Distortions

by Ann Beattie

  They sit on chairs by the pool, sipping Coke from a can. The water dries on the tops of her huge breasts and is replaced by sweat. She drinks two Cokes and he drinks one. It is her idea to ask the owner of the motel the name of a good restaurant, and she goes to the desk while he’s showering. He sings in the shower. A delicious dinner! The Grand Canyon! Tum-de-dum, he sings, a little tune he learned from her. He steps out of the shower, wraps a towel around himself, and hears faintly, above the air conditioning, crying.

  Gloria is crying. She has her arms crossed in front of her, protecting herself, sitting in front of the air conditioner and crying. Hale rushes to her, and she puts her head on his shoulder—he is freezing in front of the damn air conditioner—and speaks a single word: “Cat.” She has decided that the man she just talked to was one of her cats, reincarnated. She says this because he looked so much like Mister Tom. Really he did; he had Mister Tom’s eyes. The way Mister Tom had one weak eye that went out of focus … and the man said, after he told her about restaurants, that she looked familiar. Hale said that people who ran places like motels were always thinking they saw familiar faces just because they saw so many people, that of course it was not Mister Tom. She told him to go talk to the man, to watch his eyes grow weak, drift away. But that’s not uncommon! She won’t accept it; the motel owner is Mister Tom, her own Mister Tom, and fate has guided them to this particular motel. She weeps.

  “What if it is your cat? Why are you crying?”

  “I don’t know. I want to know if Mister Tom is happy.”

  “He’s happy. He’s got a nice business, this is a good location. He’s doing fine.”

  “You don’t believe in reincarnation,” she wails. “You talk to me like I’m a child, instead of the woman you love. You don’t love me. Why did you bring me on this trip?”

  He does love her, he reassures her, and sings, “It Had To Be You.”

  “But now I’m so sad,” she tells him. “I saw Mister Tom again, and I want him to be with me.”

  Gloria makes no sense. He tells her that the motel owner is blissfully happy. He points out that the motel owner is making a lot of money and that he can sit in the sunshine by his pool in the day if he wants. She dries her eyes, wanting to believe him.

  *

  Gloria has a nightmare and wakes up Hale with her screaming. She saw Blue Boy, and he told her something evil was happening in the world. Under the covers, she shudders. Hale tells her that the air conditioning is blowing right on them and gets out of bed to adjust the flow of air. His legs are shaking.

  *

  In North Platte, Nebraska, Hale gets a little drunk with Gloria in a bar. She can drink more than he can, because she’s fatter, probably. He tells her about the people who made fun of his name in school, about all the boys who wanted to fight him because of his name, and how he always lost. He is morose. He becomes more morose when she tells him that she agrees with Blue Boy that the world is an evil place. He asks her what she means, exactly, and she can’t say. She just senses something.

  *

  A panhandler comes up to them at a diner in Fort Defiance, New Mexico. Hale says he has no money. Gloria gives him a dollar. “It was Prince,” she tells Hale, “but I must be brave.”

  “It wasn’t Prince,” he says angrily. “It was a Goddamn old bum.”

  “I know it was Prince,” she shrieks.

  “Okay, okay.” He thinks she might really flip out.

  *

  Hale thinks about getting away from her, so he won’t have to be responsible for committing her when she flips out. He thinks about ditching her somewhere, but it’s her car, and she might get the police on him. He thinks about calling his parents collect and having them send him enough money to get a plane home. But what is he supposed to do—wait around Fort Defiance, New Mexico? Arizona is only a day away. If she would just be quiet and not fantasize all the time, he could even feel exalted about seeing the Grand Canyon. She has a faraway look on her face that she isn’t willing to talk about When she’s not crying for no reason she’s talking about all the cats and kittens she had not long ago, as though important people were dead. She’s having trouble holding herself together. There are no more songs. She listens to the radio—he guesses she’s listening—and to the songs he likes, because he doesn’t care if he pleases her or not any more.

  Riding into Arizona, she says, “Do you think that maybe the reason you want to see the Grand Canyon is because you had something to do with it in your former life?”

  “I didn’t have a former life.”

  “You don’t remember it,” she says.

  “That reincarnation crap is all silly. There’s nothing after death. Nothing happens to change you. You get put in the ground and you rot.”

  “I knew you didn’t believe,” she says.

  “It’s all a lot of crap.”

  “Then how come I can remember being on a big cushion in a cold house somewhere? A castle, maybe.”

  “You made it up. It’s all in your head. A story you tell yourself.”

  “I remember it,” she says, and looks out the window with that funny expression again.

  *

  A cat runs in front of the car and Hale hits the brakes. It looked like one of Gloria’s cats, the fat orange one, and Hale knows what he’s in for. Gloria sucks in her breath. “Antonio,” she whispers. “What is he doing on a road out here in the wilderness?”

  “Somebody’s pet,” Hale says.

  “You almost killed him.”

  “It’s okay. I saw it in the rearview mirror.”

  “Poor Antonio. He was trying to tell me something.”

  “What are you crying about now, for Christ’s sake?”

  “He risked his life. There was something he wanted me to know.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake. Somebody’s damn pet.”

  “You don’t even like cats, do you?” Gloria asks. She is squinting hard, much harder than the setting sun requires.

  “Why should I care about cats?” he says.

  “They all died,” she says, as though he’s unbelievably stupid.

  “That’s right. They died. They’re gone. They aren’t coming back as motel owners or as messengers in the night, and they aren’t running in front of your car to attract your attention, Gloria.”

  “Let me out.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I want to get out of the car.”

  She has her hand on the door handle. As she turns to lift the lock, Hale reaches around her.

  “For Christ’s sake. Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “Just let me out.”

  “I’m not putting you out on some highway in Arizona.”

  “Let me out and pick up some pretty hitchhiker. Why don’t you pick up some hitchhiker? You can have my car. Just let me out.”

  Hale notices that her body is not as large as it was when they began the trip. But she still seems larger than life, with her wide, big eyes and her big mouth, her lips more prominent because they’re chapped. She’s been biting her lips. If he did let her out, no one would ever pick her up.

  “Come on, Gloria. Calm down. In a few minutes we’ll be at the Grand Canyon.”

  “You think it’s silly for me to think about my cats, but you don’t think you’re silly to always talk about the Grand Canyon. My sisters’ husbands are all like that. Anything my sisters want is silly. But they’re never silly. At least I’m not married to you.”

  Gloria hates him now. But Hale doesn’t hate Gloria. He is so used to her, to this big woman who sits complaining and crying day after day. He almost wishes she could be happy again.

  “Just sit still and relax,” Hale says. He is still covering the lock with his hand.

  *

  Gloria refuses to get out of the car when she has her chance, when it is parked at the Grand Canyon. Like a big, sulking child she sits inside with the doors locked, looking at Hale looking into the Grand Canyon. She has figured out the mess
age the cats meant to give her. She weeps for her cats, her soft little kittens. She also cries a little because for the first two days of the trip she thought she might really be starting to love Hale, that it wouldn’t be just another romance that ended sadly, like all her sisters’ marriages.

  Hale knows that he is locked out of the car. He stares into the Grand Canyon knowing that, and stands for a long time thinking before he goes to a refreshment stand. It is a little cooler under the red, white and blue striped awning. He buys two vanilla ice-cream cones and goes back to the car. He taps on the window. She puts down the map she is fanning herself with and rolls it down a crack. “More,” he says. “This is for you.” She rolls down the window enough to take the ice-cream cone from him. The first lick is so cold that she shivers. She wipes her forehead on her arm, shifts in the seat to unstick her legs. He puts his hand through the window and strokes her hair.

  “We could rent horses and ride down into the Canyon,” Hale says. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  “No,” she says. She has started to cry again.

  “Maybe your cats would all be there waiting for you.”

  “Do you think I’m a fool? That I think my cats are in the Grand Canyon?”

  “There’s a mysterious elephant burial ground in Africa, isn’t there?”

  “So what? What does that have to do with me?”

  “Come on, Gloria. Get out of the car.”

  “No,” she says, but Hale can tell that she’s wavering. It must be very hot in the car. Gloria looks terrible, sweating and crying. Her ice-cream cone is melting and running down her wrist.

  “When you get out we can freshen up over there, by the refreshment stand. And you can buy us a couple of hot dogs for dinner.”

  “You think I’m going to get out now and buy you dinner?”

  “Come on, Gloria,” he says, trying to pull the door open as if it’s unlocked. She moves away from the door.

  “Then leave,” Hale says. “You’ve got the keys. Go home.”

  “And then what would happen to you? I’d drive away and leave you here, and some pretty girl would give you a ride, and soon I’d see you again. You’d come after me.”

  “Of course I would, Gloria. I love you.”

  “No!” she cries. “I don’t think you love me at all.”

  He tries the door again, but of course it does not open. Gloria has moved into the driver’s seat now, but she makes no attempt to start the car. She is crying too hard to drive, anyway. Figuring that the car won’t be going anywhere, he climbs on the hood and mournfully, chewing the last of his ice-cream cone, gazes into the vast pit of the canyon.

  Four Stories

  About Lovers

  I

  His wife is a very sick woman, because she thinks these things through very thoroughly. He wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she likes the big white house so much not because it’s big or white, but because the post office is across the street. She is very sick, and she mails letters to him from the post office. She gets up at night, and while other wives might read or do housework with their insomnia, she writes him a letter—usually a brief note, actually—and pulls the raincoat over her nightgown and crosses the street to the post office. Some nights when he too has insomnia, he raises himself to one elbow and parts the curtains to watch her. She is a pretty wife, and he’ll be glad when she’s come back to bed.

  The matter of reading the letters, the matter of reading the letters. He is never sure what is best to do. He very rarely throws them out, though. He can’t tell what reaction she wants—it seems to be neither extreme nor anything that he’s tried yet in the in-between range. For example: one morning, reading a note detailing what hotel she went to at what hour with her lover (she doesn’t let his name slip), he screamed with frustration, banged his hands on the breakfast table. She sipped coffee, shrugged. Another time he handed the note back to her saying, “So what?” She smiled, shrugged. There was also the time he asked her if she wanted to see a psychiatrist, and she said they hadn’t helped anyone she knew, or the time he telephoned her mother and her mother said she didn’t want to get involved. Sometimes he dreams that the messages will stop coming, that the mail will bring only blessed bills. Sometimes when he looks out the window to see her crossing the road at night a thought goes through his head: it’s not for you. It’s for someone else. That’s no consolation, though, because if it’s to someone else, chances are it’s to her lover. He accepts her getting out of bed to do something related to him—mail him a letter—but what of her awakening to jot a fond message to someone else?

  She said that she wanted a big house so the baby could run and play. They have one daughter, Elizabeth, who is five. He liked the house, but wasn’t it too close to the road? She watched the baby, unlike other mothers, so what did it matter? Besides, it was the size of the house that mattered. The house had so many possibilities. When they first moved in she spent so much time redoing the house that she couldn’t have had time for a lover. The messages were few and far between at that time. But in the fall Elizabeth went to kindergarten and most of the rooms were finished, and then he began to get the messages daily, and sometimes there were two a day. From the first he never thought they were a joke, and maybe that was where he bungled—if he had only scoffed at them she might have seen that he genuinely didn’t believe it. There had been an envelope addressed to him in his wife’s handwriting and she had brought it to him while he was having breakfast, and he had smiled, expecting some kind of joke, and of course he had been doubly let down. If only he hadn’t recognized the handwriting.

  The notes are different now. The first notes, the fall notes, were brief, specific, and often personally insulting. The winter notes were longer, less specific, more … what might be called mystical. She felt that she was becoming a part of something large, large and important. In the spring there were rhymes, or little drawings, sometimes a combination: a sketch of a little animal-groundhog?—with a verse: “We went to the zoo/The sky was so blue/The sky was so blue/Then what did we do?/Then what did we do?” Now the notes are questioning—no easy clues as in the spring notes: “There is something vast and warm as summer, and at times I am as warm as summer, but other times I am cold and pull up the blanket in my sleep. How, exactly, does the mind let you know you are cold? What signal makes me move when I intend not to move?”

  One night he says her name out loud, whispers “Janet” in his sleep. Either asleep or awake she puts her arm out to stroke his side. He knows why he woke up, though—not her touch, but what he was thinking. What signaled him? What will happen now?

  As a joke, almost, he writes her a message when he gets to work and has his secretary mail it. All day he thinks, Do I need a psychiatrist? Answered by, Who have they helped? Should I speak to her mother again? Answered by, Didn’t she already tell you to leave her alone? He goes home, has dinner, plays with Elizabeth, does a little work, and goes to bed. For hours he turns in the bed, wondering what will happen. More than that, though, he is lonesome and wishes Janet would wake up. He thinks of pretending to be asleep and rolling over on her, or of calling her name—no whispering, right out loud. A cheap trick. He kicks the covers off and looks at whatever objects he can see in the room in spite of the dark and in spite of his limited perspective. And then she stirs too—for covers? No—she’s quietly getting out of bed.

  “A message?” he whispers.

  “Yes.”

  This is the first time they have ever discussed the messages when she’s in the process of writing them.

  “Coffee?” he asks.

  “All right.”

  She sits sleepily across from him at the kitchen table, and for a while as she drinks the coffee he thinks she’s forgotten about the notes she intended to write. Almost mechanically she scrawls a few words on a pad and puts a piece of paper in an envelope, then drops the envelope on the counter and walks beside him down the hall to bed. It’s a humid night and the sheets feel sticky. He has trouble g
oing to sleep. Finally he stops trying and throws his legs over the side of the bed.

  “Getting up?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s so humid it’s hard to sleep.”

  He gets up and walks across the floor.

  “Mail the letter while you’re up,” she says.

  “No,” he says. “I refuse.”

  The room is silent, and then she laughs. He goes back to the bed. She’s half on his side of the bed and makes no attempt to move. He lies down anyway. She begins to whisper—about something vast that surrounds them. Doesn’t he feel its presence? What can they do? He rests an arm across her stomach. He can’t answer the question when she whispers to him any better than he can when she writes it. He takes his arm away and pounds the bed.

  “Yes,” she says. “There.”

  It is a humid night, so it will be difficult to sleep. In the morning she will get his note, and that will be inadequate too, because it doesn’t contain any answers.

  II

  The lover thinks that he is compared unfavorably to other lovers. In fact he is no longer her lover, but he remembers when he was, and that depresses him because he never intended to become her lover and he never intended to stop being her lover. She left because he got nasty. One time they argued—well, a lot of times they argued—but one particular time they argued walking into the house and he bent to make a snowball, then another, and another. He threw them all at her, and instead of running into the house she ran around the house and, of course, finally fell. He didn’t realize that she had really been frightened until he put out his hand to help her up and she tried to scramble backward with that strange expression on her face. Then, of course, the martyrdom: he could save his energy by just kicking snow over her instead of pulling her up. Go on, go on … He wasn’t opposed to kicking a little snow? She was afraid of him sometimes, but she still fought with him.

  Pulling up in front of the house where she lives now, he tries to remember pleasant things. How they had watched the snow falling in the morning. The morning of the day he threw snowballs at her. The morning of the day she turned her ankle. He didn’t turn the ignition off. One of the girls she lived with looked at his car from where she stood on the front lawn. She must have been surprised when he took off again. She must have wanted to get a good look at him because no doubt she had heard stories about the girl’s lover.