The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [190]
He came back downstairs, and saw, through the kitchen window, that Jo was sitting outside. A woman was with her. He walked out. Paper plates and beer bottles were on the grass beside their chairs.
“Hi, honey,” she said.
“Hi,” the woman said. It was Karen Hewett.
“Hi,” he said to both of them. He had never seen Karen Hewett up close. She was tanner than he realized. The biggest difference, though, was her hair. When he had seen her, it had always been long and windblown, but today she had it pulled back in a clip.
“Get all your errands done?” Jo said.
It couldn’t have been a more ordinary conversation. It couldn’t have been a more ordinary summer day.
The night before they closed up the house, Tom and Jo lay stretched out on the bed. Jo was finishing Tom Jones. Tom was enjoying the cool breeze coming through the window, thinking that when he was in New York he forgot the Vermont house; at least, he forgot it except for the times he looked up from the street he was on and saw the sky, and its emptiness made him remember stars. It was the sky he loved in the country—the sky more than the house. If he hadn’t thought it would seem dramatic, he would have gotten out of bed now and stood at the window for a long time. Earlier in the evening, Jo had asked why he was so moody. He had told her that he didn’t feel like leaving. “Then let’s stay,” she said. It was his opening to say something about her job in the fall. He had hoped she would say something, but he hesitated, and she had only put her arms around him and rubbed her cheek against his chest. All summer, she had seduced him—sometimes with passion, sometimes so subtly he didn’t realize what was happening until she put her hand up under his T-shirt or kissed him on the lips.
Now it was the end of August. Jo’s sister in Connecticut was graduating from nursing school in Hartford, and Jo had asked Tom to stop there so they could do something with her sister to celebrate. Her sister lived in a one-bedroom apartment, but it would be easy to find a motel. The following day, they would take Byron home to Philadelphia and then backtrack to New York.
In the car the next morning, Tom felt Byron’s gaze on his back and wondered if he had overheard their lovemaking the night before. It was very hot by noontime. There was so much haze on the mountains that their peaks were invisible. The mountains gradually sloped until suddenly, before Tom realized it, they were driving on flat highway. Late that afternoon they found a motel. He and Byron swam in the pool, and Jo, although she was just about to see her, talked to her sister for half an hour on the phone.
By the time Jo’s sister turned up at the motel, Tom had shaved and showered. Byron was watching television. He wanted to stay in the room and watch the movie instead of having dinner with them. He said he wasn’t hungry. Tom insisted that he come and eat dinner. “I can get something out of the machine,” Byron said.
“You’re not going to eat potato chips for dinner,” Tom said. “Get off the bed—come on.”
Byron gave Tom a look that was quite similar to the look an outlaw in the movie was giving the sheriff who had just kicked his gun out of reach.
“You didn’t stay glued to the set in Vermont all summer and miss those glorious days, did you?” Jo’s sister said.
“I fished,” Byron said.
“He caught four trout one day,” Tom said, spreading his arms and looking from the palm of one hand to the palm of the other.
They all had dinner together in the motel restaurant, and later, while they drank their coffee, Byron dropped quarters into the machine in the corridor, playing game after game of Space Invaders.
Jo and her sister went into the bar next to the restaurant for a nightcap. Tom let them go alone, figuring that they probably wanted some private time together. Byron followed him up to the room and turned on the television. An hour later, Jo and her sister were still in the bar. Tom sat on the balcony. Long before his usual bedtime, Byron turned off the television.
“Good night,” Tom called