But.
On this Thursday morning after Stanley has made an August offer he may not be able to refuse...
On this Thursday morning after he has raced to Kate’s apartment at seven-thirty to be with her for even just a little while before going to work...
On this relentlessly hot and sluggish Thursday morning toward the end of July, David listens apathetically to his patients’ tales of sexual abuse or neglect or indulgence or addiction or identity or dysfunction, relating them only to his own passionate sexual entanglement and finding them by comparison merely dull and inane.
She calls him at ten minutes to eleven to say that the insurance company has sent her a check, and she’ll be going out today to buy a new bicycle, would he like to go with her? The bicycle shop she’s chosen is on Seventy-ninth, between First and York. He tells her he will meet her there at twelve noon.
To commemorate the occasion of the Buying of the Bike, as he will later refer to it, she is wearing what she wore in the park on the day they met. The green nylon shorts, the orange tank top shirt, the Nike running shoes and white cotton socks with the little cotton balls at the back of each. The salesman in the shop, a young man who introduces himself as Rickie, is similarly dressed; perhaps there is a bicycle race somewhere in the city today.
In any event, he is wearing red nylon shorts that do little to conceal muscular young legs, and a blue nylon tank top of a lighter shade and with the numeral 69 in white on the front of it. Hmm. The top exposes pectorals, biceps and triceps that have all had higher educations, either at the local gym or in a state penitentiary. This association comes to mind because he is sporting, on the bulging biceps of his left arm, the tattooed head of an Indian chief in full feathered headdress, and this further prompts the notion that perhaps he himself is an Indian, forgive me, David thinks, a Native American, of course. His skin fortifies the assumption, a rather dusky color that could be a suntan. But his hair is a shiny black, pulled to the back of his head in a ponytail and held there with a little beaded band that further confirms the idea that he may be a Sioux or a Cherokee or, more appropriate considering the fact that he’s twenty-two or — three years old, a mere Ute. He and Kate seem splendidly matched in age and costume. Here in the bicycle shop, David begins feeling like a decrepit fifth wheel.
Rickie the Callow Ute starts selling her a bike, making sure to flex his marvelous muscles each time he lifts down another one from the rack. He asks where she will be doing most of her riding, and she tells him in Central Park, and then immediately informs him that all she’s got to spend is four hundred dollars, so please don’t start showing her bikes that cost two, three thousand dollars, which she knows some of them do.
“I think I have some good models to show you in that price range,” Rickie says.
“Not in that range,” Kate tells him. “I’m talking four hundred dollars, not a penny more, not a penny less.”
“Including tax?” he asks, and flashes a mouthful of glistening white teeth which David would like to punch off his face.
“Well, I guess I can spring for the tax,” Kate says and smiles back.
“Phew,” Rickie says, and flicks imaginary sweat from his noble brow.
It occurs to David that they might be flirting.
Rickie displays a beautiful little number painted in a color he describes as “Wild Orchid with Blue Pearl Hyper-Highlight” and identifies as “a Cannondale aluminum bike in the 3.8 Mixte series with your hybrid frame and your TIG-welded all-chrome-moly fork,” Kate listening wide-eyed, David standing by with his thumb up his ass, “and your GripShift SRT 300 shifters with Shimano Altus C-90 Hyperglide 7-speed rear derailleur and cogset,” speaking a language known only to the Plains Indians and young Kate Duggan, who seems to know exactly whereof he speaks. But the bike costs four hundred and seventy-nine dollars, and Kate has already told him...
“Sorry, I thought I’d sneak it past you,” Rickie says, and grins his boyish all-American grin again.
“You almost did,” she says, and bats her lashes at him.
She climbs onto the next bike he lifts from the rack. As she settles onto a black leather seat Rickie describes as “a Vetta comfort saddle, made in Italy,” the side-slit in the very short green nylon shorts exposes the now-traditional hint of white cotton panties beneath. “You keep in good shape,” Rickie says, interrupting his shpiel — or at least his bike shpiel.
“Thanks,” she says. “How much is this one?”
“About the same as the other one. Where do you work out?”
“I don’t. I’m a dancer.”
“Really? What kind of dancing.”
“I’m in Cats,” she says.
“No shit!” he says.
David wonders if Rickie thinks this older person here might perchance be Kate’s brother, standing and watching this blatant little flirtation and making no comment. Or mayhap her father? Whatever his relation to this lithe slender dancer slipping so easily from saddle to saddle, David seems to have achieved an invisibility only Claude Rains or Vincent Price or Nicholson Baker could have aspired to.
“This Tassajara in the Gary Fisher line is a bit cheaper,” Rickie says, “but it’s got every feature you’d...”
“How much cheaper?”
“Four forty-nine. But it’s got your TIG-welded double-butted cro-moly frame and your Weinmann rims and Tioga Psycho tires...”
“I really can’t spend that much.”
“In that case, I’ve got just the bike for you,” Rickie says and pulls down a sporty number in the Raleigh line, which he describes as “Your sweet little M60 with a chrome-moly frame and STX Rapid Fire Plus shifters and Shimano Parallax alloy hubs. Comes in the metallic anthracite you see here.”
“How much is it?”
“Three ninety-nine, how’s that for on the nose?”
“What else have you got?” she asks.
He spends another twenty minutes showing her bikes, at the end of which time Kate settles on a purple fade, multitrack cro-moly sport with your basic high-tensile steel stays and steel fork and your Araya alloy 36-hole rims and your white decals for a mere three hundred and forty-nine dollars.
David leaves her in the shop with her credit card and Chief Running Mouth while he rushes back up to Ninety-sixth Street where he buys a hot dog with your basic mustard and sauerkraut on Lexington Avenue and gets to his office in time to greet his next patient, Alex J, who tells him that just when he thought he was making real progress, he’s started rubbing up against girls in the subway again.
When Kate phones the apartment at twenty to seven that night, she seems to have completely forgotten the Buying of the Bike. Or perhaps he’s the one who’s exaggerated it out of all proportion. He asks her to wait a minute because he’s just put his dinner in the microwave and if they’re going to talk, he wants to run into the kitchen to turn it off. He takes his good sweet time doing so, letting her cool her heels even though he knows she’s calling from the backstage phone, punishing her for her behavior earlier today. When at last he returns to the study and picks up the receiver, he says, “Okay, I’m back,” and hopes his inflection properly conveys a sense of distance. She seems not to notice.