The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [163]
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 assume 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, nobody 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 skyscraper, 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 sophomore in college. “She’s a 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 God Almighty and her God 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? 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