Secrets & Surprises

by Ann Beattie

  Back in his apartment, later that night, with his arm in a cast, he felt confused and ashamed—ashamed for the way he had treated Petra, and ashamed for having been mugged. He wanted to call Karen, but he was too embarrassed. He sat in the chair by the phone, willing her to call him. At midnight the phone rang, and he picked it up at once, sure that his telepathic message had worked. The phone call was from Stephanie, at La Guardia. She had been trying to reach Karen and couldn’t. She wanted to know if she could come to his apartment.

  “I’m not going through with it,” Stephanie said, her voice wavering. “I’m thirty-eight years old, and this was a goddamn accident.”

  “Calm down,” he said. “We can get you an abortion.”

  “I don’t know if I could take a human life,” she said, and she began to cry.

  “Stephanie?” he said. “You okay? Are you going to get a cab?”

  More crying, no answer.

  “Because it would be silly for me to get a cab just to come get you. You can make it here okay, can’t you, Steph?”

  The cabdriver who took him to La Guardia was named Arthur Shales. A small pink baby shoe was glued to the dashboard of the cab. Arthur Shales chain-smoked Picayunes. “Woman I took to Bendel’s today, I’m still trying to get over it,” he said. “I picked her up at Madison and Seventy-fifth. Took her to Bendel’s and pulled up in front and she said, Oh, screw Bendel’s.’ I took her back to Madison and Seventy-fifth.”

  Going across the bridge, Nick said to Arthur Shales that the woman he was going to pick up was going to be very upset.

  “Upset? What do I care? Neither of you are gonna hold a gun to my head, I can take anything. You’re my last fares of the night. Take you back where you came from, then I’m heading home myself.”

  When they were almost at the airport exit, Arthur Shales snorted and said, “Home is a room over an Italian grocery. Guy who runs it woke me up at six this morning, yelling so loud at his supplier. ‘You call these tomatoes?’ he was saying. ‘I could take these out and bat them on the tennis court.’ Guy is always griping about Jomatoes being so unripe.”

  Stephanie was standing on the walkway, right where she had said she would be. She looked haggard, and Nick was not sure that he could cope with her. He raised his hand to his shirt pocket for cigarettes, forgetting once again that he had given up smoking. He also forgot that he couldn’t grab anything with his right hand because it was in a cast.

  “You know who I had in my cab the other day?” Arthur Shales said, coasting to a stop in front of the terminal. “You’re not going to believe it. Al Pacino.”

  For more than a week, Nick and Stephanie tried to reach Karen. Stephanie began to think that Karen was dead. And although Nick chided her for calling Karen’s number so often, he began to worry too. Once he went to her apartment on his lunch hour and listened at the door. He heard nothing, but he put his mouth close to the door and asked her to please open the door, if she was there, because there was trouble with Stephanie. As he left the building he had to laugh at what it would have looked like if someone had seen him—a nicely dressed man, with his hands on either side of his mouth, leaning into a door and talking to it. And one of the hands in a cast.

  For a week he came straight home from work, to keep Stephanie company. Then he asked Petra if she would have dinner with him. She said no. As he was leaving the office, he passed by her desk without looking at her. She got up and followed him down the hall and said, “I’m having a drink with somebody after work, but I could meet you for a drink around seven o’clock.”

  He went home to see if Stephanie was all right. She said that she had been sick in the morning, but after the card came in the mail—she held out a postcard to him—she felt much better. The card was addressed to him; it was from Karen, in Bermuda. She said she had spent the afternoon in a sailboat. No explanation. He read the message several times. He felt very relieved. He asked Stephanie if she wanted to go out for a drink with him and Petra. She said no, as he had known she would.

  At seven he sat alone at a table in the Blue Bar, with the postcard in his inside pocket. There was a folded newspaper on the little round table where he sat, and his broken right wrist rested on it. He sipped a beer. At seven-thirty he opened the paper and looked through the theater section. At quarter to eight he got up and left. He walked over to Fifth Avenue and began to walk downtown. In one of the store windows there was a poster for Bermuda tourism. A woman in a turquoise-blue bathing suit was rising out of blue waves, her mouth in an unnaturally wide smile. She seemed oblivious of the little boy next to her who was tossing a ball into the sky. Standing there, looking at the poster, Nick began a mental game that he had sometimes played in college. He invented a cartoon about Bermuda. It was a split-frame drawing. Half of it showed a beautiful girl, in the arms of her lover, on the pink sandy beach of Bermuda, with the caption: “It’s glorious to be here in Bermuda.” The other half of the frame showed a tall tired man looking into the window of a travel agency at a picture of the lady and her lover. He would have no lines, but in a balloon above his head he would be wondering if, when he went home, it was the right time to urge an abortion to the friend who had moved into his apartment.

  When he got home, Stephanie was not there. She had said that if she felt better, she would go out to eat. He sat down and took off his shoes and socks and hung forward, with his head almost touching his knees, like a droopy doll. Then he went into the bedroom, carrying the shoes and socks, and took off his clothes and put on jeans. The phone rang and he picked it up just as he heard Stephanie’s key in the door.

  “I’m sorry,” Petra said, “I’ve never stood anybody up before in my life.”

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’m not mad.”

  “I’m very sorry,” she said.

  “I drank a beer and read the paper. After what I did to you the other night, I don’t blame you.”

  “I like you,” she said. “That was why I didn’t come. Because I knew I wouldn’t say what I wanted to say. I got as far as Forty-eighth Street and turned around.”

  “What did you want to say?”

  “That I like you. That I like you and that it’s a mistake, because I’m always letting myself in for it, agreeing to see men who treat me badly. I wasn’t very flattered the other night.”

  “I know. I apologize. Look, why don’t you meet me at that bar now and let me not walk out on you. Okay?”

  “No,” she said, her voice changing. “That wasn’t why I called. I called to say I was sorry, but I know I did the right thing. I have to hang up now.”

  He put the phone back and continued to look at the floor. He knew that Stephanie was not even pretending not to have heard. He took a step forward and ripped the phone out of the wall. It was not a very successful dramatic gesture. The phone just popped out of the jack, and he stood there, holding it in his good hand.

  “Would you think it was awful if I offered to go to bed with you?” Stephanie asked.

  “No,” he said. “I think it would be very nice.”

  Two days later he left work early in the afternoon and went to Kirby’s. Dr. Kellogg opened the door and then pointed toward the back of the house and said, “The man you’re looking for is reading.” He was wearing baggy white pants and a Japanese kimono.

  Nick almost had to push through the half-open door because the psychiatrist was so intent on holding the cats back with one foot. In the kitchen Kirby was indeed reading—he was looking at a Bermuda travel brochure and listening to Karen.

  She looked sheepish when she saw him. Her face was tan, and her eyes, which were always beautiful, looked startlingly blue now that her face was so dark. She had lavender-tinted sunglasses pushed on top of her head. She and Kirby seemed happy and comfortable in the elegant, air-conditioned house.

  “When did you get back?” Nick said.

  “A couple of days ago,” she said. “The night I last talked to you, I went over to the professor’s apartment, and in the morning
we went to Bermuda.”

  Nick had come to Kirby’s to get the car keys and borrow the Thunderbird—to go for a ride and be by himself for a while—and for a moment now he thought of asking her for the keys anyway. He sat down at the table.

  “Stephanie is in town,” he said. “I think we ought to go get a cup of coffee and talk about it.”

  Her key ring was on the table. If he had the keys, he could be heading for the Lincoln Tunnel. Years ago, they would be walking to the car hand in hand, in love. It would be her birthday. The car’s odometer would have five miles on it.

  One of Kirby’s cats jumped up on the table and began to sniff at the butter dish there.

  “Would you like to walk over to the Star Thrower and get a cup of coffee?” Nick said.

  She got up slowly.

  “Don’t mind me,” Kirby said.

  “Would you like to come, Kirby?” she asked.

  “Not me. No, no.”

  She patted Kirby’s shoulder, and they went out.

  “What happened?” she said, pointing to his hand.

  “It’s broken.”

  “How did you break it?”

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’ll tell you when we get there.”

  When they got there it was not yet four o’clock, and the Star Thrower was closed.

  “Well, just tell me what’s happening with Stephanie,” Karen said impatiently. “I don’t really feel like sitting around talking because I haven’t even unpacked yet.”

  “She’s at my apartment, and she’s pregnant, and she doesn’t even talk about Sammy.”

  She shook her head sadly. “How did you break your hand?” she said.

  “I was mugged. After our last pleasant conversation on the phone—the time you told me to come over immediately or not at all. I didn’t make it because I was in the emergency room.”

  “Oh, Christ,” she said. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I was embarrassed to call you.”

  “Why? Why didn’t you call?”

  “You wouldn’t have been there anyway.” He took her arm. “Let’s find some place to go,” he said.

  Two young men came up to the door of the Star Thrower. “Isn’t this where David had that great Armenian dinner?” one of them said.

  “I told you it wasn’t,” the other said, looking at the menu posted to the right of the door.

  “I didn’t really think this was the place. You said it was on this street.”

  They continued to quarrel as Nick and Karen walked away.

  “Why do you think Stephanie came here to the city?” Karen said.

  “Because we’re her friends,” Nick said.

  “But she has lots of friends.”

  “Maybe she thought we were more dependable.”

  “Why do you say that in that tone of voice? I don’t have to tell you every move I’m making. Things went very well in Bermuda. He almost lured me to London.”

  “Look,” he said. “Can’t we go somewhere where you can call her?”

  He looked at her, shocked because she didn’t understand that Stephanie had come to see her, not him. He had seen for a long time that it didn’t matter to her how much she meant to him, but he had never realized that she didn’t know how much she meant to Stephanie. She didn’t understand people. When he found out she had another man, he should have dropped out of her life. She did not deserve her good looks and her fine car and all her money. He turned to face her on the street, ready to tell her what he thought.

  “You know what happened there?” she said. “I got sunburned and had a terrible time. He went on to London without me.”

  He took her arm again and they stood side by side and looked at some sweaters hanging in the window of Countdown.

  “So going to Virginia wasn’t the answer for them,” she said. “Remember when Sammy and Stephanie left town, and we told each other what a stupid idea it was—that it would never work out? Do you think we jinxed them?”

  They walked down the street again, saying nothing.

  “It would kill me if I had to be a good conversationalist with you,” she said at last. “You’re the only person I can rattle on with.” She stopped and leaned into him. “I had a rotten time in Bermuda,” she said. “Nobody should go to a beach but a sand flea.”

  “You don’t have to make clever conversation with me,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “It just happened.”

  Late in the afternoon of the day that Stephanie had her abortion, Nick called Sammy from a street phone near his apartment. Karen and Stephanie were in the apartment, but he had to get out for a while. Stephanie had seemed pretty cheerful, but perhaps it was just an act for his benefit. With him gone, she might talk to Karen about it. All she had told was that it felt like she had caught an ice pick in the stomach.

  “Sammy?” Nick said into the phone. “How are you? It just dawned on me that I ought to call and let you know that Stephanie is all right.”

  “She has called me herself, several times,” Sammy said. “Collect. From your phone. But thank you for your concern, Nick.” He sounded brusque.

  “Oh,” Nick said, taken aback. “Just so you know where she is.”

  “I could name you as corespondent in the divorce case, you know?”

  “What would you do that for?” Nick said.

  “I wouldn’t. I just wanted you to know what I could do.”

  “Sammy—I don’t get it. I didn’t ask for any of this, you know.”

  “Poor Nick. My wife gets pregnant, leaves without a word, calls from New York with a story about how you had a broken hand and were having bad luck with women, so she went to bed with you. Two weeks later I get a phone call from you, all concern, wanting me to know where Stephanie is.”

  Nick waited for Sammy to hang up on him.

  “You know what happened to you?” Sammy said. “You got eaten up by New York.”

  “What kind of dumb thing is that to say?” Nick said. “Are you trying to get even or something?”

  “If I wanted to do that, I could tell you that you have bad teeth. Or that Stephanie said you were a lousy lover. What I was trying to do was tell you something important, for a change. Stephanie ran away when I tried to tell it to her, you’ll probably hang up on me when I say the same thing to you: you can be happy. For instance, you can get out of New York and get away from Karen. Stephanie could have settled down with a baby.”

  “This doesn’t sound like you, Sammy, to give advice.”

  He waited for Sammy’s answer.

  “You think I ought to leave New York?” Nick said.

  “Both. Karen and New York. Do you know that your normal expression shows pain? Do you know how much Scotch you drank the weekend you visited?”

  Nick stared through the grimy plastic window of the phone booth.

  “What you just said about my hanging up on you,” Nick said. “I was thinking that you were going to hang up on me. When I talk to people, they hang up on me. The conversation just ends that way.”

  “Why haven’t you figured out that you don’t know the right kind of people?”

  “They’re the only people I know.”

  “Does that seem like any reason for tolerating that sort of rudeness?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Another thing,” Sammy went on. “Have you figured out that I’m saying these things to you because when you called I was already drunk? I’m telling you all this because I think you’re so numbed out by your lousy life that you probably even don’t know I’m not in my right mind.”

  The operator came on, demanding more money. Nick clattered quarters into the phone. He realized that he was not going to hang up on Sammy, and Sammy was not going to hang up on him. He would have to think of something else to say.

  “Give yourself a break,” Sammy said. “Boot them out. Stephanie included. She’ll see the light eventually and come back to the farm.”

  “Should I tell her you’ll be there? I don�
�t know if—”

  “I told her I’d be here when she called. All the times she called. I just told her that I had no idea of coming to get her. I’ll tell you another thing. I’ll bet—I’ll bet—that when she first turned up there she called you from the airport, and she wanted you to come for her, didn’t she?”

  “Sammy,” Nick said, staring around him, wild to get off the phone. “I want to thank you for saying what you think. I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Forget it,” Sammy said. “I’m not in my right mind. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” Nick said.

  He hung up and started back to his apartment. He realized that he hadn’t told Sammy that Stephanie had had the abortion. On the street he said hello to a little boy—one of the neighborhood children he knew.

  He went up the stairs and up to his floor. Some people downstairs were listening to Beethoven. He lingered in the hallway, not wanting to go back to Stephanie and Karen. He took a deep breath and opened the door. Neither of them looked too bad. They said hello silently, each raising one hand.

  It had been a hard day. Stephanie’s appointment at the abortion clinic had been at eight in the morning. Karen had slept in the apartment with them the night before, on the sofa. Stephanie slept in his bed, and he slept on the floor. None of them had slept much. In the morning they all went to the abortion clinic. Nick had intended to go to work in the afternoon, but when they got back to the apartment he didn’t think it was right for him to leave Stephanie. She went back to the bedroom, and he stretched out on the sofa and fell asleep. Before he slept, Karen sat on the sofa with him for a while, and he told her the story of his second mugging. When he woke up, it was four o’clock. He called his office and told them he was sick. Later they all watched the television news together. After that, he offered to go out and get some food, but nobody was hungry. That’s when he went out and called Sammy.

  Now Stephanie went back into the bedroom. She said she was tired and she was going to work on a crossword puzzle in bed. The phone rang. It was Petra. She and Nick talked a little about a new apartment she was thinking of moving into. “I’m sorry for being so cold-blooded the other night,” she said. “The reason I’m calling is to invite myself to your place for a drink, if that’s all right with you.”