The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [191]
“Night,” Byron said.
Tom sat in silence for a minute. He was out of cigarettes and felt like a beer. He went into the room. Byron was lying in his sleeping bag, unzipped, on top of one of the beds.
“I’m going to drive down to that 7-Eleven,” Tom said. “Want me to bring you anything?”
“No, thanks,” Byron said.
“Want to come along?”
“No,” Byron said.
He picked up the keys to the car and the room key and went out. He wasn’t sure whether Byron was still sulking because he had made him go to dinner or whether he didn’t want to go back to his mother’s. Perhaps he was just tired.
Tom bought two Heinekens and a pack of Kools. The cashier was obviously stoned; he had bloodshot eyes and he stuffed a wad of napkins into the bag before he pushed it across the counter to Tom.
Back at the motel, he opened the door quietly. Byron didn’t move. Tom put out one of the two lights Byron had left on and slid open the glass door to the balcony.
Two people kissed on the pathway outside, passing the pool on the way to their room. People were talking in the room below—muted, but it sounded like an argument. The lights were suddenly turned off at the pool. Tom pushed his heels against the railing and tipped his chair back. He could hear the cars on the highway. He felt sad about something, and realized that he felt quite alone. He finished a beer and lit a cigarette. Byron hadn’t been very communicative. Of course, he couldn’t expect a ten-year-old boy to throw his arms around him the way he had when he was a baby. And Jo—in spite of her ardor, his memory of her, all summer, was of her sitting with her nose in some eighteenth-century novel. He thought about all the things they had done in July and August, trying to convince himself that they had done a lot and had fun. Dancing a couple of times, auctions, the day on the borrowed raft, four—no, five—movies, fishing with Byron, badminton, the fireworks and the sparerib dinner outside the Town Hall on the Fourth.
Maybe what his ex-wife always said was true: he didn’t connect with people. Jo never said such a thing, though. And Byron chose to spend the summer with them.
He drank the other beer and felt its effect. It had been a long drive. Byron probably didn’t want to go back to Philadelphia. He himself wasn’t too eager to begin his new job. He suddenly remembered his secretary when he confided in her that he’d gotten the big offer—her surprise, the way she hid her thumbs-up behind the palm of her other hand, in a mock gesture of secrecy. “Where are you going to go from there?” she had said. He’d miss her. She was funny and pretty and enthusiastic—no slouch herself. He’d miss laughing with her, miss being flattered because she thought that he was such a competent character.
He missed Jo. It wasn’t because she was off at the bar. If she came back this instant, something would still be missing. He couldn’t imagine caring for anyone more than he cared for her, but he wasn’t sure that he was still in love with her. He was fiddling, there in the dark. He had reached into the paper bag and begun to wrinkle up little bits of napkin, rolling the paper between thumb and finger so that it formed tiny balls. When he had a palmful, he got up and tossed them over the railing. When he sat down again, he closed his eyes and began what would be months of remembering Vermont: the garden, the neon green of new peas, the lumpy lawn, the pine trees and the smell of them at night—and then suddenly Rickman was there, rumpled and strange, but his presence was only slightly startling. He was just a man who’d dropped in on a summer day. “You’d be crazy not to be happy here,” Rickman was saying. All that was quite believable now—the way, when seen in the odd context of a home movie, even the craziest relative can suddenly look amiable.
He wondered if Jo was pregnant. Could that be what she and her sister were talking about all this time in the bar? For a second, he wanted them all to be transformed into characters in one of those novels she had read all summer. That