The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [96]
“So let’s get away from all that. Let’s go somewhere.”
“You think there aren’t people like that in California?” she said.
“It doesn’t matter what I think about California if I’m not going.” He clamped earphones on his head.
That same month, while she and Jack and Gus were sharing a pot of cheese fondue, she found out that Jack had a wife. They were at Gus’s apartment when Gus casually said something about Myra. “Who’s Myra?” she asked, and he said, “You know—Jack’s wife, Myra.” It seemed unreal to her—even more so because Gus’s apartment was such an odd place; that night Gus had plugged a defective lamp into an outlet and blown out a fuse. Then he plugged in his only other lamp, which was a sunlamp. It glowed so brightly that he had to turn it, in its wire enclosure, to face the wall. As they sat on the floor eating, their three shadows were thrown up against the opposite wall. She had been looking at that—detached, the way you would stand back to appreciate a picture—when she tuned in on the conversation and heard them talking about someone named Myra.
“You didn’t know?” Gus said to her. “Okay, I want you both out. I don’t want any heavy scene in my place. I couldn’t take it. Come on—I really mean it. I want you out. Please don’t talk about it here.”
On the street, walking beside Jack, it occurred to her that Gus’s outburst was very strange, almost as strange as Jack’s not telling her about his wife.
“I didn’t see what would be gained by telling you,” Jack said.
They crossed the street. They passed the Riviera Café. She had once counted the number of panes of glass across the Riviera’s front.
“Did you ever think about us getting married?” he said. “I thought about it. I thought that if you didn’t want to follow me to California, of course you wouldn’t want to marry me.”
“You’re already married,” she said. She felt that she had just said something very sensible. “Do you think it was right to—”
He started to walk ahead of her. She hurried to catch up. She wanted to call after him, “I would have gone!” She was panting.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m like Gus. I don’t want to hear it.”
“You mean we can’t even talk about this? You don’t think that I’m entitled to hear about it?”
“I love you and I don’t love Myra,” he said.
“Where is she?” she said.
“In El Paso.”
“If you don’t love her, why aren’t you divorced?”
“You think that everybody who doesn’t love his wife gets divorced? I’m not the only one who doesn’t do the logical thing, you know. You get nightmares from living in this sewer, and you won’t get out of it.”
“It’s different,” she said. What was he talking about?
“Until I met you, I didn’t think about it. She was in El Paso, she was gone—period.”
“Are you going to get a divorce?”
“Are you going to marry me?”
They were crossing Seventh Avenue. They both stopped still, halfway across the street, and were almost hit by a Checker cab. They hurried across, and on the other side of the street they stopped again. She looked at him, as surprised but as suddenly sure about something as he must have been the time he and his father had found the jewelry in the heart-shaped wooden box. She said no, she was not going to marry him.
It dragged on for another month. During that time, unknown to her, he wrote the song that was going to launch his career. Months after he had left the city, she heard it on her AM radio one morning, and she knew that it was his song, even though he had never mentioned it to her. She leashed the dog and went out and walked to the record shop on Sixth Avenue—walking almost the same route they had walked the night she found out about his wife—and she went in, with the dog. Her face was so strange that the man behind the cash register allowed her to break the rule about dogs in the shop because he did not want another hassle that day. She found the group’s record album with the song on it, turned it over and saw his name, in small type. She stared at the title, replaced the record and went back