After You've Gone by Alice Adams Page B

Perry,” she says. “He’s been wanting to meet you. You know, we drove down from Marin together.”
    Antonia and Perry acknowledge each other with smiles andsmall murmurs, difficult for Antonia, since she is now eating, ravenously.
    â€œReal bastards in the emergency ward,” Reeve is telling everyone; he obviously relishes his part in this rescue. “They let you wait forever,” he says.
    â€œAmong bleeding people on gurneys,” Antonia shudders. “You could die there, and I’m sure some people do, if they’re poor enough.”
    â€œ
Does
it hurt?” asks Lisa.
    â€œNot really. Really not at all. I just feel so clumsy. Clumsier than usual, I mean.”
    She and Lisa smile at each other: old friends, familiar irony.
    Now everyone has taken up forks again and begun to eat, along with Antonia. Wine is poured around, glasses refilled with red, or cold white, from pitchers.
    Reeve alone seems not to be eating much, or drinking—for whatever reasons of his own: sheer excitement, possibly, anyone who thinks about it could conclude. He seems nervy, geared up by his—their recent experience.
    The atmosphere is generally united, convivial, though. People tell their own accident stories, as they will when anyone has had an accident (hospital visitors like to tell the patient about their own operations). Bynum as a boy broke his right arm not once but twice, both times falling out of trees. Lisa broke her leg on some ice. “You remember, Antonia, that awful winter I lived in New York. Everything terrible happened.” Perry almost broke his back, “but just a fractured coccyx, as things turned out,” falling off a horse, in New Mexico (this story does not go over very well, somehow; a lack of response can be felt around the room). Phyllis broke her arm skiing in Idaho.
    Reeve refrains from such reminiscences—although he is such a tall, very vigorous young man; back in Wyoming, he must have broken something, sometime. He has the air of a man who is waiting for the main event, and who in the meantime chooses to distance himself.
    In any case, the conversation rambles on in a pleasant way, and no one is quite prepared to hear Antonia’s end-of-meal pronouncement. Leaning back and looking around, she says, “It’s odd that it’s taken me so long to see how much I hate it here.”
    This is surely something that she has never said before. However, Antonia has a known predilection for the most extreme, the most emotional statement of any given feeling, and so at first no one pays much serious attention.
    Lisa only says, “Well, the city’s not at its best in all this fog. And then your poor arm.”
    And Bynum? “You can’t mean this apartment. I’ve always loved it here.” (At which Phyllis gives him a speculative, not quite friendly look.)
    Looking at them all—at least she has everyone’s attention—Antonia says, “Well, I do mean this apartment. It’s so small, and so inconvenient having a studio five blocks away. Not to mention paying for both. Oh, I know I can afford it, but I hate to.” She looks over at Reeve, and a smile that everyone can read as significant passes between the two of them.
    One of Antonia’s cats, the guilty old tabby, Baron, has settled on her lap, and she leans to scratch the bridge of his nose, very gently.
    And so it is Reeve who announces, “I’ve talked Antonia into coming back to Wyoming with me. At least to recuperate.” He smiles widely (can he be blushing?), in evident pleasure at this continuation of his rescuer role.
    â€œI’m so excited!” Antonia then bursts out. “The Grand Tetons, imagine! I’ve always wanted to go there, and somehow I never dared. But Reeve has this whole house, and a barn that’s already a studio.”
    â€œIt’s actually in Wilson, which is just south of Jackson,” Reeve explains.