The New Yorker Stories Part 30

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 talc.u.m 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...." "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 gla.s.s. 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 gla.s.s 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and said to Ben, "It's gone now. The milk is gone." Ben, in his diapers and T-s.h.i.+rt, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 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. 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

My 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 b.u.t.tons but the top one-the one I never b.u.t.ton because n.o.body closes the b.u.t.ton under the collar. Four b.u.t.tons 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 right here," drunkenly staring at the floor beneath my barstool at the Cafe 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 b.u.t.tons." We keep walking. He pokes me in the side. "b.u.t.tons 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 Playboy cutouts." cutouts."

"All at the same time?"

"What do you mean?"

"The stamps didn't come before the Playboy Playboy pictures?" pictures?"

"Same time. I used the magnifying gla.s.s 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 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. 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 b.u.t.tons 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 b.u.t.tons. 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.

Last Friday, Nick said, "You're not going to die." He got out of bed and moved me away from the vase of flowers. It was the day I had gone to the doctor, and then we went away to visit Justin for the weekend. (Ten years ago, when Nick started living with Barbara, Justin was their next-door neighbor on West Sixteenth Street.) Everything was lovely, the way it always is at Justin's house in the country. There was a vase of phlox and daisies in the bedroom, and when I went to smell the flowers I saw the snail and said that it looked like pus. I wasn't even repelled by it-just sorry it was there, curious enough to finger it.

"Justin's not going to know what you're crying about. Justin doesn't deserve this," Nick whispered.

When touched, the snail did not contract. Neither did it keep moving.

Fact: her name is Barbara. She is the Boulder Dam. She is small and beautiful, and she has a hold on him even though they never married, because she was there first. She is the Boulder Dam.

Last year we had Christmas at Justin's. Justin wants to think of us as a family-Nick and Justin and me. His real family is one aunt, in New Zealand. When he was a child she made thick cookies for him that never baked through. Justin's ideas are more romantic than mine. He thinks that Nick should forget Barbara and move, with me, into the house that is for sale next door. Justin, in his thermal slippers and knee-high striped socks under his white pajamas, in the kitchen brewing Sleepytime tea, saying to me, "Name me one thing more pathetic than a f.a.g with a cold."

Barbara called, and we tried to ignore it. Justin and I ate cold oranges after the Christmas dinner. Justin poured champagne. Nick talked to Barbara on the phone. Justin blew out the candles, and the two of us were sitting in the dark, with Nick standing at the phone and looking over his shoulder into the suddenly darkened corner, frowning in confusion.

Standing in the kitchen later that night, Nick had said, "Justin, tell her the truth. Tell her you get depressed on Christmas and that's why you get drunk. Tell her it's not because of one short phone call from a woman you never liked."

Justin was making tea again, to sober up. His hand was over the burner, going an inch lower, half an inch more...

"Play chicken with him," he whispered to me. "Don't you be the one who gets burned."

A lady walks past us, wearing a blue hat with feathers that look as if they might be arrows shot into the brim by crazy Indians. She smiles sweetly. "The snakes are crawling out of h.e.l.l," she says.

In a bar, on Lexington, Nick says, "Tell me why you love me so much." Without a pause, he says, "Don't make a.n.a.logies."

When he is at a loss-when he is lost-he is partly lost in her. It's as though he were walking deeper and deeper into a forest, and I risked his stopping to smell some enchanted flower or his finding a pond and being drawn to it like Narcissus. From what he has told me about Barbara, I know that she is deep and cool.

Lying on the cold white paper on the doctor's examining table, I tried to concentrate not on what he was doing but on a screw holding one of the four corners of the flat, white ceiling light.

As a child, I got lost in the woods once. I had a dandelion with me, and I used it, hopelessly, like a flashlight, the yellow center my imaginary beam. My parents, who might have saved me, were drunk at a back-yard party as I kept walking the wrong way, away from the houses I might have seen. I walked slower and slower, being afraid.

Nick makes a lot of that. He thinks I am lost in my life. "All right," I say as he nudges me to walk faster. "Everything's symbolic." symbolic."

"How can you put me down when you make similes about everything?"

"I do not," I say. "The way you talk makes me want to put out my knuckles to be beaten. You're as critical as a teacher."

The walk is over. He's even done what I wanted: walked the thirty blocks to her apartment, instead of taking a cab, and if she's anxious and looking out the window, he's walked right up to the door with me, and she'll see it all-even the kiss.

It amazes him that at the same time variations of what happens to Barbara happen to me. She had her hair cut the same day I got mine trimmed. When I went to the dentist and he told me my gums were receding slightly, I hoped she'd outdo me by growing fangs. Instead, when my side started to hurt she got much worse pains. Now she's slowly getting better, back at the apartment after a spinal-fusion operation, and he's staying with her again.

Autumn, 1979. On the walk we saw one couple kissing, three people walking dogs, one couple arguing, and a cabdriver parked in front of a drugstore, changing from a denim jacket to black leather. He pulled on a leather cap, threw the jacket into the back seat, and drove away, making a U-turn on Park Avenue, headed downtown. One man looked at me as if he'd just found me standing behind the counter of a kissing booth, and one woman gave Nick such a come-on look that it made him laugh before she was even out of earshot.

"I can't stand it," Nick says.

He doesn't mean the craziness of New York.

He opens the outside door with his key, after the kiss, and for a minute we're squeezed together in the s.p.a.ce between locked doors. I've called it jail. A coffin. Two astronauts, strapped in on their way to the moon. I've stood there and felt, more than once, the lightness of a person who isn't being kept in place by gravity, but my weightlessness has been from sadness and fear.

Barbara is upstairs, waiting, and Nick doesn't know what to say. I don't. Finally, to break the silence, he pulls me to him. He tells me that when I asked for his hand earlier, I called it "the hand."

His right hand is extended, fingers on the bone between my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I look down for a second, the way a surgeon must have a moment of doubt, or even a moment of confidence, looking at the translucent, skin-tight rubber glove: his hand and not his hand, about to do something important or not important at all.

"Anybody else would have said 'your hand,' " Nick says. "When you said it that way, it made it sound as if my hand was disembodied." He strokes my jacket. "You've got your security blanket. Let me keep all the parts together. On the outside, at least." else would have said 'your hand,' " Nick says. "When you said it that way, it made it sound as if my hand was disembodied." He strokes my jacket. "You've got your security blanket. Let me keep all the parts together. On the outside, at least."

Disembodied, that hand would be a symbol from Magritte: a castle on a rock, floating over the ocean; a green apple without a tree.

Alone, I'd know it anywhere.

Running Dreams

Barnes is running with the football. The sun strikes his white pants, making them s.h.i.+ne like satin. The dog runs beside him, scattering autumn leaves, close to Barnes's ankles. By the time they get from the far end of the field to where Audrey and I are sitting, the dog has run ahead and tried to trip him three times, but Barnes gives him the football anyway. Barnes stops suddenly, holds the football out as delicately as a hostess offering a demita.s.se cup, and drops it. The dog, whose name is Bruno, snaps up the football-it is a small sponge rubber model, a toy-and runs off with it. Barnes, who is still panting, sits on the edge of Audrey's chaise, lifts her foot, and begins to rub her toes through her sock.

"I forgot to tell you that your accountant called when you were chopping wood this morning," she says. "He called to tell you the name of the contractor who put in his neighbor's pool. I didn't know you knew accountants socially."

"I knew his neighbors," Barnes says. "They're different neighbors now. The people I knew were named Matt and Zera Cartwright. Zera was always calling me to ask for Librium. They moved to Kentucky. The accountant kept in touch with them."

"There's so much about your life I don't know," Audrey says. She pulls off her sock and turns her foot in his hand. The toenails are painted red. The nails on her big toes are perfectly oval. Her heels have the soft skin and roundness of a baby's foot, which is miraculous to me, because I know she used to wear high heels to work every day in New York. It also amazes me that there are people who still paint their toenails when summer is over.

Predictably, Bruno is trying to bury the football. I once saw Bruno dig a hole for an inner tube, so the football will only be a minute's trouble. Early in the summer, Barnes came back to the house late at night-he is a surgeon-and gave the dog his black bag. If Audrey hadn't been less drunk than the rest of us, and able to rescue it, that would have been buried, too.

"Why do we have to build a pool?" Audrey says. "All that horrible construction noise. What if some kid drowns in it? I'm going to wake up every morning and go to the window and expect to see some little body-"

"You knew how materialistic I was when you married me. You knew that after I got a house in the country I'd want a pool, didn't you?" Barnes kisses her knee. "Audrey can't swim, Lynn," he says to me. "Audrey hates to learn new things."

We already know she can't swim. She's Martin's sister, and I've known her for seven years. Martin and I live together-or did until a few months ago, when I moved. Barnes has known her almost all her life, and they've been married for six months now. They were married in the living room of this house, while it was still being built, with Elvis Presley on the stereo singing "As Long as I Have You." Holly carried a bouquet of cobra lilies. Then I sang "Some Day Soon"-Audrey's favorite Judy Collins song. The dog was there, and a visiting Afghan. The stonemason forgot that he wasn't supposed to work that day and came just as the ceremony was about to begin, and decided to stay. He turned out to know how to foxtrot, so we were all glad he'd stayed. We had champagne and danced, and Martin and I fixed crepes.

"What if we just tore the cover off that David Hockney book," Audrey says now. "The one of the man floating face down in a pool, that makes him look like he's been pressed under gla.s.s? We could hang it from the tree over there, instead of wind chimes. I don't want a swimming pool."

Barnes puts her foot down. She lifts the other one and puts it in his hand.

"We can get you a raft and you can float around, and I can rub your feet," he says.

"You're never here. You work all the time," Audrey says.

"When the people come to put in the pool, you can hold up your David Hockney picture and repel them."

"What if they don't understand that, Barnes? I can imagine that just causing a lot of confusion."

"Then you lose," he says. "If you show them the picture and they go ahead and put in the pool anyway, then either it's not a real cross or they're not real vampires." He pats her ankle. "But no fair explaining to them," he says. "It has to be as serious as charades."

Martin tells me things that Barnes has told him. In the beginning, Martin didn't want his sister to marry him, but Barnes was also his best friend and Martin didn't want to betray Barnes's confidences to him, so he asked me what I thought. Telling me mattered less than telling her, and I had impressed him long ago with my ability to keep a secret by not telling him his mother had a mastectomy the summer he went to Italy. He only found out when she died, two years later, and then he found out accidentally. "She didn't want you to know," I said. "How could you keep that a secret?" he said. He loves me and hates me for things like that. He loves me because I'm the kind of person people come to. It's an attribute he wishes he had, because he's a teacher. He teaches history in a private school. One time, when we were walking through Chelsea late at night, a nicely dressed old lady leaned over her gate and handed me a can of green beans and a can opener and said, "Please." On the subway, a man handed me a letter and said, "You don't have to say anything, but please read this paragraph. I just want somebody else to see it before I rip it up." Most of these things have to do with love, in some odd way. The green beans did not have to do with love.

Martin and I are walking in the woods. The poison ivy is turning a bright autumnal red, so it's easy to recognize. As we go deeper into the woods we see a tree house, with a ladder made of four boards nailed to the tree trunk. There are empty beer bottles around the tree, but I miss the most remarkable thing in the scene until Martin points it out: a white balloon wedged high above the tree house, where a thin branch forks. He throws some stones and finally bounces one off the balloon, but it doesn't break it or set it free. "Maybe I can lure it down," he says, and he picks up an empty Michelob bottle, holds it close to his lips, and taps his fingers on the gla.s.s as if he were playing a horn while he blows a slow stream of air across the top. It makes an eerie, hollow sound, and I'm glad when he stops and drops the bottle. He's capable of surprising me as much as I surprise him. We lived together for years. A month ago, he came to the apartment I was subletting late one night, after two weeks of not returning my phone calls at work and keeping his phone pulled at home-came over and hit the buzzer and was standing there smiling when I looked out the window. He walked up the four flights, came in still smiling, and said, "I'm going to do something you're really going to like." I was ready to hit him if he tried to touch me, but he took me lightly by the wrist, so that I knew that was the only part of my body he'd touch, and sat down and pulled me into the chair with him, and whistled the harp break to "Isn't She Lovely." I had never heard him whistle before. I had no idea he knew the song. He whistled the long, complex interlude perfectly, and then sat there, silently, his lips warm against the top of my hair.

Martin pushes aside a low-hanging branch, so I can walk by. "You know what Barnes told me this morning?" he says. "He sees his regular shrink on Monday mornings, but a few weeks ago he started seeing a young woman shrink on Tuesdays and not telling either of them about the other. Then he said he was thinking about giving both of them up and buying a camera."

"I don't get it."

"He does that-he starts to say one thing, and then he adds some non sequitur. I don't know if he wants me to question him or just let him talk."

"Ask."

"You wouldn't ask."

"I'd probably ask," I say.

We're walking on leaves, through bright-green fern. From far away now, he tosses another stone, but it misses the branch; it doesn't go near the balloon.

"You know what it is?" Martin says. "He never seems seems vague or random about anything. He graduated first in his cla.s.s from medical school. All summer, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d hit a home run every time he was up at bat. He's got that charming, self-deprecating way of saying things-the way he was talking about the swimming pool. So when he seems to be opening up to me, it would be unsophisticated for me to ask what going to two shrinks and giving up both of them and buying a camera is all about." vague or random about anything. He graduated first in his cla.s.s from medical school. All summer, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d hit a home run every time he was up at bat. He's got that charming, self-deprecating way of saying things-the way he was talking about the swimming pool. So when he seems to be opening up to me, it would be unsophisticated for me to ask what going to two shrinks and giving up both of them and buying a camera is all about."

"Maybe he talks to you because you don't ask him questions."

Martin is tossing an acorn in the air. He pockets it, and squeezes my hand.

"I wanted to make love to you last night," he says, "but I knew she'd be walking through the living room all night."

She did. She got up every few hours and tiptoed past the foldout bed and went into the bathroom and stayed there, silently, for so long that I'd drift back to sleep and not realize she'd come out until I heard her walking back in again. Audrey has had two miscarriages in the year she's been with Barnes. Audrey, who swore she'd never leave the city, never have children, who hung out with poets and painters, married the first respectable man she ever dated-her brother's best friend as well-got pregnant, and grieved when she lost the first baby, grieved when she lost the second.

"Audrey will be all right," I say, and push my fingers through his.

"We're the ones I'm worried about," he says. "Thinking about them stops me from talking about us." He puts his arm around me as we walk. Our skin is sweaty-we have on too many clothes. We trample ferns I'd avoid if I were walking alone. With his head pressed against my shoulder, he says, "I need for you to talk to me. I'm out of my league with you people. I don't know what you're thinking, and I think you must be hating me."

"I told you what I thought months ago. You said you needed time to think. What more can I do besides move so you have time to think?"

He is standing in front of me, touching the b.u.t.tons of his wool s.h.i.+rt that I wear as a jacket, then brus.h.i.+ng my hair behind my shoulders.

"You went, just like that," he says. "You won't tell me what your life is like."