In the Night Café Read Online Free PDF Page A

be much older. They were pretty girls, implacably wholesome and optimistic. It was strange to think they’d known Tom much longer than I had. He’d taken them sailing when they were little and taught them to swim. “When we moved up here, we thought about calling him, but we felt funny about it,” one of them said. They told me Caroline had always been their A Number One favorite relative. All afternoon they’d been thinking about her, and they’d finally decided she should definitely do something special with her hair before her old flame arrived to take her to dinner. They’d been meaning to bring this up ever since they’d met her at the airport. “You can just set it in rollers, you know, and try teasing it some on top.”
    She seemed a little embarrassed but pleased by all the attention. “I can’t be bothered. I’ve no aptitude for anything like that.”
    â€œOh, we’ll do it for you. Please—it’ll make all the difference.”
    â€œDon’t you think she ought to try it?” one of them appealed to me.
    â€œAbsolutely,” I said, though I had no real opinion. Then I found myself saying, “Sure, take a chance. After all, what’s there to lose?” That was what Tom would have said. And if he’d been very drunk, he’d have put it, “Everyone dies. So why not?” But you could never say things like that at tea parties.
    By the time I left, the children had been coaxed into the bedroom to watch “Superman” and sure enough, the nieces had gotten Caroline onto a kitchen chair and put a towel around her shoulders. Bottles of conditioner had appeared and a whole arsenal of pink foam rubber. They were working against time. The gentleman from the past was due at seven. I learned he was a stockbroker, conveniently divorced, a man she could certainly have married if she hadn’t run off with Tom.
    One of the nieces wet a comb and started drawing it through Caroline’s hair and I saw a look come on her face of odd contentment.
    I kept learning about being a widow in little, distant flashes. I saw that after a very long while, if you had no one to touch you, you might eventually become someone who went to beauty parlors and paid to have strangers do your hair. You’d pay for the sensation of it, the hands of another human being pouring warmth on you, gently smoothing, stroking. You’d close your eyes and lean back into those hands and your face might have exactly that look, I thought.
    Life just goes on, you see, any old way it can. Even the dead can’t interrupt its flow.

4
    I CALLED CAROLINE afterwards from the subway station at Twenty-third Street. That was the only other conversation she and I ever had. I said, “Caroline, I want to spend some time with Tommy tomorrow.” I had to shout it over the phone to her because a train was going by on the lower level, and hearing a silence at the other end, I knew there wasn’t a prayer she’d let me do it. I’d been sure she wouldn’t all along.
    She said, “My God, what’s all that noise?”
    I said, “I’m in the subway, Caroline,” and she said something about the awfulness of subways and how could I bear to ride them? And then she said in a chilly, constrained voice, “Could you possibly pick him up by eleven? I’d like to go out to brunch.”
    That was all. No questions.
    I’ve wondered ever since if she’d actually somehow been counting on me, wanting to leave me alone with Tommy from the start.
    â€œThis is sweet of you, Joanna,” she said, as if I were doing her a favor.
    She wasn’t there when I picked him up.
    There are white, glittery mornings in New York when the wind steals your breath and salt runs out of your eyes. It was one of those, not ideal at all for a tour. It worried me that Tommy had immediately taken off his cap—a striped, knitted thing with a tassel