The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [203]
Howard is smiling.
“So I put it in my purse and I walked for a few blocks, and I thought, Well, what for, really? Some man in San Francisco? For what? A one-night stand? I went back to the hotel, and when I walked in the man behind the desk stood up and said, ‘Excuse me. Were you just eating dinner?,’ and I said, ‘A few minutes ago,’ and he said, ‘Someone left this for you.’ It was a hotel envelope. In the elevator on the way to my room, I opened it, and it was the same business card, with ‘Please call’ written on it.”
“I hope you called,” Howard says.
“I decided to sleep on it. And in the morning I decided not to. But I kept the card. And then at the end of August I was walking in the East Village, and a couple obviously from out of town were walking in front of me, and a punk kid got up off the stoop where he was sitting and said to them, ‘Hey—I want my picture taken with you.’ I went into a store, and when I came out the couple and the punk kid were all laughing together, holding these Polaroid snaps that another punk had taken. It was a joke, not a scam. The man gave the kid a dollar for one of the pictures, and they walked off, and the punk sat back down on the stoop. So I walked back to where he was sitting, and I said, ‘Could you do me a real favor? Could I have my picture taken with you, too?’ ”
“What?” Howard says. The violin is soaring. He gets up and turns the music down a notch. He looks over his shoulder. “Yeah?” he says.
“The kid wanted to know why I wanted it, and I told him because it would upset my boyfriend. So he said yeah—his face lit up when I said that—but that he really would appreciate two bucks for more film. So I gave it to him, and then he put his arm around me and really mugged for the camera. He was like a human boa constrictor around my neck, and he did a Mick Jagger pout. I couldn’t believe how well the picture came out. And that night, on the white part on the bottom I wrote, ‘I’m somebody whose name you still don’t know. Are you going to find me?’ and I put it in an envelope and mailed it to him in San Francisco. I don’t know why I did it. I mean, it doesn’t seem like something I’d ever do, you know?”
“But how will he find you?” Howard says.
“I’ve still got his card,” I say, shrugging my good shoulder toward my purse on the floor.
“You don’t know what you’re going to do?” Howard says.
“I haven’t thought about it in months.”
“How is that possible?”
“How is it possible that somebody can go into a restaurant and be hit by lightning and the other person is, too? It’s like a bad movie or something.”
“Of course it can happen,” Howard says. “Seriously, what are you going to do?”
“Let some time pass. Maybe send him something he can follow up on if he still wants to.”
“That’s an amazing story,” Howard says.
“Sometimes—well, I hadn’t thought about it in a while, but at the end of summer, after I mailed the picture, I’d be walking along or doing whatever I was doing and this feeling would come over me that he was thinking about me.”
Howard looks at me strangely. “He probably was,” he says. “He doesn’t know how to get in touch with you.”
“You used to be a screenwriter. What should he do?”
“Couldn’t he figure out from the background that it was the Village?”
“I’m not sure.”
“If he could, he could put an ad in the Voice.”
“I think it was just a car in the background.”
“Then you’ve got to give him something else,” Howard says.
“For what? You want your sister to have a one-night stand?”
“You make him sound awfully attractive,” Howard says.
“Yeah, but what if he’s a rat? It could be argued that he was just cocky, and that he was pretty sure that I’d respond. Don’t you think?”
“I think you should get in touch with him. Do it in some amusing way if you want, but I wouldn’t let him slip away.”
“I never had him. And from the looks of it he has a wife.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” I say. “I guess I don’t know.”
“Do it,” Howard says. “I think you need this,” and