The New Yorker Stories (41 page)

“She’ll be full of sushi and Perrier. I’ll bet they don’t want dinner.”

“You’ll want dinner,” she says. “I should get something.”

He drives to the market. When they pull into the parking lot, Ben goes into the store with Inez, instead of to the liquor store next door with him. Tom gets a bottle of cognac and pockets the change. The clerk raises his eyebrows and drops them several times, like Groucho Marx, as he slips a flyer into the bag, with a picture on the front showing a blue-green drink in a champagne glass.

“Inez and I have secrets,” Ben says, while they are driving home. He is standing up to hug her around the neck from the back seat.

Ben is tired, and he taunts people when he is that way. Amanda does not think Ben should be condescended to: she reads him R. D. Laing, not fairy tales; she has him eat French food, and only indulges him by serving the sauce on the side. Amanda refused to send him to kindergarten. If she had, Tom believes, if he was around other children his age, he might get rid of some of his annoying mannerisms.

“For instance,” Inez says, “I might get married.”

“Who?” he says, so surprised that his hands feel cold on the wheel.

“A man who lives in town. You don’t know him.”

“You’re dating someone?” he says.

He guns the car to get it up the driveway, which is slick with mud washed down by a lawn sprinkler. He steers hard, waiting for the instant when he will be able to feel that the car will make it. The car slithers a bit but then goes straight; they get to the top. He pulls onto the lawn, by the back door, leaving the way clear for Shelby and Amanda’s car to pull into the garage.

“It would make sense that if I’m thinking of marrying somebody I would have been out on a date with him,” Inez says.

Inez has been with them since Ben was born, five years ago, and she has gestures and expressions now like Amanda’s—Amanda’s patient half-smile that lets him know she is half charmed and half at a loss that he is so unsophisticated. When Amanda divorced him, he went to Kennedy to pick her up when she returned, and her arms were loaded with pineapples as she came up the ramp. When he saw her, he gave her that same patient half-smile.

At eight, they aren’t back, and Inez is worried. At nine, they still aren’t back. “She did say something about a play yesterday,” Inez whispers to Tom. Ben is playing with a puzzle in the other room. It is his bedtime—past it—and he has the concentration of Einstein. Inez goes into the room again, and he listens while she reasons with Ben. She is quieter than Amanda; she will get what she wants. Tom reads the newspaper from the market. It comes out once a week. There are articles about deer leaping across the road, lady artists who do batik who will give demonstrations at the library. He hears Ben running up the stairs, chased by Inez.

Water is turned on. He hears Ben laughing above the water. It makes him happy that Ben is so well adjusted; when he himself was five, no woman would have been allowed in the bathroom with him. Now that he is almost forty, he would like it very much if he were in the bathtub instead of Ben—if Inez were soaping his back, her fingers sliding down his skin.

For a long time, he has been thinking about water, about traveling somewhere so that he can walk on the beach, see the ocean. Every year he spends in New York he gets more and more restless. He often wakes up at night in his apartment, hears the air-conditioners roaring and the woman in the apartment above shuffling away her insomnia in satin slippers. (She has shown them to him, to explain that her walking cannot possibly be what is keeping him awake.) On nights when he can’t sleep, he opens his eyes just a crack and pretends, as he did when he was a child, that the furniture is something else. He squints the tall mahogany chest of drawers into the trunk of a palm tree; blinking his eyes quickly, he makes the night light pulse like a buoy bobbing in the water and tries to imagine that his bed is a boat, and that he is setting sail, as he and Amanda did years before, in Maine, where Perkins Cove widens into the choppy, ink-blue ocean.

Upstairs, the water is being turned off. It is silent. Silence for a long time. Inez laughs. Rocky jumps onto the stairs, and one board creaks as the cat pads upstairs. Amanda will not let him have Ben. He is sure of it. After a few minutes, he hears Inez laugh about making it snow as she holds the can of talcum powder high and lets it sift down on Ben in the tub.

Deciding that he wants at least a good night, Tom takes off his shoes and climbs the stairs; no need to disturb the quiet of the house. The door to Shelby and Amanda’s bedroom is open. Ben and Inez are curled on the bed, and she has begun to read to him by the dim light. She lies next to him on the vast blue quilt spread over the bed, on her side with her back to the door, with one arm sweeping slowly through the air:
“Los soldados hicieron alto a la entrada del pueblo. . . .”

Ben sees him, and pretends not to. Ben loves Inez more than any of them. Tom goes away, so that she will not see him and stop reading.

He goes into the room where Shelby has his study. He turns on the light. There is a dimmer switch, and the light comes on very low. He leaves it that way.

He examines a photograph of the beak of a bird. A photograph next to it of a bird’s wing. He moves in close to the picture and rests his cheek against the glass. He is worried. It isn’t like Amanda not to come back, when she knows he is waiting to see her. He feels the coolness from the glass spreading down his body. There is no reason to think that Amanda is dead. When Shelby drives, he creeps along like an old man.

He goes into the bathroom and splashes water on his face, dries himself on what he thinks is Amanda’s towel. He goes back to the study and stretches out on the daybed, under the open window, waiting for the car. He is lying very still on an unfamiliar bed, in a house he used to visit two or three times a year when he and Amanda were married—a house always decorated with flowers for Amanda’s birthday, or smelling of newly cut pine at Christmas, when there was angel hair arranged into nests on the tabletops, with tiny Christmas balls glittering inside, like miraculously colored eggs. Amanda’s mother is dead. He and Amanda are divorced. Amanda is married to Shelby. These events are unreal. What is real is the past, and the Amanda of years ago—that Amanda whose image he cannot get out of his mind, the scene he keeps remembering. It had happened on a day when he had not expected to discover anything; he was going along with his life with an ease he would never have again, and, in a way, what happened was so painful that even the pain of her leaving, and her going to Shelby, would later be dulled in comparison. Amanda—in her pretty underpants, in the bedroom of their city apartment, standing by the window—had crossed her hands at the wrists, covering her breasts, and said to Ben, “It’s gone now. The milk is gone.” Ben, in his diapers and T-shirt, lying on the bed and looking up at her. The mug of milk waiting for him on the bedside table—he’d drink it as surely as Hamlet would drink from the goblet of poison. Ben’s little hand on the mug, her breasts revealed again, her hand overlapping his hand, the mug tilted, the first swallow. That night, Tom had moved his head from his pillow to hers, slipped down in the bed until his cheek came to the top of her breast. He had known he would never sleep, he was so amazed at the offhand way she had just done such a powerful thing. “Baby—” he had said, beginning, and she had said, “I’m not your baby.” Pulling away from him, from Ben. Who would have guessed that what she wanted was another man—a man with whom she would stretch into sleep on a vast ocean of blue quilted satin, a bed as wide as the ocean? The first time he came to Greenwich and saw that bed, with her watching him, he had cupped his hand to his brow and looked far across the room, as though he might see China.

The day he went to Greenwich to visit for the first time after the divorce, Ben and Shelby hadn’t been there. Inez was there, though, and she had gone along on the tour of the redecorated house that Amanda had insisted on giving him. Tom knew that Inez had not wanted to walk around the house with them. She had done it because Amanda had asked her to, and she had also done it because she thought it might make it less awkward for him. In a way different from the way he loved Amanda, but still a very real way, he would always love Inez for that.

Now Inez is coming into the study, hesitating as her eyes accustom themselves to the dark. “You’re awake?” she whispers. “Are you all right?” She walks to the bed slowly and sits down. His eyes are closed, and he is sure that he could sleep forever. Her hand is on his; he smiles as he begins to drift and dream. A bird extends its wing with the grace of a fan opening;
los soldados
are poised at the crest of the hill. About Inez he will always remember this: when she came to work on Monday, after the weekend when Amanda had told him about Shelby and said that she was getting a divorce, Inez whispered to him in the kitchen, “I’m still your friend.” Inez had come close to him to whisper it, the way a bashful lover might move quietly forward to say “I love you.” She had said that she was his friend, and he had told her that he never doubted that. Then they had stood there, still and quiet, as if the walls of the room were mountains and their words might fly against them.

Gravity

M
y favorite jacket was bought at L. L. Bean. It got from Maine to Atlanta, where an ex-boyfriend of mine found it at a thrift shop and bought it for my birthday. It was a little tight for him, but he was wearing it when he saw me. He said that if I had not complimented him on the jacket he would just have kept it. In the pocket I found an amyl nitrite and a Hershey’s Kiss. The candy was put there deliberately.

In the eight years I’ve had it, I’ve lost all the buttons but the top one—the one I never button because nobody closes the button under the collar. Four buttons are gone, but I can only remember how the next-to-last one disappeared: I saw it dangling but thought it would hold. Later, crouched on the floor, I said, “It stands to reason that since I haven’t moved off this barstool, it has to be on the floor
right here
,” drunkenly staring at the floor beneath my barstool at the Café Central.

Nick, the man I’m walking with now, couldn’t possibly fit into the jacket. He wishes that I didn’t fit into it, either. He hates the jacket. When I told him I was thinking about buying a winter scarf, he suggested that rattails might go with the jacket nicely. He keeps stopping at store windows, offering to buy me a sweater, a coat. Nothing doing.

“I’m going crazy,” Nick says to me, “and you’re depressed because you’ve lost your buttons.” We keep walking. He pokes me in the side. “Buttons might as well be marbles,” he says.

“Did you ever play marbles?”

“Play marbles?” he says. “Don’t you just look at them?”

“I don’t think so. I think there’s a game you can play with them.”

“I had cigar boxes full of marbles when I was a kid. Isn’t that great? I had marbles and stamps and coins and
Playboy
cutouts.”

“All at the same time?”

“What do you mean?”

“The stamps didn’t come before the
Playboy
pictures?”

“Same time. I used the magnifying glass with the pictures instead of the stamps.”

The left side of my jacket overlaps the right, and my arms are crossed tightly in front of me, holding it closed. Nick notices and says, “It’s not very cold,” putting an arm around my shoulders.

He’s right. It isn’t. Last Friday afternoon, the doctor told me I was going to have to go to the hospital on Wednesday, the day after tomorrow, to have a test to find out if some blockage in a Fallopian tube has been causing the pain in my left side, and I’m a coward. I have never believed anything in
The Bell Jar
except Esther Greenwood’s paranoid idea that when you’re unconscious you feel pain and later you forget that you felt it.

He’s taken his arm away. I keep tight hold on my jacket with one hand and put my other hand around his wrist so he’ll take his hand out of his pocket.

“Give me the hand,” I say. We walk along like that.

The other buttons fell off without seeming to be loose. They came off last winter. That was when I first fell in love with Nick, and other things seemed very unimportant. I thought then that during the summer I’d sew on new buttons. It’s October now, and cold. We’re walking up Fifth Avenue, just a few blocks away from the hospital where I’ll have the test. When he realizes it, he’ll turn down a side street.

“You’re not going to die,” he says.

“I know,” I say, “and it would be silly to be worried about anything short of dying, wouldn’t it?”

“Don’t take it out on me,” he says, and steers me onto Ninety-sixth Street.

There are no stars this evening, so Nick is talking about the stars. He asks if I’ve ever imagined the thoughts of the first astronomer turning the powerful telescope on Saturn and seeing not only the planet but rings—smoky loops. He stops to light a cigarette.

The chrysanthemums planted down the middle of Park Avenue are just a blur in the dark. I think of de Heem’s flowers: move close to one of his paintings and you see a snail curled on the wood, and tiny insects coating the leaves. It happens sometimes when you bring flowers in from the garden—a snail that looks and feels like pus, climbing a stem.