The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [165]
Chester gets up, drinks the last of his bourbon, puts the glass 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 nobody’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 God Almighty? Holly’s the one who seriously believes in God 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 shaggy. 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 glass 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 buttons 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 glasses; he promised Holly he’d fix the leaking faucet. He’ll have one drink at the bar, say hello 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