“Figure it out,” she said bitterly.
She knew her worth. He was required to say that he was done with the Natural Woman. Nothing less would do.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you for being sorry.”
“Becky—”
“What.”
“I really like you.”
It wasn’t enough. She picked up a rag and returned to the dining room to wipe down tables. It wasn’t enough, and then she heard how hard he slammed the front door behind him. She heard the hurt of his having called her house and come looking for her, only to be treated so meanly, and suddenly the person she was but didn’t understand was running out into the night. Tanner was slumped against the side of his Volkswagen bus, his head bowed. At the sound of her feet, as they outran her better judgment, he looked up. She ran straight into his arms. A breeze from the south had risen, more springlike than autumnal. The hands she’d dreamed of were on her head, in her hair. And then, just like that, in the most unplanned and unconsidered way, it had happened.
She was awakened by the telephone. She’d fallen asleep on her back, crossways on her bed, and opened her eyes to a gray sky framed by her window and broken by black branches. Her mother was tapping on her door.
“Becky? It’s Jeannie Cross.”
She went to the phone in her parents’ bedroom and waited for her mother to hang up downstairs. Jeannie was calling about a party that night at the Carduccis’。 Becky appreciated that Jeannie was still including her, and she might have liked to accept the invitation for friendship’s sake. But she was going to the concert.
“There’s a concert?”
“Crossroads,” Becky said.
A silence.
“I see,” Jeannie said.
“You know what, though? I’m going with Tanner.”
“Tanner Evans?”
“Yeah, he’s the headliner, and he’s taking me.”
“Well, well, well.”
Becky was tempted to say more, but she might already have said too much. Tanner didn’t quite know yet that he was taking her to the concert. In her mind, their very long kiss had been definitive, but much had been left unspoken, and she wouldn’t feel secure until the world had seen her walk into First Reformed on his arm. She asked Jeannie if she wanted to go shopping with her. It was almost funny how eagerly Jeannie said yes, after all these weeks of distance. But Jeannie wasn’t free until three thirty.
“Shoot,” Becky said. “I’m meeting Tanner at four.”
“Wow, Bex. Too busy with a guy.”
“I know,” she said happily. “It’s weird.”
“Tomorrow, though? I’m not doing anything all day.”
Becky took a long shower and performed delicate work at the bathroom mirror, applying makeup that was enhancing without, she hoped, being noticeable. Perry banged rudely on the locked door, offered some commentary which she ignored, and went away. Dressing, too, she labored to strike a balance between elegance and Crossroads. She had to look good for at least the next ten hours, beginning especially at four o’clock. By the time she went down to the kitchen, her mother was bundling herself into a frightful old coat.
“I’m late to my class,” her mother said. “Can you make sure you’re home by six?”
Becky filled her mouth with a sugar cookie. “I’m not going to the Haefles’ party.”
“I’m afraid that’s not negotiable.”
“I’m not negotiating.”
“You can discuss it with your father, then.”
“There’s nothing to discuss.”
Her mother sighed. “You know, honey, it’s not the worst thing in the world to make a young man wait. I know it doesn’t feel that way to you, but there is always tomorrow.”
“Thank you for your input.”
“I take it he managed to find you last night?”
“I thought you were late for your exercise class.”
Her mother sighed more heavily and turned away. Becky was sorry to have to freeze her out. Her goodwill was boundless, but her mother was wrong. Tomorrow was too late for the work she had to do. Tanner wasn’t headlining the concert, he was co-headlining it with Laura Dobrinsky. Becky needed every minute she could get with him before it started.
The time had come to take action. A dull red gash had opened and closed below the clouds on the eastern horizon, over the fields of broken cornstalks distantly visible from the window of Clem’s room, while he typed the last sentences of his Roman history term paper. His desk, in the uneasy light, was stubbled over with red eraser morsels and cloud-colored ash. His clean-living roommate, Gus, had already decamped to Moline for the holidays, and Clem had seized on his absence to smoke heavily all night, powering himself forward with nicotine and with rage at his primary sources, Livy and Polybius, for contradicting each other, rage also at the dwindling of his hoped-for hours of sleep from six to three to zero, and rage, most of all, at himself for having spent Monday seeking pleasure in his girlfriend’s bed, allowing himself to believe that he could research and write a fifteen-page paper in two twelve-hour workdays. The pleasure he’d experienced on Monday now amounted to nothing. His eyes and his throat were on fire, his stomach on the verge of digesting itself. The paper he’d produced, on Scipio Africanus, was an ill-argued tangle of repetitive phrases for which he’d be lucky to get a B-minus. Its badness was the final confirmation of a thing he’d known for weeks.