“No, look here. Here’s the Big Dipper. Right out the front window. Can you see? Come down until you find these two bright stars. They’re always in line with Polaris. That’s the bowl, see? Polaris is the end of the handle of the Little Dipper. You find those three stars, you can always find which way is north. And, of course, your dipper.”
She heard him moving around, trying to get comfortable. She thought of the van’s front seats, their hard, lumpy upholstery. She felt a little guilty, with the lovely, warm bed he’d made for her. “Are you sure you’re okay up there?” she said.
“Oh yeah, I’m fine. I can sleep anywhere.”
She was thinking about insisting that he come back and take the bed for a while, but she must have nodded off, because she suddenly jerked awake. She heard John moving around and said, “John?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Do you want to come back here?”
“Oh no, I’m all right,” he said.
She sat up so she could see him. He was curled up in the driver’s seat, shivering, with the blanket pulled closely around him.
“Come back here,” she said. “You’re freezing!”
He stumbled to the back and they sat up under the blankets, with their legs touching.
“What time do you think it is?” she said. It was disconcerting not to know. She almost always knew what time it was, within six minutes. It drove Patsy crazy. “How do you do that?” she’d demand.
“I don’t know. Maybe midnight.”
Pru pulled the blanket up as far as she could. “My nose is freezing.”
“Try not to think about it.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. We could talk.”
“Okay. What should we talk about?”
“Do you want to hear the story of Delphinus? Now that I’m thinking about it?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. Poseidon . . . you know Poseidon, right?”
“Ship that drowned Shelley Winters. And god of fish. Or something like that.”
“Close enough. Poseidon had fallen in love with one of the sea nymphs, named Amphitrite. But Amphitrite, to protect her virginity, fled to the mountains. Delphinus found her and wooed her for Poseidon. He persuaded her to return from the mountains and to marry Poseidon. So, to reward Delphinus, Poseidon put an image of a dolphin in the sky, among the stars.”
“You know, that’s a lot like what happened with me and Rudy.”
He laughed. “How did you meet Rudy, anyway?”
She smiled, in the dark. It was actually a good story. She met Rudy when she and McKay were playing pool, at the bar under the souvlaki place next to her building. She loved watching McKay shoot pool. He took less than a second to line up the shot, then happily whacked the cue ball with the stick as hard as he possibly could. He hit very few of his shots that way, but he didn’t care.
Rudy was supposed to meet a work friend, and while he waited, he watched Pru and McKay. He told her, later, that he’d liked the “set of her jib.” He and McKay traded quips for a while, until McKay understood it was really Pru he was interested in. Rudy asked if he could call her, and although he was a bit of a mess, with his sloppy clothes and his big old glasses, he seemed funny and sincere. She’d just broken up with someone not a mess—and not funny or sincere, either—so she’d said yes.
The next morning, at one minute after seven, her phone rang. He didn’t even announce his name. It was as if he’d been waking her up every morning for years. “Don’t you hate it when you forget to turn off your clock radio on Sunday, and so you wake up to NPR’s Bluegrass Hour?” he’d said. She sat up and listened to him talk for half an hour. The very neat but insincere guy she’d just broken up with—Nate—hadn’t been much of a talker, either, so it was a very pleasant change. Rudy made her feel pretty loved, that was for sure. Now that she thought about it, though, it seemed a little odd. He seemed so sure of her, so quickly. That sudden attachment, and all the proposals? What was all that about, anyway? She’d liked it, though. She couldn’t deny that.
She made John tell her about Lila. They’d met at her twenty-second-birthday party. They were both doing graduate work at Columbia, and he’d been invited to the party by a mutual friend. Just before John and his friend arrived, Lila ate a piece of the cake, which someone had spiked with twenty-two hits of acid. She did her share of drugs in those days, but she hadn’t known about the acid in the cake. John left the party before the acid had kicked in, but the next morning, he saw her. He was on the commuter train to the city and happened to look out the window at the next stop, where Lila stood waiting on the platform. He knew she had a job, at Sotheby’s. She was wearing dark glasses and standing stock still, and even though there was snow on the ground, she wasn’t wearing shoes. John had gotten off his train and brought her home, and a year later they were married.
Pru added a swing coat and a French twist and had a complete picture of John’s wife at twenty-two: Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, deftly applying lipstick without a mirror as she was being driven away from the city jail.
“It wasn’t awful,” John said. “It wasn’t like we woke up yelling at each other or had affairs or anything like that. It was just sort of . . . a struggle. A little struggle, every day. Pick, pick, pick. You know.
“And then she had a miscarriage. It was early, first trimester,” he added, quickly. “I had already bought the diner and we were caught up in disagreeing about that. The place embarrassed her. She hated the name, the old sign, and the
