The New Yorker Stories

“This is a toast to me,” Milo says, “because I am going to be going to San Francisco.”

It was not a very good or informative toast. Bradley and I sip from our glasses. Louise puts her glass down hard and bursts into tears, knocking the glass over. The champagne spills onto the cover of a big art book about the unicorn tapestries. She runs into the bedroom and slams the door.

Milo looks furious. “Everybody lets me know just what my insufficiencies are, don’t they?” he says. “Nobody minds expressing himself. We have it all right out in the open.”

“He’s criticizing me,” Bradley murmurs, his head still bowed. “It’s because I was offered a job here in the city and I didn’t automatically refuse it.”

I turn to Milo. “Go say something to Louise, Milo,” I say. “Do you think that’s what somebody who isn’t brokenhearted sounds like?”

He glares at me and stomps into the bedroom, and I can hear him talking to Louise reassuringly. “It doesn’t mean you’ll never see me,” he says. “You can fly there, I’ll come here. It’s not going to be that different.”

“You lied!” Louise screams. “You said we were going to brunch.”

“We are. We are. I can’t very well take us to brunch before Sunday, can I?”

“You didn’t say you were going to San Francisco. What is San Francisco, anyway?”

“I just said so. I bought us a bottle of champagne. You can come out as soon as I get settled. You’re going to like it there.”

Louise is sobbing. She has told him the truth and she knows it’s futile to go on.

By the next morning, Louise acts the way I acted—as if everything were just the same. She looks calm, but her face is small and pale. She looks very young. We walk into the restaurant and sit at the table Milo has reserved. Bradley pulls out a chair for me, and Milo pulls out a chair for Louise, locking his finger with hers for a second, raising her arm above her head, as if she were about to take a twirl.

She looks very nice, really. She has a ribbon in her hair. It is cold, and she should have worn a hat, but she wanted to wear the ribbon. Milo has good taste: the dress she is wearing, which he bought for her, is a hazy purple plaid, and it sets off her hair.

“Come with me. Don’t be sad,” Milo suddenly says to Louise, pulling her by the hand. “Come with me for a minute. Come across the street to the park for just a second, and we’ll have some space to dance, and your mother and Bradley can have a nice quiet drink.”

She gets up from the table and, looking long-suffering, backs into her coat, which he is holding for her, and the two of them go out. The waitress comes to the table, and Bradley orders three Bloody Marys and a Coke, and eggs Benedict for everyone. He asks the waitress to wait awhile before she brings the food. I have hardly slept at all, and having a drink is not going to clear my head. I have to think of things to say to Louise later, on the ride home.

“He takes so many chances,” I say. “He pushes things so far with people. I don’t want her to turn against him.”

“No,” he says.

“Why are you going, Bradley? You’ve seen the way he acts. You know that when you get out there he’ll pull something on you. Take the job and stay here.”

Bradley is fiddling with the edge of his napkin. I study him. I don’t know who his friends are, how old he is, where he grew up, whether he believes in God, or what he usually drinks. I’m shocked that I know so little, and I reach out and touch him. He looks up.

“Don’t go,” I say quietly.

The waitress puts the glasses down quickly and leaves, embarrassed because she thinks she’s interrupted a tender moment. Bradley pats my hand on his arm. Then he says the thing that has always been between us, the thing too painful for me to envision or think about.

“I love him,” Bradley whispers.

We sit quietly until Milo and Louise come into the restaurant, swinging hands. She is pretending to be a young child, almost a baby, and I wonder for an instant if Milo and Bradley and I haven’t been playing house, too— pretending to be adults.

“Daddy’s going to give me a first-class ticket,” Louise says. “When I go to California we’re going to ride in a glass elevator to the top of the Fairman Hotel.”

“The Fairmont,” Milo says, smiling at her.

Before Louise was born, Milo used to put his ear to my stomach and say that if the baby turned out to be a girl he would put her into glass slippers instead of bootees. Now he is the prince once again. I see them in a glass elevator, not long from now, going up and up, with the people below getting smaller and smaller, until they disappear.

The Burning House

Freddy Fox is in the kitchen with me. He has just washed and dried an avocado seed I don’t want, and he is leaning against the wall, rolling a joint. In five minutes, I will not be able to count on him. However: he started late in the day, and he has already brought in wood for the fire, gone to the store down the road for matches, and set the table. “You mean you’d know this stuff was Limoges even if you didn’t turn the plate over?” he called from the dining room. He pretended to be about to throw one of the plates into the kitchen, like a Frisbee. Sam, the dog, believed him and shot up, kicking the rug out behind him and skidding forward before he realized his error; it was like the Road Runner tricking Wile E. Coyote into going over the cliff for the millionth time. His jowls sank in disappointment.

“I see there’s a full moon,” Freddy says. “There’s just nothing that can hold a candle to nature. The moon and the stars, the tides and the sunshine—and we just don’t stop for long enough to wonder at it all. We’re so engrossed in ourselves.” He takes a very long drag on the joint. “We stand and stir the sauce in the pot instead of going to the window and gazing at the moon.”