Back in his living room he made himself a fresh drink and picked up a half-finished detective story. Around three he realized he had been waiting for Karen to come home. He closed the book, annoyed with himself, and went upstairs. The stairs seemed steeper than they had for the past week. He was a long time falling asleep and did not sleep well.
He made his own breakfast. Mrs. Kleinschmidt had Sundays off, and before Hugh awoke her daughter-in-law had come to take her to church. She would spend the day with her children and grandchildren. Karen’s bedroom door was closed when he passed it. He did not knock, but before putting up coffee he went out and checked the garage. The VW was still gone.
He was on his second cup of coffee when he heard her turn into the driveway. She came directly into the kitchen, pert and bright-eyed, neat and trim in faded jeans and a striped T-shirt. She said, “Shit, I missed breakfast. I hope there’s coffee.”
“A full pot. What do you want? I’ll fix something.”
“I think I’ll just have toast. Have you got a cigarette? I’ve been smoking mentholated ones and I can’t stand them.” She sat down, poured coffee and smoked one of his cigarettes while the bread toasted. “It was late and I was too stoned to drive home,” she said. “A combination of tired and stoned, actually. I wasn’t that stoned. I was hoping I’d have breakfast with you and Linda.”
“Linda didn’t stay over.”
“Karen did. She was here then, huh? Or you wouldn’t have said it that way.”
“As a matter of fact she was. I brought her here to meet you but you weren’t here.”
She grinned. “That’s a fresh approach. I guess it worked out well enough, didn’t it?”
“You could say so.”
“Well, I told you she wouldn’t be able to resist you. Not in that suit.”
She took it for granted that he had made love to Linda. To correct that impression he would have had to say more than he wanted to say, so he let it stand. She assumed an act had taken place and seemed pleased, even proud of him, and he told himself there was no harm in his enjoying her admiration even under false pretenses. A child, he assured himself, ought to be allowed to cherish certain illusions about her father. Even if they were not the orthodox ones.
They spent the afternoon walking in the woods. She talked at length about various people she had known at Northwestern. College had been a great change for her and he wondered if she could appreciate how radically different the environment had been. Anita and her husband were determinedly modern parents, desperately enlightened, but their automatic liberalism and furious sincerity had not altered the fact that a middle-class white suburban high school in Arizona was more than miles away from a large Midwestern university. Karen’s recent visits to him in New Hope were better preparation, in a way; she told him how the people she had met on campus reminded her of street people she had run across on earlier vacations in the village.
They ate fried chicken and drank root beer at a road-place on 202. Back at the house he made them each a drink. A drink together, generally before dinner when Mrs. Kleinschmidt was home to prepare the evening meal, had become an unannounced ritual for the two of them. “If you’re going to drink at all,” he’d told her, “you ought to do it properly. You don’t like straight whiskey, and it’s a bad idea anyway until you have a fair idea of your capacity. Learn to get used to it with water or soda. One advantage of soda is that it’s consistent. You can’t get a drink of scotch and water in a town where the water’s bad, not any more than you can get a decent cup of coffee.”
He put on the radio and they listened to an FM rock station. As she finished her drink she announced that she would be going out; she’d promised to meet “some people” in town.
“You can bring home anyone you like, you know.”
“So you can meet him at breakfast?”
“I suppose I could stand it if he can.”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “I wonder,” she said.
“If he could stand it?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s funny.”
“What is?”
“All of this. The process of getting used to each other, I guess. If Mother had any idea. She already knew I wasn’t going back home for the summer. We had that out long ago. She didn’t quite say it, not in those words, but she’s glad I’m here where at least you can keep an eye on me.”
She had said it in precisely those words, to Hugh if not to Karen, but he had not reported on the conversation. Karen tended to make a game out of the two of them combining to deceive Anita, and he did not want to encourage this.
He was vaguely disappointed when she left. He picked up the detective story he had given up on the night before but it did not engage his interest. He tried other books with the same result. He was lonely, he realized, and restless. He could not sit still and his hands fidgeted with pipes and other small objects. He thought of Linda. “Give me a couple of days.” Yeah, he thought, but what about tonight? And smiled at the old joke, the inconsolable widower on the night of his wife’s funeral, the friend gently trying to ease his bereavement. “Time heals all wounds. In not too many months you’ll be over the shock, you’ll go out and socialize, you’ll meet a woman, in a year or two you’ll be married again.” “Yeah, but what about tonight?”
Well, what about tonight? He walked toward the bar then changed his mind. Drinking would fit his mood, but solitary drinking would be a bad idea. He had to be among people.
He drove the Buick across the bridge and parked across the street from a tavern in Lambertville. Liquor could not be sold in Pennsylvania on a Sunday; the old law was still on the books, although each year there was word it would be repealed. This was no great hardship for New Hope drinkers, given their access to taverns on the Jersey side, all of which consequently did almost as good volume Sundays as Saturdays. Several Lambertville restaurants would only sell drinks to dinner patrons on Sunday, but the bulk of the taverns had no such restriction.
Hugh ordered a scotch and soda and drank it at the bar. Two men a few stools away were discussing baseball, and neither seemed to be paying any attention to what the other said. One reminisced about the great Yankee teams of his youth while the other went on about what was wrong with the Phillies this season. Someone played a Tammy Wynette record on the jukebox. His restlessness did not dissipate. He stayed at the bar for half an hour, then left it and walked around the corner to another place. After two more drinks and a little less than an hour he was ready to get moving again. He bought a fresh pack of cigarettes from a machine, lit one, and walked out into the cool night air.
Yeah, but what about tonight?
He could go to Trenton. There were bars there where people on the prowl were apt to run across one another. He did not know Trenton well, but he knew of a few places downtown off State Street that had that sort of reputation.
But he had never liked Trenton, and didn’t feel like driving that far now. He had already had several drinks, and although he was by no means drunk neither was he entirely sober. The drive to Trenton would be no problem in and of itself. He was in decent shape to drive. If he went, though, he would have several more drinks in Trenton, probably one or two in each of the bars he would go to. At that point it would be no pleasure to drive home, and might not be safe.
Nor had he ever been much good at picking up strangers. Even on the rare occasions when he had done so successfully, the evening had never been what he had hoped it might be. He always kept a part of himself guarded, nervous that his partner might suddenly turn out to be insane or criminal, that a husband or lover might turn up at any moment, either genuinely jealous or in some prearranged variant of the badger game. If the woman was interested in simple uncomplicated emotionless sex, he either suspected her motives or felt himself degraded by the experience. If she showed some personal interest in him that extended beyond the arena of the bedroom, he couldn’t help worrying she would try to trap him into something he did not want.