“What day did this happen?”
“It was June nineteenth in the Philippines. June eighteenth in Denver.”
Anabel’s voice became hushed. “This is extremely weird,” she said. “My mother died on the same day. We were both half orphaned on the exact same day.”
It now seems to me somehow crucial that the day was arguably not the same — her mother had died on the nineteenth. And until that Friday night I’d never been a superstitious person. My father had waged a personal war against the overvaluation of coincidence; he had a classroom riff, sometimes repeated at home, in which he “proved” that chewing Juicy Fruit gum causes hair to be blond, by way of illustrating proper scientific inference. But when Anabel spoke those words, after an hour and a half in which my world had been shrinking to the size of her voice in my ear — and here again it seems crucial that we had our first real conversation on the phone, which distills a person into words passing directly into the brain — I shivered as if my fate were overtaking me. How could the coincidence not be significant? The interesting person who’d pronounced me a jerk not six hours earlier had now been confiding in me, in her lovely voice, for an hour and a half. It felt incredible, magical. After the shiver had passed, I had an erection.
“What do you think it means?” Anabel said.
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. That’s what my dad would say. Although—”
“It’s very weird,” she said. “I wasn’t even planning on going to your office today. I was coming back from the Barnes Collection, which is a different story, why anybody still thinks Renoir père needs to be looked at, but there is such a person at Tyler and I have the misfortune of being in his lecture class, not having taken it last year when everyone else did. I’d imagined that an exception might be made, but, safe to say, nobody’s in a mood to make exceptions for me now. But I was on the platform at Thirtieth Street, and I got so upset thinking about what you’d done to me that I let my train go by. And that seemed like a sign that I should go and find you. Because I missed the train. I’ve never gotten so involved in a thought I’ve missed a train.”
“That does seem like a sign,” I said, at the urging of my erection.
“Who are you?” she said. “Why did this happen?”
In the state her voice had put me in, I didn’t consider these questions nutty, but I was spooked by their seriousness. “I am an American, Denver-born,” I said. And added, pompously, “Saul Bellow.”
“Saul Bellow is from Denver?”
“No, Chicago. You asked me who I am.”
“I didn’t ask who Saul Bellow is.”
“He won the Pulitzer Prize,” I said, “and that’s what I want to do.” I was trying to seem a tiny bit interesting to her, but instead I sounded idiotic to myself.
“You want to be a novelist?” Anabel said.
“Journalist.”
“So I don’t have to worry about you taking my story and putting it in a novel.”
“Not going to happen.”
“It’s my story. My material. It’s what my art comes out of.”
“Of course it is.”
“But journalists betray people for a living. Your little reporter betrayed me. I thought he was interested in what I was trying to express.”
“That’s not the only kind of journalist.”
“I’m trying to figure out whether I should be hanging up now. Whether these are bad signs. Betrayal and death, those are bad signs, aren’t they? I think I should be hanging up on you. I’m remembering that you hurt me.”
But of course she couldn’t hang up.
“Anabel, please,” I said. It was the first time I’d spoken her name. “I want to see you again.”
I saw her again, but not before going to Lucy’s house for weak coffee and some sort of brown Betty with oatmeal in it. Lucy’s house was overwarm and reeked, to me, of fucking like bunnies. “You shouldn’t feel bad about the article,” she told me. “I only called you to warn you a righteous tornado was heading your way. Anabel needs to read Nietzsche and get over her thing about good and evil. The only philosopher she ever talks about is Kierkegaard. Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He’d never stop asking, ‘Can I do this to you? Is this OK?’”
“I still feel bad,” I said.
“She called me yesterday to talk about you. Apparently you had some sort of marathon conversation?” Lucy helped herself to more brown Betty. She wasn’t fat, but she was getting a little Moosewoody in the face and thighs. “She asked me if you’re Good, capital G, which I took to mean she might want you in her pants. You certainly need to be in someone’s pants, but I’m not sure that hers are the right ones. I know what I’m talking about. I was head over heels for her myself, our senior year at Choate. All the teachers were in awe of her, and she always had funds and got these crazy-strong buds they’ve started growing hydroponically. She had trouble relating to people, but not when she was stoned. She’d get massively stoned at parties, sort of dangerously stoned, and then have sex with somebody, and then get up at six in the morning and write college-level papers. I wanted to sleep with her myself, but she’d sworn off sex by the time we roomed together. Now she’s given up pot, too. She’s become Saint Anabel. I still love her, and I felt bad about the article, but it was really her fault for talking to your reporter. She sets herself up for these things.”
“Does she have a boyfriend?”
“Not for the longest time,” Lucy said. “I asked her how often she masturbates, and she acted all appalled with me for asking. As if she hadn’t been one of the wildest girls in the history of Choate. But I think she’s sort of messed up sexually from that. She was too young and she also got VD. It’s unfortunate, but the upshot is I don’t think she’s a great candidate for you.”
I was still processing this information when Lucy took my hand and led me out of the kitchen, away from its towers of crusty cookware, and up to the room she shared with her boyfriend, Bob. The bed was unmade, the floor strewn with clothes. “I have a new plan,” she said. She pressed her forehead into mine and propelled me backward onto the bed. “We can start slowly and see how this goes. What do you think?”
“What about Bob?”
“That’s my problem, not yours.”
Just a week earlier, I might have been down with the plan. But now that Anabel was in the picture, I felt disappointed by the idea that sex, which had assumed such fearsome proportions in my mind, was supposed to be as natural and homey as eating brown Betty. There was also no escaping the conclusion that Lucy was trying to keep me away from Anabel. She was all but saying so. We necked on her paisley sheets for no more than ten minutes before I excused myself.
“This is fun, though, don’t you think?” Lucy said. “We should have thought of this months ago.”
“Definitely fun,” I said. To be polite, I added that I looked forward to the next time.
How different my Sunday afternoon with Anabel was. We met at the art museum under a cold gray sky. Anabel came clad in a black-trimmed crimson cashmere coat and strong opinions. I’d asked for instruction in art, and she swept through the galleries impatiently, issuing blanket dismissals—“snore,” “wrong idea,” “religion blah blah blah,” “meat and more meat”—until we came to Thomas Eakins. Here she stopped and visibly relaxed.