The following is an excerpt from the story Going:
It wasn’t so hard to understand, was it? He was in love and wanted to be with her. And she owed it to him, didn’t she? Hadn’t she made him love her, promising that she was going to be around for a long, long time when they first met and then, after not such a very long time, leaving New York City to attend that art school in Boston? Didn’t she understand the stress and strain on him to be so far away from her, and the expense of traveling all those miles by bus or train so he could have a weekend with her in her Park Drive apartment overlooking the Fenway for that year she was away? Besides, it would be good for her to have a summer job, to see how real people lived, rather than run off to her family’s huge estate up there in the Catskills, as she had been doing every summer of her life. Even her mother, Lydia, said so.
Such thoughts went through Mark’s mind as he stood under the shade of a honey locust tree on the West Village side street. The tree was one of many on the long block of brownstones and other small buildings, and he was grateful for the shade on a hot, humid afternoon and the respite from the bustle of Manhattan and the carpet of crud laid down by the buses and trucks on the avenues. But as he waited for Claudia to emerge from the design studio owned by a family friend in the four-story building, other less certain thoughts began to fill his mind—mainly, that he was seeking to alter the current of her life. They triggered a surge of anxiety that quickly had him in its grip. He imagined Claudia in a state of fury for having bent to his will, and suddenly envisioned her as a powerful locomotive bursting through the building’s walls and roaring right over him.
Afterward he would wonder if that moment of mental weakness had been her opening to break free, if possibly his insecurity had traveled through the outer wall of the building and lodged in her mind. For if she was not a locomotive, she nevertheless emerged with a look of fury on her pretty face and tore past him without a word. Down the block she streaked, and when finally he caught up with her at the corner and reached for her shoulder, she shook free and continued on her way. Only at the entrance to the subway at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue did she turn to him and say, with an emphatic quality to her words, “Look, I am an artist, not some sort of nine to five person as you would have me be. I will not do paste-ups and mechanicals all day while gray-haired men leer at me.”
Download this story as a pdf: Going