The New Yorker Stories

would be given something practical (stocks), and something frivolous (glasses too fragile for the dishwasher). Then there would be one personal present for each of them: probably a piece of gold jewelry for Cammy and a silk tie for Peter. Cammy occasionally wore one of the ties when she dressed like a nineteen-forties businessman. Peter thought the ties were slightly effeminate—he never liked them. The year before, when her parents gave her a lapis ring, he had pulled it off her finger to examine it on Christmas night, in bed, then pushed it on his little finger and wiggled it, making a Clara Bow mouth and pretending to be gay. He had been trying to show her how ridiculous he would look wearing a wedding ring. They had been married three years then, and some part of her was still so sentimental that she asked him from time to time if he wouldn’t reconsider and wear a wedding ring. It wasn’t that she thought a ring would be any sort of guarantee. They had lived together for two years before they suddenly decided to get married, but before the wedding they had agreed that it was naive to expect a lifetime of fidelity. If either one became interested in someone else, they would handle the situation in whatever way they felt best, but there would be no flaunting of the other person, and they wouldn’t talk about it.

A couple of months before the last trip to her parents’—Christmas a year ago—Peter had waked her up one night to tell her about a young woman he had had a brief affair with. He described his feelings about being with the woman—how much he liked it when she put her hand over his when they sat at a table in a restaurant; the time she had dissipated some anger of his by suddenly putting her lips to the deepening lines in his forehead, to kiss his frown away. Then Peter had wept onto Cammy’s pillow. She could still remember his face—the only time she had ever seen him cry—and how red and swollen it was, as if it had been burned. “Is this discreet enough for you?” he had said. “Do you want to push this pillow into my face so not even the neighbors can hear?” She didn’t care what the neighbors thought, because she didn’t even know the neighbors. She had not comforted him or touched the pillow. She had not been dramatic and gone out to sleep on the sofa. After he went to work in the morning, she had several cups of coffee and then went out to try to cheer herself up. She bought flowers at an expensive flower shop on Greenwich Avenue, pointing to individual blossoms for the florist to remove one by one, choosing with great care. Then she went home, trimmed the stems, and put them in little bottles—just a few stalks in each, all flowers and no greens. By evening, when Peter was about to come home, she realized that he would see them and know that she had been depressed, so she bunched them all together again and put them in a vase in the dining room. Looking at them, she suddenly understood how ironic it was that all during the past summer, when she was falling more deeply in love with Peter, he was having a flirtation and then an affair with someone else. Cammy had begun to be comfortable with how subtly attuned to each other they were, and she had been deluded. It made her embarrassed to remember how close she felt to Peter late one fall afternoon on Bleecker Street, when Peter stopped to light a cigarette. Something had made her poke him in the ribs. She didn’t often act childish, and she could see that he was taken aback, and that made her laugh and poke him again. Every time he thought she’d finished and tried to light another match, she managed to take him by surprise and tickle him again; she even got through the barrier he’d made with his elbows pointed into his stomach. “What is this?” he said. “The American Cancer Society sent you to torture me?” People were looking—who said people don’t notice things in New York?— and Peter was backing away, then doubling up, with the cigarette unlit in his mouth, admitting that he couldn’t control her. When she moved toward him to hug him and end the game, he didn’t believe it was over; he turned sideways, one hand extended to ward her off, clumsily trying to thumb up a flame with his right hand. This was the opposite of the night she had sex with Michael Grizetti: she could remember all of this moment—the smiling fat woman walking by, talking to herself, the buzzing sound of the neon sign outside the restaurant, Peter’s stainless- steel watchband sparkling under the streetlight, the de-de-de-deeeeeeh of a car horn in the distance. “Time!” he had shouted, backing away. Then, at a safe distance, he crossed his fingers above his head, like a child.

Now Peter slapped her bottom. “I’m going to run,” he said. He took off into the park, his running shoes kicking up clods of snow. She watched him go. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and his short leather jacket came just to his waist, so that he looked like an adolescent in ill-fitting clothes. She had on cowboy boots instead of running shoes. Why did she hold it against him that she had decided at the last minute to go with him and that she was wearing the wrong shoes? Did she expect him to throw down his cape?

She probably would not have thought of a cape at all, except that his scarf flew off as he ran, and he didn’t notice. She turned into the park to get it. The snow was falling in smaller flakes now; it was going to stay. Maybe it was the realization that even icier weather was still to come that suddenly made her nearly numb with cold. The desire to be in the sun was almost a hot spot between her ribs; something actually burned inside her. Like everyone she knew, she had grown up watching Porky Pig and Heckle and Jeckle on Saturday mornings—cartoons in which the good guys got what they wanted and no consequences were permanent. Now she wanted one of those small tornadoes that whipped through cartoons, transporting objects and characters with miraculous speed from one place to another. She wanted to believe again in the magic power of the wind.

They went back to the house. Music was playing loudly on the radio, and her father was hollering to her mother, “First we get that damned ‘Drummer Boy’ dirge, and now they’ve got the Andrews Sisters singing ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.’ What the hell does that have to do with Christmas? Isn’t that song from the Second World War? What are they doing playing that stuff at Christmas? Probably some disc jockey that’s high. Everybody’s high all the time. The guy who filled my gas tank this morning was high. The kid they put on to deliver mail’s got eyes like a pinwheel and walks like he might step on a land mine. What about ‘White Christmas’? Do they think that Bing Crosby spent his whole life playing golf ?”

Peter came up behind Cammy as she was hanging his scarf on a peg on the back of the kitchen door. He helped her out of her coat and hung it over the scarf.

“Look at this,” Cammy’s mother said proudly, from the kitchen.

They walked into the room where her mother stood and looked down. While they were out, she had finished making the annual buche de Noel: a fat, perfect cylinder of a log, with chocolate icing stroked into the texture of tree bark. A small green-and-white wreath had been pumped out of a pastry tube to decorate one end, and there was an open jar of raspberry jam that her mother must have used to make the bow.

“It was worth my effort,” her mother said. “You two look like children seeing their presents on Christmas morning.”

Cammy smiled. What her mother had just said was what gave her the idea of touching the Yule log—what made her grin and begin to wiggle her finger lightly through a ridge, widening it slightly, giving the bark at least one imperfection. Once her finger touched it, it was difficult to stop—though she knew she had to let the wild upsweep of the tornado she might create stay an image in her mind. The consolation, naturally, was what would happen when she raised her finger. Slowly—while Peter and her mother stared—she lifted her hand, still smiling, and began to suck the chocolate off her finger.

In the White Night

“Don’t think about a cow,” Matt Brinkley said. “Don’t think about a river, don’t think about a car, don’t think about snow. . . .”

Matt was standing in the doorway, hollering after his guests. His wife, Gaye, gripped his arm and tried to tug him back into the house. The party was over. Carol and Vernon turned to wave goodbye, calling back their thanks, whispering to each other to be careful. The steps were slick with snow; an icy snow had been falling for hours, frozen granules mixed in with lighter stuff, and the instant they moved out from under the protection of the Brinkleys’ porch the cold froze the smiles on their faces. The swirls of snow blowing against Carol’s skin reminded