“Why didn’t you tell me you knew Joe?” I said as soon as she sat down.
Rose looked a little surprised. “I did. First day we met.”
“No, I mean knew Joe. Slept with him. You were his girlfriend.”
This time she looked a lot surprised, but something else, too. Several expressions, including what I thought were anger and sadness, passed over her face. “Jack, I wasn’t his ‘girlfriend,’” she said finally.
“Everyone in here seems to think so, including” --I tossed my head in Susie’s direction--“the waitress.” I paused. Rose was looking down at her hands. She wasn’t wearing nail polish these days; in fact her nails were stained and chipped on the ends, and she picked at the rough skin of a callous that had formed on her right palm. I repeated my question. “So, why didn’t you tell me? D’you think I’d be jealous?”
“No.”
“Well, what?”
Rose looked up. “Are you gonna break up with him, Jack?”
“No. I don’t know.” I tried to read her face, but all I could see was that she was concentrating--the look that she had the first time we met, when she crossed the street. “Maybe. But I don’t get it. I thought you were my friend. How come you didn’t tell me Do you still have a thing for him?”
“No!” The word came out louder than she probably meant it to. The people at the next table looked our way.
“No,” Rose repeated. “I don’t ‘have a thing’ for him. And you shouldn’t, either.”
“Hey, I love Joe. He’s been really great to me. I can’t help it if he dumped you and--”
“He didn’t dump me. It isn’t like you think.”
“So tell me how it is.”
Rose exhales heavily. She looked angry again, her brow creased and her dark eyes glittering. “It isn’t. I don’t want him He doesn’t want me. But he’s a creep, Jackie, and I don’t want you--"
"Oh, stop it!” I interrupted. “We’ve been friends for a year. Why didn’t either of you say anything?”
“He probably doesn’t remember.”
“Whattaya mean? Because he was drunk?”
“Well, he was drunk, we both were, but that’s not why. I... I wasn’t anything to him, Jack. Just something he wanted to do. An experience he wanted to have.”
I didn’t know quite what to make of this, but, I didn’t like it, so I got up, pushing my chair back hard against the wall. Susie had just come up to our table carrying glasses of ice water in both hands. I brushed past her roughly, making her spill the water, and I ran out of the restaurant and down the block toward home. I don’t think Rose tried to follow me, because after I slowed down and looked back at Buddy’s, there was no one on the sidewalk.
It was only a few blocks to my house, but I didn’t want to go home right away, so I angled up toward the campus and cut across the quad to the Student Union. It was just about dusk, and nobody much was around. I sat down on the steps by the Union. I felt like crying, but I didn’t.
I sat there breathing kind of hard and watching the bats that come out that time of the evening. They flapped out of the big trees that ring the quad and looped, one by one, around the grassy square. I remembered watching my brothers “fish” for bats from the front porch of our house in Paris. They’d tie a small sinker on the end of their fishing line and cast it up in the air toward the trees in our yard. The bats, mistaking it for some kind of flying bug, would swoop out of the trees at the sinker, pulling up at the last minute, when they realized it wasn’t something to eat after all. “Sucker!” my brothers would yell at the bats and cast again.
