He went into a coffee shop, feeling guilty for leaving John Joel alone in the doctor’s office. But he hated to treat him like a child, the way Louise did. Maybe letting him handle it on his own would give him self-confidence. He drank a black coffee, pouring a little water into the cup to cool it while two men who worked there argued about what song titles ought to be put in the jukebox. A tall fat man sitting on a stool at the counter kept whispering to them, cupping his hand over a piece of paper. “ ‘Greek selection’ is good enough,” one said, and the other hit him with a dishtowel, saying, “The songs have names. You think all Greek songs are ‘Never on Sunday’?” Finally, both men had towels and were slapping each other’s shoulders. Two women waited by the cash register. “ ‘Oh you can kiss me on a Mon-day, a Mon-day, a Mon-day,’ ” one man sang, and the tall fat man shrugged in disgust. The other man swatted the man who was dancing and singing. “Can I have a bagel and a coffee to go?” one of the women by the cash register said. “ ‘Or you can kiss me on a Tues-day, a Tues-day, a Tues-day, a Tues-day’s very good,’ ” the man sang. He was jumping in the air and clicking his heels together, hands cupped over his head. “ ‘Greek selection,’ ” the other man said. “Just write it down, and that’s that.” The tall man put his head in his hands and let it all go on. One of the women walked out, but the one who had asked for the bagel just gave her order again. John left a dollar, without asking for a check, and went out. The coffee had given him a lift. He looked up at the sky: still overcast, but a few breaks of light. He checked his watch and went to the corner and looked for a cab. Cabs came by him so fast that they looked like they had been launched. Finally he saw an empty one and hailed it. “Thirty-ninth and Fifth,” he said.
He hardly ever went into Lord and Taylor’s because it made him sad that she worked there. But he wanted to see her. He felt as if he had been running and running and had never touched base. It was a kind of anxiety that came on him lately: that he was rushing forward, but leaving something behind. Not that he could grab her over the counter at Lord and Taylor’s. And he had no idea what he was going to say when he saw her.
He leaned on the counter and waited while she folded something and handed it to a customer and thanked her. She knew he was there, but didn’t acknowledge him.
“You know what Lois Lane wonders when she’s flying with Superman?” Nina said, without showing any surprise at seeing him.
“What?”
“She’s thinking: Can you read my mind?”
“I can’t. What are you thinking?”
“That I don’t like working at Lord and Taylor’s, and I’m embarrassed for you to be here.”
“Why should you be embarrassed? Your mother is the only one who believes in success for college grads, right?”
“This place is creepy. You don’t belong here. I hope I don’t belong here.”
“Can you read my mind?” he said. “I feel like it’s been steamrollered. I feel like a tumbleweed might blow out of my ear when the winds shift in the desert in there.”
“God,” she said. “Stop it.”
“I can’t come over tonight,” he said. “John Joel’s at the orthodontist’s, and I’ve got to take him back to Rye this afternoon.”
“Then come back,” she said.
“Come back again?” he said. He hesitated. “Maybe I should have dinner with them.”
“Then do it,” she said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sit around and get stoned,” he said.
She shrugged.
“I’ll drive back in,” he said. “I’m meeting him for lunch. He and Nick and I are having lunch. Maybe that’s good enough.”
“Listen,” she said. “If you think you should have dinner with them tonight, do it.”
“He was telling me… Did you ever see those things called snakes? They’re about the size of a cigarette, and when you light them they expand and curl like a snake? I hadn’t thought about them since I was a kid. Do you know the things I’m talking about?”
“I don’t think Lord and Taylor’s carries them.”
“Come on,” he said. “You know the things I mean?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re not just saying that?”
“No. Why would I pretend to know what snakes are? The boy who lived next door to us used to light snakes. What about them?”
“I don’t know. Do you want to get some snakes and sparklers for the Fourth of July?”
“All right,” she said. “Why?”
“You sound like my kid.”
“Is this another one of your things about how much younger I am than you? Even if I am, I’m more together than you are.”
“That’s the truth.”
“Maybe you ought to go to work,” she said. She laid her hand over his.
“I was scared to death of those things,” he said. “The truth of it is that I hated caps and cherry bombs and snakes. How did I ever make it through the Army?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was barely born. Remember?”
“I want to get a snake and have you light it, okay? You light it, and this time if I feel like jumping back, I jump back.”
He realized for the first time that a woman was waiting politely beside him, holding a package of panty hose.
The de rigueur picture on the desk: Nantucket, rented boat, August vacation. The children: not the children as they really were, even then. Mary in her gingerbread-man bathing suit, wet pigtails tied with red ribbons, staring seriously into the camera; John Joel still a baby, sitting on the deck at Louise’s feet, Louise’s face a little blurred because at the last second she had moved slightly, trying to make him look into the camera. Before he was fat. When he still had his downy, shoulder-length baby hair. Louise tall and tanned, seven months pregnant, wearing a gingerbread-man bathing suit like Mary’s, but without the ruffle. And from the left, harsh sunlight, washing out the deck so that it looked as if Louise was poised on the edge of something, a woman not bending forward to direct her little boy’s attention to the lens, but moving to protect him from something more serious. At the right was the jagged shadow of the ship’s big sail. How strange that years later he would be fascinated not by the people but by the light and shadow, the light washing out one side of the photograph and the dark shadow jabbing toward them from the other side. He could not remember, and the picture did not help himremember, what it was like to take a family vacation in Nantucket. How easy to look back and see that things were ending, going wrong. Even the way shadows fell in a snapshot became symbolic.
When Mary and John Joel were asleep, they had lain in their cabin and she had curled on her side, with her back to him, and he had made love to her that way, holding her stomach in the front. They had been afraid that the children, separated from them by a wall the thickness of cardboard, would wake up, that a wave would toss the ship at the wrong moment, that it was late in the pregnancy and there might be pain.
Not true: Those were easier things to say to each other than what they were really afraid of.
Seven
