The New Yorker Stories (50 page)

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Drew says. “What a sick thing to say.”

“I was kidding.”

“And no matter what I said now, I couldn’t win, could I? If I made out like I’d be crazy to be interested in Holly, you’d be insulted, right?”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” Chester says. “You go see Charlotte. I’ll sit here and have a drink. What do you want me for?”

“I told her you were coming,” Drew says. He takes a sip of his drink. “I was thinking about that time we went to Coney Island,” he says.

“You told me,” Chester says. “You mean years ago, right?”

“I told you about shooting the rifle?”

“Coney Island,” Chester sighs. “Have some dogs at Nathan’s, ride that Cyclone or whatever it’s called, pop a few shots and win your girl a prize . . .”

“I told you?”

“Go ahead and tell me,” Chester says.

Chester pours two drinks. After Drew’s drink is poured, Drew puts his hand over the glass again.

“You’ve got about five minutes to tell me, by the way, unless you’re really going to stand her up,” Chester says.

“Maybe she’ll stand
me
up.”

“She won’t stand you up.”

“O.K.,” Drew says. “Charlotte and I went to Coney Island. Got on those rides that tilt you every which way, and what do you call that thing with the glass sides that goes up the pole so you can look out—”

“I’ve never been to Coney Island,” Chester says.

“I was showing her my style,” Drew says. “The best part was later. This guy in the shooting gallery clips the cardboard card with the star on it to the string, sends it down to the end of the line, and I start blasting. Did it three or four times, and there was always some tiny part of the blue left. The pinpoint of the tip of one triangle. The middle of the target was this blue star. I was such a great shot that I was trying to win by shooting out the star, and the guy finally said to me, “Man, you’re trying to blast that star away. What you do is shoot
around
it, and the star falls out.” Drew looks at Chester through the circle of his thumb and first finger, drops his hand to the table. “What you’re supposed to do is go around it, like slipping a knife around a cake pan to get the cake out.” Drew takes a sip of his drink. He says, “My father never taught me anything.”

Chester gets up, drinks the last of his bourbon, puts the glass in the sink. He looks around his kitchen as if it were unfamiliar. At one time, it was. Holly had it painted pastel green while he was at work. Now it’s pearl-colored. Her skin was the color of the kitchen walls when they wheeled her out of the recovery room. He put his hands on her feet, for some reason, before she was even able to speak and tell him that she was cold. Sometimes in the winter when they’re in bed, he reaches down and gets her feet and tucks them under his legs. Drew met Holly before he did, fifteen years ago. He went out with her once, and he didn’t even kiss her. Now, when he comes to dinner every month or so, he kisses her forehead when he comes and when he goes. “I’m persuading her,” Drew sometimes says—or something like that—when he leaves. “Fifteen years, and I’m still giving her every opportunity.” Holly always blushes. She likes Drew. She thinks that he drinks too much but that nobody’s perfect. Holly’s way of thinking about things has started to creep into Chester’s speech. A minute ago, wasn’t he talking about God Almighty? Holly’s the one who seriously believes in God Almighty.

Drew stands beside Chester at the kitchen sink and splashes water on his face. He’s tan and he looks good. Hair a little shaggy. There’s some white in his sideburns. He wipes his face on the dish towel and swirls water in his mouth, spits it out. He pours a glass of water and drinks a few sips. The five minutes were up ten minutes ago. They go out to the hall and get the keys off the table. They’re on a Jaguar key chain. Chester’s car is a ’68 Pontiac.

“Who’s driving the Indian?” Chester says.

Drew reaches for the keys. In the elevator, he sees coronas around the lighted buttons with the floor numbers on them and tosses the keys back to Chester. Chester almost misses them because his mind is elsewhere. He has to remember to wash the glasses; he promised Holly he’d fix the leaking faucet. He’ll have one drink at the bar, say hello to Charlotte, and do some work around the apartment later. The elevator is going frustratingly slow. If they can have a child and if it’s a girl, Holly wants to name it for a flower: Rose or Lily or Margy—is that what she thought up? Short for Marigold.

Drew is thinking about what he can say to Charlotte. They were together for two years. There was a world between them. How do people make small talk when they’ve shared a world? And if you say something real, it always seems too sudden. There are a lot of things he’d like to know, questions he could probably shoot out like gunfire. She really loved him, and she married somebody else? She got tired of trying to convince him that she loved him? She read in some magazine that people who’ve had an unhappy childhood, the way he did, stay screwed up? He remembers his father: instead of walking him through museums and taking trips to see statues and to eat in dim taverns with pewter plates, places that had been standing since the nineteenth century, he could have done something practical, like teach him to shoot. Just put your arms outside the kid’s, move his fingers where they should go, line up the rifle and show him how to sight, tell him how to keep the gun steady, if that isn’t already obvious.

Drew slides into the car, bangs his knee on the side of the door as he pulls it shut. In another second, Chester has opened the driver’s door and gotten in. But he doesn’t start the car.

“You know, friendship’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it?” Chester says, clamping his hand on Drew’s shoulder.

Drew looks over at him, and Chester looks sad. Drew wonders if Chester is worried about Holly. Or is he just drunk? But that has to wait for a second. What Drew has just realized is that what felt like panic all day is really excitement. A drink with Charlotte—after all this time, he’s seeing her again. What he wants to say to Chester is so difficult that he can’t bring himself to look him in the eye.

“Ches,” Drew says, looking through the windshield, rubbing his hand over his mouth, then resting it on his chin. “Ches—have you ever been in love?”

Television

B
illy called early in the week to tell me he’d found out that Friday was Atley’s birthday. Atley had been Billy’s lawyer first, and then Billy recommended him to me. He became my lawyer when I called Billy after my car fell into a hole in the car wash. Atley gave me a free five minutes in his office so that I could understand that small claims court would be best. Billy had the idea that we should take Atley to lunch on his birthday. I said to him, “What are we going to do with Atley at lunch?” and he said that we’d think of something. I was all for getting some out-of-work ballerina to run into the restaurant with Mylar balloons, but Billy said no, we’d just think of something. He picked the restaurant, and when Friday came we were still thinking when the three of us met there and sat down, and because we were all a little uptight the first thing we thought of, of course, was having some drinks. Then Atley got to telling the story about his cousin who’d won a goldfish in a brandy snifter; he got so attached to the fish that he went out and got it an aquarium, but then he decided that the fish didn’t look happy in the aquarium. Atley told his cousin that the brandy glass had magnified the fish and that’s what made it look happy, but the cousin wouldn’t believe it, so the cousin had a couple of drinks that night and decided to lower the brandy glass into the aquarium. He dug around in the pebbles and then piled them up around the base of the glass to anchor it, and the fish eventually started swimming around and around outside the top of the submerged glass in the same contented way, Atley said, that people in a hot tub sit there and hold their hands next to where the jets of water rush in.

The waiter came and told us the specials, and Billy and I both started smiling and looking away, because we knew that it was Atley’s birthday and we were going to have to do something pretty soon. If we’d known the fish story beforehand, we could have gotten a fish as a gag present. The waiter probably thought we were laughing at him and hated us for it; he had to stand there and say “Côtelette Plus Ça Change” or whatever the specialty was, when actually he wanted to be John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever
. He had the pelvis for it.

Billy said, when he was eating his shrimp, “My parents had a New Year’s Eve party the last time I visited them, and some woman got ripped and took my father’s shoe and sock off and painted his toenails.” At this point I cracked up, and the waiter, who was removing my plate, looked at me as if I was dispensable. “That’s not it, that’s not the punch line!” Billy said. Atley held his hand up in cop-stopping-traffic style, and Billy made a fist and hit it. Then he said, “The punch line is, a week later my father was reading the paper at breakfast and my mother said, ‘What if I get some nail-polish remover and fix your toes?’ and my father said, ‘Don’t do it.’ She was
scared
to do it!”

“I had such a happy childhood,” I said. “We always rented a beach house during the summer, and my mother and father had one of each of our baby shoes bronzed—my sister’s and mine—and my parents danced in the living room a lot. My father said the only way he’d have a TV was if he could think of it as a giant radio, so when they finally bought one he’d be watching and my mother would come into the room and he’d get up and take her in his arms and start humming and dancing. They’d dance while Kate Smith talked or whatever, or while Gale Storm made her
My Little Margie
noise.”

Atley squinted and leaned against the table. “Come on, come on, come on—what do two people who have money do all day?” he whispered. That was when Billy kissed me, which made it look as if what we did was make love all day, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth. In the back of my mind I thought that maybe it was part of some act Billy was putting on because he’d already figured out what to do about the birthday. The waiter was opening a bottle of champagne, which I guess Billy had ordered. I knew very few facts about Billy’s ex. One was that she really liked champagne. Another was that she had been in Alateen. Her father had been a big drunk. He’d thrown her mother out a window once. She’d gone back to him but not until she’d taken him to court.

“I’ll tell you something,” Atley said. “I shocked the hell out of one of our summer interns. I took him aside in the office and I told him, ‘You know what lawyers are? Barnacles on a log. The legal system is like one big, heavy log floating downstream, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Remember every time one of those judges lifts a gavel that it’s just a log with a handle.’ ”

The cork took off right across the restaurant. We all looked. It landed near the pastry cart. The waiter said, “It flew through my fingers,” and looked at his hand, as surprised as if he’d been casually counting his fingers and found that he had seven of them. We were all sorry for the waiter because he was so shocked. He stared at his hand so long that we looked away. Billy kissed me again. I thought it might be a gesture to break the silence.

The waiter poured champagne into Atley’s glass first; he did it quickly and his hand was shaking so much that the foam started to rise fast. Atley held up his hand to indicate that he should stop pouring. Billy punched Atley’s hand again.

“You son of a gun,” Billy said. “Do you think we don’t know it’s your birthday? Did you think we didn’t know that?”

Atley turned a little red. “How did you know that?” he said.

Billy raised his glass and we all raised ours and clinked them, above the pepper mill.

Atley was quite red.

“Son of a gun,” Billy said. I smiled, too. The waiter looked and saw that we had drained our glasses, and looked surprised again. He quickly came back to pour champagne, but Billy had beaten him to it. In a few minutes, the waiter came back and put three brandy snifters with a little ripple of brandy in them on the table. We must have looked perplexed, and the waiter certainly did. “From the gentleman across the room,” the waiter said. We turned around. Billy and I didn’t recognize anybody, but some man was grinning like mad. He lifted his lobster off his plate and pointed it at Atley. Atley smiled and mouthed, “Thank you.”

“One of the best cytologists in the world,” Atley said. “A client.”

When I looked away, the man was still holding his lobster and moving it so that it looked as if it were swimming through air.

“The gentleman told me to bring the brandy now,” the waiter said, and went away.

“Do you think it would be crude to tell him we’re going to leave him a big tip?” Billy said.

“Are we?” I said.

“Oh, I’ll leave the tip. I’ll leave the tip,” Atley said.

The waiter, who seemed always to be around our table, heard the word “tip” and looked surprised again. Billy picked up on this and smiled at him. “We’re not going anywhere,” he said.

It was surprising how fast we ate, though, and in a little while, since none of us wanted coffee, the waiter was back with the bill. It was in one of those folders—a leather book, with the restaurant’s initials embossed on the front. It reminded me of my Aunt Jean’s trivet collection, and I said so. Aunt Jean knew somebody who would cast trivets for her, to her specifications. She had an initialed trivet. She had a Rolls-Royce trivet—those classy intertwined
R
s. This had us laughing. I was the only one who hadn’t touched the brandy. When Billy put his credit card in a slot in the book, Atley said, “Thank you.” I did too, and Billy put his hand over mine and kissed me again. He’d kissed me so many times that by now I was a little embarrassed, so to cover up for that I touched my forehead to his after the kiss so that it would seem like a routine of ours to Atley. It was either that or say, “What are you doing?”