Going across the bridge, Nick said to Arthur Shales that the woman he was going to pick up was going to be very upset.
“Upset? What do I care? Neither of you are gonna hold a gun to my head, I can take anything. You’re my last fares of the night. Take you back where you came from, then I’m heading home myself.”
When they were almost at the airport exit, Arthur Shales snorted and said, “Home is a room over an Italian grocery. Guy who runs it woke me up at six this morning, yelling so loud at his supplier. ‘You call these tomatoes?’ he was saying. ‘I could take these out and bat them on the tennis court.’ Guy is always griping about Jomatoes being so unripe.”
Stephanie was standing on the walkway, right where she had said she would be. She looked haggard, and Nick was not sure that he could cope with her. He raised his hand to his shirt pocket for cigarettes, forgetting once again that he had given up smoking. He also forgot that he couldn’t grab anything with his right hand because it was in a cast.
“You know who I had in my cab the other day?” Arthur Shales said, coasting to a stop in front of the terminal. “You’re not going to believe it. Al Pacino.”
For more than a week, Nick and Stephanie tried to reach Karen. Stephanie began to think that Karen was dead. And although Nick chided her for calling Karen’s number so often, he began to worry too. Once he went to her apartment on his lunch hour and listened at the door. He heard nothing, but he put his mouth close to the door and asked her to please open the door, if she was there, because there was trouble with Stephanie. As he left the building he had to laugh at what it would have looked like if someone had seen him — a nicely dressed man, with his hands on either side of his mouth, leaning into a door and talking to it. And one of the hands in a cast.
For a week he came straight home from work, to keep Stephanie company. Then he asked Petra if she would have dinner with him. She said no. As he was leaving the office, he passed by her desk without looking at her. She got up and followed him down the hall and said, “I’m having a drink with somebody after work, but I could meet you for a drink around seven o’clock.”
He went home to see if Stephanie was all right. She said that she had been sick in the morning, but after the card came in the mail — she held out a postcard to him — she felt much better. The card was addressed to him; it was from Karen, in Bermuda. She said she had spent the afternoon in a sailboat. No explanation. He read the message several times. He felt very relieved. He asked Stephanie if she wanted to go out for a drink with him and Petra. She said no, as he had known she would.
At seven he sat alone at a table in the Blue Bar, with the postcard in his inside pocket. There was a folded newspaper on the little round table where he sat, and his broken right wrist rested on it. He sipped a beer. At seven-thirty he opened the paper and looked through the theater section. At quarter to eight he got up and left. He walked over to Fifth Avenue and began to walk downtown. In one of the store windows there was a poster for Bermuda tourism. A woman in a turquoise-blue bathing suit was rising out of blue waves, her mouth in an unnaturally wide smile. She seemed oblivious of the little boy next to her who was tossing a ball into the sky. Standing there, looking at the poster, Nick began a mental game that he had sometimes played in college. He invented a cartoon about Bermuda. It was a split-frame drawing. Half of it showed a beautiful girl, in the arms of her lover, on the pink sandy beach of Bermuda, with the caption: “It’s glorious to be here in Bermuda.” The other half of the frame showed a tall tired man looking into the window of a travel agency at a picture of the lady and her lover. He would have no lines, but in a balloon above his head he would be wondering if, when he went home, it was the right time to urge an abortion to the friend who had moved into his apartment.
When he got home, Stephanie was not there. She had said that if she felt better, she would go out to eat. He sat down and took off his shoes and socks and hung forward, with his head almost touching his knees, like a droopy doll. Then he went into the bedroom, carrying the shoes and socks, and took off his clothes and put on jeans. The phone rang and he picked it up just as he heard Stephanie’s key in the door.
“I’m sorry,” Petra said, “I’ve never stood anybody up before in my life.”
“Never mind,” he said. “I’m not mad.”
“I’m very sorry,” she said.
“I drank a beer and read the paper. After what I did to you the other night, I don’t blame you.”
“I like you,” she said. “That was why I didn’t come. Because I knew I wouldn’t say what I wanted to say. I got as far as Forty-eighth Street and turned around.”
“What did you want to say?”
“That I like you. That I like you and that it’s a mistake, because I’m always letting myself in for it, agreeing to see men who treat me badly. I wasn’t very flattered the other night.”
“I know. I apologize. Look, why don’t you meet me at that bar now and let me not walk out on you. Okay?”
“No,” she said, her voice changing. “That wasn’t why I called. I called to say I was sorry, but I know I did the right thing. I have to hang up now.”
He put the phone back and continued to look at the floor. He knew that Stephanie was not even pretending not to have heard. He took a step forward and ripped the phone out of the wall. It was not a very successful dramatic gesture. The phone just popped out of the jack, and he stood there, holding it in his good hand.
“Would you think it was awful if I offered to go to bed with you?” Stephanie asked.
“No,” he said. “I think it would be very nice.”
Two days later he left work early in the afternoon and went to Kirby’s. Dr. Kellogg opened the door and then pointed toward the back of the house and said, “The man you’re looking for is reading.” He was wearing baggy white pants and a Japanese kimono.
Nick almost had to push through the half-open door because the psychiatrist was so intent on holding the cats back with one foot. In the kitchen Kirby was indeed reading — he was looking at a Bermuda travel brochure and listening to Karen.
She looked sheepish when she saw him. Her face was tan, and her eyes, which were always beautiful, looked startlingly blue now that her face was so dark. She had lavender-tinted sunglasses pushed on top of her head. She and Kirby seemed happy and comfortable in the elegant, air-conditioned house.
“When did you get back?” Nick said.
“A couple of days ago,” she said. “The night I last talked to you, I went over to the professor’s apartment, and in the morning we went to Bermuda.”
Nick had come to Kirby’s to get the car keys and borrow the Thunderbird — to go for a ride and be by himself for a while — and for a moment now he thought of asking her for the keys anyway. He sat down at the table.
“Stephanie is in town,” he said. “I think we ought to go get a cup of coffee and talk about it.”
Her key ring was on the table. If he had the keys, he could be heading for the Lincoln Tunnel. Years ago, they would be walking to the car hand in hand, in love. It would be her birthday. The car’s odometer would have five miles on it.
One of Kirby’s cats jumped up on the table and began to sniff at the butter dish there.
“Would you like to walk over to the Star Thrower and get a cup of coffee?” Nick said.