When he hung up, he took Petra’s glass but found that he had run out of Scotch. He suggested that they go to a bar on West Tenth Street.
When they got to the bar, he excused himself almost immediately. Karen had sounded depressed, and he could not enjoy his evening with Petra until he made sure everything was all right. Once he heard her voice, he knew he wanted to be with her and not Petra. He told her that he was going to come to her apartment when he had finished having a drink, and she said that he should come over immediately or not at all, because she was about to go to the professor’s. She was so abrupt that he wondered if she could be jealous.
He went back to the bar and sat on the stool next to Petra and picked up his Scotch and water and took a big drink. It was so cold that it made his teeth ache. Petra had on blue slacks and a white blouse. He rubbed his hand up and down her back, just below the shoulders. She was not wearing a brassiere.
“I have to leave,” he said.
“You have to leave? Are you coming back?”
He started to speak, but she put up her hand. “Never mind,” she said. “I don’t want you to come back.” She sipped her Margarita. “Whoever the woman is you just called, I hope the two of you have a splendid evening.”
Petra gave him a hard look, and he knew that she really wanted him to go. He stared at her—at the little crust of salt on her bottom lip—and then she turned away from him.
He hesitated for just a second before he left the bar. He went outside and walked about ten steps, and then he was jumped. They got him from behind, and in his shock and confusion he thought that he had been hit by a car. He lost sense of where he was, and although it was a dull blow, he thought that somehow a car had hit him. Looking up from the sidewalk, he saw them—two men, younger than he was, picking at him like vultures, pushing him, rummaging through his jacket and his pockets. The crazy thing was he was on West Tenth Street; there should have been other people on the street, but there were not. His clothes were tearing. His right hand was wet with blood. They had cut his arm, the shirt was bloodstained, he saw his own blood spreading out into a little puddle. He stared at it and was afraid to move his hand out of it. Then the men were gone and he was left half sitting, propped up against a building where they had dragged him. He was able to push himself up, but the man he began telling the story to, a passer-by, kept coming into focus and fading out again. The man had on a sombrero, and he was pulling him up but pulling too hard. His legs didn’t have the power to support him—something had happened to his legs—so that when the man loosened his grip he went down on his knees. He kept blinking to stay conscious. He blacked out before he could stand again.
Back in his apartment, later that night, with his arm in a cast, he felt confused and ashamed—ashamed for the way he had treated Petra, and ashamed for having been mugged. He wanted to call Karen, but he was too embarrassed. He sat in the chair by the phone, willing her to call him. At midnight the phone rang, and he picked it up at once, sure that his telepathic message had worked. The phone call was from Stephanie, at La Guardia. She had been trying to reach Karen and couldn’t. She wanted to know if she could come to his apartment.
“I’m not going through with it,” Stephanie said, her voice wavering. “I’m thirty-eight years old, and this was a goddamn accident.”
“Calm down,” he said. “We can get you an abortion.”
“I don’t know if I could take a human life,” she said, and she began to cry.
“Stephanie?” he said. “You okay? Are you going to get a cab?”
More crying, no answer.
“Because it would be silly for me to get a cab just to come get you. You can make it here okay, can’t you, Steph?”
The cabdriver who took him to La Guardia was named Arthur Shales. A small pink baby shoe was glued to the dashboard of the cab. Arthur Shales chain-smoked Picayunes. “Woman I took to Bendel’s today, I’m still trying to get over it,” he said. “I picked her up at Madison and Seventy-fifth. Took her to Bendel’s and pulled up in front and she said, ‘Oh, screw Bendel’s.’ I took her back to Madison and Seventy-fifth.”
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 tomatoes being so unripe.”
