ladies’ man, and I was his sidekick. Not just on stage but in life. He was always in the limelight.”
Somehow it didn’t bother me that he was talking about a completely different person. Nor did I try to correct him. My son had read his picture books so well that it seemed quite likely he might have had a leading role in a play one day.
“Is he still acting?”
“Yes—”
“Really? I thought so. Could you tell him I called?”
“Of course, I will.”
After he had hung up, I held the phone to my ear for a moment, listening to the hum of the dial tone. I never heard from him again.
The bell in the clock tower began to ring. A flock of pigeons lifted into the sky. As the fifth chime sounded, a door beneath the clock opened and a little parade of animated figurines pirouetted out—a few soldiers, a chicken, and a skeleton. Since the clock was very old, the figurines were slightly discolored, their movements stiff and awkward. The chicken’s head swiveled about as if to squawk; the skeleton danced. And then, from the door, an angel appeared, beating her golden wings.
The girl in the kitchen replaced the receiver. I held my breath. She looked down at the phone for a moment, then she heaved a deep sigh and dabbed at her tears with the napkin.
I repeated to myself what I would say when she emerged into the fading light of the shop: “Two strawberry shortcakes, please.”
FRUIT JUICE
It was late in the day, and classes had ended. The library was nearly empty. I sat in a quiet corner, studying, when she appeared from nowhere and startled me out of my book.
“Are you busy this Sunday?” she asked.
Her question flustered me for a moment, I didn’t know what to say. She was staring down at the floor, half hidden behind a bookshelf.
“If you have plans, of course, don’t worry about it.” She held a book in her hand, and absentmindedly rubbed her palm along its spine. I knew her from class, but we had never spoken before, and I had never been this close to her.
“No, I’m not busy,” I said rather brusquely, to hide my confusion.
“Well … I was hoping you’d come with me somewhere.”
Was she asking me out? That seemed to be where this was going. If so, I had no objections. She seemed nice enough. At the same time, though, I knew better than to jump to conclusions—and her invitation felt more like an apology than an attempt at flirtation.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To a French restaurant,” she said with some hesitation, her eyes still fixed on the floor. “I don’t want to go, but I have to. We’ll have lunch … that’s about it. It’ll be painless.” Her whole body seemed to shrink with each word she spoke, as though she hoped to hide behind that bookshelf, deep in the shadows of the library. “I know this must seem kind of random. Just tell me if you don’t want to go.”
Sunlight streamed in through the window to the west, turning her long hair amber. I could hear in the distance the sound of basketballs bouncing against the gymnasium floor.
“Sure, I’d be happy to go,” I said. “Just to have lunch, right? Why not?”
I resisted the urge to press for details, or to ask why she had chosen me of all people to go with her. I worried that if she were forced to say more, she might shrink farther away and disappear altogether.
“Thank you,” she said, with obvious relief. Then, at last, she looked up and smiled slightly, but I felt a pang of disappointment.
“My mother is sick,” the girl told me in the subway on the way to the restaurant. “Did you know she’s in the hospital?” I shook my head. I had heard that she lived alone with her mother, but that was all I knew about her. A rumor had circulated around school that she was someone’s illegitimate child. I didn’t remember much about it.
“She has liver cancer. She won’t live much longer.” Her words were clear and audible over the rumbling of the subway. “The other day she told me that if anything happened to her I should contact this man, that he would help me.”
She pulled a business card from her skirt pocket. It was printed with the name of a relatively well-known politician, a man who had recently served in some important post, as minister of labor or perhaps postmaster general. The edges of the card were creased and worn, as though her mother had been keeping it for some time.
“How bad is she?” I asked, not knowing quite what to say. I was afraid of hurting her.
“Four months in the hospital. I’ve been home alone all that time.”
She was wearing a blouse with a floral pattern and a skirt of some soft material. The collar and cuffs of the blouse were neatly ironed. She looked older in these clothes than she did in her school uniform.
She was an inconspicuous girl, perhaps the quietest in our grade. She almost never spoke in class, and when asked to stand up and translate a passage from English, or to solve a math problem on the board, she did it as discreetly as possible, without fuss. She had no friends to speak of, belonged to no clubs, and she ate her lunch in a corner by herself.
Still, no one bullied her or treated her like an outcast. She wasn’t disagreeable, just easy to ignore. You could even say her silence suited her. The pale skin, the long, straight hair, the shadows under her eyes when she bowed her head—it all lent her a kind of tranquillity that I think we didn’t want to disturb.
But when someone did take notice of her, it seemed she was always apologizing for it—I suppose “apologetic” might be the best word to describe her. “I’m sorry, please ignore me…” You could almost hear her murmur the words, like an incantation, a way of conjuring a still place for herself.
“Are you meeting him for the first time today?” I asked, glancing down at the business card in her hand.
“Yes.”
“He never came to see you, even when you were little?”
“Never,” she said, shaking her head.
She was so close to me I wondered if she could feel my breath. The card trembled in her hand.
A waiter led us into a private room at the back of the restaurant, where the man was already seated at a table too large for three, sipping a garish red cocktail. For some reason I had assumed he would be accompanied by a secretary or a bodyguard, but he was alone.
A chandelier hung from the ceiling and flowers had been arranged around the room. The silverware gleamed, the tablecloth was blindingly white.
They barely greeted each other, exchanging little more than vague, meaningless grunts. She sat down without introducing me, and I realized the moment for such formalities had already passed.
Sitting with her back straight, she studied the menu from top to bottom, though she seemed to have little interest in selecting something to eat. This went on for a while. “Order whatever you like,” the man repeated several times, just to break the unbearable tension, but she was intent to make him stew in silence. I ran my finger along the edge of the elaborately folded napkin.
“Is there anything you don’t like to eat?” he asked.
“No,” we said at nearly the same time.
He ordered a great deal of food, speaking so quickly that the waiter could barely keep up. Clearly he was accustomed to giving orders. The dishes arrived one after another and we made short work of them, our chewing and swallowing the only sound in the room. The man downed another drink.
He was short and solidly built, but he looked older than he did on television. His hair was thinning and the
