “You’ll have to treat this car a little roughly, I’m afraid,” he said. That afternoon, after he left, she made spaghetti sauce, chopping little pieces of pepper and onion and mushroom. When the sauce had cooked down, she called Mrs. Larsen and said that she would bring over dinner. She usually ate with the old lady once a week. The old lady often added a pinch of cinnamon to her food, saying that it brought out the flavor better than salt, and that since she was losing her sense of smell, food had to be strongly flavored for her to taste it. Once she had sprinkled cinnamon on a knockwurst. This time, as they ate, Natalie asked the old lady how much she paid the boy to bring the paper.

“I give him a dollar a week,” the old lady said.

“Did he set the price, or did you?”

“He set the price. He told me he wouldn’t take much because he has to walk this street to get to his apartment anyway.”

“He taught me a lot about the car today,” Natalie said.

“He’s very handsome, isn’t he?” the old lady said.

She asked Larry, “How were your parents?”

“Fine,” he said. “But I spent almost all the time with Andy. It’s almost his birthday, and he’s depressed. We went to see Mose Allison.”

“I think it stinks that hardly anyone else ever visits Andy,” she said.

“He doesn’t make it easy. He tells you everything that’s on his mind, and there’s no way you can pretend that his troubles don’t amount to much. You just have to sit there and nod.”

She remembered that Andy’s room looked like a gymnasium. There were handgrips and weights scattered on the floor. There was even a psychedelic pink hula hoop that he was to put inside his elbow and then move his arm in circles wide enough to make the hoop spin. He couldn’t do it. He would lie in bed with the hoop in back of his neck, and holding the sides, lift his neck off the pillow. His arms were barely strong enough to do that, really, but he could raise his neck with no trouble, so he just pretended that his arms pulling the loop were raising it. His parents thought that it was a special exercise that he had mastered.

“What did you do today?” Larry said now.

“I made spaghetti,” she said. She had made it the day before, but she thought that since he was mysterious about the time he spent away from her (“in the lab” and “at the gym” became interchangeable), she did not owe him a straight answer. That day she had dropped off the film and then she had sat at the drugstore counter to have a cup of coffee. She bought some cigarettes, though she had not smoked since high school. She smoked one mentholated cigarette and then threw the pack away in a garbage container outside the drugstore. Her mouth still felt cool inside.

He asked if she had planned anything for the weekend.

“No,” she said.

“Let’s do something you’d like to do. I’m a little ahead of myself in the lab right now.”

That night they ate spaghetti and made plans, and the next day they went for a ride in the country, to a factory where wooden toys were made. In the showroom he made a bear marionette shake and twist. She examined a small rocking horse, rhythmically pushing her finger up and down on the back rung of the rocker to make it rock. When they left they took with them a catalogue of toys they could order. She knew that they would never look at the catalogue again. On their way to the museum he stopped to wash the car. Because it was the weekend there were quite a few cars lined up waiting to go in. They were behind a blue Cadillac that seemed to inch forward of its own accord, without a driver. When the Cadillac moved into the washing area, a tiny man hopped out. He stood on tiptoe to reach the coin box to start the washing machine. She doubted if he was five feet tall.

“Look at that poor son of a bitch,” he said.

The little man was washing his car.

“If Andy could get out more,” Larry said. “If he could get rid of that feeling he has that he’s the only freak . . . I wonder if it wouldn’t do him good to come spend a week with us.”

“Are you going to take him in the wheelchair to the lab with you?” she said. “I’m not taking care of Andy all day.”

His face changed. “Just for a week was all I meant,” he said.

“I’m not doing it,” she said. She was thinking of the boy, and of the car. She had almost learned how to drive the car.

“Maybe in the warm weather,” she said. “When we could go to the park or something.”

He said nothing. The little man was rinsing his car. She sat inside when their turn came. She thought that Larry had no right to ask her to take care of Andy. Water flew out of the hose and battered the car. She thought of Andy, in the woods at night, stepping on the land mine, being blown into the air. She wondered if it threw him in an arc, so he ended up somewhere away from where he had been walking, or if it just blasted him straight up, if he went up the way an umbrella opens. Andy had been a wonderful ice skater. They all envied him his long sweeping turns, with his legs somehow neatly together and his body at the perfect angle. She never saw him have an accident on the ice. Never once. She had known Andy, and they had skated at Parker’s pond, for eight years before he was drafted.

The night before, as she and Larry were finishing dinner, he had asked her if she intended to vote for Nixon or McGovern in the election. “McGovern,” she said. How could he not have known that? She knew then that they were farther apart than she had thought. She hoped that on Election Day she could drive herself to the polls—not go with him and not walk. She planned not to ask the old lady if she wanted to come along because that would be one vote she could keep Nixon from getting.

At the museum she hesitated by the sculpture but did not point it out to him. He didn’t look at it. He gazed to the side, above it, at a Francis Bacon painting. He could have shifted his eyes just a little and seen the sculpture, and her, standing and staring.

After three more lessons she could drive the car. The last two times, which were later in the afternoon than her first lesson, they stopped at the drugstore to get the old lady’s paper, to save him from having to make the same trip back on foot. When he came out of the drugstore with the paper, after the final lesson, she asked him if he’d like to have a beer to celebrate.

“Sure,” he said.

They walked down the street to a bar that was filled with college students. She wondered if Larry ever came to this bar. He had never said that he did.

She and Michael talked. She asked why he wasn’t in high school. He told her that he had quit. He was living with his brother, and his brother was teaching him carpentry, which he had been interested in all along. On his napkin he drew a picture of the cabinets and bookshelves he and his brother had spent the last week constructing and installing in the house of two wealthy old sisters. He drummed the side of his thumb against the edge of the table in time with the music. They each drank beer, from heavy glass mugs.

“Mrs. Larsen said your husband was in school,” the boy said. “What’s he studying?”

She looked up, surprised. Michael had never mentioned her husband to her before. “Chemistry,” she said.

“I liked chemistry pretty well,” he said. “Some of it.”

“My husband doesn’t know you’ve been giving me lessons. I’m just going to tell him that I can drive the stick shift, and surprise him.”

“Yeah?” the boy said. “What will he think about that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll like it.”

“Why?” the boy said.

His question made her remember that he was sixteen. What she had said would never have provoked another question from an adult. The adult would have nodded or said, “I know.”

She shrugged. The boy took a long drink of beer. “I thought it was funny that he didn’t teach you himself, when Mrs. Larsen told me you were married,” he said.

They had discussed her. She wondered why Mrs. Larsen wouldn’t have told her that, because the night she ate dinner with her she had talked to Mrs. Larsen about what an extraordinarily patient teacher Michael was. Had Mrs. Larsen told him that Natalie talked about him?

On the way back to the car she remembered the photographs and went back to the drugstore and picked up the prints. As she took money out of her wallet she remembered that today was the day she would have to pay him. She looked around at him, at the front of the store, where he was flipping through magazines. He was tall and he was wearing a very old black jacket. One end of his long thick maroon scarf was hanging down his back.

“What did you take pictures of ?” he said when they were back in the car.

“Furniture. My husband wanted pictures of our furniture, in case it was stolen.”

“Why?” he said.

“They say if you have proof that you had valuable things, the insurance company won’t hassle you about reimbursing you.”

“You have a lot of valuable stuff ?” he said.

“My husband thinks so,” she said.

A block from the driveway she said, “What do I owe you?”

“Four dollars,” he said.

“That’s nowhere near enough,” she said and looked over at him. He had opened the envelope with the pictures in it while she was driving. He was staring at the picture of her legs. “What’s this?” he said.

She turned into the driveway and shut off the engine. She looked at the picture. She could not think what to tell him it was. Her hands and heart felt heavy.

“Wow,” the boy said. He laughed. “Never mind. Sorry. I’m not looking at any more of them.”

He put the pack of pictures back in the envelope and dropped it on the seat between them.

She tried to think what to say, of some way she could turn the pictures into a joke. She wanted to get out of the car and run. She wanted to stay, not to give him the money, so he would sit there with her. She reached into her purse and took out her wallet and removed four one-dollar bills.

“How many years have you been married?” he asked.

“One,” she said. She held the money out to him. He said “Thank you” and leaned across the seat and put his right arm over her shoulder and kissed her. She felt his scarf bunched up against their cheeks. She was amazed at how warm his lips were in the cold car.

He moved his head away and said, “I didn’t think you’d mind if I did that.” She shook her head no. He unlocked the door and got out.

“I could drive you to your brother’s apartment,” she said. Her voice sounded hollow. She was extremely embarrassed, but she couldn’t let him go.

He got back in the car. “You could drive me and come in for a drink,” he said. “My brother’s working.”

When she got back to the car two hours later she saw a white parking ticket clamped under the windshield wiper, flapping in the wind. When she opened the car door and sank into the seat, she saw that he had left the money, neatly folded, on the floor mat on his side of the car. She did not pick up the money. In a while she started the car. She stalled it twice on the way home. When she had pulled into the driveway she looked at the money for a long time, then left it lying there. She left the car unlocked, hoping the money would be stolen. If it disappeared, she could tell herself that she had paid him. Otherwise she would not know how to deal with the situation.

When she got into the apartment, the phone rang. “I’m at the gym to play basketball,” Larry said. “Be home in an hour.”

“I was at the drugstore,” she said. “See you then.”

She examined the pictures. She sat on the sofa and laid them out, the twelve of them, in three rows on the cushion next to her. The picture of the piano was between the picture of her feet and the picture of herself that she had shot by aiming into the mirror. She picked up the four pictures of their furniture and put them on the table. She picked up the others and examined them closely. She began to understand why she had taken them. She had photographed parts of her body, fragments of it, to study the pieces. She had probably done it because she thought so much about Andy’s body and the piece that was gone—the leg, below the knee, on his left side. She had had two bourbon-and-waters at the boy’s apartment, and drinking always depressed her. She felt very depressed looking at the pictures, so she put them down and went into the bedroom. She undressed. She looked at her body—whole, not a bad figure—in the mirror. It was an automatic reaction with her to close the curtains when she was naked, so she turned quickly and went to the window and did that. She went back to the mirror; the room was darker now and her body looked better. She ran her hands down her sides, wondering if the feel of her skin was anything like the way the sculpture would feel. She was sure that the sculpture would be smoother—her hands would move more quickly down the slopes of it than she wanted—that it would be cool, and that somehow she could feel the grayness of it. Those things seemed preferable to her hands lingering on her body, the imperfection of her skin, the overheated apartment. If she were the piece of sculpture and if she could feel, she would like her sense of isolation.