“What are you talking about?” Robert said. “Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying? If you’ve got some woman there, tell her to go to the toilet for a minute, for Christ’s sake.”
“That doesn’t cut the mustard anymore,” Dan said. “You can’t shuffle women off like they’re cats and dogs.”
Robert slammed down the phone and went back to McHenry’s. She was still not there. He left, and out on the corner the black man from the bar walked up to him and offered to sell him cocaine. He politely refused, saying he had no money. The man nodded and walked down the street. Robert watched him for a minute, then looked away. For just a few seconds he had been interested in the way the man moved, what he looked like walking down the street. When he had lived at the house with Penelope, Robert had watched her, too; he had done endless drawings of her, sketched her on napkins, on the corner of the newspaper. But paintings—when he tried to do anything formal, he hadn’t been able to go through with it. Cyril told him it was because he was afraid of capturing her. At first he thought Cyril’s remark was stupid, but now—standing tired and cold on the street corner—he had to admit that he’d always been a little afraid of her, too. What would he have done tonight if he’d found her? Why had her phone call upset him so much—because she was stoned? He thought about Penelope—about putting his head down on her shoulder, somewhere where it was warm. He began to walk home. It was a long walk, and he was very tired. He stopped and looked in a bookstore window, then walked past a dry cleaner’s. The last time he’d looked, it had been a coffee shop. At a red light he heard Bob Dylan on a car radio, making an analogy between time and a jet plane.
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?”
