The New Yorker Stories

“Can’t say,” I say.

She nods. “It’s funny to be in a situation where you know something about somebody and they don’t know anything about you, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean? You just told me about Colorado, and the restaurant you were going to open.”

“Yeah,” she says, “but that’s nothing personal. You know what I mean.”

“Then go ahead and tell me something personal.”

She blushes. “Oh, I didn’t mean that.”

“Why not?” I say. “This is a strange enough night already, isn’t it? What if you tell me something personal?”

She gnaws at her cuticle. She might be younger than I thought. She has long, shiny hair. I try to picture her in a nylon jacket, on a ski slope. That makes the night seem hotter suddenly. It makes me realize that in a few months, though, we will be wearing down-filled jackets. Last November there was a big snow.

“The guy I live with is an illustrator,” she says. “You’ve probably seen some of his stuff. He doesn’t need money, he just wants to have it all. To draw. To have a restaurant. He’s grabby. He usually figures it out to have what he wants, though.” She takes a drink. “I feel funny saying this,” she says. “I don’t know why I started to tell you about us.” Then she stops talking, smiling apologetically.

Instead of coaxing her, I get up and put some things on two plates, put one plate on a table by my chair, and hand the other plate to her. I pour her another glass of wine.

“He has a studio next to the ceramics factory,” she says. “That big building with the black shutters. In the afternoon he calls me, and I take over a picnic basket and we eat lunch and make love.”

I break a cracker in half with my thumb and first finger and eat it.

“That’s not it, though,” she says. “The thing is, it’s always something like Wonder bread. It’s real kinky. I trim off the crust and make bologna sandwiches with a lot of mayonnaise. Or I’ll make Cheez Whiz sandwiches with Ritz crackers, or peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwiches. And we drink Kool-Aid or root beer or something like that. One time I cooked hot dogs and sliced them to go on crackers and squirted cheese around the circles. We had that and Dr Pepper. The thing is, the lunch has to be really disgusting.”

“I got that,” I say. “I guess I got it.”

“Oh,” she says, dropping her eyes. “I mean, I guess it’s obvious. Of course you figured it out.”

I wait to see if she’s going to ask me to reveal something. But instead she gets up and pours the last of the wine into her glass and stands with her back to me, looking out the window.

I know that ceramics factory. It’s not in a good part of town. There’s a bar just down the street from it, and one night when I was coming out of the bar a kid jumped me. I remember how fast he came at me on his bike, and the screech of tires, as if the bike were a big car. Then he was all over me, half punching and half squeezing, as if my wallet would pop out of hiding like a clown’s head spinning out of a jack-in-the-box. “It’s in my back pocket,” I said, and when I said that he jammed his hand into the pocket and then slugged me in the side, hard. “Stay down!” he said in sort of a whisper, and I lay there, curled on my side, putting my hand over my face so that if he thought about it later he wouldn’t come back and make more trouble because I’d gotten a good look at him. My nose was bleeding. I only had about twenty bucks in my wallet, and I’d left my credit cards at home. Finally I got up and tried to walk. There was a light on in the ceramics factory, but I could tell from the stillness that nobody was there—it was just a light that had been left on. I put my hand on the building and tried to stand up straighter. There was a point when a terrible pain shot through me—such a sharp pain that I went down again. I took a few breaths, and it passed. Through the big glass window I saw ceramic shepherds and animals—figures that would be placed in creches. They were unpainted—they hadn’t been fired yet—and because they were all white and just about the same size, the donkeys and the Wise Men looked a lot alike. It was a week or so before Christmas, and I thought, Why aren’t they finished? They’re playing it too close; if they don’t get at it and start painting, it’s going to be too late. “Marie, Marie,” I whispered, knowing I was in trouble. Then I walked as well as I could, got to my car, and went home to my wife.

Horatio’s Trick

A few days before Christmas, the UPS truck stopped in front of Charlotte’s house. Charlotte’s ex-husband, Edward, had sent a package to her and a larger package to their son, Nicholas, who was nineteen. She opened hers immediately. It was the same present she had been sent the year before: a pound of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, wrapped in silver striped paper, with a card that read “Merry Christmas from Edward Anderson and family.” This time, Edward’s wife had written the card; it wasn’t his handwriting. Charlotte dumped the contents out onto the kitchen floor and played a game of marbles, pinging one nut into another and watching them roll in different directions. She’d had a few bourbons, not too many, while Nicholas was off at the gas station getting an oil change. Before she began the game of chocolate marbles, she pulled the kitchen door closed; otherwise, Horatio, the dog, would come running in at full tilt, as he always did when he heard any sound in the kitchen. Horatio was a newcomer to the house—a holiday visitor. He belonged to Nicholas’s girlfriend, Andrea, who had flown to Florida for a Christmas visit with her parents, and since Nicholas was going to drive here for his Christmas, he had brought Horatio along, too.

Nicholas was a junior at Notre Dame. He had his father’s wavy hair—Edward hated that kind of hair, which he called kinky—but not his blue eyes. Charlotte had always been sad about that. Nicholas had her eyes: ordinary brown eyes that she loved to look at, although she could not say why she found them so interesting. She had to remember not to look at him too long. Only that morning he had said at breakfast, “Charlotte, it’s a little unnerving to roll out of bed and be stared at.” He often called her Charlotte now. She had moved to Charlottesville six years ago, and although it was a very sociable town and she had met quite a few people (she had finally reached the point with most of them where they had stopped making jokes about a Charlotte coming to live in Charlottesville), she did not know anyone with a son Nicholas’s age. Oddly enough, she knew two women about her age who were having babies. One of them seemed slightly abashed; the other was ecstatic. It was a scandal (people parodied themselves in Charlottesville by calling scandals—which they did not believe in— “scandales”) that the ecstatic forty-one-year-old mother-to-be, a recent graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, was not married. Other gossip had it that she was forty-three.

Charlotte worked as a legal secretary for an old and prestigious law firm in town. She had left New York after she and Edward separated a dozen years ago, and had moved to Washington, where she enrolled in American University to resume her B.A. studies in preparation for entering law school. Nicholas went to Lafayette School, and was taken care of on the weekends by her parents, who lived in the Cleveland Park area, while Charlotte sequestered herself and studied almost around the clock. But there were problems: Nicholas had a hard time making friends in his new school; also, the bitterness between Charlotte and Edward seemed to escalate when there was actual distance between them, so Charlotte was constantly distracted by Edward’s accusatory phone