The New Yorker Stories (42 page)

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 fag 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 Hell,” 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 analogies.”

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.”

“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 space 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 breasts. 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.”

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

B
arnes is running with the football. The sun strikes his white pants, making them shine 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 demitasse 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 crêpes.

“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 glass? 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 glass 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.