The New Yorker Stories (61 page)

“What did her lover do?”

“He ran the music store. He left town.”

“Where did he go?”

“Montpelier.”

“How do you find all this stuff out?”

“Ask. Get told,” Howard says. “Then he was cleaning his gun in Montpelier the other day, and it went off and he shot himself in the foot. Didn’t do any real damage, though.”

“It’s hard to think of anything like that as poetic justice,” I say. “So are the Jansons happy again?”

“I don’t know. We don’t see much of them,” Howard says. “We’re not really involved in any social whirl, you know. You only visit during the holidays, and that’s when we give the annual party.”

“Oh, hel-lo,” Becky says, sweeping into the living room from the front door, bringing the cold and her girlfriend Deirdre in with her. Deirdre is giggling, head averted. “My friends! My wonderful friends!” Becky says, trotting past, hand waving madly. She stops in the doorway, and Deirdre collides with her. Deirdre puts her hand up to her mouth to muffle a yelp, then bolts past Becky into the kitchen.

“I can remember being that age,” I say.

“I don’t think I was ever that stupid,” Howard says.

“A different thing happens with girls. Boys don’t talk to each other all the time in quite the same intense way, do they? I mean, I can remember when it seemed that I never talked but that I was always
confiding
something.”

“Confide something in me,” Howard says, coming back from flipping the Bach on the stereo.

“Girls just talk that way to other girls,” I say, realizing he’s serious.

“Gidon Kremer,” Howard says, clamping his hand over his heart. “God—tell me that isn’t beautiful.”

“How did you find out so much about classical music?” I say. “By asking and getting told?”

“In New York,” he says. “Before I moved here. Before L.A., even. I just started buying records and asking around. Half the city is an unofficial guide to classical music. You can find out a lot in New York.” He pours more wine into his glass. “Come on,” he says. “Confide something in me.”

In the kitchen, one of the girls turns on the radio, and rock and roll, played low, crosses paths with Bach’s violin. The music goes lower still. Deirdre and Becky are laughing.

I take a drink, sigh, and nod at Howard. “When I was in San Francisco last June to see my friend Susan, I got in a night before I said I would, and she wasn’t in town,” I say. “I was going to surprise her, and she was the one who surprised me. It was no big deal. I was tired from the flight and by the time I got there I was happy to have the excuse to check into a hotel, because if she’d been there we’d have talked all night. Acting like Becky with Deirdre, right?”

Howard rolls his eyes and nods.

“So I went to a hotel and checked in and took a bath, and suddenly I got my second wind and I thought what the hell, why not go to the restaurant right next to the hotel—or in the hotel, I guess it was—and have a great dinner, since it was supposed to be such a great place.”

“What restaurant?”

“L’Étoile.”

“Yeah,” he says. “What happened?”

“I’m telling you what happened. You have to be patient. Girls always know to be patient with other girls.”

He nods yes again.

“They were very nice to me. It was about three-quarters full. They put me at a table, and the minute I sat down I looked up and there was a man on a banquette across the room from me. He was looking at me, and I was looking at him, and it was almost impossible not to keep eye contact. It just hit both of us, obviously. And almost on the other side of the curve of the banquette was a woman, who wasn’t terribly attractive. She had on a wedding ring. He didn’t. They were eating in silence. I had to force myself to look somewhere else, but when I did look up he’d look up, or he’d already be looking up. At some point he left the table. I saw that in my peripheral vision, when I had my head turned to hear a conversation on my right and I was chewing my food. Then after a while he paid the check and the two of them left. She walked ahead of him, and he didn’t seem to be with her. I mean, he walked quite far behind her. But naturally he didn’t turn his head. And after they left I thought, That’s amazing. It was really like kinetic energy. Just wham. So I had coffee, and then I paid my check, and when I was leaving I was walking up the steep steps to the street and the waiter came up behind me and said, ‘Excuse me. I don’t know what I should do, but I didn’t want to embarrass you in the restaurant. The gentleman left this for you on his way out.’ And he handed me an envelope. I was pretty taken aback, but I just said, ‘Thank you,’ and continued up the steps, and when I got outside I looked around. He wasn’t there, naturally. So I opened the envelope, and his business card was inside. He was one of the partners in a law firm. And underneath his name he had written, ‘Who are you? Please call.’ ”

Howard is smiling.

“So I put it in my purse and I walked for a few blocks, and I thought, Well, what for, really? Some man in San Francisco? For what? A one-night stand? I went back to the hotel, and when I walked in the man behind the desk stood up and said, ‘Excuse me. Were you just eating dinner?,’ and I said, ‘A few minutes ago,’ and he said, ‘Someone left this for you.’ It was a hotel envelope. In the elevator on the way to my room, I opened it, and it was the same business card, with ‘Please call’ written on it.”

“I hope you called,” Howard says.

“I decided to sleep on it. And in the morning I decided not to. But I kept the card. And then at the end of August I was walking in the East Village, and a couple obviously from out of town were walking in front of me, and a punk kid got up off the stoop where he was sitting and said to them, ‘Hey—I want my picture taken with you.’ I went into a store, and when I came out the couple and the punk kid were all laughing together, holding these Polaroid snaps that another punk had taken. It was a joke, not a scam. The man gave the kid a dollar for one of the pictures, and they walked off, and the punk sat back down on the stoop. So I walked back to where he was sitting, and I said, ‘Could you do me a real favor? Could I have my picture taken with you, too?’ ”

“What?” Howard says. The violin is soaring. He gets up and turns the music down a notch. He looks over his shoulder. “Yeah?” he says.

“The kid wanted to know why I wanted it, and I told him because it would upset my boyfriend. So he said yeah—his face lit up when I said that—but that he really would appreciate two bucks for more film. So I gave it to him, and then he put his arm around me and really mugged for the camera. He was like a human boa constrictor around my neck, and he did a Mick Jagger pout. I couldn’t believe how well the picture came out. And that night, on the white part on the bottom I wrote, ‘I’m somebody whose name you still don’t know. Are you going to find me?’ and I put it in an envelope and mailed it to him in San Francisco. I don’t know why I did it. I mean, it doesn’t seem like something I’d ever do, you know?”

“But how will he find you?” Howard says.

“I’ve still got his card,” I say, shrugging my good shoulder toward my purse on the floor.

“You don’t know what you’re going to do?” Howard says.

“I haven’t thought about it in months.”

“How is that possible?”

“How is it possible that somebody can go into a restaurant and be hit by lightning and the other person is, too? It’s like a bad movie or something.”

“Of course it can happen,” Howard says. “Seriously, what are you going to do?”

“Let some time pass. Maybe send him something he can follow up on if he still wants to.”

“That’s an amazing story,” Howard says.

“Sometimes—well, I hadn’t thought about it in a while, but at the end of summer, after I mailed the picture, I’d be walking along or doing whatever I was doing and this feeling would come over me that he was thinking about me.”

Howard looks at me strangely. “He probably was,” he says. “He doesn’t know how to get in touch with you.”

“You used to be a screenwriter. What should he do?”

“Couldn’t he figure out from the background that it was the Village?”

“I’m not sure.”

“If he could, he could put an ad in the
Voice
.”

“I think it was just a car in the background.”

“Then you’ve got to give him something else,” Howard says.

“For what? You want your sister to have a one-night stand?”

“You make him sound awfully attractive,” Howard says.

“Yeah, but what if he’s a rat? It could be argued that he was just cocky, and that he was pretty sure that I’d respond. Don’t you think?”

“I think you should get in touch with him. Do it in some amusing way if you want, but I wouldn’t let him slip away.”

“I never had him. And from the looks of it he has a wife.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” I say. “I guess I don’t know.”

“Do it,” Howard says. “I think you need this,” and when he speaks he whispers—just what a girl would do. He nods his head yes. “Do it,” he whispers again. Then he turns his head abruptly, to see what I am staring at. It is Kate, wrapped in a towel after her bath, trailing the long cord of the extension phone with her.

“It’s Frank,” she whispers, her hand over the mouthpiece. “He says he’s going to come to the party after all.”

I look at her dumbly, surprised. I’d almost forgotten that Frank knew I was here. He’s only been here once with me, and it was clear that he didn’t like Howard and Kate. Why would he suddenly decide to come to the party?

She shrugs, hand still over the mouthpiece. “Come here,” she whispers.

I get up and start toward the phone. “If it’s not an awful imposition,” she says, “maybe he could bring Deirdre’s father with him. He lives just around the corner from you in the city.”

“Deirdre’s father?” I say.

“Here,” she whispers. “He’ll hang up.”

“Hi, Frank,” I say, talking into the phone. My voice sounds high, false.

“I miss you,” Frank says. “I’ve got to get out of the city. I invited myself. I assume since it’s an annual invitation it’s all right, right?”

“Oh, of course,” I say. “Can you just hold on for one second?”

“Sure,” he says.

I cover the mouthpiece again. Kate is still standing next to me.

“I was talking to Deirdre’s mother in the bathroom,” Kate whispers. “She says that her ex-husband’s not really able to drive yet, and that Deirdre has been crying all day. If he could just give him a lift, they could take the train back, but—”

“Frank? This is sort of crazy, and I don’t quite understand the logistics, but I’m going to put Kate on. We need for you to do us a favor.”

“Anything,” he says. “As long as it’s not about Mrs. Joan Wilde-Younge’s revision of a revision of a revision of a spiteful will.”

I hand the phone to Kate. “Frank?” she says. “You’re about to make a new friend. Be very nice to him, because he just had his gallbladder out, and he’s got about as much strength as seaweed. He lives on Seventy-ninth Street.”

I am in the car with Howard, huddled in my coat and the poncho. We are on what seems like an ironic mission. We are going to the 7-Eleven to get ice. The moon is shining brightly, and patches of snow shine like stepping stones in the field on my side of the car. Howard puts on his directional signal suddenly and turns, and I look over my shoulder to make sure we’re not going to be hit from behind.

“Sorry,” he says. “My mind was wandering. Not that it’s the best-marked road to begin with.”

Miles Davis is on the tape deck—the very quiet kind of Miles Davis.

“We’ve got a second for a detour,” he says.

“Why are we detouring?”

“Just for a second,” Howard says.

“It’s freezing,” I say, dropping my chin to speak the words so my throat will warm up for a second. I raise my head. My clavicle is colder.

“What you said about kinetic energy made me think about doing this,” Howard says. “You can confide in me and I can confide in you, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“This,” he says, turning onto property marked “
NO TRESPASSING
.” The road is quite rutted where he turns onto it, but as it begins to weave up the hill it smooths out a little. He is driving with both hands gripping the wheel hard, sitting forward in the seat as if the extra inch, plus the brights, will help him see more clearly. The road levels off, and to our right is a pond. It is not frozen, but ice clings to the sides, like scum in an aquarium. Howard clicks out the tape, and we sit there in the cold and silence. He turns off the ignition.

“There was a dog here last week,” he says.

I look at him.

“Lots of dogs in the country, right?” he says.

“What are we doing here?” I say, drawing up my knees.

“I fell in love with somebody,” he says.

I had been looking at the water, but when he spoke I turned and looked at him again.

“I didn’t think she’d be here,” he says quietly. “I didn’t even really think that the dog would be here. I just felt drawn to the place, I guess—that’s all. I wanted to see if I could get some of that feeling back if I came here. You’d get it back if you called that man, or wrote him. It was real. I could tell when you were talking to me that it was real.”

“Howard, did you say that you fell in love with somebody? When?”

“A few weeks ago. The semester’s over. She’s graduating. She’s gone in January. A graduate student—like that? A twenty-two-year-old kid. One of my pal Lightfoot’s philosophy students.” Howard lets go of the wheel. When he turned the ignition off, he had continued to grip the wheel. Now his hands are on his thighs. We both seem to be examining his hands. At least, I am looking at his hands so I do not stare into his face, and he has dropped his eyes.

“It was all pretty crazy,” he says. “There was so much passion, so fast. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I don’t think I let on to her how much I cared. She saw that I cared, but she . . . she didn’t know my heart kept stopping, you know? We drove out here one day and had a picnic in the car—it would have been your nightmare picnic, it was so cold—and a dog came wandering up to the car. Big dog. Right over there.”

I look out my window, almost expecting that the dog may still be there.