The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [138]
“Play chicken with him,” he whispered to me. “Don’t you be the one who gets burned.”
A lady walks past us, wearing a blue hat with feathers that look as if they might be arrows shot into the brim by crazy Indians. She smiles sweetly. “The snakes are crawling out of Hell,” she says.
In a bar, on Lexington, Nick says, “Tell me why you love me so much.” Without a pause, he says, “Don’t make analogies.”
When he is at a loss—when he is lost—he is partly lost in her. It’s as though he were walking deeper and deeper into a forest, and I risked his stopping to smell some enchanted flower or his finding a pond and being drawn to it like Narcissus. From what he has told me about Barbara, I know that she is deep and cool.
Lying on the cold white paper on the doctor’s examining table, I tried to concentrate not on what he was doing but on a screw holding one of the four corners of the flat, white ceiling light.
As a child, I got lost in the woods once. I had a dandelion with me, and I used it, hopelessly, like a flashlight, the yellow center my imaginary beam. My parents, who might have saved me, were drunk at a back-yard party as I kept walking the wrong way, away from the houses I might have seen. I walked slower and slower, being afraid.
Nick makes a lot of that. He thinks I am lost in my life. “All right,” I say as he nudges me to walk faster. “Everything’s symbolic.”
“How can you put me down when you make similes about everything?”
“I do not,” I say. “The way you talk makes me want to put out my knuckles to be beaten. You’re as critical as a teacher.”
The walk is over. He’s even done what I wanted: walked the thirty blocks to her apartment, instead of taking a cab, and if she’s anxious and looking out the window, he’s walked right up to the door with me, and she’ll see it all—even the kiss.
It amazes him that at the same time variations of what happens to Barbara happen to me. She had her hair cut the same day I got mine trimmed. When I went to the dentist and he told me my gums were receding slightly, I hoped she’d outdo me by growing fangs. Instead, when my side started to hurt she got much worse pains. Now she’s slowly getting better, back at the apartment after a spinal-fusion operation, and he’s staying with her again.
Autumn, 1979. On the walk we saw one couple kissing, three people walking dogs, one couple arguing, and a cabdriver parked in front of a drugstore, changing from a denim jacket to black leather. He pulled on a leather cap, threw the jacket into the back seat, and drove away, making a U-turn on Park Avenue, headed downtown. One man looked at me as if he’d just found me standing behind the counter of a kissing booth, and one woman gave Nick such a come-on look that it made him laugh before she was even out of earshot.
“I can’t stand it,” Nick says.
He doesn’t mean the craziness of New York.
He opens the outside door with his key, after the kiss, and for a minute we’re squeezed together in the space between locked doors. I’ve called it jail. A coffin. Two astronauts, strapped in on their way to the moon. I’ve stood there and felt, more than once, the lightness of a person who isn’t being kept in place by gravity, but my weightlessness has been from sadness and fear.
Barbara is upstairs, waiting, and Nick doesn’t know what to say. I don’t. Finally, to break the silence, he pulls me to him. He tells me that when I asked for his hand earlier, I called it “the hand.”
His right hand is extended, fingers on the bone between my breasts. I look down for a second, the way a surgeon must have a moment of doubt, or even a moment of confidence, looking at the translucent, skin-tight rubber glove: his hand and not his hand, about to do something important or not important at all.
“Anybody else would have said ‘your hand,’ ” Nick says. “When you said it that way, it made it sound as if my hand was disembodied.” He strokes my jacket. “You’ve got your security blanket. Let me keep all the parts together. On the outside, at least.”
Disembodied, that hand would be a symbol from Magritte: a castle