by Ann Beattie
Even with the shallots, the trout does not taste very good to her.
The next day she doesn’t go to work. She gets up at seven-thirty, as usual, and dresses, but she parks at a downtown garage and goes shopping. For some reason, she’s still tired. She would have preferred to stay at home, but she didn’t want him to think anything was wrong, and she couldn’t say that she didn’t feel like going to work, because she had already told him how much she liked the job. She has no respect for women who say one thing one minute and another the next. She buys another bottle of perfume—a more expensive bottle—from the same salesgirl. She has been in the store several hours, going leisurely from department to department, when she realizes she hasn’t left a list of instructions for Jim. Has he called her office? Does he already know she isn’t there? In a panic, she asks a salesgirl where there is a telephone. She calls immediately. There’s no answer! What does that mean? Then she hears his voice. He’s been asleep. She’s lucky, because it’s late in the afternoon—two o’clock. She keeps her voice steady; she has called because she forgot to leave the list. “What did you want me to get?” he asks. Her mind goes blank. Finally she thinks of something: lobster. And ground pork. Consomme. She will fix lobster in lobster sauce. “We had fish last night,” he says sleepily. He’s right; she’s forgotten even eating last night. She never makes a mistake in menu planning. He’s just pointed out an error; he knows she’s slipping … “But that sounds good,” he says. “Any spices we don’t have? Let me write this down.”
It is a delicious dinner. They eat earlier than usual because she’s so hungry. She didn’t want to eat lunch at the store, because it was just a cafeteria; it was too much trouble to move the car to go somewhere else. As she eats she concentrates, but still has no memory of having eaten dinner the night before. He sighs with contentment, spooning the rice onto his plate, ladling sauce over top of it. It is a particularly good dinner. She prepared it very slowly, with much care, fascinated herself by what she was doing.
She expects that he will be in her office waiting for her, but she doesn’t see him all that day. She walks up the stairs instead of taking the elevator. Eventually the fluorescent lights make her feel warm, and with the warmth comes calm. She works with accuracy and speed. The day is over before it begins. She feels real relief, walking down the stairs, that she has not had to see him. She knows men, and that is why she thought he would be standing in her office, waiting for her when she came in in the morning, but this time she has been wrong. As she starts her walk across the parking lot she begins to think of dinner. Some of the ingredients for this night’s dinner are a little hard to find out of season, and she hopes he has not had to take the crosstown bus again. She’s tired, and she knows what it is to exhaust yourself in a day.
Then she sees the car. Far in the distance, blocking her own car from view, yet she knows with certainty that her car is behind it. She walks more slowly. She tries to think, but nothing comes. Yes—it’s his car. She remembers the color. She remembers the make: a Pontiac. She remembers him, too, sees his face as clearly as she now sees the car, although he isn’t looking in her direction, but in front of him, down the lot. She’s almost close enough to touch him before he realizes she’s there. In fact, her hand does touch the glass. She stands there with her hand against his window until he reaches across the seat and opens the door on her side. Then she gets into the car.
Tonight he has been unable to find fresh thyme. It is the first time he has ever failed. She makes the dinner without it, but it’s flat, lacking a certain delicacy of flavor. And he knows it, too, his palate as fine as hers. Neither of them eats much. The wine they have with the meal is very good. He has selected wisely. But the main course is a disappointment. He looks sad—eats listlessly, says little. He has failed.
After dinner she goes into the bathroom. The two little bottles of perfume are on a shelf. She takes them down and smells them, both much the same. With her eyes closed, slowly breathing in the aroma, she remembers the motel room, the ride, the hamburger she ate with him at a roadside stand. She had been very nervous coming back to the apartment, late again, but once more he hadn’t been there. He was hours late coming in, having searched everywhere for the thyme. And he was depressed not to have found it; he forgot to brush her hair. He sat in his own chair and said very little. Perhaps it is the memory of the hamburger-she never eats cheap food like that—or something about the strong smell of the perfume released in the small room that makes her sick. She is sick, vomiting in the bathroom for a long time before the sickness passes, and then she’s all right. He’ll say she has been pushing herself too hard, and that will start a whole discussion: moving to a larger apartment, his cooking dinners, everything. She goes into the living room to face it, but the room is empty. He has gone out for one of his infrequent walks.
Eventually she will be caught. She knows that. This night she is very late; she should have called with an excuse hours ago. She uses the telephone at the entrance to the parking lot, trying to keep her voice soft and regular, counting the white lines that divide the lot into the parking places until his voice comes on the line. Something happened to her car, she tells him. It did? His voice is strained. She doesn’t say anything.
“There’s a man,” she says.
“Speak louder. You said the car broke down. Where?”
“In the parking lot. There’s a man.”
“Yes?”
“Who’s going to fix it.”
There is another silence.
“Will you call back if there’s any real trouble?”
“Yes,” she says.
He is waiting in the car. It’s all right, she assures him. He rides her to her car at the back of the parking lot. She opens the door and gets in. She watches his car drive away in the rearview mirror, and then she gets out of the car and stands in the parking lot. Standing there, she thinks of her lover, gone in one direction, and of Jim, in another. She watches the leaves blow across the surface and sees that now the parking lot is mostly brown, instead of black. Autumn always makes her feel uneasy. Autumn, or the fact that she hasn’t eaten all day. She gets in the car and drives home to make dinner.
Vermont
Noel is in our living room shaking his head. He refused my offer and then David’s offer of a drink, but he has had three glasses of water. It is absurd to wonder at such a time when he will get up to go to the bathroom, but I do. I would like to see Noel move; he seems so rigid that I forget to sympathize, forget that he is a real person. “That’s not what I want,” he said to David when David began sympathizing. Absurd, at such a time, to ask what he does want. I can’t remember how it came about that David started bringing glasses of water.
Noel’s wife, Susan, has told him that she’s been seeing John Stillerman. We live on the first floor, Noel and Susan on the second, John on the eleventh. Interesting that John, on the eleventh, should steal Susan from the second floor. John proposes that they just rearrange—that Susan moved up to the eleventh, into the apartment John’s wife only recently left, that they just … John’s wife had a mastectomy last fall, and in the elevator she told Susan that if she was losing what she didn’t want to lose, she might as well lose what she did want to lose. She lost John—left him the way popcorn flies out of the bag on the roller coaster. She is living somewhere in the city, but John doesn’t know where. John is a museum curator, and last month, after John’s picture appeared in a newsmagazine, showing him standing in front of an empty space where a stolen canvas had hung, he got a one-word note from his wife: “Good.” He showed the note to David in the elevator. “It was tucked in the back of his wallet—the way all my friends used to carry rubbers in high school,” David told me.
“Did you guys know?” Noel asks. A difficult one; of course we didn’t know, but naturally we guessed. Is Noel able to handle such semantics? David answers vaguely. Noel shakes his head vaguely, accepting David’s vague answer. What else will he accept? The move upstairs? For now,
another glass of water.
David gives Noel a sweater, hoping, no doubt, to stop his shivering. Noel pulls on the sweater over pajamas patterned with small gray fish. David brings him a raincoat, too. A long white scarf hangs from the pocket Noel swishes it back and forth listlessly. He gets up and goes to the bathroom.
“Why did she have to tell him when he was in his pajamas?” David whispers.
Noel comes back, looks out the window. “I don’t know why I didn’t know. I can tell you guys knew.”
Noel goes to our front door, opens it, and wanders off down the hallway.
“If he had stayed any longer, he would have said, ‘Jeepers,’” David says.
David looks at his watch and sighs. Usually he opens Beth’s door on his way to bed, and tiptoes in to admire her. Beth is our daughter. She is five. Some nights, David even leaves a note in her slippers, saying that he loves her. But tonight he’s depressed. I follow him into the bedroom, undress, and get into bed. David looks at me sadly, lies down next to me, turns off the light. I want to say something but don’t know what to say. I could say, “One of us should have gone with Noel. Do you know your socks are still on? You’re going to do to me what Susan did to Noel, aren’t you?”
“Did you see his poor miserable pajamas?” David whispers finally. He throws back the covers and gets up and goes back to the living room. I follow, half asleep. David sits in the chair, puts his arms on the armrests, presses his neck against the back of the chair, and moves his feet together. “Zzzz,” he says, and his head falls forward.
Back in bed, I lie awake, remembering a day David and I spent in the park last August. David was sitting on the swing next to me, scraping the toes of his tennis shoes in the loose dirt.
“Don’t you want to swing?” I said. We had been playing tennis. He had beaten me every game. He always beats me at everything—precision parking, three-dimensional ticktacktoe, soufflés. His soufflés rise as beautifully curved as the moon.
“I don’t know how to swing,” he said.
I tried to teach him, but he couldn’t get his legs to move right. He stood the way I told him, with the board against his behind, gave a little jump to get on, but then he couldn’t synchronize his legs. “Pump!” I called, but it didn’t mean anything. I might as well have said, “Juggle dishes.” I still find it hard to believe there’s anything I can do that he can’t do.
He got off the swing. “Why do you act like everything is a goddamn contest?” he said, and walked away.
“Because we’re always having contests and you always win!” I shouted.
I was still waiting by the swings when he showed up half an hour later.
“Do you consider it a contest when we go scuba diving?” he said.
He had me. It was stupid of me last summer to say how he always snatched the best shells, even when they were closer to me. That made him laugh. He had chased me into a corner, then laughed at me.
I lie in bed now, hating him for that. But don’t leave me, I think—don’t do what Noel’s wife did. I reach across the bed and gently take hold of a little wrinkle in his pajama top. I don’t know if I want to yank his pajamas—do something violent—or smooth them. Confused, I take my hand away and turn on the light. David rolls over, throws his arm over his face, groans. I stare at him. In a second he will lower his arm and demand an explanation. Trapped again. I get up and put on my slippers.
“I’m going to get a drink of water,” I whisper apologetically.
Later in the month, it happens. I’m sitting on a cushion on the floor, with newspapers spread in front of me, repotting plants. I’m just moving the purple passion plant to a larger pot when David comes in. It is late in the afternoon—late enough to be dark outside. David has been out with Beth. Before the two of them went out, Beth, confused by the sight of soil indoors, crouched down beside me to ask, “Are there ants, Mommy?” I laughed. David never approved of my laughing at her. Later, that will be something he’ll mention in court, hoping to get custody: I laugh at her. And when that doesn’t work, he’ll tell the judge what I said about his snatching all the best seashells.
David comes in, coat still buttoned, blue silk scarf still tied (a Christmas present from Noel, with many apologies for losing the white one), sits on the floor, and says that he’s decided to leave. He is speaking very reasonably and quietly. That alarms me. It crosses my mind that he’s mad. And Beth isn’t with him. He has killed her!
No, no, of course not. I’m mad. Beth is upstairs in her friend’s apartment. He ran into Beth’s friend and her mother coming into the building. He asked if Beth could stay in their apartment for a few minutes. I’m not convinced: What friend? I’m foolish to feel reassured as soon as he names one—Louisa. I feel nothing but relief. It might be more accurate to say that I feel nothing. I would have felt pain if she were dead, but David says she isn’t, so I feel nothing. I reach out and begin stroking the plant’s leaves. Soft leaves, sharp points. The plant I’m repotting is a cutting from Noel’s big plant that hangs in a silver ice bucket in his window (a wedding gift that he and Susan had never used). I helped him put it in the ice bucket. “What are you going to do with the top?” I asked. He put it on his head and danced around.
“I had an uncle who got drunk and danced with a lampshade on his head,” Noel said. “That’s an old joke, but how many people have actually seen a man dance with a lampshade on his head? My uncle did it every New Year’s Eve.”
“What the hell are you smiling about?” David says. “Are you listening to me?”
I nod and start to cry. It will be a long time before I realize that David makes me sad and Noel makes me happy.
Noel sympathizes with me. He tells me that David is a fool; he is better off without Susan, and I will be better off without David. Noel calls or visits me in my new apartment almost every night. Last night he suggested that I get a babysitter for tonight, so he could take me to dinner. He tries very hard to make me happy. He brings expensive wine when we eat in my apartment and offers to buy it in restaurants when we eat out. Beth prefers it when we eat in; that way, she can have both Noel and the toy that Noel inevitably brings. Her favorite toy, so far, is a handsome red tugboat pulling three barges, attached to one another by string. Noel bends over, almost doubled in half, to move them across the rug, whistling and calling orders to the imaginary crew. He does not just bring gifts to Beth and me. He has bought himself a new car, and pretends that this is for Beth and me. (“Comfortable seats?” he asks me. “That’s a nice big window back there to wave out of,” he says to Beth.) It is silly to pretend that he got the car for the three of us. And if he did, why was he too cheap to have a radio installed, when he knows I love music? Not only that but he’s bowlegged. I am ashamed of myself for thinking bad things about Noel. He tries so hard to keep us cheerful. He can’t help the odd angle of his thighs. Feeling sorry for him, I decided that a cheap dinner was good enough for tonight. I said that I wanted to go to a Chinese restaurant.
At the restaurant I eat shrimp in black bean sauce and drink a Heineken’s and think that I’ve never tasted anything so delicious. The waiter brings two fortune cookies. We open them; the fortunes make no sense. Noel summons the waiter for the bill. With it come more fortune cookies—four this time. They are no good, either: talk of travel and money. Noel says, “What bloody rot.” He is wearing a gray vest and a white shirt. I peek around the table without his noticing and see that he’s wearing gray wool slacks. Lately it has been very important for me to be able to see everything. Whenever Noel pulls the boats out of sight, into another room, I move as quickly as Beth to watch what’s going on.
Standing behind Noel at the cash register, I see that it has started to rain—a mixture of rain and snow.
“You know how you can tell a Chinese restaurant from any other?” Noel asks, pushing open the door. “Even when it’s raining, the cats still run for the street.”
I shake my head in disgust.
Noel stretches the skin a
t the corners of his eyes. “Sorry for honorable joke,” he says.
We run for the car. He grabs the belt of my coat, catches me, and half lifts me with one arm, running along with me dangling at his side, giggling. Our wool coats stink. He opens my car door, runs around, and pulls his open. He’s done it again; he has made me laugh.
We start home.
We are in heavy traffic, and Noel drives very slowly, protecting his new car.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“Thirty-six,” Noel says.
“I’m twenty-seven,” I say.
“So what?” he says. He says it pleasantly.
“I just didn’t know how old you were.”
“Mentally, I’m neck and neck with Beth,” he says.
I’m soaking wet, and I want to get home to put on dry clothes. I look at him inching through traffic, and I remember the way his face looked that night he sat in the living room with David and me.
“Rain always puts you in a bad mood, doesn’t it?” he says. He turns the windshield wipers on high. Rubber squeaks against glass.
“I see myself dead in it,” I say.
“You see yourself dead in it?”
Noel does not read novels. He reads Moneysworth, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary. I reprimand myself; there must be fitting ironies in the Wall Street Journal.
“Are you kidding?” Noel says. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself at dinner. It was a good dinner, wasn’t it?”
“I make you nervous, don’t I?” I say.
“No. You don’t make me nervous.”
Rain splashes under the car, drums on the roof. We ride on for blocks and blocks. It is too quiet; I wish there were a radio. The rain on the roof is monotonous, the collar of my coat is wet and cold. At last we are home. Noel parks the car and comes around to my door and opens it. I get out. Noel pulls me close, squeezes me hard. When I was a little girl, I once squeezed a doll to my chest in an antique shop, and when I took it away the eyes had popped off. An unpleasant memory. With my arms around Noel, I feel the cold rain hitting my hands and wrists.