The New Yorker Stories (54 page)

I
t was almost Christmas, and Cammy and Peter were visiting her parents in Cambridge. Late in the afternoon on the second day of their visit, Cammy followed Peter upstairs when he went to take a shower. She wanted a break from trying to make conversation with her mother and father.

“Why is it that I always feel guilty when we’re not at my parents’ house at Christmas?” he said.

“Call them,” she said.

“That makes me feel worse,” he said.

He was looking in the mirror and rubbing his chin, though he had shaved just a few hours ago. Every afternoon, she knew, he felt for a trace of beard but didn’t shave again if he found it. “They probably don’t even notice we’re not there,” he said. “Who’d have time, with my sister and her
au pair
and her three kids and her cat and her dog and her rabbit.”

“Gerbil,” Cammy said. She sat at the foot of the bed while he undressed. Every year was the same; they offered to visit his parents in Kentucky, and his mother hinted that there was not enough room. The year before, he had said that they’d bring sleeping bags. His mother had said that she thought it was silly to have her family sprawled on the floor, and that they should visit at a more convenient time. Several days ago, before Cammy and Peter left New York for Boston, they had got presents in the mail from his parents. Each of them had been sent a Christmas stocking with a fake-fur top. Cammy’s stocking contained makeup. Peter’s was full of joke presents—a hand buzzer, soap that turned black when you washed your hands, a key chain with a dried yellow fish hanging from it. Peter’s stocking had had a hundred-dollar bill folded in the toe. In the toe of her stocking, Cammy found cuticle scissors.

While Peter showered, she wandered around her old room; when they arrived, they had been tired from the long drive, and she went to sleep with no more interest in her surroundings than she would have had in an anonymous motel room. Now she saw that her mother had got rid of most of the junk that used to be here, but she had also added things—her high-school yearbook, a Limoges dish with her Girl Scout ring in it—so that the room looked like a shrine. Years ago, Cammy had rolled little curls of Scotch Tape and stuck them to the backs of pictures of boyfriends or would-be boyfriends and then pushed the snapshots against the mirror to form the shape of a heart. Only two photos remained on the mirror now, both of Michael Grizetti, who had been her steady in her last year of high school. When her mother had moved them and put them neatly under the frame of the mirror, top left and right, she must have discovered the secret. Cammy pulled the larger picture out and turned it over. The hidden snapshot was still glued to the back: Grizzly with his pelvis thrust forward, thumbs pointing at his crotch, and the message “Nil desperandum x x x x x x x x x x” written on the snapshot across his chest. It all seemed so harmless now. He was the first person Cammy had slept with, and most of what she remembered now was what happened after they had sex. They went into New York, with fake IDs and fifty dollars Grizzly borrowed from his brother. She could still remember how the shag carpet tickled the soles of her feet when she went to the window of their hotel in the morning and pulled open the heavy curtains and looked across a distance so short that she thought she could reach out and touch the adjacent building, so close and so high that she couldn’t see the sky; there had been no way to tell what kind of day it was. Now she noticed that there was a little haze over Michael Grizetti’s top lip in the photograph. It was dust, not a mustache.

Peter came out of the bathroom. Over the years, he had gotten his hair cut closer and closer, so that now when she touched his head the curls were too tight to spring up at her touch. His head looked a little like a cantaloupe—a ridiculous idea, which would be useful just the same; she and her friends always said amusing things about their husbands when they wrote each other. She saved the more flattering images of him as things to say to him after making love. Her high-school English teacher would have approved. The teacher loved to invent little rhymes for the class:

Your conversation can be terrific;

Just remember: be specific

Peter’s damp towel flew past her and landed on the bed. As usual, he discarded it as if he had just finished it off in a fight. The week before, he had been in Barbados on a retreat with his company, and he was still very tan. There was a wide band of white skin where he had worn his swimming trunks. In the dim afternoon light he looked like a piece of Marimekko fabric.

He pulled on sweatpants, tied the drawstring, and lit a cigarette with the fancy lighter she had bought him for Christmas. She had given it to him early. It was a metal tube with a piece of rawhide attached to the bottom. When the string was pulled, an outer sleeve of metal rose over the top, to protect the flame. Peter loved it, but she was a little sorry after she gave it to him; there had been something dramatic about huddling in doorways with him, using her body to help him block the wind while he struck matches to light a cigarette. She took two steps toward him now and gave him a hug, putting her hands under his armpits. They were damp. She believed it was a truth that no man ever dried himself thoroughly after showering. He kissed across her forehead, then stopped and pushed his chin between her eyebrows. She couldn’t respond; she had told him the night before that she didn’t understand how anyone could make love in their parents’ house. He shook his head, almost amused, and tucked a thermal shirt into the sweatpants, then pulled on a sweater. “I don’t care if it
is
snowing,” he said. He was going running.

They walked downstairs. Her father, a retired cardiologist, was on his slant board in the living room, arms raised to heaven, holding the
Wall Street Journal
. “How do you reconcile smoking a pack a day, and then going running?” her father said.

“To tell you the truth,” Peter said, “I don’t run for my health. It clears my mind. I run because it gives me a high.”

“Well, do you think mental health is separate from the health of the body?”

“Oh, Stan,” Cammy’s mother said, coming into the living room, “no one is trying to argue with you about medicine.”

“I wasn’t talking about
medicine
,” he said.

“People just talk loosely,” her mother said.

“I’d never argue that point,” her father said.

Cammy found these visits more and more impossible. As a child she had been told what to do and think, and then when she got married her parents had backed off entirely, so that in the first year of her marriage she found herself in the odd position of advising her mother and father. Then, at some point, they had managed to turn the tables again, and now all of them were back to “Go.” They argued with each other and made pronouncements instead of having conversations.

She decided to go running with Peter and pulled her parka off a hanger in the closet. She was still having trouble zipping it outside, and Peter helped by pulling the material down tightly in front. It only made her feel more helpless. He saw her expression and nuzzled her hair. “What do you expect from them?” he said, as the zipper went up. She thought, He asks questions he knows I won’t bother to answer.

Snow was falling. They were walking through a Christmas-card scene that she hadn’t believed in in years; she half expected carolers around the corner. When Peter turned left, she guessed that they were heading for the park on Mass. Avenue. They passed a huge white clapboard house with real candles glowing in all the windows. “Some place,” Peter said. “Look at that wreath.” The wreath that hung on the front door was so thick that it was convex; it looked as if someone had uprooted a big boxwood and cut a hole in the center. Peter made a snowball and threw it, almost getting a bull’s-eye.

“Are you crazy?” she said, grabbing at his hand. “What are you going to do if they open the door?”

“Listen,” he said, “if they lived in New York the wreath would be stolen. This way, everybody can enjoy throwing snowballs at it.”

On the corner, a man stood staring down at a small brown dog wearing a plaid coat. The blond man standing next to him said, “I told you so. She may be blind, but she still loves it out in the snow.” The other man patted the shivering dog, and they continued on their walk.

Christmas in Cambridge. Soon it would be Christmas Eve, time to open the gifts. As usual, she and Peter would be given something practical (stocks), and something frivolous (glasses too fragile for the dishwasher). Then there would be one personal present for each of them: probably a piece of gold jewelry for Cammy and a silk tie for Peter. Cammy occasionally wore one of the ties when she dressed like a nineteen-forties businessman. Peter thought the ties were slightly effeminate—he never liked them. The year before, when her parents gave her a lapis ring, he had pulled it off her finger to examine it on Christmas night, in bed, then pushed it on his little finger and wiggled it, making a Clara Bow mouth and pretending to be gay. He had been trying to show her how ridiculous he would look wearing a wedding ring. They had been married three years then, and some part of her was still so sentimental that she asked him from time to time if he wouldn’t reconsider and wear a wedding ring. It wasn’t that she thought a ring would be any sort of guarantee. They had lived together for two years before they suddenly decided to get married, but before the wedding they had agreed that it was naive to expect a lifetime of fidelity. If either one became interested in someone else, they would handle the situation in whatever way they felt best, but there would be no flaunting of the other person, and they wouldn’t talk about it.

A couple of months before the last trip to her parents’—Christmas a year ago—Peter had waked her up one night to tell her about a young woman he had had a brief affair with. He described his feelings about being with the woman—how much he liked it when she put her hand over his when they sat at a table in a restaurant; the time she had dissipated some anger of his by suddenly putting her lips to the deepening lines in his forehead, to kiss his frown away. Then Peter had wept onto Cammy’s pillow. She could still remember his face—the only time she had ever seen him cry—and how red and swollen it was, as if it had been burned. “Is this discreet enough for you?” he had said. “Do you want to push this pillow into my face so not even the
neighbors
can hear?” She didn’t care what the neighbors thought, because she didn’t even know the neighbors. She had not comforted him or touched the pillow. She had not been dramatic and gone out to sleep on the sofa. After he went to work in the morning, she had several cups of coffee and then went out to try to cheer herself up. She bought flowers at an expensive flower shop on Greenwich Avenue, pointing to individual blossoms for the florist to remove one by one, choosing with great care. Then she went home, trimmed the stems, and put them in little bottles—just a few stalks in each, all flowers and no greens. By evening, when Peter was about to come home, she realized that he would see them and know that she had been depressed, so she bunched them all together again and put them in a vase in the dining room. Looking at them, she suddenly understood how ironic it was that all during the past summer, when she was falling more deeply in love with Peter, he was having a flirtation and then an affair with someone else. Cammy had begun to be comfortable with how subtly attuned to each other they were, and she had been deluded. It made her embarrassed to remember how close she felt to Peter late one fall afternoon on Bleecker Street, when Peter stopped to light a cigarette. Something had made her poke him in the ribs. She didn’t often act childish, and she could see that he was taken aback, and that made her laugh and poke him again. Every time he thought she’d finished and tried to light another match, she managed to take him by surprise and tickle him again; she even got through the barrier he’d made with his elbows pointed into his stomach. “What
is
this?” he said. “The American Cancer Society sent you to torture me?” People were looking—who said people don’t notice things in New York?—and Peter was backing away, then doubling up, with the cigarette unlit in his mouth, admitting that he couldn’t control her. When she moved toward him to hug him and end the game, he didn’t believe it was over; he turned sideways, one hand extended to ward her off, clumsily trying to thumb up a flame with his right hand. This was the opposite of the night she had sex with Michael Grizetti: she could remember all of this moment—the smiling fat woman walking by, talking to herself, the buzzing sound of the neon sign outside the restaurant, Peter’s stainless-steel watchband sparkling under the streetlight, the
de-de-de-deeeeeeh
of a car horn in the distance. “Time!” he had shouted, backing away. Then, at a safe distance, he crossed his fingers above his head, like a child.

Now Peter slapped her bottom. “I’m going to run,” he said. He took off into the park, his running shoes kicking up clods of snow. She watched him go. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and his short leather jacket came just to his waist, so that he looked like an adolescent in ill-fitting clothes. She had on cowboy boots instead of running shoes. Why did she hold it against him that she had decided at the last minute to go with him and that she was wearing the wrong shoes? Did she expect him to throw down his cape?

She probably would not have thought of a cape at all, except that his scarf flew off as he ran, and he didn’t notice. She turned into the park to get it. The snow was falling in smaller flakes now; it was going to stay. Maybe it was the realization that even icier weather was still to come that suddenly made her nearly numb with cold. The desire to be in the sun was almost a hot spot between her ribs; something actually burned inside her. Like everyone she knew, she had grown up watching Porky Pig and Heckle and Jeckle on Saturday mornings—cartoons in which the good guys got what they wanted and no consequences were permanent. Now she wanted one of those small tornadoes that whipped through cartoons, transporting objects and characters with miraculous speed from one place to another. She wanted to believe again in the magic power of the wind.