The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [53]
“You sure are,” he said and edged away.
He went out and walked to a phone booth and dialed Dan’s number. “Dan,” he said, “I don’t want to alarm you, but Penelope got a little loaded tonight and I went out to look for her and I’ve lost track of her.”
“Is that right?” Dan said. “She told me she was going to sleep over at Marielle’s.”
“I guess she was. It’s a long story, but she left there and she got pretty wrecked, Dan. I was worried about her, so—”
“Listen,” Dan said. “Can I call you back in fifteen minutes?”
“What do you mean? I’m at a phone booth.”
“Well, doesn’t it have a number? I’ll be right back with you.”
“She’s wandering around New Haven in awful shape, Dan. You’d better get down here and—”
Dan was talking to someone, his hand covering the mouthpiece.
“To tell you the truth,” Dan said, “I can’t talk right now. In fifteen minutes I can talk, but a friend is here.”
“What are you talking about?” Robert said. “Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying? If you’ve got some woman there, tell her to go to the toilet for a minute, for Christ’s sake.”
“That doesn’t cut the mustard anymore,” Dan said. “You can’t shuffle women off like they’re cats and dogs.”
Robert slammed down the phone and went back to McHenry’s. She was still not there. He left, and out on the corner the black man from the bar walked up to him and offered to sell him cocaine. He politely refused, saying he had no money. The man nodded and walked down the street. Robert watched him for a minute, then looked away. For just a few seconds he had been interested in the way the man moved, what he looked like walking down the street. When he had lived at the house with Penelope, Robert had watched her, too; he had done endless drawings of her, sketched her on napkins, on the corner of the newspaper. But paintings—when he tried to do anything formal, he hadn’t been able to go through with it. Cyril told him it was because he was afraid of capturing her. At first he thought Cyril’s remark was stupid, but now—standing tired and cold on the street corner—he had to admit that he’d always been a little afraid of her, too. What would he have done tonight if he’d found her? Why had her phone call upset him so much—because she was stoned? He thought about Penelope—about putting his head down on her shoulder, somewhere where it was warm. He began to walk home. It was a long walk, and he was very tired. He stopped and looked in a bookstore window, then walked past a dry cleaner’s. The last time he’d looked, it had been a coffee shop. At a red light he heard Bob Dylan on a car radio, making an analogy between time and a jet plane.
She called in the morning to apologize. When she hung up on him the night before, she got straight for a minute—long enough to hail a cab—but she had a bad time in the cab again, and didn’t have the money to pay for the ride . . . To make a long story short, she was with Marielle.
“Why?” Robert asked.
Well, she was going to tell the cabdriver to take her to Robert’s place, but she was afraid he was mad. No—that wasn’t the truth. She knew he wouldn’t be mad, but she couldn’t face him. She wanted to talk to him, but she was in no shape.
She agreed to meet him for lunch. They hung up. He went into the bathroom to shave. A letter his father had written him, asking why he had dropped out of graduate school, was scotch-taped to the mirror, along with other articles of interest. There was one faded clipping, which belonged to Johnny and had been hung on the refrigerator