Secrets & Surprises (20 page)

Outside, she began to cry. “I could have asked Cyril to go, but I didn’t,” she said.

He put his arm around her. “You’re bats,” he said.

He tried to get her to walk faster. By the time they got back to his apartment, she was smiling again, and talking about going skiing in the Rockies. He opened the door and saw a note lying on the floor, written by Dan. It was Penelope’s name, written over and over, and a lot of profanity. He showed it to her. Neither of them said anything. He put it back on the table, next to an old letter from his mother that begged him to go back to graduate school.

“I want to stop smoking,” she said, handing him her cigarette pack. She said it as if it were a revelation, as if everything, all day, had been carefully leading up to it.

It is a late afternoon in February, and Penelope is painting her toenails. She had meant what she said about moving in with him. She didn’t even go back to Dan’s apartment for her clothes. She has been borrowing Robert’s shirts and sweaters, and wears his pajama bottoms under his long winter coat when she goes to the laundromat so she can wash her one pair of jeans. She has quit her job. She wants to give a farewell party before they go to Colorado.

She is sitting on the floor, and there are little balls of cotton stuck between her toes. The second toe on each foot is crooked. She wore the wrong shoes as a child. One night she turned the light on to show Robert her feet, and said that they embarrassed her. Why, then, is she painting her toenails?

“Penelope,” he says, “I have no interest in any damn party. I have very little interest in going to Colorado.”

Today he told his boss that he would be leaving next week. His boss laughed and said that he would send his brother around to beat him up. As usual, he could not really tell whether his boss was kidding. Before he goes to bed, he intends to stand a Coke bottle behind the front door.

“You said you wanted to see the mountains,” Penelope says.

“I know we’re going to Colorado,” he says. “I don’t want to get into another thing about that.”

He sits next to her and holds her hand. Her hands are thin. They feel about an eighth of an inch thick to him. He changes his grip and gets his fingers down toward the knuckles, where her hand feels more substantial.

“I know it’s going to be great in Colorado,” Penelope says. “This is the first time in years I’ve been sure something is going to work out. It’s the first time I’ve been sure that doing something was worth it.”

“But why Colorado?” he says.

“We can go skiing. Or we could just ride the lift all day, look down on all that beautiful snow.”

He does not want to pin her down or diminish her enthusiasm. What he wants to talk about is the two of them. When he asked if she was sure she loved him she said yes, but she never wants to talk about them. It’s very hard to talk to her at all. The night before, he asked some questions about her childhood. She told him that her father died when she was nine, and her mother married an Italian who beat her with the lawnmower cord. Then she was angry at him for making her remember that, and he was sorry he had asked. He is still surprised that she has moved in with him, surprised that he has agreed to leave New Haven and move to Colorado with her, into the house of a couple he vaguely remembers—nice guy, strung-out wife.

“Did you get a letter from Matthew and Bea yet?” he says.

“Oh, yes, Bea called this morning when you were at work. She said she had to call right away to say yes, she was so excited.”

He remembers how excited Bea was the time she stayed with them in the country house. It seemed more like nervousness, really, not excitement. Bea said she had been studying ballet, and when Matthew told her to show them what she had learned, she danced through the house, smiling at first, then panting. She complained that she had no grace—that she was too old. Matthew tried to make her feel better by saying that she had only started to study ballet late, and she would have to build up energy. Bea became more frantic, saying that she had no energy, no poise, no future as a ballerina.

“But there’s something I ought to tell you,” Penelope says. “Bea and Matthew are breaking up.”

“What?” he says.

“What does it matter? It’s a huge state. We can find a place to stay. We’ve got enough money. Don’t always be worried about money.”

He was just about to say that they hardly had enough money to pay for motels on the way to Colorado.

“And when you start painting again—”

“Penelope, get serious,” he says. “Do you think that all you have to do is produce some paintings and you’ll get money for them?”

“You don’t have any faith in yourself,” she says.

It is the same line she gave him when he dropped out of graduate school, after she had dropped out herself. Somehow she was always the one who sounded reasonable.

“Why don’t we forget Colorado for a while?” he says.

“Okay,” she says. “We’ll just forget it.”

“Oh, we can go if you’re set on it,” he says quickly.

“Not if you’re only doing it to placate me.”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to stick around New Haven.”

“Then what are you complaining about?” she says.

“I wasn’t complaining. I was just disappointed.”

“Don’t be disappointed,” she says, smiling at him.

He puts his forehead against hers and closes his eyes. Sometimes it is very nice to be with her. Outside he can hear the traffic, the horns blowing. He does not look forward to the long drive West.

In Nebraska they get sidetracked and drive a long way on a narrow road, with holes so big that Robert has to swerve the car to avoid them. The heater is not working well, and the defroster is not working at all. He rubs the front window clear with the side of his arm. By early evening he is exhausted from driving. They stop for dinner at Gus and Andy’s Restaurant, and are served their fried-egg sandwiches by Andy, whose name is written in sequins above his shirt pocket. That night, in the motel, he feels too tired to go to sleep. The cat is scratching around in the bathroom. Penelope complains about the electricity in her hair, which she has just washed and is drying. He cannot watch television because her hair dryer makes the picture roll.

“I sort of wish we had stopped in Iowa to see Elaine,” she says. Elaine is her married sister.

She drags on a joint, passes it to him.

“You were the one who didn’t want to stop,” he says. She can’t hear him because of the hair dryer.

“We used to pretend that we were pregnant when we were little,” she says. “We pulled the pillows off and stuck them under our clothes. My mother was always yelling at us not to mess up the beds.”

She turns off the hair dryer. The picture comes back on. It is the news; the sportscaster is in the middle of a basketball report. On a large screen behind him, a basketball player is shown putting a basketball into a basket.

Before they left, Robert had gone over to Cyril’s apartment. Cyril seemed to know already that Penelope was living with him. He was very nice, but Robert had a hard time talking to him. Cyril said that a girl he knew was coming over to make dinner, and he asked him to stay. Robert said he had to get going.

“What are you going to do in Colorado?” Cyril asked.

“Get some kind of job, I guess,” he said.

Cyril nodded about ten times, the nods growing smaller.

“I don’t know,” he said to Cyril.

“Yeah,” Cyril said.

They sat. Finally Robert made himself go by telling himself that he didn’t want to see Cyril’s girl.

“Well,” Cyril said. “Take care.”

“What about you?” he asked Cyril. “What are you going to be up to?”

“Much of the same,” Cyril said.

They stood at Cyril’s door.

“Seems like we were all together at that house about a million years ago,” Cyril said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Maybe when the new people moved in they found dinosaur tracks,” Cyril said.

In the motel that night, in his dreams Robert makes love to Penelope. When the sun comes through the drapes, he touches her shoulder and thinks about waking her. Instead, he gets out of bed and sits by the dresser and lights the stub of the joint. It’s gone in three tokes, and he gets back into bed, cold and drowsy. Going to sleep, he chuckles, or thinks he hears himself chuckling. Later, when she tries to rouse him, he can’t move, and it isn’t until afternoon that they get rolling. He feels tired but still up from the grass. The effect seems not to have worn off with sleep at all.

They are at Bea and Matthew’s house. It was cloudy and cold when they arrived, late in the afternoon, and the sides of the roads were heaped high with old snow. Robert got lost trying to find the house and finally had to stop in a gas station and telephone to ask for directions. “Take a right after the feed store at the crossroads,” Matthew told him. It doesn’t seem to Robert that they are really in Colorado. That evening Matthew insists that Robert sit in their one chair (a black canvas butterfly chair) because Robert must be tired from driving. Robert cannot get comfortable in the chair. There is a large photograph of Nureyev on the wall across from Robert, and there is a small table in the corner of the room. Matthew has explained that Bea got mad after one of their fights and sold the rest of the living-room furniture. Penelope sits on the floor at Robert’s side. They have run out of cigarettes, and Matthew and Bea have almost run out of liquor. Matthew is waiting for Bea to drive to town to buy more; Bea is waiting for Matthew to give in. They are living together, but they have filed for divorce. It is a friendly living-together, but they wait each other out, testing. Who will turn the record over? Who will buy the Scotch?

Their dog, Zero, lies on the floor listening to music and lapping apple juice. He pays no attention to the stereo speakers but loves headphones. He won’t have them put on his head, but when they are on the floor he creeps up on them and settles down there. Penelope points out that one old Marianne Faithfull record seems to make Zero particularly euphoric. Bea gives him apple juice for his constipation. She and Matthew dote on the dog. That is going to be a problem.

For dinner Bea fixes beef Stroganoff, and they all sit on the floor with their plates. Bea says that there is honey in the Stroganoff. She is ignoring Matthew, who stirs his fork in a circle through his food and puts his plate down every few minutes to drink Scotch. Earlier Bea told him to offer the bottle around, but they all said they didn’t want any. A tall black candle burns in the center of their circle; it is dark outside, and the candle is the only light. When they finish eating, there is only one shot of Scotch left in the bottle and Matthew is pretty drunk. He says to Bea, “I was going to move out the night before Christmas, in the middle of the night, so that when you heard Santa Claus, it would have been me instead, carrying away Zero instead of my bag of tricks.”

“Bag of
toys,
” Bea says. She has on a satin robe that reminds Robert of a fighter’s robe, stuffed between her legs as she sits on the floor.

“And laying a finger aside of my nose …” Matthew says. “No, I wouldn’t have done that, Bea. I would have given the finger to you.” Matthew raises his middle finger and smiles at Bea. “But I speak figuratively, of course. I will give you neither my finger nor my dog.”

“I got the dog from the animal shelter, Matthew,” Bea says. “Why do you call him your dog?”

Matthew stumbles off to bed, almost stepping on Penelope’s plate, calling over his shoulder, “Bea, my lovely, please make sure that our guests finish that bottle of Scotch.”

Bea blows out the candle and they all go to bed, with a quarter inch of Scotch still in the bottle.

“Why are they getting divorced?” Robert whispers to Penelope in bed.

They are in a twin bed, narrower than he remembers twin beds being, lying under a brown-and-white quilt.

“I’m not really sure,” she says. “She said that he was getting crazier.”

“They both seem crazy.”

“Bea told me that he gave some of their savings to a Japanese woman who lives with a man he works with, so she can open a gift shop.”

“Oh,” he says.

“I wish we had another cigarette.”

“Is that all he did?” he asks. “Gave money away?”

“He drinks a lot,” Penelope says.

“So does she. She drinks straight from the bottle.” Before dinner Bea had tipped the bottle to her lips too quickly and the liquor ran down her chin. Matthew called her disgusting.

“I think he’s nastier than she is,” Penelope says.

“Move over a little,” he says. “This bed must be narrower than a twin bed.”

“I
am
moved over,” she says.

He unbends his knees, lies straight in the bed. He is too uncomfortable to sleep. His ears are still ringing from so many hours on the road.

“Here we are in Colorado,” he says. “Tomorrow we’ll have to drive around and see it before it’s all under snow.”

The next afternoon he borrows a tablet and walks around outside, looking for something to draw. There are bare patches in the snow—patches of brown grass. Bea and Matthew’s house is modern, with a sundeck across the back and glass doors across the front. For some reason the house seems out of place; it looks Eastern. There are no other houses nearby. Very little land has been cleared; the lawn is narrow, and the woods come close. It is cold, and there is a wind in the trees. Through the woods, in front of the house, distant snow-covered mountains are visible. The air is very clear, and the colors are too bright, like a Maxfield Parrish painting. No one would believe the colors if he painted them. Instead he begins to draw some old fence posts, partially rotted away. But then he stops. Leave it to Andrew Wyeth. He dusts away a light layer of snow and sits on the hood of his car. He takes the pencil out of his pocket again and writes in the sketchbook: “We are at Bea and Matthew’s. They sit all day. Penelope sits. She seems to be waiting. This is happening in Colorado. I want to see the state, but Bea and Matthew have already seen it, and Penelope says that she cannot face one more minute in the car. The car needs new spark plugs. I will never be a painter. I am not a writer.”