What? She looked at him, her eyes a mixture of confusion and sudden mounting anger. No.
I just meant— I just wanted to make sure there’s someone here to take care of you.
I don’t need anyone to take care of me, Nat, she said. Her sense of anger seemed to have faded just as quickly as it had come. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek and then opened the door and stepped out into the drizzling rain. He thought she might say something to him, some last thing, but the door swung closed and he watched her walk up the stairs to the apartment and disappear inside.
He did not see her the next day nor the day after that and although he knew that he had no reason to expect her to knock on his door again he still caught himself harboring that expectation, as if what he had done had cemented some bond that he knew they did not actually share. And then the guilt, because he also knew he was pining over his best friend’s girlfriend, a condition that became acute only after he heard, from the car’s tinny radio, Rick Springfield singing plaintively and publically about everything he held secret in his heart. He punched the buttons on the car stereo to find anything else but all the stations had turned to static and he drove on past the nightclubs and casinos with the hiss of dead air streaming into the car from all directions at once.
He did not hear from her for two weeks but then she appeared again, knocking on the apartment door on a bright warm day and asking him, of all things, if he would like to go see a movie with her, a question that seemed so surprising that all he could do was stammer out a brief, Sure, sure, that sounds great, all the while standing in the doorway in a kind of frozen bewilderment until she said, Well, OK, let’s go then, and he turned and grabbed his coat and keys and came out the door so quickly that he nearly collided with her. Easy tiger, she said and laughed.
She put her arm through his as they came down the stairs and he smiled. When they entered the car she told him that she was grateful he was her friend. Her hand came into his own for a moment and squeezed it.
I’m glad I could help, he said.
He drove them across town to the movie theater by the Peppermill using the same route he used nearly every evening when driving to work, a route he did not have to think about but which turned them through the casinos and down Virginia Street past all the bars and clubs he and Rick had spent their nights in, the storefronts of which looked grim and silent in the white light of the late afternoon.
He bought them popcorn and sodas from the concession stand and they sat next to each other in the back row like lovers and midway through the film she laid her head upon his shoulder and then whispered up at him, Put your arm around me, Nat. I’m cold, and he did, stroking her hair slowly in the darkness while people danced on the glowing flat plane of the screen. That feels nice, she said. The heart in his chest seemed a machine blown clear of all measure, not beating anymore but ringing out like the hammer and bell of an alarm clock. He did not know what was happening on the screen and did not care. For years afterward, any time he would hear the film’s title song on the radio he would be transported back to that theater, to the smell of popcorn and the warmth of her nestled there beside him in the darkness like a secret. As if they were innocent. As if anything was.
Later, they sat on the sofa in his apartment and she sat so close to him that her knee pressed against his own, the feeling of it a faint heat running into him. She told him that both her parents were dead, that her father had worked for the telephone company, that her mother had been an office clerk of some kind, and that both were alcoholics. She told him that when she was fifteen her father had tried to drive the three of them into the grave at the wheel of a funeral-black Oldsmobile. Both mother and father had been killed in the accident. She had survived. Her only living relative was an uncle but he was in prison in Carson City and for this reason they put her in foster care and she walked away from that house in the middle of the night and came to Reno.
The strawberry wine seemed to slosh back and forth inside his chest. He wanted to ask her more about those blank years but he also did not want to know what she had done to survive. As it turned out he could not have asked her anyway because in the next moment she had pushed him back onto the sofa and had slid her tongue into his mouth.
He thought that he should stop but his body was moving of its own accord now, moving with a ferocious and unstoppable need. He might have been saying something too but if so he could not stop that either. The words were like a colored ribbon pulling out of him.
What’re you sorry about? she said into his ear.
What?
You keep saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” What are you sorry about?
Shouldn’t we—, he began but there were no words beyond those two and when she pulled his hands to her breasts he could not even think of what question he was trying to ask.
HE AWOKE to the pain of his throbbing finger, opening his crusted eyes into his dingy bedroom, the contents illuminated by an angle of light that seemed incongruous with the morning. He did not know what time it was and at first could not remember what had happened but then it all came flooding back to him and when he pulled his hand up in front of his face he could see the tattered white tissues wrapping his broken finger. He pulled the clock from where it lay on the dirty carpet below him and set it upon his chest: 12:05. Then the lit window high up on the wall and then back to the clock again. It was past noon.