The Waiting Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

said.
    She nodded and let go of my hand.
    "My name's Sam," I told her.
    "Mine's Leslie Wirth," she said.
    "Good to meet you, Leslie." I shook her hand. Her grip was weaker than it had been twenty minutes before. I said, "Can I call you?"
    She smiled noncommittally. "Thanks for the moral support, Sam."
    "My pleasure."
    When she got out of the cab in front of her sister's house on Mission Boulevard in Jackson Heights, I called after her, "You didn't answer me."
    She looked back. "About what?"
    "About calling you."
    "Oh. You're right, I didn't."
    "Well," I said, "can I or can't I?"
    "I wish you would," she answered, smiled invitingly, and went up the walk to her sister's house.
    ~ * ~
    I called her three days later. We went to a Chinese restaurant called the Imperial Palace, on East 29th Street, where she made light conversation about an aquarium near our table. A cockroach climbed up the side of the aquarium and we both scowled at it. I didn't know what her feelings about cockroaches were then. For all I knew, she could have jumped up from her seat and run away screaming. But she didn't. She said that the cockroach was gone and that was good. I agreed. If she had jumped up and run screaming from the restaurant I don't believe I'd have anything to write now; I think the whole thing would have ended there. So our first agreement was about a cockroach.
    I've always thought that people in love should agree.
    After the restaurant we walked in a small park near Second Avenue. There were no streetlamps and the evening was pleasantly cool. My arm slipped easily around her waist, and her arm slipped easily around mine. There was no groping, no uncertainty. It was as easy as our conversation. She told me I had a belly and should get rid of it. I chuckled. I didn't like being told that I had a belly because I was constantly sucking it in and thought no one noticed.
    "No I don't," I said.
    "Yes, you do. You're out of shape."
    I shrugged. "I guess I am," I said, and I found that I didn't at all mind admitting my imperfections to her.

FOUR
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    The last time I saw Abner in Bangor, I thought he was a lot more than just another of my high school friends, more than merely someone who had written something stupid in my high school yearbook. I thought we'd shared quite a lot during our five years in school together. Hell, we'd grown up together, we had shared the torments and anxieties of the damned (the damned, of course, being those who have to live through the ages of thirteen to seventeen). I'd told him secrets that I'd never have told anyone else, and he had done the same with me. So, in the most important ways, we were like brothers.
    After I got shipped off to Viet Nam, I wrote him at least two dozen long, rambling, and drearily philosophical letters about what a "shitty place" it was and what a "shitty war" we were waging there, and he wrote long, newsy letters about goings-on in Bangor and goings-on in his life, his thoughts, his loves, his heartaches.
    When I came home, I learned that he'd gone to live in the Midwest. I wrote several letters to various addresses his father gave me, but only one was answered, briefly and brusquely, and the rest were returned marked "Addressee Unknown." Inexorably, we fell out of touch.
    But when I saw him come out of that little Greek restaurant in New York twenty years later, he was like a lifeline to my past, to a time when I was younger, and happier, more naive, less cynical, more hopeful—to a time when I was pretty much of a nerd, too. And the fact that I had such a short glimpse of him then, that first time, made it very dreamlike, almost romantic. Sort of, This is my brother and I haven't seen him in a long time and here in this big impersonal city we can prop each other up and give each other strength.
    So, when I saw him that second time, when that crazy cabbie roared past me, down East 42nd Street, I latched on to the first thing that might possibly get Abner and me back together