She was flipping through the newspaper, stretched out on her side on the floor, her long brown hair blocking his view of her face. He didn’t need to look at her: he knew she was beautiful. It was nice just to have her there. Although he couldn’t understand what went on in her head, he was full of factual information about her. She had grown up in Iowa. She was almost five feet nine inches tall, and she weighed a hundred and twenty-five pounds, and when she was younger, when she weighed less, she had been a model in Chicago. Now she was working as a clerk in a boutique in New Haven. She didn’t want to model again, because that was no easier than being a salesperson; it was more tiring, even if it did pay better.
“Thanks for fixing my boots again,” she said, rolling up her pants leg to put one on.
“Why are you leaving?” Robert said. “Dan’s student won’t be out of there yet.”
Dan was a painter who had lost his teaching job in the South. He moved to New Haven and was giving private lessons to students three times a week.
“Marielle’s going to pick me up,” Penelope said. “She wants me to help her paint her bathroom.”
“Why can’t she paint her own bathroom? She could do the whole thing in an hour.”
“I don’t want to help her paint,” Penelope said, sighing. “I’m just doing a favor for a friend.”
“Why don’t you do me a favor and stay?”
“Come on,” she said. “Don’t do that. You’re my best friend.”
“Okay,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t fight over it anyway. He went to the kitchen table and got her coat. “Why don’t you wait till she gets here?”
“She’s meeting me at the drugstore.”
“You sure are nice to some of your friends,” he said.
She ignored him. She did not totally ignore him; she kissed him before she left. And although she did not say that she’d see him the next day, he knew she’d be back.
When Penelope left, Robert went into the kitchen and put some water on to boil. It was his habit since moving to this apartment to have a cup of tea before bed and to look out the window into the brightly lit alley. Interesting things appeared there: Christmas trees, large broken pieces of machinery, and, once, a fireman’s uniform, very nicely laid out — a fireman’s hat and suit. He was an artist — or, rather, he had been an artist until he dropped out of school — and sometimes he found that he still arranged objects and landscapes, looking for a composition. He sat on the kitchen table and drank his tea. He often thought about buying a kitchen chair, but he told himself that he’d move soon and he didn’t want to transport furniture. When he was a child, his parents had moved from apartment to apartment. Their furniture got more and more battered, and his mother had exploded one day, crying that the furniture was worthless and ugly, and threatening to chop it all up with an ax. Since he moved from the country Robert had not yet bought himself a bed frame or curtains or rugs. There were roaches in the apartment, and the idea of the roaches hiding — being able to hide on the underside of curtains, under the rug — disgusted him. He didn’t mind them being there so much when they were out in the open.
The Yale catalogue he had gotten months before when he first came to New Haven was still on the kitchen table. He had thought about taking a course in architecture, but he hadn’t. He was not quite sure what to do. He had taken a part-time job working in a picture-framing store so he could pay his rent. Actually, he had no reason for being in New Haven except to be near Penelope. When Robert lived in the house with Johnny and Cyril and Penelope, he had told himself that Penelope would leave Johnny and become his lover, but it never happened. He had tried very hard to get it to happen; they had often stayed up later than any of the others, and they talked — he had never talked so much to anybody in his life — and sometimes they fixed food before going to bed, or took walks in the snow. She tried to teach him to play the recorder, blowing softly so she wouldn’t wake the others. Once in the summer they had stolen corn, and Johnny had asked her about it the next morning. “What if the neighbors find out somebody from this house stole corn?” he said. Robert defended Penelope, saying that he had suggested it. “Great,” Johnny said. “The Bobbsey Twins.” Robert was hurt because what Johnny said was true — there wasn’t anything more between them than there was between the Bobbsey Twins.
Earlier in the week Robert had been sure that Penelope was going to make a break with Dan. He had gone to a party at their apartment, and there had been a strange assortment of guests, almost all of them Dan’s friends — some Yale people, a druggist who had a Marlboro cigarette pack filled with reds that he passed around, and a neighbor woman and her six-year-old son, whom the druggist teased. The druggist showed the little boy the cigarette pack full of pills, saying, “Now, how would a person light a cigarette like this? Which end is the filter?” The boy’s mother wouldn’t protect him, so Penelope took him away, into the bedroom, where she let him empty Dan’s piggy bank and count the pennies. Marielle was also there, with her hair neatly braided into tight corn rows and wearing glasses with lenses that darkened to blue. Cyril came late, pretty loaded. “Better late than never,” he said, once to Robert and many times to Penelope. Then Robert and Cyril huddled together in a corner, saying how dreary the party was, while the druggist put pills on his tongue and rolled them sensually across the roof of his mouth. At midnight Dan got angry and tried to kick them all out — Robert and Cyril first, because they were sitting closest to him — and that made Penelope angry because she had only three friends at the party, and the noisy ones, the drunk or stoned ones, were all Dan’s friends. Instead of arguing, though, she cried. Robert and Cyril left finally and went to Cyril’s and had a beer, and then Robert went back to Dan’s apartment, trying to get up the courage to go in and insist that Penelope leave with him. He walked up the two flights of stairs to their door. It was quiet inside. He didn’t have the nerve to knock. He went downstairs and out of the building, hating himself. He walked home in the cold, and realized that he must have been a little drunk, because the fresh air really cleared his head.
Robert flipped through the Yale catalogue, thinking that maybe going back to school was the solution. Maybe all the hysterical letters his mother and father wrote were right, and he needed some order in his life. Maybe he’d meet some other girls in classes. He did not want to meet other girls. He had dated two girls since moving to New Haven, and they had bored him and he had spent more money on them than they were worth.
The phone rang; he was glad, because he was just about to get very depressed.
It was Penelope, sounding very far away, very knocked out. She had left Marielle’s because Marielle’s boyfriend was there, and he insisted that they all get stoned and listen to “Trout Mask Replica” and not paint the bathroom, so she left and decided to walk home, but then she realized she didn’t want to go there, and she thought she’d call and ask if she could stay with him instead. And the strangest thing. When she closed the door of the phone booth just now, a little boy had appeared and tapped on the glass, fanning out a half circle of joints. “Ten dollars,” the boy said to her. “Bargain City.” Imagine that. There was a long silence while Robert imagined it. It was interrupted by Penelope, crying.
“What’s the matter, Penelope?” he said. “Of course you can come over here. Get out of the phone booth and come over.”
She told him that she had bought the grass, and that it was powerful stuff. It was really the wrong thing to do to smoke it, but she lost her nerve in the phone booth and didn’t know whether to call or not, so she smoked a joint — very quickly, in case any cops drove by. She smoked it too quickly.