The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [50]
“Thanks for fixing my boots again,” she said, rolling up her pants leg to put one on.
“Why are you leaving?” Robert said. “Dan’s student won’t be out of there yet.”
Dan was a painter who had lost his teaching job in the South. He moved to New Haven and was giving private lessons to students three times a week.
“Marielle’s going to pick me up,” Penelope said. “She wants me to help her paint her bathroom.”
“Why can’t she paint her own bathroom? She could do the whole thing in an hour.”
“I don’t want to help her paint,” Penelope said, sighing. “I’m just doing a favor for a friend.”
“Why don’t you do me a favor and stay?”
“Come on,” she said. “Don’t do that. You’re my best friend.”
“Okay,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t fight over it anyway. He went to the kitchen table and got her coat. “Why don’t you wait till she gets here?”
“She’s meeting me at the drugstore.”
“You sure are nice to some of your friends,” he said.
She ignored him. She did not totally ignore him; she kissed him before she left. And although she did not say that she’d see him the next day, he knew she’d be back.
When Penelope left, Robert went into the kitchen and put some water on to boil. It was his habit since moving to this apartment to have a cup of tea before bed and to look out the window into the brightly lit alley. Interesting things appeared there: Christmas trees, large broken pieces of machinery, and, once, a fireman’s uniform, very nicely laid out—a fireman’s hat and suit. He was an artist—or, rather, he had been an artist until he dropped out of school—and sometimes he found that he still arranged objects and landscapes, looking for a composition. He sat on the kitchen table and drank his tea. He often thought about buying a kitchen chair, but he told himself that he’d move soon and he didn’t want to transport furniture. When he was a child, his parents had moved from apartment to apartment. Their furniture got more and more battered, and his mother had exploded one day, crying that the furniture was worthless and ugly, and threatening to chop it all up with an ax. Since he moved from the country Robert had not yet bought himself a bed frame or curtains or rugs. There were roaches in the apartment, and the idea of the roaches hiding—being able to hide on the underside of curtains, under the rug—disgusted him. He didn’t mind them being there so much when they were out in the open.
The Yale catalogue he had gotten months before when he first came to New Haven was still on the kitchen table. He had thought about taking a course in architecture, but he hadn’t. He was not quite sure what to do. He had taken a part-time job working in a picture-framing store so he could pay his rent. Actually, he had no reason for being in New Haven except to be near Penelope. When Robert lived in the house with Johnny and Cyril and Penelope, he had told himself that Penelope would leave Johnny and become his lover, but it never happened. He had tried very hard to get it to happen; they had often stayed up later than any of the others, and they talked—he had never talked so much to anybody in his life—and sometimes they fixed food before going to bed, or took walks in the snow. She tried to teach him to play the recorder, blowing softly so she wouldn’t wake the others. Once in the summer they had stolen corn, and Johnny had asked her about it the next morning. “What if the neighbors find out somebody from this house stole corn?” he said. Robert defended Penelope, saying that he had suggested it. “Great,” Johnny said. “The Bobbsey Twins.” Robert was hurt because what Johnny said was true—there wasn’t anything more between them than there was between the Bobbsey Twins.
Earlier in the week Robert had been sure that Penelope was going to make a break with Dan. He had gone to a party at their apartment, and there had been a strange assortment of guests, almost all of them Dan’s friends—some