“We’re going to have to wait for the next train,” I tell him.
“How come?”
“Because we missed our train.”
“Didn’t you know it when you looked at your watch at Bonnie’s?”
He is getting tired, and cranky. Next he’ll ask how old I am. And why his mother prefers to stay with Brandon instead of coming to New York with us.
“It would have been rude to leave earlier. We were only there a little while.”
I look at him to see what he thinks. Sometimes his thinking is a little slow, but he is also very smart about what he senses. He thinks what I think — that if I had meant to, we could have caught the train. He stares at me with the same dead-on stare Ray gives me when he thinks I am being childish. And, of course, it is because of Ray that I lingered. I always mean not to call him, but I almost always do. We cross the terminal and I go to a phone and drop in a dime. Andrew backs up and spins on his heel. His parka slips off his shoulder again. And his glove — where is his glove? One glove is on the right hand, but there’s no glove in either pocket. I sound disappointed, far away when Ray says hello.
“It’s just — he lost his glove,” I say.
“Where are you?” he says.
“Grand Central.”
“Are you coming in or going out?”
“Going home.”
His soft voice: “I was afraid of that.”
Silence.
“Ray?”
“What? Don’t tell me you’re going to concoct some reason to see me — ask me to take him off, man to man, and buy him new gloves?”
It makes me laugh.
“You know what, lady?” Ray says. “I do better amusing you over the phone than in person.”
A woman walks by, carrying two black poodles. She has on a long gray fur coat and carries the little dogs, who look as if they’re peeking out of a cave of fur, nestled in the crook of each arm. Everything is a Stan Mack cartoon. Another woman walks across the terminal. She has forgotten something, or changed her mind — she shakes her head suddenly and begins to walk the other way. Far away from us, she starts to run. Andrew turns and turns. I reach down to make him be still, but he jerks away, spins again, loses interest and just stands there, staring across the station.
“Fuck it,” Ray says. “Can I come down and buy you a drink?”
More coffee. Andrew has a milkshake. Ray sits across from us, stirring his coffee as if he’s mixing something. Last year when I decided that loving Ray made me as confused as disliking Arthur, and that he had too much power over me and that I could not be his lover anymore, I started taking Andrew to the city with me. It hasn’t worked out well; it exasperates Ray, and I feel guilty for using Andrew.
“New shoes,” Ray says, pushing his leg out from under the table.
He has on black boots, and he is as happy with them as Andrew was with the pennies I gave him this morning. I smile at him. He smiles back.
“What did you do today?” Ray says.
“Went on an errand for Ruth. Went to the Guggenheim.”
He nods. I used to sleep with him and then hold his head as if I believed in phrenology. He used to hold my hands as I held his head. Ray has the most beautiful hands I have ever seen.
“Want to stay in town?” he says. “I was going to the ballet. I can probably get two more tickets.”
Andrew looks at me, suddenly interested in staying.
“I’ve got to go home and make dinner for Arthur.”
“Milk the cows,” Ray says. “Knead the bread. Stoke the stove. Go to bed.”
Andrew looks up at him and smiles broadly before he gets self-conscious and puts his hand to the corner of his mouth and looks away.
“You never heard that one before?” Ray says to Andrew. “My grandmother used to say that. Times have changed and times haven’t changed.” He looks away, shakes his head. “I’m profound today, aren’t I? Good it’s coffee and not the drink I wanted.”
Andrew shifts in the booth, looks at me as if he wants to say something. I lean my head toward him. “What?” I say softly. He starts a rush of whispering.
“His mother is learning to fall,” I say.
“What does that mean?” Ray says.
“In her dance class,” Andrew says. He looks at me again, shy. “Tell him.”
“I’ve never seen her do it,” I say. “She told me about it — it’s an exercise or something. She’s learning to fall.”
Ray nods. He looks like a professor being patient with a student who has just reached an obvious conclusion. You know when Ray isn’t interested. He holds his head very straight and looks you right in the eye, as though he is.
“Does she just go plop?” he says to Andrew.
“Not really,” Andrew says, more to me than to Ray. “It’s kind of slow.”
I imagine Ruth bringing her arms in front of her, head bent, an almost penitential position, and then a loosening in the knees, a slow folding downward.
Ray reaches across the table and pulls my arms away from the front of my body, and his touch startles me so that I jump, almost upsetting my coffee.
“Let’s take a walk,” he says. “Come on. You’ve got time.”
He puts two dollars down and pushes the money and the check to the back of the table. I hold Andrew’s parka for him and he backs into it. Ray adjusts it on his shoulders. Ray bends over and feels in Andrew’s pockets.
“What are you doing?” Andrew says.
“Sometimes disappearing mittens have a way of reappearing,” Ray says. “I guess not.”
Ray zips his own green jacket and pulls on his hat. I walk out of the restaurant beside him, and Andrew follows.
“I’m not going far,” Andrew says. “It’s cold.”
I clutch the envelope. Ray looks at me and smiles, it’s so obvious that I’m holding the envelope with both hands so I don’t have to hold his hand. He moves in close and puts his hand around my shoulder. No hand-swinging like children — the proper gentleman and the lady out for a stroll. What Ruth has known all along: what will happen can’t be stopped. Aim for grace.
JACKLIGHTING
It is Nicholas’s birthday. Last year he was alive, and we took him presents: a spiral notebook he pulled the pages out of, unable to write but liking the sound of paper tearing; magazines he flipped through, paying no attention to pictures, liking the blur of color. He had a radio, so we could not take a radio. More than the radio, he seemed to like the sound the metal drawer in his bedside table made, sliding open, clicking shut. He would open the drawer and look at the radio. He rarely took it out.
Nicholas’s brother Spence has made jam. For days the cat has batted grapes around the huge homemade kitchen table; dozens of bloody rags of cheesecloth have been thrown into the trash. There is grape jelly, raspberry jelly, strawberry, quince, and lemon. Last month, a neighbor’s pig escaped and ate Spence’s newly planted fraise des bois plants, but overlooked the strawberry plants close to the house, heavy with berries. After that, Spence captured the pig and called his friend Andy, who came for it with his truck and took the pig to his farm in Warrenton. When Andy got home and looked in the back of the truck, he found three piglets curled against the pig.
In this part of Virginia, it is a hundred degrees in August. In June and July you can smell the ground, but in August it has been baked dry; instead of smelling the earth you smell flowers, hot breeze. There is a haze over the Blue Ridge Mountains that stays in the air like cigarette smoke. It is the same color as the eye shadow Spence’s girlfriend, Pammy, wears. The rest of us are sunburned, with pink mosquito bites on our bodies, small scratches from gathering raspberries. Pammy has just arrived from Washington. She is winter-pale. Since she is ten years younger than the rest of us, a few scratches wouldn’t make her look as if she belonged, anyway. She is in medical school at Georgetown, and her summer-school classes have just ended. She arrived with leather sandals that squeak. She is exhausted and sleeps half the day, upstairs, with the fan blowing on her. All weekend the big fan has blown on Spence, in the kitchen, boiling and bottling his jams and jellies. The small fan blows on Pammy.