She got up and went into the kitchen. “Do you want a drink?” she said. He had shook her up a little. He was sorry he had done it. He looked at the rug and tried to compose his thoughts. She came to the kitchen doorway and looked at him. Now she did look upset. She walked back to the living room and sat beside him.
“Did you do that to scare me?” she said.
“I just went out of control,” he said.
She leaned back against the sofa and closed her eyes. It was very quiet; depending on how strong the breeze was, you heard different noises: scratchy or soft, the tinkling of wind chimes. He held her earrings between two fingers: a gold sliver of moon on which a little star had landed. He studied it, dangling from her ear, rubbed it the way he would rub a shell, doubting the cool smoothness of it.
“Go make us a drink,” she said. “I’m not as dishonest as you think I am. I was flirting. I did it just to do it. I was pretty surprised when he found out where I lived and put all those bushes in the backyard.”
They hadn’t done this routine for so many years that at first Hildon didn’t realize it had begun. It was what they had done long ago: belittled themselves so much that the other would be overwhelmed with positive feelings. That was the way they had so often ended up in bed. He was standing. She put her hands behind his knees and drew her forehead to his leg. He froze for a second, then stepped toward her. She kissed his leg.
Hildon started to laugh. He needed to choke back a terrible sadness that had started to overwhelm him. He sat on the couch now, leaning the tip of one shoulder against the back, and began to raise her shirt out of her jeans. He kissed her stomach. His nose tickled her, and she drew up her legs. “I didn’t think he was nineteen,” Hildon said. “I was just being a prick.”
4
THE pickup truck that passed Lucy as she was driving to the airport to get Nicole made her feel as if she were in a time warp: it was a red Ford, and the driver had his long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. As she passed, Lucy looked over and saw a thin, round-faced blond girl sitting in the passenger’s seat. Wedged between them was an Irish Setter. Where would all the Irish Setters of the world be today if there had been no hippies? Lucy saw the bumper in her rearview mirror and cut back into the lane. Her mother would have said, “Where can they be going?” Her mother was always mystified by the sight of people casually dressed, couples together at two in the afternoon. She was not really asking a question but saying that she did not approve of people who did not work. She was still dismayed that Jane had no career, and she didn’t take what Lucy did seriously. She could not take it seriously that Lucy was a teacher in the Arts in the Schools program because that was part time. She understood that Lucy got paid for the columns she wrote, but since they were a joke and very few people had made careers out of jokes, she didn’t take that seriously either. Lucy couldn’t argue with her there.
She listened to the radio. She was trying to get back to that. When Les left, she had stopped listening to music. He had played the radio all the time. When she had an image of Les, music accompanied it, like the beginning of a movie. The Eurythmics were on the radio. This summer’s Eurythmics record was not as good as “Sweet Dreams.” Lyrics didn’t remind her of Les — he had loved all A.M. music, so just the sound of the radio was painful. The specifics changed, but the format never did. It was one advertising jingle or another. Music playing softly, gradually getting louder as the DJ finished talking, the number to call to name a song and win a prize, the number-one song, the big hit of summer, fast talk about worthless products, where to get tickets to this concert or that concert, whatever shouldn’t be missed, and don’t be late. Men at Work. Culture Club. Michael Jackson then and now. Blast from the Past, Oldies but Goodies, two hot dogs for the price of one, and a cold front moving in from the North. Then came a Möbius strip of music. All over America, people were driving around hearing a song and remembering exactly where they were, who they loved, how they thought it would turn out. In traffic jams, women with babies and grocery bags were suddenly eighteen years old, in summer, on the beach, in the arms of somebody who hummed that song in their ear. They ironed to songs they had slow-danced to, shot through intersections on yellow lights the way they always had, keeping time with the Doors’ drumbeat. They might have to be reminded of many of the names of kids they had gone to school with, but once they heard the name, they could say with certainty which of them thought John was the best Beatle and which thought Paul was. They were as sure of the top ten, the summer they graduated from high school, as any minister of the Ten Commandments. It was how people kept in touch with their past. And above all, no matter how many other people had danced to it or made love to it or hung pictures of Jackson Browne or Bruce Springsteen or Van Halen in their bedroom, it was personal. Cyndi Lauper was singing “Time After Time” when Lucy turned off the radio. Bad enough that one song, or two songs, could break your heart — she had to make the mistake of falling in love with somebody who was an addict to all of it. It was like falling in love with someone and having it be your own special secret that the sun went down at night.
It was still difficult for Lucy to believe that she had spent more than ten years in New York. Every time she got in her car now, she remembered with amazement all the time she had spent on buses and in subways and being thrown around in cabs. She had had a car then, but it was impossible to drive in the city. She stored it in a carport in Hackensack, for $25 a month, with a woman who was a cousin of a woman Lucy had gone to school with. At the time, this had made perfect sense. On weekends — almost every weekend, when she got together with Les Whitehall — they drove to the Hudson Valley, or to see friends of hers in Connecticut. In retrospect it was amazing to realize that at least once a week she had been amazed that there was still a sky. She had gotten so used to the hard edges of things that she had come to think of the world as a gigantic coloring book, all outlines and shapes, so clearly delineated that there was little need to fill it in. One star. Two. A sky that looked like corridors, one turn after another determined by the tops of buildings jutting up as obstacles. The most needed crayon was gray.
Lucy had gone to New York because she thought that she would become a success. There was quite a difference between being successful, which she might have done anywhere, and being a success. Being a success meant being a personality, and New York was a big stage, always ready. The props distracted people, though, and Lucy was no exception. She began to work less; to worry more about getting enough sleep, which resulted in restless nights and dragged-out days; and as she lost ground, to fixate on what she had. By the time she doubted that she was going to be a success, it was also clear that the city had a way of keeping people. Life was so difficult that small triumphs began to look like success. Managing to keep your car so near the city seemed a real coup. The city always allowed people to fool themselves. There were statistics of people mugged or robbed or raped, but it still seemed that there was safety in numbers. There was something solid about New York that couldn’t be shaken. It was a wall, and the people were Humpty Dumpty; the New York Times, the mayor, even signs hurriedly printed and hung on trees warned them to be careful, so if they toppled, they could only blame themselves. The king’s horses and the king’s men couldn’t help them. The horses were for hire, trotting around Central Park with carriages full of tourists.