The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [227]
“Let me help you get it off,” I said, feeling more light-headed than I had when I’d come in. I felt as if I were sleepwalking.
The girl faced me, mascara smudged in half-moons beneath her eyes, her nose bright red, one side of her lip more pointed than the other. From the look in her eyes, I was just a person who happened to be in the room. The way I had happened to be in the room in New York the day Richard came out of the bathroom, one shirtsleeve rolled up, frowning, saying, “What do you think this rash is on my arm?”
“I’m all right,” the girl said, wiping her eyes. “It’s not your problem.”
“I’d say she does care,” I said. “People get very anxious in hospitals. I came in to throw some water on my face because I was feeling a little faint.”
“Do you feel better now?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“We’re not the ones who are dying,” she said.
It was a disembodied voice that came from some faraway, perplexing place, and it disturbed me so deeply that I needed to hold her for a moment—which I did, tapping my forehead lightly against hers and slipping my fingers through hers to give her a squeeze before I walked out the door.
Ned had gone outside and was leaning against a lamppost. He pointed the glowing tip of his cigarette to the right, asking silently if I wanted to go to the coffee shop down the block. I nodded, and we fell into step.
“I don’t think this is a walk we’re going to be taking too many more times,” he said. “The doctor stopped to talk, on his way out. He’s run out of anything optimistic to say. He also took a cigarette out of my fingers and crushed it under his heel, told me I shouldn’t smoke. I’m not crazy about doctors, but there’s still something about that one that I like. Hard to imagine I’d ever warm up to a guy with tassels on his shoes.”
It was freezing cold. At the coffee shop, hot air from the electric heater over the door smacked us in the face as we headed for our familiar seats at the counter. Just the fact that it wasn’t the hospital made it somehow pleasant, though it was only a block and a half away. Some of the doctors and nurses went there, and of course people like us—patients’ friends and relatives. Ned nodded when the waitress asked if we both wanted coffee.
“Winter in Boston,” Ned said. “Never knew there was anything worse than winter where I grew up, but I think this is worse.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Kearney, Nebraska. Right down Route Eighty, about halfway between Lincoln and the Wyoming border.”
“What was it like, growing up in Nebraska?”
“I screwed boys,” he said.
It was either the first thing that popped into his head, or he was trying to make me laugh.
“You know what the first thing fags always ask each other is, don’t you?” he said.
I shook my head no, braced for a joke.
“It’s gotten so the second thing is ‘Have you been tested?’ But the first thing is still always ‘When did you know?’ ”
“Okay,” I said. “Second question.”
“No,” he said, looking straight at me. “It can’t happen to me.”
“Be serious,” I said. “That’s not a serious answer.”
He cupped his hand over mine. “How the hell do you think I got out of Kearney, Nebraska?” he said. “Yeah, I had a football scholarship, but I had to hitchhike to California—never been to another state but Wyoming—hitched with whatever I had in a laundry bag. And if a truck driver put a hand on my knee, you don’t think I knew that was a small price to pay for a ride? Because luck was with me. I always knew that. Just the way luck shaped those pretty hands of yours. Luck’s always been with me, and luck’s with you. It’s as good as anything else we have to hang on to.”
He lifted his hand from mine, and yes, there it was: the perfect hand, with smooth skin, tapered fingers, and nails curved and shining under the gloss of a French manicure. There was a small, dark smudge across one knuckle. I licked the middle finger of the other hand to see if I could gently rub it away, that smudge of mascara that must have passed from the hand of the girl in the bathroom to my hand when