The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [101]
From his seat Nick could see the sign of the restaurant hanging outside the front window. “Star Thrower Café,” it said, in lavender neon. He got depressed thinking that if she became more serious about the professor—he had lasted longer than any of the others—he would only be able to see her by pretending to run into her at places like the Star Thrower. He had also begun to think that he had driven the Thunderbird for the last time. She had almost refused to let him drive it again after the time, two weeks earlier, when he tapped a car in front of them on Sixth Avenue, making a dent above their left headlight. Long ago she had stopped letting him use her squirrel coat as a kind of blanket. He used to like to lie naked on the tiny balcony outside her apartment in the autumn, with the Sunday Times arranged under him for padding and the coat spread on top of him. Now he counted back and came up with the figure: he had known Karen for seven years.
“What are you thinking?” he said to her.
“That I’m glad I’m not thirty-eight years old, with a man putting pressure on me to have a baby.” She was talking about Stephanie and Sammy.
Her hand was on the table. He cupped his hand over it just as the waiter came with the plates.
“What are you thinking?” she said, withdrawing her hand.
“At least Stephanie has the sense not to do it,” he said. He picked up his fork and put it down. “Do you really love that man?”
“If I loved him, I suppose I’d be at my apartment, where he’s been waiting for over an hour. If he waited.”
When they finished she ordered espresso. He ordered it also. He had half expected her to say at some point that the trip with him was the end, and he still thought she might say that. Part of the problem was that she had money and he didn’t. She had had money since she was twenty-one, when she got control of a fifty-thousand-dollar trust fund her grandfather had left her. He remembered the day she had bought the Thunderbird. It was the day after her birthday, five years ago. That night, laughing, they had driven the car through the Lincoln Tunnel and then down the back roads in Jersey, with a stream of orange crepe paper blowing from the radio antenna, until the wind ripped it off.
“Am I still going to see you?” Nick said.
“I suppose,” Karen said. “Although things have changed between us.”
“I’ve known you for seven years. You’re my oldest friend.”
She did not react to what he said, but much later, around midnight, she called him at his apartment. “Was what you said at the Star Thrower calculated to make me feel bad?” she said. “When you said that I was your oldest friend?”
“No,” he said. “You are my oldest friend.”
“You must know somebody longer than you’ve known me.”
“You’re the only person I’ve seen regularly for seven years.”
She sighed.
“Professor go home?” he said.
“No. He’s here.”
“You’re saying all this in front of him?”
“I don’t see why there has to be any secret about this.”
“You could put an announcement in the paper,” Nick said. “Run a little picture of me with it.”
“Why are you so sarcastic?”
“It’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing that you’d say this in front of that man.”
He was sitting in the dark, in a chair by the phone. He had wanted to call her ever since he got back from the restaurant. The long day of driving had finally caught up with him, and his shoulders ached. He felt the black man’s hands on his shoulders, felt his own body folding up, felt himself flying backward. He had lost sixty-five dollars that night. The day she bought the Thunderbird, he had driven it through the tunnel into New Jersey. He had driven, then she had driven, and then he had driven again. Once he had pulled into the parking lot of a shopping center and told her to wait, and had come back with the orange crepe paper. Years later he had looked for the road they had been on that night, but he could never find it.
The next time Nick heard from her was almost three weeks after the trip to Virginia. Since he didn’t have the courage to call her, and since he expected not to hear from