"Yes, I can see that."
"You think this'll work out?"
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know, the age difference, the language barrier…" He smiled hopefully, and let the sentence trail.
"Frankly, I don't think it has a chance," she said, and did not return his smile.
"Let me get you another beer."
"I'm not ready for one yet."
"I'll get you one, anyway."
"I'm really not that thirsty."
"It doesn't matter. I'm the last of the big spenders," he said, and smiled again, but she only glanced toward her friends, who had begun a lively discussion about Mies. "Well, I'll get one for you."
"Suit yourself," she said, and shrugged.
He rose and went for the beer, half afraid she would leave the table while he was gone, aware that he was losing her, desperately searching in his mind for something to say that would salvage the situation, wondering where he had made his mistake, should he not have told her he was eighteen? or kidded her about the accent? if only he could think of a joke or an anecdote, something that would make her laugh. "One beer," the bartender said, and he picked it up and walked back to the table with it.
"Drink it quick before the foam disappears," he said, but she did not pick up the mug, and they sat in silence as the bubbles of foam rapidly dissipated, leaving a flat smooth amber surface an inch below the rim of the mug.
"Tell me about yourself," he said.
"My hair is shaggy," she said, "and I have a thick Southern accent, and…"
"Well, I know all that," he said, and realized at once he was pursuing the same stupid line, the wrong line, and yet seemed unable to stop himself. "Isn't there anything interesting you can add?"
"Oh, shut up," she said.
"What?"
"Just shut up."
"Okay," he said, but he could not remain silent for long. "We're having our first argument," he said, and smiled.
"Yes, and our last," she answered, and began to turn away from him. He caught her hand immediately.
"Come out with me this Saturday night," he said.
"I'm busy."
"Next Saturday."
"I'm busy then, too."
"The Saturday after…"
"I'm busy every Saturday until the Fourth of July. Let go of my hand, please."
"You'll be sorry," he said. "I'm going to be a famous artist."
"I'm sure."
"Come out with me."
"No."
"Okay," he said, and released her hand, and rose, and walked back to the bar.
He knew then perhaps, or should have known then, that it was finished, that there was no sense in a pursuit that would only lead to the identical conclusion, postponed. But he found himself searching for her on the windswept campus, Ryerson and Emerson, the malls and the parking lots, Steuben Walk in front of the Engineering Building, and then in the halls and classrooms themselves, and even on the Clinton-Washington subway station. In his notebook, he wrote:
The notebook, which he had begun in October, and which he would continue to keep through the next several years, was a curious combination of haphazard scholarship, personal jottings, disjointed ideas and notions, doo-dlings, line drawings, and secret messages written in a code he thought only he could decipher. He had learned from his uncle a drawing technique that served him well all through high school, though it was later challenged by his instructor at the League. Revitalized provisionally at Pratt, it was an instant form of representation that sometimes veered dangerously close to cartoon exposition. But it nonetheless enabled him to record quickly and without hesitation anything that came into his line of vision. The technique, however, candid and loose, did not work too well without a model, and as his memory of the girl he'd met only once began to fade, he found himself relying more and more upon language to describe her and his feelings about her. A struggle for expression seemed to leap from the pages of the notebook, paragraphs of art history trailing into a personal monologue, or a memorandum, or a query, and then a sketch, and now a poem or an unabashed cartoon, and then again into desperate prose, until the pages at last were overwhelmed with words:
On Friday, November 12th, he hit upon the idea (and dutifully recorded it verbatim in his notebook) of perhaps asking a second-year art student about Ebie. Outside an illustration class, he stopped a girl with her arm in a cast, her hair pulled back into a pony tail, and asked her if she knew Ebie Dearborn.
Late that afternoon, he spent the last of his week's allowance on a dozen red roses, and went up to her apartment without calling first. The building she lived in on Myrtle was a crumbling red brick structure with enormous bosses on either corner, a simulated keystone arch over the front doorway. The elevated trains roared past the building, but he scarcely heard them over the pounding of his heart, or so he wrote faithfully in his notebook that night:
"Come in," she said.
He tried the door, found it unlocked, and stepped into a narrow corridor that seemed to run the length of the apartment. An ornately framed mirror hung directly opposite the entrance. He looked at his own image and shouted, "Where are you?"
"Where do you think I am?" she shouted back. "In here."
He shrugged at himself in the mirror and followed the sound of her voice. She was sitting up in a large bed in a small bedroom facing the street and the elevated structure. She was wearing a blue nightgown, and there was a blue ribbon in her hair. She looked thin and pale and very tired as she turned to greet him. She blinked once in surprise and then said, "What are you doing here?"
"Who'd you think it was?" he asked.
"Peter."
"Who's Peter?"
"The boy who lives upstairs. He's been bringing me chicken soup and such." She paused. "How'd you know where I lived?"
"I've been searching for you."
"What are those?"
"Roses."
"For me?"
"Yes."
Ebie nodded, and then stared at him and continued nodding. At last she said, "I'm sick."
"Yes, I know."
"Who told you?"
"A girl with a broken arm."
"Cathy?"
"I don't know her name."
"With a pony tail?"
"Yes."
"That's Cathy Ascot. She's accident prone."
"She told me you were sick and that you lived on Myrtle Avenue. Why are you listed in the book as Dearborn, E. B.?"
"So everyone'll think it's a man living here and I won't get calls from all the nuts in Brooklyn."
"I know one nut who's going to be calling you a lot."
"Who? Oh. You mean you?"
"That's right."
"Well, I don't guess I can stop you from calling."
"No, I don't guess you can."
"Are you going to just stand there with those roses in your hand?"
"I should put them in something, huh?"
"I think there's a vase in the kitchen. The cabinet over the stove."
"You won't disappear, will you?"
"What?"
"When I go for the vase."
"I don't usually disappear," Ebie said. "I just happened to get sick the day after I met you, that's all."