“You remember me?”
She looked up. “Sure.”
“Thanks for driving me home the other night. How’d you get home?”
“Walked.”
“You could’ve taken a cab and just told them to put it on my father’s account.”
“He must be an important man.”
“He is.” Then: “Mind if I sit down?”
“I sort of have a boyfriend.”
“The football player?”
“Yes.” She smiled and he was cut in half so profound was the effect of her smile on him. He wanted to cry in both joy and sorrow, joy for her smile, sorrow for her words. He felt scared, and wondered if he might be losing his mind. He’d been drinking too much beer lately, that was for sure. “The funny thing is, I don’t even like sports.”
“I’d like to go out with you sometime.”
“I guess I’m just not sure how things’re going to go with Brad. So I really can’t make any dates.”
A few weeks later — well into outrageous green suffocating summer now — Peter heard that Brad took a bad spill on his motorcycle. Real bad. He’d be in University hospital for several months.
He’d tried to distract himself with the wildest girls he could find. He had a lot of giggles and a lot of sex and a lot of brewskis and yet he was still soul-empty. He’d never felt like this. Empty this way. Empty and scared and lonely and jealous. What the hell was it about Nora anyway? Sure, she was beautiful but so were most of his girls. Sure, she was winsome and sweet but so were some of the girls he’d dated seriously. Sure, she was— And then he realized what it was. He couldn’t have her. That was what was so special about her. If she’d ever just give in to him the way the other girls did... he wouldn’t want her.
She was just playing games like all the other girls (or so he’d always imagined they were playing games anyway) and he was — for the first time — losing.
He did a very irrational thing one rainy night. He parked in the alley behind her apartment house and watched as she left the house. He climbed the fire escape along the back and broke into her room and there he saw her paintings. They were everywhere, leaning against the walls, set in chairs, standing on one of the three easels. As silver rain eeled down the windows, he stood in the lightning-flashes of the night and escaped into the various worlds she had painted. They looked like magazine cover illustrations from every decade in this century — the doughboys of World War I, the hollow-eyed farmers of the Depression, the dogfaces of World War II, a young girl with a 1950s hula hoop, an anti-Vietnam hippie protester, a stockbroker on the floor, Times Square the first night of the new century. There was a reality to the illustrations that gave him a dizzy feeling, as if they were drawing him into the world they represented. He’d have to give up smoking so much pot, too. It obviously wasn’t doing him any good.
Then she came home, carrying a small damp sack of groceries, her red hair bejeweled with raindrops. The funny thing was she didn’t even ask him why he was here. She just set down the groceries and came to him.
Not long after that, a local newspaper editor, Paul Sheridan, came up on the street to him and said, “I see you know Nora Caine. She’s going to teach you a lot.” As always, the white-haired, ruddy-cheeked Sheridan smelled of liquor. He was in his sixties. As a young man, he’d written a novel that had sold very well. But that was the end of his literary career. He could never seem to find a suitable subject for a second novel. His wife and daughter had died in a fire some time ago. He had inherited the newspaper from his father and ran it until his drinking caused him to bring in his cousin, who ran the paper and did a better job than Paul ever had. Now Paul wrote some editorials, some reviews of books nobody in a town like this would ever read, and did pieces on town history, at which he excelled. There was always talk that somebody should collect these pieces that stretched back now some twenty-five years but as yet nobody had. Sheridan said: “If you’re strong, Peter, you’ll be the better man for it.”
What the hell was Sheridan muttering about? How did he even know that Peter knew Nora? And how the hell did anybody Sheridan’s age know Nora?
It was two weeks before she’d let Peter sleep with her. He was crazy by then. He was so caught up in her, he found himself thinking unimaginable things: he wouldn’t go to college, he’d get a job so they could get married. And they’d have a kid. He didn’t want to lose her and he lived in constant terror that he would. But if they had a kid... When he was away from her, he was miserable. His parents took to giving him long confused looks. He no longer returned the calls of his buddies — they seemed childish to him now. Nora was the one lone true reality. He would not wash his hands sometimes for long periods; he wanted to retain their intimacy. He learned things about women — about fears and appetites and nuances. And he learned about heartbreak. The times they’d argue, he was devastated when he realized that someday she might well leave him.
And so it went all summer.
He took her home. His parents did not care for her. “Sort of... aloof” his mother said. “What’s wrong with Tom Bolan’s daughter? She’s a lot better looking than this Nora and she’s certainly got a nicer pair of melons” his father said. To which his mother predictably replied, “Oh, Lloyd, you and your melons. Good Lord.”
They avoided the old places he used to go. He didn’t want to share her.
There was no intimacy they did not know, sexual, mental, spiritual. She even got him to go to some lectures at the University on Buddhism and he found himself not enraptured (as she seemed to be) but at least genuinely interested in the topic and the discussion that followed.
He would lay his hand on her stomach and dream of the kid they’d have. He’d see toddlers on the street and try to imagine what it’d be like to have one of his own. And you know what, he thought it would be kinda cool, actually. It really would be.
And then, this one morning, she was gone.
Her landlady told him that a cab had shown up right at nine o’clock this morning and taken her and her two bags (they later found that she’d shipped all her canvases and art supplies separately) and that she was gone. She said to tell Peter goodbye for her.
He’d known they were in some sort of trouble these past couple of weeks — something she wouldn’t discuss — but now it had all come crashing down.
A cab had picked her up. Swept her away. Points unknown.
Tell Peter goodbye for me.
He had enemies. The whole Wyeth family did. Whenever anything bad happened to one of the Wyeths the collective town put on a forlorn face of course (hypocrisy not being limited to Madison Avenue cocktail parties) and then proceeded to chuckle when the camera was off them.
A fine handsome boy, they said, too bad.
He wasn’t a fine boy, though, and everybody knew it. He had treated some people terribly. Girls especially. Get them all worked up and tell them lots of lies and then sleep with them till a kind of predatory spell came over him and he was stalking new blood once again. There had been two abortions; a girl who’d sunk into so low a depression that she had to stay in a hospital for a time; and innumerable standard-issue broken hearts. He was no kinder to males. Boys who amused him got to warm themselves in the great presence of a Wyeth; but when they amused him no longer — or held strong opinions with which he disagreed or hinted that maybe his family wasn’t all that it claimed to be — they were banished forever from the golden kingdom.
So who could argue that the bereaved, angry, sullen, despondent, boy who had been dumped by a passing-through girl... who could argue that he didn’t deserve it?
His mother suggested a vacation. She had family in New Hampshire.