by Ann Beattie
“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 someplace 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 him 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 prob
ably 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.”
“It’s not all right,” he said. “I’m sorry. There are some people here now.”
“I get it,” she said. “Okay. I won’t bother you anymore.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. He knew he had not explained things well, but the thought of adding Petra to the scene at his apartment was more than he could bear, and he had been too abrupt.
She said goodbye coldly, and he went back to his chair and fell in it, exhausted.
“A girl?” Karen said.
He nodded.
“Not a girl you wanted to hear from.”
He shook his head no. He got up and pulled up the blind and looked out to the street. The boy he had said hello to was playing with a hula hoop. The hula hoop was bright blue in the twilight. The kid rotated his hips and kept the hoop spinning perfectly. Karen came to the window and stood next to him. He turned to her, wanting to say that they should go and get the Thunderbird, and as the night air cooled, drive out of the city, smell honeysuckle in the fields, feel the wind blowing.
But the Thunderbird was sold. She had told him the news while they were sitting in the waiting room of the abortion clinic. The car had needed a valve job, and a man she met in Bermuda who knew all about cars had advised her to sell it. Coincidentally, the man—a New York architect—wanted to buy it. Even as Karen told him, he knew she had been set up. If she had been more careful, they could have been in the car now, with the key in the ignition, the radio playing. He stood at the window for a long time. She had been conned, and he was more angry than he could tell her. She had no conception—she had somehow never understood—that Thunderbirds of that year, in good condition, would someday be worth a fortune. She had told him this way: “Don’t be upset, because I’m sure I made the right decision. I sold the car as soon as I got back from Bermuda. I’m going to get a new car.” He had moved in his chair, there in the clinic. He had had an impulse to get up and hit her. He remembered the scene in New Haven outside the bar, and he understood now that it was as simple as this: he had money that the black boy wanted.
Down the street the boy picked up his hula hoop and disappeared around the corner.
“Say you were kidding about selling the car,” Nick said.
“When are you going to stop making such a big thing over it?” Karen said.
“That creep cheated you. He talked you into selling it when nothing was wrong with it.”
“Stop it,” she said. “How come your judgments are always right and my judgments are always wrong?”
“I don’t want to fight,” he said. “I’m sorry I said anything.”
“Okay,” she said and leaned her head against him. He draped his right arm over her shoulder. The fingers sticking out of the cast rested a little above her breast.
“I just want to ask one thing,” he said, “and then I’ll never mention it again. Are you sure the deal is final?”
Karen pushed his hand off her shoulder and walked away. But it was his apartment, and she couldn’t go slamming around in it. She sat on the sofa and picked up the newspaper. He watched her. Soon she put it down and stared across the room and into the dark bedroom, where Stephanie had turned off the light. He looked at her sadly for a long time, until she looked up at him with tears in her eyes.
“Do you think maybe we could get it back if I offered him more than he paid me for it?” she said. “You probably don’t think that’s a sensible suggestion, but at least that way we could get it back.”
SHIFTING
The woman’s name was Natalie, and the man’s name was Larry. They had been childhood sweethearts; he had first kissed her at an ice-skating party when they were ten. She had been unlacing her skates and had not expected the kiss. He had not expected to do it, either—he had some notion of getting his face out of the wind that was blowing across the iced-over lake, and he found himself ducking his head toward her. Kissing her seemed the natural thing to do. When they graduated from high school he was named “class clown”
in the yearbook, but Natalie didn’t think of him as being particularly funny. He spent more time than she thought he needed to studying chemistry, and he never laughed when she joked. She really did not think of him as funny. They went to the same college, in their hometown, but he left after a year to go to a larger, more impressive university. She took the train to be with him on weekends, or he took the train to see her. When he graduated, his parents gave him a car. If they had given it to him when he was still in college, it would have made things much easier. They waited to give it to him until graduation day, forcing him into attending the graduation exercises. He thought his parents were wonderful people, and Natalie liked them in a way, too, but she resented their perfect timing, their careful smiles. They were afraid that he would marry her. Eventually, he did. He had gone on to graduate school after college, and he set a date six months ahead for their wedding so that it would take place after his first-semester final exams. That way he could devote his time to studying for the chemistry exams.
When she married him, he had had the car for eight months. It still smelled like a brand-new car. There was never any clutter in the car. Even the ice scraper was kept in the glove compartment. There was not even a sweater or a lost glove in the backseat. He vacuumed the car every weekend, after washing it at the car wash. On Friday nights, on their way to some cheap restaurant and a dollar movie, he would stop at the car wash, and she would get out so he could vacuum all over the inside of the car. She would lean against the metal wall of the car wash and watch him clean it.
It was expected that she would not become pregnant. She did not. It had also been expected that she would keep their apartment clean, and keep out of the way as much as possible in such close quarters while he was studying. The apartment was messy, though, and when he was studying late at night she would interrupt him and try to talk him into going to sleep. He gave a chemistry-class lecture once a week, and she would often tell him that overpreparing was as bad as underpreparing. She did not know if she believed this, but it was a favorite line of hers. Sometimes he listened to her.