Everybody Loves Somebody (20 page)

Whatever the exact sequence of events, Nora eventually found herself crossing a Beaux Arts threshold whose door was held open
by a man in tails and white gloves. She rode with the woman up the spacious elevator to the sixth floor, filed down a plush
hallway, and entered a dank, unpleasant box of a studio overlooking an airshaft, a single room furnished only with a mattress
on the floor, a card table, a small refrigerator, and an electric burner. The coil, left on, had heated into a pulsing red.

“Trust no one,
ch豩e,
” the woman said, bolting the door and turning with the flare of an experienced dancer to place her hat on a brass wall hook
shaped like a beckoning hand. “Except yourself. Trust your instinct.” This last word she pronounced with emphasis on the second
syllable. “Instinct will serve you well. Instinct will give you access to the true self behind the mask.” Behind what mask?
What did she mean? And why did she tuck a new cigarette into her holder and light it, only to leave it burning in the ashtray?

Nora indicated her puzzlement with a shrug, at which the woman seemed to take offense. Rapidly unbuttoning her coat, she said,
“You have already concluded I am raving mad!”

“No, really! I was, you know, just wondering where you’re from?”

“From?”

“From wh-where are you?” Nora stuttered through the jumbled syntax.

“I am third-generation American, if you please! But I have invited you here not to answer your questions but so you may confirm
a hunch for me.”

“A hunch?”

“You want cocoa, yes? And what stupid ass left the burner on! Mother of God. It couldn’t have been you, pussy-puss-puss. Somewhere
in this room there is my little pusswillow.”

Whether this woman was as raving mad as she dared Nora to consider her or whether she was amusing herself with the performance,
Nora would never know for sure. She was calling for her cat; obviously, there was no cat. It wasn’t hiding under the one table
or in a cabinet. “Here, sweetbit.” It wasn’t anywhere to be found. “Ah, mea culpa, little dandelion puff.” The cat clearly
didn’t exist, even if the woman thought otherwise.

“Love-pie!”

This was the moment when Nora should have excused herself and headed toward the door—except that the cat suddenly was there,
a blue-veined hairless feline lump, uncovered when the woman peeled back the bedspread. Pussy-puss-puss, with squinting eyes
and tuftless ears flattened in annoyance at the woman who had roused it from sleep. And suddenly what seemed mad was not the
woman herself but the Chinese box of a world which she inhabited, a cell inside a cell, which happened to be the same world
where Nora was trapped, a world designed to make no sense.

With the hairless cat on her lap, the woman positioned herself amid the pillows on the mattress while Nora took it upon herself
to heat milk and measure out the cocoa. They conversed about the weather—yesterday a storm, today clear, tomorrow predicted
to be overcast, perhaps with morning flurries. They talked about the carriage horses and the dangers of Central Park at night.
Then, out of the blue, the woman said, her gaze resting heavily on Nora’s back, “By the way, the money you purported to have
found belonged to you, I know. I never carry a bill so grand. Nothing more than three dollars, in case of purse-snatching.
I think, therefore, you have a secret.”

Nora flinched, startled by the woman’s insight, and her right heel slipped out of the suede nest of her desert boot. She struggled
to reset it while she stirred the cocoa and sugar into the milk.

“I don’t have any secret,” she murmured.

“Everyone has a secret. And your own has to do with money, I believe. A girl your age who returns her own money to a stranger
is looking for a gift she cannot bring herself to request directly. You have a need for charity, yes? You are looking for
a mother, yes? Perhaps it is that you are an orphan, yes? This is my hunch. Wrong or right?”

Nora had to bend over and untie her boot in order to fit her foot back into it. The action gave her a chance to formulate
a reply.

“Wrong.”

“Oh!” The woman voiced her surprise with this delicate exclamation and picked up her cigarette to indicate that she would
forget the subject altogether. Between puffs she sipped her hot cocoa. She told Nora about her dream of someday moving from
the back of the building to the front, into a luxury apartment with a view of the park. She said she had many boyfriends who
were contributing to her cause. They were none of them hippies, she said. This was her choice. She did not like hippies. Peace
signs pasted on their jeans. Hair down to their knees. Stay away from hippies, she warned Nora in a fading voice. Hippies
and dogs. There was no reason for dogs to exist, as far as the woman could see. And she could see very far. Hippies, dogs,
and purse-snatchers. Begin with instinct, she said, drifting off into a dream. And from there...

The sleeping, hairless cat floated like a strange seabird on the waves of the sleeping woman’s chest. Nora watched them for
a few minutes, then she turned off the burner, unlocked the door, and let herself out.

I’
M NOT SURE EXACTLY HOW
Nora occupied herself during the next couple of hours. She didn’t go into any stores or hotels, and I don’t know if she approached
any more women. But the day wore relentlessly on, and finally Nora Owen was standing beside me in the Automat, looking famished
and exhausted, her nose red from the wintry air.

“I think you dropped this.”

She held a crumpled bill, which I started to accept with gratitude. But when I saw it was a twenty, I withdrew my hand, convinced
that the money wasn’t mine and suspecting the kindness to be followed by some quick, clever swindle, likely with an accomplice
appearing on the scene any moment.

“Please” She thrust it back at me.

“You’re mistaken.”

“I found it...”

“It’s not mine.”

“It is”

“Not.”

“It must be.”

“No!”

My raised voice hushed the voices of diners around me, but only for a moment. After the pause, the murmur in the Automat resumed,
and I tried to continue reading. But the girl kept herself planted stubbornly beside my table, so I began gathering the sections
of the newspaper, preparing to leave. Then I looked up and saw that her face was damp and puckered from crying.

I figured that I was more than twice her age. I wasn’t ready to trust her completely, but I wanted to help. My work, I decided,
could wait while I bought this poor girl some lunch and listened to the story she had to tell.

With the money, Nora’s money, I bought her what she requested: a tuna sandwich and a cup of coffee. I pocketed the change,
intending to give it back to her as soon as she was ready to accept it. I was surprised to hear she wanted coffee but was
less surprised as I watched her dilute it with cream and three packets of sugar. She appeared relieved to have food in front
of her, behavior I initially misinterpreted as evidence that she didn’t usually know where her next meal was coming from.
But after we’d introduced ourselves I soon learned that she had a home in the suburbs and, I could guess, a mother who kept
the refrigerator well-stocked. She was in Manhattan because, well, um, to tell the truth, she was playing hooky, she confessed
with a grin.

I was starting to feel some impatience with her and suggested that she go ahead and eat her lunch. She took a sip of her coffee
to oblige me, then she clapped a hand over her mouth. Before I could ask her what was wrong, she’d gotten up from her seat
and rushed out the nearest exit. Through the window I watched her lean against the side of the building. She stood there with
her eyes closed, her hand tight over her lips, while people made a wide arc around her.

I stood up, meaning to offer assistance, but sat down again after deciding that my presence would only add to her discomfort
and embarrassment. Watching her, my suspicions began to clarify into a new formulation. The girl was no swindler. She was
not using money to make an illegal profit. She had no accomplices.

After a few minutes she recovered from the nausea, dabbed at her face with a paper napkin, and stretched her arms before she
returned to join me at the table in the Automat. I tried to lock her gaze with mine, but she shook her head, shaking away
unpleasant thoughts.

“You feel better now?”

“Sort of.”

“Good.”

“Mmm.”

“It’s really not my business...” I began.

“What?”

“I hope you don’t mind my asking...”

“What?”

“Are you in trouble, dear?”

She watched a customer poke change into the slot for the sandwich case. “I hate tuna,” she said idly, as though to herself.

“Then why’d you order it?”

“I didn’t order it. You just bought it for me.”

I bristled, hearing the ring of contempt in her voice. There would be no shaking her belief that the mistake was mine.

“Does coffee often make you ill?”

“No.”

“Do you think you’re coming down with the flu?”

“No.”

“Then there’s the other possibility to consider. The possibility of trouble. Now do you know what I mean?”

At the time, I judged her to be seventeen or eighteen. If I had known that she was only fourteen I don’t think I would have
confronted her so bluntly. Her sudden intake of breath suggested more the shock of guilt than of surprise. She started to
rise, then sat back down and rested her hands on the edge of the table. I expected her to begin to sob. Instead she leaned
forward, looked me straight in the eye, and, with a prepossession that made it my turn to cringe, said simply, “Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

This, I thought, was just how the girl, so sensible when faced with the world’s insanity, would have said it to her mother,
if her mother had known to ask. Yeah. That’s right. Big deal.

S
ITTING ACROSS FROM NORA OWEN
in the Automat, it occurred to me that she was
made much of,
to borrow a description from one of the historical documents I’d been reading recently, but the details were eluding me.
The turning point came when I decided I would not badger the defiant girl with more questions. After waiting for the explanation
that didn’t come, I stood up, preparing once more to leave her on her own. Truthfully, I wanted Nora to experience the force
of my impatience. She’d singled me out for a reason, but if she wasn’t going to say what, exactly, she needed from me, I wasn’t
going to linger.

I’d gotten halfway across the room before she rushed over to stop me. Wouldn’t I listen to what she had to say, she asked
me, the challenge colored with an accusatory emphasis. I’d only meant to encourage her to be forthright with me, but instead
she was acting as though she’d been abandoned. I felt an urge to do just that—to get on with my life and leave her to ensnare
some other willing stranger.

I motioned to the stools at the counter by the window and said I’d be right there. I filled my cup with more coffee and bought
a ginger ale for Nora and joined her a minute later.

I pushed the soda in front of her. She took little sips through the straw while she stared out the window. Maybe she needed
a prompt from me, but I preferred to wait. She waited with me. Through the smudged plate glass we watched the crowd swell
at the intersection and with a surge move forward with the light. We watched a man who’d been pulling a reluctant child by
the wrist scoop up the boy and carry him across the street. We watched a woman hail a taxi.

“You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had,” Nora said at last—not what I’d been expecting from her. “This crazy lady I met on
the street, she invited me up to her apartment, and when we got there”

“You shouldn’t be so trusting.”

“That’s just what she said. But I could tell right away that she was harmless.” She went on to recount the adventure from
the moment she’d met the woman to her culminating hunch.

“Her hunch?”

“She thought I wanted her to be my mother!” We both laughed at this, but our laughter soon evaporated into an awkward silence.
Keep going, I thought. Tell me the truth.

“The truth is,” Nora said, startling me with the echo of my thought, “she was sort of right. I mean, I am looking for a mother.
Are you my mother? Ha, just kidding. Anyway. The truth is, I am looking for a mother. But not for myself, not, I mean, it’s
just...”

She sipped her ginger ale between lips pressed into a tight, flirtatious smile. I felt suddenly as though I were being teased
with a strange kind of courtship, though I was stupidly slow to guess the content of her insinuations.

“What I’m saying is...it’s all about...it’s about how I’m looking for a mother. I mean a mother for my baby.”

“You’re having a baby?”

“That trouble we were talking about earlier. Get it?”

She’d thrown me off guard. I was supposed to offer help in the form of guidance, but now I couldn’t match her obvious implications
with their meaning. The trouble, her trouble. Get it? She was just a child herself. She didn’t know what she was saying. What
was she saying? “This guy, you know, he just.” The motor of her voice shut off again, but only for a few seconds. “Forget
it. Don’t ask me to talk about it!”

“That’s fine.” I was conscious of the stares of other diners and made a gesture with my hands to calm her. I had no sense
how to articulate my sympathy, partly because I still hadn’t quite let myself understand what she was telling me.

“So anyway.” She touched her belly. “Here we are.” She closed her eyes and settled back into her chair as if she were preparing
to sunbathe.

I wanted to suggest that surely there was someone else in her life more deserving of her confidence. But her tone of voice
conveyed fragility. I watched her, trying to imagine her thoughts.

“It’s so hard to explain,” she finally resumed, leaning forward. She’d slipped her straw from the glass and was drawing designs
on the counter with dribbles of soda. “Everything was fine, and then this happened. This shit. I could, you know, get rid
of it. But I’m going to do it.” She was drawing loops and crosses. Or was she signing her name? “I mean, go ahead and have
it.” She sucked air through the empty straw, then held it like a cigarette between her fingers.