Everybody Loves Somebody (19 page)

He can’t wait to be home. But as he drives through the center of town, he begins to wonder if Trudy will guess that he’s been
drinking. He’s more than two hours late. He should have called. Of course he’ll apologize for being late, but once he explains
about the deer, the flat tire, and Cyril’s garage, she’ll realize that it couldn’t have been helped. Will she let him take
her in his arms? Oh, Trudy, give your husband a kiss, show him that you love him. But she won’t love him, not if she assumes
he’s intoxicated. Her attitude will need no more expression than what her body will convey as she pushes him away.

Although he’s only a couple of miles from home, he decides to stop for a cup of hot black coffee at HoJo’s. The hostess greets
him by name and leads him to a booth by the window. He moves with slow, deliberate steps to keep himself steady. While he’s
waiting for his coffee, he uses the restaurant’s pay phone to call home.

“Trudy,” he says, half covering the mouthpiece with his hand.

“Bob, is that you? I’ve been so worried!”

“Some...ting, thing, something unexpected...”

“What’s happened?”

It takes an effort to speak precisely. “I had a blowout on the road. I’m here...where am I? They’re fixing the tire, here
at the garage.”

“I can hardly hear you.”

“A bad connection. Listen, I be—will be home in an hour. They’re fixing the flat.”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, Bob.”

Back at his booth, sipping his coffee, he imagines the scene he has managed to avoid. If he’d gone home too soon, his wife
would have smelled the whiskey on his breath and responded with the cold resistance that he has envisioned countless times,
though never actually witnessed. In the six years of their marriage he hasn’t given her any reason to doubt him. But if she
did doubt him, if she thought him less than worthy simply because he’d had more than a few drinks, wouldn’t he have tried
to turn to his child for affection, his darling little baby, perfect in every way? What young father doesn’t live to hear
the sound of his child’s laughter when he tosses her into the air and catches her, tosses her again and again like a beanbag?
Up the stairs he would have pounded, every stride heavy with the vivid awareness that he was a man who others assumed had
made it
. Heading directly into the baby’s room, he would have fumbled with the wall switch, and when the light flicked on, he would
have found that Trudy had managed to arrive before him and already planted herself in front of the crib, as placid and powerful
as the doe who’d made sure that her fawns crossed safely from one side to the other of Route 28.

Women always think men are blind to their own faults. The truth is, Bob knows the dangers of liquor and is able to remain
in control. But it’s not easy when business and related situations demand the courteous acceptance of whatever’s offered—mimosas
and beer and whiskey. Because he’s a courteous man, Bob is at HoJo’s drinking coffee instead of trying to prove to Trudy that
he can put one foot in front of the other.

It occurs to him that
flabbergasted
is a good word, a word that can fill the mind like helium in a balloon. Though the scene will never be enacted, he still
can’t believe that if he were home by now, his wife wouldn’t let him hold the baby. But he has to believe it. Confronted with
what she’d interpret as the evidence of his intemperance, his wife would refuse to let him reassure her. He can predict the
outcome of their argument, if they’d gone ahead and argued. But isn’t it always better to avoid a conflict than to persist
in stubborn self-righteousness? He won’t make the same mistakes other men make. It’s really very simple: he’ll stay at HoJo’s
drinking black coffee, then he’ll go home.

OR ELSE

In the Automat

N
ora Owen had never arrived alone in the city before, and now she found herself swept toward the exit by the pack of morning
commuters, most of them businessmen who proceeded in a vaguely furtive manner, as though they were secretly and independently
trailing someone who was trailing someone else, the crowds separating into currents up the escalators and across the main
concourse beneath the vaulted ceiling and its pinpoint constellations, carrying Nora this way and that and finally to the
end of a taxi line. But she didn’t want a taxi, and once she realized what the others were waiting for she headed in the opposite
direction, downtown on Vanderbilt, no, uptown and over to Fifth, yes, this was correct. Firmly en route, she swung her arms,
fingers balled into loose fists. The ridges below her cheeks swelled when she tightened her jaw. Every few steps her lower
lip disappeared beneath her upper teeth and then reappeared as she exhaled in a long, determined sigh.

She paused to study a window display. A fan blew sparkling ribbons around a mannequin draped from head to toe in mink. Inside
the store, a clerk moved slowly, like a fish along the bottom of a clear lake. Nora watched the clerk adjust a blouse on a
hanger. She watched the mannequin. She watched the shadowy reflection of herself watching and with a start noticed the image
of a man looming behind her—a ghost, or a trick of perception, and when she turned he shouldn’t really have been there. But
he was there—a black man in a speckled wool coat holding in his outstretched hand a worn red leather wallet identical to the
one she’d been carrying in her back pocket.

“Does this belong to you?”

He had stolen her wallet. Next he’d hit her, knock her to the ground, and race away, taking with him the seventy-eight dollars
she’d managed to save over the past year. She knew that such things happened routinely in the city. Except...what did he say?

“Um...”

“Yes?”

“Me?”

“You dropped this.”

“I did?”

She wanted to thank him, but first she had to check to make sure her money was still in the wallet. When she looked up again
the man was walking away with a decisiveness that from behind conveyed a fierce disgust, though the tilt of his head suggested
that he might have been laughing. So Nora laughed, too, along with the rich old matron who’d been laboriously entering the
store with tottering, high-heeled steps and had paused to witness the conversation.

“It’s your lucky day, miss!” cried the old woman in delight. Nora made a motion as though tipping a hat, and she continued
on her way, heading uptown on Fifth Avenue. She rested the fingertips of one hand on the wallet in her pocket. She intended
to be more careful with her belongings, though not careful enough to guard against the sudden blinding of the winter sun as
she crossed the street, the glare dissolving the oncoming taxi into a watery nothing. The taxi honked, Nora jumped, and that
was that—the taxi had already entered the jam on Fifth Avenue and Nora was safely up on the curb.

She stopped to examine a store’s display of robes and slippers. She stopped again to admire the diamonds in Tiffany’s window.
She crossed Fifth Avenue beside a man walking a poodle, both of whom, man and dog, were haloed by white puffed curls.

Up the carpeted steps of the hotel past a doorman who was helping a woman into a limousine. Through the revolving door and
into the hushed lobby. Red-capped wooden soldiers dangled on gold threads from the branches of a ten-foot Christmas tree.
Piles of gift boxes sparkled in the light cast by the immense chandelier. Everyone seemed to be floating a few inches in the
air, except for Nora. What was she doing there? Blink. Um. The pale, freckled face of a girl inept at deception. She felt
like she would collapse in a faint if someone asked her what she wanted. But staff and guests alike seemed absorbed in some
important communal task, and Nora could move among them along the main corridor without any objections. She could muse over
a breakfast menu posted on a pedestal. Even better, she could retreat into the shadows of stairway number 5 and sit on the
bottom stair, settle herself, relax. She could listen to the pleasant music coming from the Palm Court. She could savor the
mingling scents of perfume and cinnamon and cigarettes.

Eyes narrowed into a squint, shoulders hunched, back stooped, knees indecorously apart. She held steady, but the longer she
sat and watched, the more her attitude expressed uncertainty. She stared at the ladies in their furs, watched one and then
another as they made their way along the corridor. Not many people noticed her. A bellman wheeling his cart nodded with a
hint of complicity, and one elderly man circled back after passing her once, tapped his cane near her feet, and hissed something,
though whether it was an admonition, an insult, or advice, she wasn’t sure.

She sat there for a long time, long enough to think hard about her strategy. The plan she’d devised at home did not include
a detailed vision of action. And so she sat and thought and thought some more. And then all at once she sprang up, seized
by an idea, fumbled for her wallet, slipped a bill from it, and discreetly crumpled it in her hand.

“Ma’am, excuse me, ma’am, I think, um, you dropped this.” Nora held up the dollar bill. The woman, a wispy, fragile thing
enshrouded in a lavender silk pantsuit, looked at her with disbelief that within seconds had transformed into disdain.

“Pardon?”

“You dropped this?” She could only cast the possibility as a question. This, um, here—a whole dollar. Actually, it was Nora’s
dollar, but Nora was pretending otherwise, earning no more than the woman’s cough of scorn and retaining the dollar for herself.

Although shaken, she wasn’t yet defeated, and after a few minutes she tried again, catching a woman on her way to the powder
room down the hall. But the woman, who had dark eyes furrowed with thick, extravagantly arched brows, spoke little English.
She shrugged and took the dollar from Nora, then searched in her own purse for change. Confused, she thrust the handful of
coins toward Nora, and Nora was obliged to accept it—a total of one dollar and thirty cents, unintended profit that had a
heartening effect.

She decided that one dollar wasn’t enough. Next time, she tried a five-dollar bill.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

The woman glared at her. Her dyed blond elegance looked coarse at close range. Nora smiled weakly. Without a word, the woman
accepted the five dollars and clacked away on sequined shoes before Nora could explain.

She would have no other opportunity to try again, for a concierge came striding toward her, obviously preparing to ask if
she was indeed staying at the hotel or if she was what she appeared: an abominable vagrant off the streets.

No need to bother asking. Nora brushed past him, ducking to hide her face and keep him from enjoying the pleasure of her humiliation.
He stood with folded arms, watching to make sure she reached the doors without an escort.

O
N THE MORNING
of the day that I first met Nora Owen, I was at the main branch of the public library, though not in my usual place, which
had already been claimed by a woman who was bent over the desk, studying her documents with a magnifying glass. I was impressed
by her absorption in her work. Taking a seat at a table across the aisle, I set out to mimic her concentration.

I’d intended to spend the whole day working on an extensive footnote, but as the hours passed, I became convinced that I’d
been wasting my time. I’d wasted the morning on a footnote, and I’d wasted many months on a project that would come to nothing.
The more I considered it, the more defeated I felt: the subject of my research was arcane, and my information came from questionable
sources. I might as well have been transcribing the documents word for word. I’d been working intently, with the effort that
as a child I devoted to color-by-number kits. I’d been too pleased with the precision of my study to wonder about my purpose,
and I’d forgotten to ask myself whether the fantastic claims I’d been recounting were true.

Shortly after eleven o’clock I left the library. Instead of going directly back to my apartment, I set out walking. I stopped
in a shop on Madison and bought a pair of leather gloves—a Christmas present for my fianç—and a scarf for my sister.
At noon I decided to have some lunch. Back then, in the winter of 1972, there was still an Automat on the southeast corner
of Third Avenue and Forty-second Street, and this is where, after I finished my sandwich, I spent a lazy hour sipping coffee
cranked from the mouth of a brass dolphin and reading the newspaper. This is where I first laid eyes on Nora Owen.

A
COUPLE OF LONG BLOCKS WEST OF THE HOTEL
, Nora decided to try again, acting this time with a jittery boldness that made itself visible in the ten-dollar bill she
pretended to scoop from the sidewalk.

“Excuse me”

“Mmm?”

The woman’s age was hard to gauge beneath the mask of rouge and eye shadow. She could have been forty-five or twenty-five.
A tall white woman with a wide-brimmed black hat, a white lamb’s wool coat, and black boots, she inhaled smoke through her
long cigarette holder and studied the money Nora offered.

“I think you dropped this?” Nora leaned her weight forward on the ball of her left foot. For a few awkward seconds the woman
didn’t say anything. Then she did something remarkable enough to draw stares from passersby: she withdrew her cigarette holder
from the corner of her mouth, pursed her glossy lips, turned her face aside, and spit onto the curb.

“You are a dear,” the woman growled, her English tinged with a slight accent that Nora couldn’t identify. “You are truly the
sweetest thing I have seen in months, and for your kindness you must come home with me and enjoy a cup of hot cocoa, yes?”

“Um...”

“Yes!”

Later, Nora would tell this story more than once to me. In one version, the woman took her by the hand and forcefully led
her into a nearby building. In another version, the woman delivered a lengthy monologue right there on the street—a speech
about the rarity of a girl as innocent and sweet as Nora in a world rife with criminals.