Last Night - James Salter [31]
The waves, the ocean, the white blinding sand. It was at Westhampton, where they went for the weekend. On the train every seat was taken. Young men in T-shirts and with manly chests were joking in the aisles. Noreen sat beside him, the happiness coming off her like heat. She had a small gold cross, the size of a dime, on a thin gold necklace lying on her shirt. He hadn’t noticed it before. He was about to say something when the train began bucking and slowed to a stop.
— What is it? What’s happened?
They were not in a station but alongside a low embankment, amid weedy-looking growth. After a while the word came back, they had hit a bicyclist.
— Where? How? Arthur said. We’re in a forest.
No one knew much more. People were speculating, should they get off and try to find a taxi; where were they, anyhow? There were guesses. A few individuals did get off and were walking by the side of the train.
— God, I knew something like this would happen, Arthur said.
— Something like this? Noreen said. How could there be something like this?
— When we hit the cow, a man sitting across from them offered.
— The cow? We also hit a cow? Arthur exclaimed.
— A couple of weeks ago, the man explained.
That night Noreen showed him how to eat a lobster.
— My mother would die if she knew this, Arthur said.
— How will she know?
— She’d disown me.
— You start with the claws, Noreen said.
She had tucked the napkin into his collar. They drank some Italian wine.
Westhampton, her tanned legs and pale heels. The feeling she gave him of being younger, even, God help him, debonair. He was playful. On the beach he wore a coconut hat. He had fallen in love, deeply, and without knowing it. He hadn’t realized he had been living a shallow life. He only knew that he was happy, happier than he had ever been, in her company. This warmhearted girl with her legs, her fragrance, and perfect little ears that were tuned to him. And she took some kind of pleasure in him! They were guests of the Senders and he slept in a separate room in the basement while she was upstairs, but they were under the same roof and he would see her in the morning.
— When are you going to marry her? everyone asked.
— She wouldn’t have me, he equivocated.
Then, offhandedly, she admitted meeting someone else. It was sort of a joke, Bobby Piro. He was stocky, he lived with his mother, had never married.
— He has black, shiny hair, Arthur guessed as if goodnaturedly.
He had to treat it lightly, and Noreen did the same. She would make fun of Bobby when talking about him, his brothers, Dennis and Paul, his wanting to go to Vegas, his mother making chicken Vesuvio, Sinatra’s favorite, for her.
— Chicken Vesuvio, Arthur said.
— It was pretty good.
— So you met his mother.
— I’m too skinny, she said.
— She sounds like my mother. Are you sure she’s Italian?
She liked Bobby, at least a little, he could see. Still it was difficult to think of him as being really significant. He was someone to talk about. He wanted her to go away on a weekend with him.
— To the Euripides, Arthur said, his stomach suddenly turning over.
— Not that good.
The Euripides Hotel that didn’t exist, but that they always joked about because he didn’t know who Euripides was.
— Don’t let him take you to the Euripides, he said.
— I couldn’t do that. It’s a Greek place, she said. For us Greeks.
Then, late one night in October, his doorbell rang.
— Who is it? Arthur said.
— It’s me.
He opened the door. She stood in the doorway with a smile that he saw had hesitation in it.
— Can I come in?
— Sure, tootsula. Of course. Come in. What’s happened, is something wrong?
— There’s nothing wrong, really. I just thought I would . . . come by.
The room was clean but somehow barren. He never sat in it and as much