She called in the morning to apologize. When she hung up on him the night before, she got straight for a minute — long enough to hail a cab — but she had a bad time in the cab again, and didn’t have the money to pay for the ride … To make a long story short, she was with Marielle.
“Why?” Robert asked.
Well, she was going to tell the cabdriver to take her to Robert’s place, but she was afraid he was mad. No — that wasn’t the truth. She knew he wouldn’t be mad, but she couldn’t face him. She wanted to talk to him, but she was in no shape.
She agreed to meet him for lunch. They hung up. He went into the bathroom to shave. A letter his father had written him, asking why he had dropped out of graduate school, was scotch-taped to the mirror, along with other articles of interest. There was one faded clipping, which belonged to Johnny and had been hung on the refrigerator at the house, about someone called the California Superman who had frozen to death in his Superman suit, in his refrigerator. All of Robert’s friends had bizarre stories displayed in their apartments. Cyril had a story about a family that had starved to death, in their car at the side of the highway. Their last meal had been watermelon. The clipping was tacked to Cyril’s headboard. It made Robert feel old and disoriented when he realized that these awful newspaper articles had replaced those mindless Day-Glo pictures everybody used to have. Also, people in New Haven had begun to come up to him on the street — cops, surely; they had to be cops — swinging plastic bags full of grass in front of his nose, bringing handfuls of ups and downs out of their pockets. Also, the day before, he had got a box from his mother. She sent him a needlepoint doorstop, with a small white-and-gray Scottie dog on it, and a half-wreath of roses underneath it. It really got him down.
He began to shave. His cat walked into the bathroom and rubbed against his bare ankle, making him jerk his leg away, and he cut his cheek. He put a piece of toilet paper against the cut, and sat on the side of the tub. He was angry at the cat and angry at himself for being depressed. After all, Dan was out of the picture now. Penelope had been found. He could go get her, the way he got groceries, the way he got a book from the library. It seemed too easy. Something was wrong.
He put on his jeans — he had no clean underwear; forget about that — and a shirt and his jacket, and walked to the restaurant. Penelope was in the first booth, with her coat still on. There was a bottle of beer on the table in front of her. She was smiling sheepishly, and seeing her, he smiled back. He sat next to her and put his arm around her shoulder, hugging her to him.
“Who’s the first girl you ever loved?” she said.
Leave it to her to ask something like that. He tried to feel her shoulder beneath her heavy coat, but couldn’t. He tried to remember loving anyone but her. “A girl in high school,” he said.
“I’ll bet she had a tragic end,” she said.
The waitress came and took their orders. When she went away, Penelope continued, “Isn’t that what usually happens? People’s first loves washing up on the beach in Mexico?”
“She didn’t finish high school with me. Her parents yanked her out and put her in private school. For all I know, she did go to Mexico and wash up on the beach.”
She covered her ears. “You’re mad at me,” she said.
“No,” he said, hugging her to him. “I wasn’t too happy last night, though. What did you want to talk to me about?”
“I wanted to know if I could live with you.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Really? You wouldn’t mind?”
“No,” he said.
While she was smiling at the startled look on his face, the waitress put a cheeseburger in front of him. She put an omelette in front of Penelope, and Penelope began to eat hungrily. He picked up his cheeseburger and bit into it. It was good. It was the first thing he had eaten in more than a day. Feeling sorry for himself, he took another bite.
“I just took a few drags of that stuff, and I felt like my mind was filling up with clouds,” she said.
“Forget about it,” he said. “You’re okay now.”
“I want to talk about something else, though.”
He nodded.
“I slept with Cyril,” she said.
“What?” he said. “When did you sleep with Cyril?”
“At the house,” she said. “And at his place.”
“Recently?” he said.
“A couple of days ago.”
“Well,” he said. “Why are you telling me?”
“Cyril told Dan,” she said.
That explained it.
“What do you expect me to say?” he said.
“I don’t know. I wanted to talk about it.”
He took another bite of his cheeseburger. He did not want her to talk about it.
“I don’t know why I should be all twisted around,” she said. “And I don’t even know why I’m telling you.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said.
“Are you jealous?”
“Yes.”
“Cyril said you had a crush on me,” she said.
“That makes it sound like I’m ten years old,” he said.
“I was thinking about going to Colorado,” she said.
“I don’t know what I expected,” he said, slamming his hand down on the table. “I didn’t expect that you’d be talking about screwing Cyril and going to Colorado.” He pushed his plate away, angry.
“I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Shouldn’t have told me what? What am I going to do about it? What do you expect me to say?”
“I thought you felt the way I feel,” she said. “I thought you felt stifled in New Haven.”
He looked at her. She had a way of sometimes saying perceptive things, but always when he was expecting something else.
“I have friends in Colorado,” she said. “Bea and Matthew. You met them when they stayed at the house once.”
“You want me to move out to Colorado because Bea and Matthew are there?”
“They have a big house they’re having trouble paying the mortgage on.”
“But I don’t have any money.”
“You have the money your father sent you so you could take courses at Yale. And you could get back into painting in Colorado. You’re not a picture framer — you’re a painter. Wouldn’t you like to quit your lousy job framing pictures and get out of New Haven?”
“Get out of New Haven?” he repeated, to see what it felt like. “I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t seem very reasonable.”
“I don’t feel right about things,” she said.
“About Cyril?”
“The last five years,” she said.
He excused himself and went to the bathroom. Scrawled above one of the mirrors was a message: “Time will say nothing but I told you so.” A very literate town, New Haven. He looked at the bathroom window, stared at the ripply white glass. He thought about crawling out the window. He was not able to deal with her. He went back to the booth.
“Come on,” he said, dropping money on the table.