Ann Beattie - Secrets & Surprises

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?”

“She didn’t finish high school with me. Her parents yanked her out and put her in private school. For all I know, she did go to Mexico and wash up on the beach.”

She covered her ears. “You’re mad at me,” she said.

“No,” he said, hugging her to him. “I wasn’t too happy last night, though. What did you want to talk to me about?”

“I wanted to know if I could live with you.”

“Sure,” he said.

“Really? You wouldn’t mind?”

“No,” he said.

While she was smiling at the startled look on his face, the waitress put a cheeseburger in front of him. She put an omelette in front of Penelope, and Penelope began to eat hungrily. He picked up his cheeseburger and bit into it. It was good. It was the first thing he had eaten in more than a day. Feeling sorry for himself, he took another bite.

“I just took a few drags of that stuff, and I felt like my mind was filling up with clouds,” she said.

“Forget about it,” he said. “You’re okay now.”

“I want to talk about something else, though.”

He nodded.

“I slept with Cyril,” she said.

“What?” he said. “When did you sleep with Cyril?”

“At the house,” she said. “And at his place.”

“Recently?” he said.

“A couple of days ago.”

“Well,” he said. “Why are you telling me?”

“Cyril told Dan,” she said.

That explained it.

“What do you expect me to say?” he said.

“I don’t know. I wanted to talk about it.”

He took another bite of his cheeseburger. He did not want her to talk about it.

“I don’t know why I should be all twisted around,” she said. “And I don’t even know why I’m telling you.”

“I wouldn’t know,” he said.

“Are you jealous?”

“Yes.”

“Cyril said you had a crush on me,” she said.

“That makes it sound like I’m ten years old,” he said.

“I was thinking about going to Colorado,” she said.

“I don’t know what I expected,” he said, slamming his hand down on the table. “I didn’t expect that you’d be talking about screwing Cyril and going to Colorado.” He pushed his plate away, angry.

“I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Shouldn’t have told me what? What am I going to do about it? What do you expect me to say?”

“I thought you felt the way I feel,” she said. “I thought you felt stifled in New Haven.”

He looked at her. She had a way of sometimes saying perceptive things, but always when he was expecting something else.

“I have friends in Colorado,” she said. “Bea and Matthew. You met them when they stayed at the house once.”

“You want me to move out to Colorado because Bea and Matthew are there?”

“They have a big house they’re having trouble paying the mortgage on.”

“But I don’t have any money.”

“You have the money your father sent you so you could take courses at Yale. And you could get back into painting in Colorado. You’re not a picture framer — you’re a painter. Wouldn’t you like to quit your lousy job framing pictures and get out of New Haven?”

“Get out of New Haven?” he repeated, to see what it felt like. “I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t seem very reasonable.”

“I don’t feel right about things,” she said.

“About Cyril?”

“The last five years,” she said.

He excused himself and went to the bathroom. Scrawled above one of the mirrors was a message: “Time will say nothing but I told you so.” A very literate town, New Haven. He looked at the bathroom window, stared at the ripply white glass. He thought about crawling out the window. He was not able to deal with her. He went back to the booth.

“Come on,” he said, dropping money on the table.

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.