Secrets & Surprises Read Free

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 Jomatoes being so unripe.”
    Stephanie was standing on the walkway, right where she had said she would be. She looked haggard, and Nick was not sure that he could cope with her. He raised his hand to his shirt pocket for cigarettes, forgetting once again that he had given up smoking. He also forgot that he couldn’t grab anything with his right hand because it was in a cast.
    “You know who I had in my cab the other day?” Arthur Shales said, coasting to a stop in front of the terminal. “You’re not going to believe it. Al Pacino.”
    For more than a week, Nick and Stephanie tried to reach Karen. Stephanie began to think that Karen was dead. And although Nick chided her for calling Karen’s number so often, he began to worry too. Once he went to her apartment on his lunch hour and listened at the door. He heard nothing, but he put his mouth close to the door and asked her to please open the door, if she was there, because there was trouble with Stephanie. As he left the building he had to laugh at what it would have looked like if someone had seen him—a nicely dressed man, with his hands on either side of his mouth, leaning into a door and talking to it. And one of the hands in a cast.
    For a week he came straight home from work, to keep Stephanie company. Then he asked Petra if she would have dinner with him. She said no. As he was leaving the office, he passed by her desk without looking at her. She got up and followed him down the hall and said, “I’m having a drink with somebody after work, but I could meet you for a drink around seven o’clock.”
    He went home to see if Stephanie was all right. She said that she had been sick in the morning, but after the card came in the mail—she held out a postcard to him—she felt much better. The card was addressed to him; it was from Karen, in Bermuda. She said she had spent the afternoon in a sailboat. No explanation. He read the message several times. He felt very relieved. He asked Stephanie if she wanted to go out for a drink with him and Petra. She said no, as he had known she would.
    At seven he sat alone at a table in the Blue Bar, with the postcard in his inside pocket. There was a folded newspaper on the little round table where he sat, and his broken right wrist rested on it. He sipped a beer. At seven-thirty he opened the paper and looked through the theater section. At quarter to eight he got up and left. He walked over to Fifth Avenue and began to walk downtown. In one of the store windows there was a poster for Bermuda tourism. A woman in a turquoise-blue bathing suit was rising out of blue waves, her mouth in an unnaturally wide smile. She seemed oblivious of the little boy next to her who was tossing a ball into the sky. Standing there, looking at the poster, Nick began a mental game that he had sometimes played in college. He invented a cartoon about Bermuda. It was a split-frame drawing. Half of it showed a beautiful girl, in the arms of her lover, on the pink sandy beach of Bermuda, with the caption: “It’s glorious to be here in Bermuda.” The other