Algis Budrys - Who?

She nodded quickly. “Yes, I do. Would you like the number?”

“I’ll write it down.” He found a piece of paper in his wallet and a pencil in his shirt pocket. He wrote the number down, put his wallet and his pencil back, and once again they simply stood there.

“Monday’s my day off,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

“All right, Luke.”

He looked down at her, thinking, No, no, God damn it, I’m not going to try and kiss her good night. This isn’t like that. This is a crazy thing. She’s not like that.

“Good night, Edith.”

“Good night, Luke.”

He reached out and touched her shoulder, feeling as though he had a stupid expression on his face. She put her hand up and covered his. Then he turned away and went quickly down the stairs, feeling like a fool, and a savage, and an idiot, and like almost anything but an eighteen-year-old boy.

When he went to work the next day, he was all mixed up. No matter how much he thought about it, he couldn’t make sense out of what had happened to him yesterday. He went about his work in an abstracted daze, his mind so knotted that his face was completely blank. He avoided Barbara’s eyes, and tried to keep from talking to her.

Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, she trapped him behind the counter. He stood there hopelessly, caught between the espresso machine and the cash register, an emptied cup dangling from his hand.

Barbara smiled at him pleasantly. “Hey, there, Tedesco, thinking about your money?” There was an anxious tightness in the skin at the corners of her eyes.

“Money?”

“Well — you know. When somebody goes around in a fog, people usually ask him if he’s thinking about his money.”

“Oh! No — no, it’s not anything like that.”

“What’d you do yesterday? Fall in love?”

His face turned hot. The cup almost dropped out of his hand, as though he were an automatic machine and Barbara had struck a button. And then he was astonished at his reaction to the word. He stood gaping, completely off-stride.

“I’ll be damned,” Barbara said. “I hit it.”

Lucas had no clear idea of what to say. Fall in love? No! “Look — Barbara — it’s not… that way…”

“What way?” Her cheekbones were splotched with red.

“I don’t know. I’m just trying to explain…”

“Look, I don’t care what way it is. If it’s giving you trouble, I hope you get it straightened out. But I’ve got a fellow who gives me troubles, now and then.”

As she thought about it, she realized she was being perfectly honest. She remembered that Tommy was a very nice guy, and interesting too. It was a shame about Lucas, because she’d always thought he’d be nice to go out with, but that was the way things worked out: you got a certain fair share of good breaks from life, and you had no right to expect things your way every time.

She was already closing down her mind to any possibility that there might have been more than a few friendly dates between them. She was a girl with a great deal of common sense, and she had learned that there was nothing to be gained in life from idle second thoughts.

“Well, rush hour’s coming up,” she said pointedly, got the sugar can out from under the counter, and went to refill the bowls on her tables. Her heels tapped rapidly on the wooden floor.

For a long moment, Lucas was only beginning to get his thoughts in order. The whole business had happened so fast.

He looked toward where Barbara was busy with her tables, and it was obvious to him that as far as she was concerned, the whole episode was over.

Not for him. It was barely beginning. Now it had to be analyzed — gone over, dissected, thoroughly examined for every possible reason why things had worked out this way. Only yesterday morning he had been a man with a definite course of action in mind, based on a concrete and obvious situation.

Now everything was changed, in such a short space of time, and it was unthinkable that anyone could simply leave it at that, without asking how, and why.

And yet Barbara was obviously doing just that-accepting a new state of affairs without question or investigation.

Lucas frowned at the problem. It was an interesting thing to think over.

It was even more than that, though he was at best partially aware of it. It was a perfect problem to consider if he didn’t want to think about the way he felt toward Edith.

He stood behind the counter, thinking that all the people he had ever known — even people fully as quickminded as Barbara — consistently took things as they came. And it struck him that if so many people were that way, then there must be value in it. It was actually a far simpler way of living — less wasteful of time, more efficient in its use of emotional energy, more direct.

Then, it followed that there was something inefficient and basically wrong with his whole approach to living among other people. It was no surprise that he’d fallen into this emotional labyrinth with Barbara and Edith.

Now his mind had brought him back to that. How did he feel about Edith? He couldn’t just forget about it. He’d asked for her phone number. She’d be expecting him to call. He could see her, quite plainly, waiting at night for the phone to ring. He had a responsibility there.

And Barbara. Well — Barbara was tough-fibered. But he must have hurt her at least a little bit.

But how had this whole business come about? In one day, he’d made a mess of everything. It might be easy to simply forget it and start fresh, but could he do that? Could he let something like this stay in the back of his mind forever, unresolved?

I’m all fouled up, he thought.

He had thought he understood himself, and had shaped himself to live most efficiently in his world. He had made plans on that basis, and seen no flaws in them. But now he had to re-learn almost everything before a new and better Lucas Martino could emerge.

For one more moment before he had to get to work, he tried to decide how he could puzzle it all out and still learn not to waste his time analyzing things that couldn’t be changed. But rush hour was coming. People were already starting to trickle into the store, and his tables weren’t set up yet.

He had to leave it at that, but not permanently. He pushed it to the back of his mind, where he could bring it out and worry at it when he had time — where it could stay forever, unchanging and waiting to be solved.

Circumstances trapped him. Soon he was in school. There he had to learn to give precisely the answers expected of him, and no others. He learned, and there was no difficulty about the scholarship to Massachusetts Tech. But that demanded a great deal of his attention.

He saw Edith fairly often. Whenever he called her, it was always with the hope that this time something would happen — they’d fight, or elope, or do something dramatic enough to solve things at one stroke. Their dates were always nerve-racking for that reason, and they were never casual with each other. He noticed that she gradually let her hair grow out dark brown, and that she stopped living on her parents’ checks. But he had no idea of what that might mean. She found work in a store on Fourteenth Street, and moved into a nearby cold-water flat where they sometimes visited together. But he had maneuvered himself into a position where every step he made to solve one problem only made the other worse. So he wavered between them. He and Edith rarely even kissed. They never made love.

He stayed on at Espresso Maggiore until his studies began taking up too much of his time. He often talked to Barbara through slack times in the day. But they were just two people working in the same place and helping each other fight boredom. The only things they could talk about were the work, his studies, or what would happen to her fiancee whose grades hadn’t stayed up and who was now in Asia. Never, with anyone, could he talk about anything important to him.