The New Yorker Stories Part 34

"I feel so silly asking this, but my husband... Oh, the nurse... But I don't have any bleeding!... Is this because you think I'm old old?"

I ink out my last line and print instead, "ISN'T IT AMAZING THAT A HUGE WISTERIA VINE IS THRIVING RIGHT HERE IN NEW YORK CITY?"

I go into the living room. The view out of the tall windows is of the projects the next street over. Below me, in the back, are gardens, with high walls dividing them. Next door, two actors stand at opposite ends of their garden, each reading aloud from an identical book.

" 'What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, or to the dreadful summit of the cliff... ' "

"Again!" the actor from the far end of the garden hollers.

" 'What if it tempt you... ' "

"Oh, yeah. 'It waves me still. Go on, I'll follow thee.' "

As I'm watching, trying to block out Corky's mounting hysteria, I see a kid of about ten, who has hauled himself up so that he can see over the fence of the adjacent garden. He throws something-a stone or a bottle cap-and screams, "Get back where you belong, f.a.ggots!," drops to the ground, and runs toward his back door. Then I hear the ice-cream truck come down the street, playing its carrousel music. As my grandmother recently wrote me (with a fountain pen, flawlessly executing the Palmer method), "Sandy darling, everyone in New York's always worked up."

"All right, I'll do it your way," Corky is saying, as I go back to the bedroom and sit on the bed. She sounds like some brave actress in a nineteen-forties movie. This notion is reinforced by her bottom lip, quivering.

Two o'clock in the morning, and Corky and I are the last people in the restaurant except for Wyatt, my longtime friend. He's just shaken some vegetables around in a pan and brought them to the table, along with a bottle of pepper vodka. A truck rattles by. Corky and I share the last slice of lemon meringue pie. Wyatt's key ring is on the table: four keys to the restaurant, so he can set the alarms before he leaves.

"This place is pretty crazy," he says, picking up a snow pea. "I thought that nothing could be worse than teaching fifth-grade grammar. But knowing all the rhymes on the jukebox is probably worse than teaching grammar." He takes a joint out of his shirt pocket. "You know what happened tonight? My father's accountant came in here with a guy. They had on T-shirts with swirls of pink and blue and green-it would have been good protective coloration in a basket of Easter eggs. The accountant almost died when he saw me. Then, Tuesday night, my old Hackensack heartthrob, Dorie Vesco, came in. I saw her sitting at the bar. She was all tied up. She had on one of those blouses that lace up the front and those shoes with strings that you wrap around your ankles. The guy she was with was a real jerk. Dorie Vesco and I recognized each other at the same instant, and when I hugged her the guy said, 'This some kind of a setup?' " He laughs. "Wyatt and the cat," he says, rubbing his foot over an orange cat that has just darted under the table. "She's been around here longer'n me. Longer than anybody. Cat can't set alarms, Wyatt can."

We are in what used to be Jason's favorite restaurant. I used to live with Jason; now we're apart. After Wyatt took a job as a waiter here, though, Jason stopped coming. "Honey, it's just too odd," Jason said to me one night. "I don't feel comfortable being waited on by the same person I always call when I have a question about the correct use of apostrophes."

When we go out, Wyatt hands Corky the keys to the car. I open the back door, muttering about what a bad idea this is, because she has only had three driving lessons so far. She no more than pulls away from the curb than a cop car comes up alongside us and stops for the red light. I catch one cop's eye and look away. Our car is angled strangely through two lanes. No cars are in back of us or around us. Next, one of the cops catches Corky's eye. "You know what?" he calls over. "If you were a red Toyota with six guys inside, we'd have found what we're looking for." Then the cop in the driver's seat leans forward and hollers, "Now he'll tell you that if you twinkled you'd be the North Star, and we could follow you so we don't get lost."

The light changes and the cop car takes off, no siren, at about sixty miles an hour.

"Still nothing behind us," Wyatt says, patting Corky's leg. "First rule of driving: Many other dangerous people are driving at the same time you are, and you must drive defensively."

"Did you think you'd marry Jason?" Corky says.

I never lived in a dorm when I was in college, but Corky did. Lights-out is still a signal to her to start talking.

"We almost got married," I say. "I told you about that. The summer he bought the house in Garrison. We were as stupid as everybody else who's breaking up. We kept finding something to do that interested us, so we could pretend that we were interested in each other."

"What about you and Wyatt?"

"I've always thought that he loved somebody else. We had quite a talk about that years ago, and he said I was wrong. Then again, he never mentioned Dorie Vesco until tonight."

"Archie told me a week before our wedding that he'd been engaged twice before." She lights a cigarette. "Which was the one who flushed his credit card down the toilet?"

"Sally."

"And Sondra's the one who swallowed the ring?"

"A citrine with diamonds. Our grandmother's. When Archie took her to the emergency room and she filled out the form, she said that she'd swallowed a bone."

"She had to be nuts not to level with the people in the emergency room," Corky says.

I roll over to see Corky's face in the half-dark. She has unrolled the futon sofa into a mat on the bedroom floor, where she will sleep tonight.

"You know the rest of that story, don't you?" I say. "The next day, he got a book about training puppies. He took it home and showed her the part where they say not to worry if your dog swallows a rock unless it chokes. A joke, but when they went to couples therapy she kept bringing up the dog book."

Looking back, I can see how Jason liked to manipulate me. He relied on being a Southern boy when he wanted something. He talked about the house he wanted to buy as our opportunity to "live life on the plantation." Even before we went to look at the property in Garrison, he was planning the afternoon croquet games we were going to play there; we'd play croquet and drink mint juleps, he announced. When Jason really wanted something, he began by making it into some kind of fantasy-the more exaggerated and ridiculous the better. He said that made it easier to cope with whatever problems came up later. We had lived together in the city for more than a year, and he was restless and wanted a place in the country. So he bought the big yellow house up the Hudson in Garrison and he took a leave of absence from his job and spent a month that autumn painting it white. I glazed windows and helped him sand the floors, and by the time the house started to shape up I loved it more than Jason did. In the mornings, I had coffee and watched the sparrows and the squirrel fighting over the birdseed in the hanging feeder outside the kitchen. I began to wait, in the late afternoon, for the sky to get pale and the sun to set. Jason took to sleeping late and reading magazines and watching the evening news. When he went back to the law firm where he worked in New York, I stayed on. Wyatt visited. Jason called and said that he couldn't come up for a couple of weekends because he had so much paperwork. The next weekend, Corky and my brother drove up, and just before they left she took me by the arm in the driveway and walked me around to the back of their car. "I'd say that if you want to keep Jason you ought to get back to the city," she said. But by then I wanted to believe what Jason said he believed when he bought the house: that New York City was a battle, that it was important to escape to a place where you didn't always have to be on guard, that it was important to remember that it was a green world. Late in November, when I did leave the house at last and took the train back to New York, I walked into our apartment and felt like a stranger. He was still at the office. I wandered around, a little surprised that my things were still there-a pair of my sandals under the chair in the bedroom where I always kicked them. Walking around the bedroom verified what I hadn't been able to admit in Garrison: that it really was over between us. Seeing my things there didn't make me feel at home; it made me realize that it had always been Jason's apartment. He had hung up the Audubon prints his parents had given us for Christmas; I'd never liked them-they were like prints on the walls of some country inn-and here they were, out in plain view. They were on the north wall, which he had always insisted be left empty because pictures would spoil the beauty of the bricks. When Jason came home from work, we made drinks and went up to the roof and talked. It was clear that we wouldn't stay together, but he seemed to take it as a foregone conclusion. When I walked over to where he stood by the railing, it surprised me to see that he had tears in his eyes.

"Why be upset?" I said. "It's not your fault. We both feel the same way."

"When are you going to stop taking everything so casually?" he said. "As if you didn't matter. You're one of the nicest people I've ever known, and you made a really bad choice about me, way back. I feel guilty that I lived with you and let you a.s.sume that I loved you."

"You did love me," I said.

"Honey, I'm telling you the truth," he said sadly. "Don't forget what good Southern manners I have. You used to make fun of that. I wanted wanted to love you. I acted as if I loved you." to love you. I acted as if I loved you."

When I left, I walked to the restaurant and sat at the bar, waiting for Wyatt to get off work. Jason didn't love me the time he said that on Sat.u.r.day nights he never wanted to go out but only wanted to listen to Keith Jarrett's "The Mourning of a Star" and make love? Not when I read him Firbank's The Flower Beneath the Foot The Flower Beneath the Foot and he laughed until he had to cover his face and then wipe tears away with the palms of his hands? Not at Thanksgiving, when we were doing the dishes and he kept putting his arm around my waist and raising my soapy hand out of the water to waltz me out of the kitchen? and he laughed until he had to cover his face and then wipe tears away with the palms of his hands? Not at Thanksgiving, when we were doing the dishes and he kept putting his arm around my waist and raising my soapy hand out of the water to waltz me out of the kitchen?

I saw Jason one more time after that night-when I went there on a Sunday afternoon in February, after I'd moved. I wanted us to be friends. I climbed to the fourth floor, certain, for the millionth time, that the ancient stairs were going to cave in. I sat in one of the canvas director's chairs and let him pour me a cup of coffee from the Melitta coffeepot. It was my pot, and I'd forgotten to pack it. Jason didn't offer to give it back. He told me about the Garrison house; he had put it up for sale, and a television producer and his wife had made an offer. They were negotiating. As we talked, my eye caught the bright-pink spine of the Firbank book on the topmost bookshelf across the room. Maybe he was harboring secret grudges. Maybe there were things I had taken home with me inadvertently. He got all the Keith Jarrett records. My down vest. The Firbank. Before I moved, he had helped me by separating my books and records from his and putting mine in cartons. I didn't unpack for weeks, so it took a while to realize how many were missing. If he'd done it deliberately, one other thing he did threw me off: at the bottom of one of the cartons of books he had put his gray corduroy shirt, which I had always pulled over my nightgown on cold winter mornings.

This weekend Corky told me, in the bedroom, that since Jason and I broke up I had begun to shut myself off from everyone-she was trying to be supportive, she said, and I wouldn't even talk about my anger or my sadness. I told her that I thought about it a lot-that when people weren't in love they had a lot of time to think; that's why there weren't very many surprises, or the surprises didn't have the same intensity they had when you were in love. What happened when I'd been waiting for her to come to my apartment the day before, for example: A bee flew into the bedroom, b.u.mped against the skylight, buzzing. I dismissed my other options right away: hiding under the blanket all day; rolling the Times Times into a club and trying to kill it. I decided to do nothing, and when it flew lower, out of the skylight, it did the last thing I would have predicted-it flew in a straight line to the inch-wide crack in the screen, almost filled in by the lush vines that covered the building, and disappeared through the leaves. I waited for it to be perverse and fly back in, but it didn't. Then I got up and tore the leaves away from the screen and put masking tape over the crack where the screen had separated from the frame. into a club and trying to kill it. I decided to do nothing, and when it flew lower, out of the skylight, it did the last thing I would have predicted-it flew in a straight line to the inch-wide crack in the screen, almost filled in by the lush vines that covered the building, and disappeared through the leaves. I waited for it to be perverse and fly back in, but it didn't. Then I got up and tore the leaves away from the screen and put masking tape over the crack where the screen had separated from the frame.

It's logical that everyone wants to be in love. Then, for a while, life isn't taken up with the tedium of thinking everything through, talking things through. It's nice to be able to notice small objects or small moments, to point them out and to have someone eager to pretend that there's more to them than it seems. Jason was very good at that-at convincing me that somehow, because we were together, what we saw took on an importance beyond itself. The last autumn we were together, we drove over to Cold Spring, late one afternoon. We drove to the far side of the railroad tracks, past the gazebo, to the edge of the paved area where cars park at the edge of the Hudson. How could he have tried to convince me, later, that he didn't love me? We were young lovers then, getting out of the car and throwing stale bread to the black ducks on the river. We sat on a bench, looking at the high cliffs across the water and tightening our hold on each other's waist as we imagined, I suppose, the voyage we'd have to take to get there, and the climb to the top. Or maybe we squeezed each other tighter because we were safe where we were: no boat, no possibility we'd swim, no reason to make such an effort anyway. It was October, and the wind was so strong that it nearly knocked us off the bench; tears came to my eyes long before Jason whispered to me to look: such strong wind-it made it seem that the water was being blown downstream, instead of flowing.

Coney Island

Drew is sitting at the kitchen table in his friend Chester's apartment in Arlington. It's a bright day, and the sun shining through the kitchen curtains, patterned with chickens, gives the chickens an advantage they don't have in real life; backlit, they're luminous. Beautiful.

Drew has been at Chester's for a couple of hours. The light is sharp now, in late afternoon. Between them, on the table, the bottle of Jack Daniel's is half empty. Chester pours another half inch into his gla.s.s, wipes the bottle neck with his thumb, licks it. He twirls the cap back on the bottle, like people who replace the cork after they've poured a gla.s.s of wine. Chester likes wine; his wife, Holly, converted him, but he knows better than to offer wine to Drew. Holly is in the hospital now, and will be there overnight; his tests for infertility were negative, and now the doctors are doing some kind of minor exploratory surgery on her. Maybe he would have gotten loaded today even if Drew hadn't shown up.

Drew is tapping the salt and pepper shakers together. The shakers are in the shape of penguins. What a sense of humor his friends Ches and Holly have! One penguin looks like a penguin, and the other has on a vest and top hat. Probably they were manufactured as jokes.

Chester's radio needs new batteries. He holds it in his right hand and shakes it with the motion he'd use to shake a c.o.c.ktail shaker. Earlier, he thought about shaking up some Manhattans, but Drew said he preferred his bourbon straight.

Today, Drew drove across the mountains from Waynesboro to come to his nephew's christening in Arlington. The party afterward was at his mother's. Before the party he had pruned some bushes, fixed the bas.e.m.e.nt door so it wouldn't stick. Afterward, when everyone had gone and his mother was in the bathroom, he used the phone and called his old girlfriend, Charlotte. That was unexpected, even to Drew. The month before, Charlotte married a man who managed a trendy hardware store in some mall outside of Arlington. Drew's mother cut the wedding announcement out of the paper and sent it to him at work, with "Personal" written on the envelope. Now when he has this affair with Charlotte, his secretary will know. What else would a secretary think about a boss getting a letter marked "Personal"?

It's less than an hour until Drew will go to meet Charlotte for a drink. Charlotte Coole, now Charlotte Raybill. Charlotte Coole Raybill, for all Drew knows. Chester has agreed to go along, so that if they're seen people may at least a.s.sume it's just some friends having a drink for old times' sake. Everybody knows everybody else's business. A cousin of Drew's, Howard, had a long affair with a married woman when he lived in New York. It lasted four years. They always met in Grand Central. For years, people hurried around them. Children were tugged past. Religious fanatics held out pamphlets. It was so likely that they'd see somebody one of them knew that of course they never did, and, to their knowledge, n.o.body ever saw them. They drank at Windows on the World. Who would ever find them there? Howard had a way of telling the story for laughs-the two of them holding each other beside the gate of the Mount Kisco local, kissing until their mouths felt burned, and then, downtown, sitting beside the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty. When Drew was a little boy, he went to New York with his family. They climbed up the statue, and for years he still believed what his father told him-that he'd climbed into the thumb. Howard's lover divorced her husband but married someone else. Howard got bitter and took it out on everybody. Once, he told Drew and Chester that they were nowhere, that they'd never examined anything for a moment in their lives. What did Howard know, Drew thinks. Howard used to look out high windows and he ended up in another skysc.r.a.per, in a shrink's office, with the blinds closed.

Drew says, "Charlotte's elbows were pointy, like a hard lemon. I used to hold on to her elbows when I made love to her. What a thing to be sitting here remembering."

"Drew, she's meeting you for a drink," Chester says sadly. "She's not going to leave her husband."

Chester taps the radio lightly on the table, the way he'd tap a cigarette out of a pack. Drew and Chester don't smoke. They haven't smoked since college. Drew met Charlotte and fell in love with her when he was a soph.o.m.ore in college. "She's a kid kid," Howard had said to him back then, in one of those late-night fraternity-house rap sessions. Howard always took a fatherly tone, although he was only two years ahead of them. "Let's call Howard," Drew says now. "Ask him what he thinks about Holly." Howard is a surgeon in Seattle. They track him down sometimes at the hospital, or through his answering service, late at night. A couple of times, drunk, they disguised their voices and gave garbled panicky accounts of what they thought Howard would recognize as a heart attack or a ruptured appendix.

"I met the doctor Holly's been going to," Chester says. He points at the kitchen ceiling. "If that that G.o.d Almighty and her G.o.d Almighty gynecologist think there's no reason why she can't have a baby, I'm just going to wait this one out." G.o.d Almighty and her G.o.d Almighty gynecologist think there's no reason why she can't have a baby, I'm just going to wait this one out."

"I just thought we might call him," Drew says. He takes off his shoes.

"No point calling about this," Chester says. Chester pours himself another drink. He rubs his hair back off his forehead, and that feels good. He does it again, then once again.

"Call the hospital and see how she made out," Drew says.

"I'm her husband and you think I wasn't there there? I saw her. They wheeled her out and she said that she didn't care if she never had a kid-that she couldn't stand to feel like ice. That was the, you know... anesthetic. I held her feet in my hands for an hour. She was asleep and the nurse told me to go home. In the morning, when Dr. High and Mighty shows up, I guess we'll know something. How come you're so full of advice?"

"I didn't give any advice. I said to call her," Drew says.

Drew holds the bottle against his forehead for a second, then puts it back on the table. "I'm hungry," he says. "I ought to do everything before I see Charlotte, shouldn't I? Eat so there'll be time to talk. Drink and get sober. Do it all beforehand."

"How come you decided to call Charlotte today?" Chester says.

"My nephew-"

"I mean why call Charlotte Charlotte? Why call her?"

This time, Drew fiddles with the radio, and a station comes in, faintly. They both listen, surprised. It's still only October, and the man is talking about the number of shopping days left until Christmas. Drew moves the dial and loses the station. He can't get it back. He shoves the radio across the table. A penguin tips over. It rests there, with its pointed face on the radio.

"I'll have another drink and stand her up," Drew says.

"Oh, I can do it for you," Chester says, and sets the penguin upright.

"Aren't you a million laughs," Drew says. "Charlotte-not the penguin. Charlotte, Charlotte-Charlotte who isn't going to leave her husband. Does that get her name into the conversation enough?"

"I don't want to go with you," Chester says. "I don't see the point of it." He rubs his hands across his forehead again. He cups one hand over his eyes and doesn't say anything else.

Drew puts his hand over his gla.s.s. The gesture of a person refusing a refill, but no one's offering. He looks at his hands.

Chester reaches in his shirt pocket. If the missing laundry receipt isn't there or in his wallet, where is it? It has to be somewhere, in some pocket. He puts his index finger in the neck of the bottle. He wiggles it. There is a little pile of salt where the penguin tipped over. Chester pushes the salt into a line, pretends to be holding a straw in his fingers, touches the imaginary straw to the inch of salt, closes off one nostril, inhales with the other as he moves the straw up the line. He smiles more widely.

"Be glad you don't have that problem," Drew says.

"I am," Chester says. "I tell you, I'm glad I don't even remember being ga.s.sed when I had my tonsils out when I was a kid. Holly was so cold and sleepy. But not nice sleep-more like she'd been hit."

"She's O.K.," Drew says.

"How do you know?" Chester says. Then he's surprised by how harsh his voice sounds. He smiles. "Sneaking around to see her, the way you make arrangements to see Charlotte?" he says.

"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 gla.s.s 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 me up." 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 gla.s.s 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 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." 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 gla.s.s 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 n.o.body'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 G.o.d Almighty? Holly's the one who seriously believes in G.o.d 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 s.h.a.ggy. 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 gla.s.s 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 b.u.t.tons 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 gla.s.ses; he promised Holly he'd fix the leaking faucet. He'll have one drink at the bar, say h.e.l.lo 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

Billy 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s into the aquarium. He dug around in the pebbles and then piled them up around the base of the gla.s.s to anchor it, and the fish eventually started swimming around and around outside the top of the submerged gla.s.s 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 "Cotelette Plus ca Change" or whatever the specialty was, when actually he wanted to be John Travolta in Sat.u.r.day Night Fever Sat.u.r.day Night Fever. He had the pelvis for it.