Secrets & Surprises

Colorado

Penelope was in Robert’s apartment, sitting on the floor, with the newspaper open between her legs. Her boots were on the floor in front of her. Robert had just fixed the zipper of one of the boots. It was the third time he had repaired the boots, and this time he suggested that she buy a new pair. “Why?” she said. “You fix them fine every time.” In many of their discussions they came close to arguments, but they always stopped short. Penelope simply would not argue. She thought it took too much energy. She had not even argued with Robert’s friend Johnny, whom she had been living with, moved out on her, taking twenty dollars of her money. Still, she hated Johnny for it, and sometimes Robert worried that even though he and Penelope didn’t argue, she might be thinking badly of him, too. So he didn’t press it. Who cared whether she bought new boots or not?

Penelope came over to Robert’s apartment almost every evening. He had met her more than a year before, and they had been nearly inseparable ever since. For a while he and Penelope and Johnny and another friend, Cyril, had shared a house in the country, not far from New Haven. They had all been in graduate school then. Now Johnny had gone, and the others were living in New Haven, in different apartments, and they were no longer going to school. Penelope was living with a man named Dan. Robert could not understand this, because Dan and Penelope did not communicate even well enough for her to ask him to fix her boots. She hobbled over to Robert’s apartment instead. And he couldn’t understand it back when she was living with Johnny, because Johnny had continued to see another girl, and had taken Penelope’s money and tried to provoke arguments, even though Penelope wouldn’t argue. Robert could understand Penelope’s moving in with Dan at first, because she hadn’t had enough money to pay her share of the house rent and Dan had an apartment in New Haven, but why had she just stayed there? Once, when he was drunk, Robert had asked her that, and she had sighed and said she wouldn’t argue with him when he’d been drinking. He had not been trying to argue. He had just wanted to know what she was thinking. But she didn’t like to talk about herself, and saying that he was drunk had been a convenient excuse. The closest he ever got to an explanation was when she told him once that it was important not to waste your energy jumping from one thing to another. She had run away from home when she was younger, and when she returned, things were only worse. She had flunked out of Bard and dropped out of Antioch and the University of Connecticut, and now she knew that all colleges were the same — there was no point in trying one after another. She had traded her Ford for a Toyota, and Toyotas were no better than Fords.

She was flipping through the newspaper, stretched out on her side on the floor, her long brown hair blocking his view of her face. He didn’t need to look at her: he knew she was beautiful. It was nice just to have her there. Although he couldn’t understand what went on in her head, he was full of factual information about her. She had grown up in Iowa. She was almost five feet nine inches tall, and she weighed a hundred and twenty-five pounds, and when she was younger, when she weighed less, she had been a model in Chicago. Now she was working as a clerk in a boutique in New Haven. She didn’t want to model again, because that was no easier than being a salesperson; it was more tiring, even if it did pay better.

“Thanks for fixing my boots again,” she said, rolling up her pants leg to put one on.

“Why are you leaving?” Robert said. “Dan’s student won’t be out of there yet.”

Dan was a painter who had lost his teaching job in the South. He moved to New Haven and was giving private lessons to students three times a week.

“Marielle’s going to pick me up,” Penelope said. “She wants me to help her paint her bathroom.”

“Why can’t she paint her own bathroom? She could do the whole thing in an hour.”

“I don’t want to help her paint,” Penelope said, sighing. “I’m just doing a favor for a friend.”

“Why don’t you do me a favor and stay?”

“Come on,” she said. “Don’t do that. You’re my best friend.”

“Okay,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t fight over it anyway. He went to the kitchen table and got her coat. “Why don’t you wait till she gets here?”

“She’s meeting me at the drugstore.”

“You sure are nice to some of your friends,” he said.

She ignored him. She did not totally ignore him; she kissed him before she left. And although she did not say that she’d see him the next day, he knew she’d be back.

When Penelope left, Robert went into the kitchen and put some water on to boil. It was his habit since moving to this apartment to have a cup of tea before bed and to look out the window into the brightly lit alley. Interesting things appeared there: Christmas trees, large broken pieces of machinery, and, once, a fireman’s uniform, very nicely laid out — a fireman’s hat and suit. He was an artist — or, rather, he had been an artist until he dropped out of school — and sometimes he found that he still arranged objects and landscapes, looking for a composition. He sat on the kitchen table and drank his tea. He often thought about buying a kitchen chair, but he told himself that he’d move soon and he didn’t want to transport furniture. When he was a child, his parents had moved from apartment to apartment. Their furniture got more and more battered, and his mother had exploded one day, crying that the furniture was worthless and ugly, and threatening to chop it all up with an ax. Since he moved from the country Robert had not yet bought himself a bed frame or curtains or rugs. There were roaches in the apartment, and the idea of the roaches hiding — being able to hide on the underside of curtains, under the rug — disgusted him. He didn’t mind them being there so much when they were out in the open.

The Yale catalogue he had gotten months before when he first came to New Haven was still on the kitchen table. He had thought about taking a course in architecture, but he hadn’t. He was not quite sure what to do. He had taken a part-time job working in a picture-framing store so he could pay his rent. Actually, he had no reason for being in New Haven except to be near Penelope. When Robert lived in the house with Johnny and Cyril and Penelope, he had told himself that Penelope would leave Johnny and become his lover, but it never happened. He had tried very hard to get it to happen; they had often stayed up later than any of the others, and they talked — he had never talked so much to anybody in his life — and sometimes they fixed food before going to bed, or took walks in the snow. She tried to teach him to play the recorder, blowing softly so she wouldn’t wake the others. Once in the summer they had stolen corn, and Johnny had asked her about it the next morning. “What if the neighbors find out somebody from this house stole corn?” he said. Robert defended Penelope, saying that he had suggested it. “Great,” Johnny said. “The Bobbsey Twins.” Robert was hurt because what Johnny said was true — there wasn’t anything more between them than there was between the Bobbsey Twins.

Earlier in the week Robert had been sure that Penelope was going to make a break with Dan. He had gone to a party at their apartment, and there had been a strange assortment of guests, almost all of them Dan’s friends — some Yale people, a druggist who had a Marlboro cigarette pack filled with reds that he passed around, and a neighbor woman and her six-year-old son, whom the druggist teased. The druggist showed the little boy the cigarette pack full of pills, saying, “Now, how would a person light a cigarette like this? Which end is the filter?” The boy’s mother wouldn’t protect him, so Penelope took him away, into the bedroom, where she let him empty Dan’s piggy bank and count the pennies. Marielle was also there, with her hair neatly braided into tight corn rows and wearing glasses with lenses that darkened to blue. Cyril came late, pretty loaded. “Better late than never,” he said, once to Robert and many times to Penelope. Then Robert and Cyril huddled together in a corner, saying how dreary the party was, while the druggist put pills on his tongue and rolled them sensually across the roof of his mouth. At midnight Dan got angry and tried to kick them all out — Robert and Cyril first, because they were sitting closest to him — and that made Penelope angry because she had only three friends at the party, and the noisy ones, the drunk or stoned ones, were all Dan’s friends. Instead of arguing, though, she cried. Robert and Cyril left finally and went to Cyril’s and had a beer, and then Robert went back to Dan’s apartment, trying to get up the courage to go in and insist that Penelope leave with him. He walked up the two flights of stairs to their door. It was quiet inside. He didn’t have the nerve to knock. He went downstairs and out of the building, hating himself. He walked home in the cold, and realized that he must have been a little drunk, because the fresh air really cleared his head.

Robert flipped through the Yale catalogue, thinking that maybe going back to school was the solution. Maybe all the hysterical letters his mother and father wrote were right, and he needed some order in his life. Maybe he’d meet some other girls in classes. He did not want to meet other girls. He had dated two girls since moving to New Haven, and they had bored him and he had spent more money on them than they were worth.

The phone rang; he was glad, because he was just about to get very depressed.

It was Penelope, sounding very far away, very knocked out. She had left Marielle’s because Marielle’s boyfriend was there, and he insisted that they all get stoned and listen to “Trout Mask Replica” and not paint the bathroom, so she left and decided to walk home, but then she realized she didn’t want to go there, and she thought she’d call and ask if she could stay with him instead. And the strangest thing. When she closed the door of the phone booth just now, a little boy had appeared and tapped on the glass, fanning out a half circle of joints. “Ten dollars,” the boy said to her. “Bargain City.” Imagine that. There was a long silence while Robert imagined it. It was interrupted by Penelope, crying.

“What’s the matter, Penelope?” he said. “Of course you can come over here. Get out of the phone booth and come over.”

She told him that she had bought the grass, and that it was powerful stuff. It was really the wrong thing to do to smoke it, but she lost her nerve in the phone booth and didn’t know whether to call or not, so she smoked a joint — very quickly, in case any cops drove by. She smoked it too quickly.

“Where are you?” he said.

“I’m near Park Street,” she said.

“What do you mean? Is the phone booth on Park Street?”

“Near it,” she said.

“Okay. I’ll tell you what. You walk down to McHenry’s and I’ll get down there, okay?”

“You don’t live very close,” she said.

“I can walk there in a hurry. I can get a cab. You just take your time and wander down there. Sit in a booth if you can. Okay?”

“Is it true what Cyril told me at Dan’s party?” she said. “That you’re secretly in love with me?”

He frowned and looked sideways at the phone, as if the phone itself had betrayed him. He saw that his fingers were white from pressing so hard against the receiver.

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “Where I grew up, the cop cars had red lights. These green things cut right through you. I think that’s why I hate this city — damn green lights.”

“Is there a cop car?” he said.

“I saw one when you were talking,” she said.

“Penelope. Have you got it straight about walking to McHenry’s? Can you do that?”

“I’ve got some money,” she said. “We can go to New York and get a steak dinner.”

“Christ,” he said. “Stay in the phone booth. Where is the phone booth?”

“I told you I’d go to McHenry’s. I will. I’ll wait there.”

“Okay. Fine. I’m going to hang up now. Remember to sit in a booth. If there isn’t one, stand by the bar. Order something. By the time you’ve finished it, I’ll be there.”

“Robert,” she said.

“What?”

“Do you remember pushing me in the swing?”

He remembered. It was when they were all living in the country. She had been stoned that day, too. All of them — stoned as fools. Cyril was running around in Penelope’s long white bathrobe, holding a handful of tulips. Then he got afraid they’d wilt, so he went into the kitchen and got a jar and put them in that and ran around again. Johnny had taken a few Seconals and was lying on the ground, saying that he was in a hammock, and cackling. Robert had thought that he and Penelope were the only ones straight. Her laughter sounded beautiful, even though later he realized it was wild, crazy laughter. It was the first really warm day, the first day when they were sure that winter was over. Everyone was delighted with everyone else. He remembered very well pushing her in the swing.

“Wait,” he said. “I want to get down there. Can we talk about this when I get there? Will you walk to the bar?”

“I’m not really that stoned,” she said, her voice changing suddenly. “I think it’s that I’m sick.”

“What do you mean? How do you feel?”

“I feel too light. Like I’m going to be sick.”

“Look,” he said. “Cyril lives right near Park. What if you give me the number of the phone booth, and I call Cyril and get him down there, and I’ll call back and talk to you until he comes. Will you do that? What’s the phone number?”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t talk anymore right now,” she said. “I want to get some air.” She hung up.

He needed air too. He felt panicked, the way he had the day she was in the swing, when she said, “I’m going to jump!” and he knew it was going much too fast, much too high — the swing flying out over a hill that rolled steeply down to a muddy bank by the creek. He had had the sense to stop pushing, but he only stood there, waiting, shivering in the breeze the swing made.

He went out quickly. Park Street — somewhere near there. OK, he would find her. He knew he would not. There was a cab. He was in the cab. He rolled down the window to get some air, hoping the driver would figure he was drunk.

“What place you looking for again?” the driver said.

“I’m looking for a person, actually. If you’d go slowly …”

The cabdriver drove down the street at ordinary speed, and stopped at a light. A family crossed in front of the cab: a young black couple, the father with a child on his shoulders. The child was wearing a Porky Pig mask.

The light changed and the car started forward. “Goddamn,” the driver said. “I knew it.”

Steam had begun to rise from under the hood. It was a broken water hose. The cab moved into the next lane and stopped. Robert stuffed two one-dollar bills into the driver’s hand and bolted from the cab.

“Piece of junk!” he heard the driver holler, and there was the sound of metal being kicked. Robert looked over his shoulder and saw the cabdriver kicking the grille. Steam was pouring out in a huge cloud. The driver kicked the cab again.

He walked. It seemed to him as if he were walking in slow motion, but soon he was panting. He passed several telephone booths, but all of them were empty. He felt guilty about not helping the cabdriver, and he walked all the way to McHenry’s. He thought — and was immediately struck with the irrationality of it — that New Haven was really quite a nice town, architecturally.

Penelope was not at McHenry’s. “Am I a black dude?” a black man said to him as Robert wedged his way through the crowd at the bar. “I’m gonna ask you straight, look at me and tell me: Ain’t I a black dude?” The black man laughed with real joy. He did not seem to be drunk. Robert smiled at the man and headed toward the back of the bar. Maybe she was in the bathroom. He stood around, looking all over the bar, hoping she’d come out of the bathroom. Time passed. “If I was drunk,” the black man said as Robert walked toward the front door, “I might try to put some rap on you, like I’m the king of Siam. I’m not saying nothing like that. I’m asking you straight: Ain’t I a black dude, though?”

“You sure are,” he said and edged away.

He went out and walked to a phone booth and dialed Dan’s number. “Dan,” he said, “I don’t want to alarm you, but Penelope got a little loaded tonight and I went out to look for her and I’ve lost track of her.”

“Is that right?” Dan said. “She told me she was going to sleep over at Marielle’s.”

“I guess she was. It’s a long story, but she left there and she got pretty wrecked, Dan. I was worried about her, so—”

“Listen,” Dan said. “Can I call you back in fifteen minutes?”

“What do you mean? I’m at a phone booth.”

“Well, doesn’t it have a number? I’ll be right back with you.”

“She’s wandering around New Haven in awful shape, Dan. You’d better get down here and—”

Dan was talking to someone, his hand covering the mouthpiece.

“To tell you the truth,” Dan said, “I can’t talk right now. In fifteen minutes I can talk, but a friend is here.”

“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?”

“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.

“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.”

Zero wanders up behind him, and he tears off the piece of sketch paper and crumples it into a ball, throws it in the air. Zero’s eyes light up. They play ball with the piece of paper — he throws it high, and Zero waits for it and jumps. Finally the paper gets too soggy to handle. Zero walks away, then sits and scratches.

Behind the house is a ruined birdhouse, and some strings hang from a branch, with bits of suet tied on. The strings stir in the wind. “Push me in the swing,” he remembers Penelope saying. Johnny was lying in the grass, talking to himself. Robert tried to dance with Cyril, but Cyril wouldn’t. Cyril was more stoned than any of them, but showing better sense. “Push me,” she said. She sat on the swing and he pushed. She weighed very little — hardly enough to drag the swing down. It took off fast and went high. She was laughing — not because she was having fun, but laughing at him. That’s what he thought, but he was stoned. She was just laughing. Fortunately, the swing had slowed when she jumped. She didn’t even roll down the hill. Cyril, looking at her arm, which had been cut on a rock, was almost in tears. She had landed on her side. They thought her arm was broken at first. Johnny was asleep, and he slept through the whole thing. Robert carried her into the house. Cyril, following, detoured to kick Johnny. That was the beginning of the end.

He walks to the car and opens the door and rummages through the ashtray, looking for the joint they had started to smoke just before they found Bea and Matthew’s house. He has trouble getting it out because his fingers are numb from the cold. He finally gets it and lights it, and drags on it walking back to the tree with the birdhouse in it. He leans against the tree.

Dan had called him the day before they left New Haven and said that Penelope would kill him. He asked Dan what he meant. “She’ll wear you down, she’ll wear you out, she’ll kill you,” Dan said.

He feels the tree snapping and jumps away. He looks and sees that everything is OK. The tree is still there, the strings hanging down from the branch. “I’m going to jump!” Penelope had called, laughing. Now he laughs, too — not at her, but because here he is, leaning against a tree in Colorado, blown away. He tries speaking, to hear what his speech sounds like. “Blown away,” he says. He has trouble getting his mouth into position after speaking.

In a while Matthew comes out. He stands beside the tree and they watch the sunset. The sky is pale-blue, streaked with orange, which seems to be spreading through the blue sky from behind, like liquid seeping through a napkin, blood through a bandage.

“Nice,” Matthew says.

“Yes,” he says. He is never going to be able to talk to Matthew.

“You know what I’m in the doghouse for?” Matthew says.

“What?” he says. Too long a pause before answering. He spit the word out, instead of saying it.

“Having a Japanese girl friend,” Matthew says, and laughs.

He does not dare risk laughing with him.

“And I don’t even have a Japanese girl friend,” Matthew says. “She lives with a guy I work with. I’m not interested in her. She needed money to go into business. Not a lot, but some. I loaned it to her. Bea changes facts around.”

“Where did you go to school?” he hears himself say.

There is a long pause, and Robert gets confused. He thinks he should be answering his own question.

Finally: “Harvard.”

“What class were you in?”

“Oh,” Matthew says. “You’re stoned, huh?”

It is too complicated to explain that he is not. He says, again, “What class?”

“1967,” Matthew says, laughing. “Is that your stuff or ours? She hid our stuff.”

“In my glove compartment,” Robert says, gesturing.

He watches Matthew walk toward his car. Sloped shoulders. Something written across the back of his jacket, being spoken by what looks like a monster blue bird. Can’t read it. In a while Matthew comes back smoking a joint, Zero trailing behind.

“They’re inside, talking about what a pig I am,” Matthew exhales.

“How come you don’t have any interest in this Japanese woman?”

“I do,” Matthew says, smoking from his cupped hand. “I don’t have a chance in the world.”

“I don’t guess it would be the same if you got another one,” he says.

“Another what?”

“If you went to Japan and got another one.”

“Never mind,” Matthew says. “Never mind bothering to converse.”

Zero sniffs the air and walks away. He lies down on the driveway, away from them, and closes his eyes.

“I’d like some Scotch to cool my lungs,” Matthew says. “And we don’t have any goddamn Scotch.”

“Let’s go get some,” he says.

“Okay,” Matthew says.

They stay, watching the colors intensify. “It’s too cold for me,” Matthew says. He thrashes his arms across his chest, and Zero springs up, leaping excitedly, and almost topples Matthew.

They get to Matthew’s car. Robert hears the door close. He notices that he is inside. Zero is in the back seat. It gets darker. Matthew hums. Outside the liquor store Robert fumbles out a ten-dollar bill. Matthew declines. He parks and rolls down the window. “I don’t want to walk in there in a cloud of this stuff,” he says. They wait. Waiting, Robert gets confused. He says, “What state is this?”

“Are you kidding?” Matthew asks. Matthew shakes his head. “Colorado,” he says.