Perfect Recall

by Ann Beattie

  Fiona looked at Carleyville. “I apologize for losing my temper,” she said.

  “You could do me a favor,” he said.

  She looked surprised. “What?” she said.

  “Do you know a good florist?”

  She half smiled, suspecting the beginning of some joke.

  “I know it exasperates you to hear my notions about karma, but I owe somebody something, and until I deliver, my karma’s going to stay jeopardized.”

  “Flowers?” she said.

  “Right. Getting some roses to a woman I was supposed to send a fax to. A woman who works for the phone company.”

  “Who is that?” Jimmy said.

  “Some woman who helped me out,” Carleyville said.

  “Well, actually, I have a catalogue from a place that delivers very nice flowers,” Fiona said. She turned and left the room.

  Good, Carleyville thought. That left only the question of what her name was . . . if he’d written it down. . . . Her name, her alias—and then the address to send them to. That would be something he could call and ask, since he wouldn’t know where to begin looking for an old bill.

  It seemed destined not to work; he didn’t require ESP to figure that out. “Scratch that,” he said suddenly. “Scratch the phone lady. I know what to do.”

  Fiona reappeared with a catalogue. He flipped through, stopped when he saw an interesting flower. Birds-of-paradise; maybe she’d see the significance in that. More amusing than roses. An improvement on the roses idea. A little pricey, but his credit card wasn’t maxed out yet. He went to the phone—the miraculously working phone—and dialed the toll-free number. Twenty-four-hour flowers—great. Always open, like a hospital. Like a church.

  He gave the operator the information: Birds-of-paradise were to be sent to Christie Cooper in Billings, Montana. Her address (he fumbled) was written down on the top of a traffic ticket he’d gotten for parking approximately ten seconds too long at some voracious Pac-Man parking meter, the day before he left. He’d jotted down her address just in case. On the off chance he might decide to get in touch. In extracting his wallet, though, half of the inside of his pants pocket came with it. What next? Scarves? A rabbit? Adventure Kitty brushed against his leg from behind, and he kicked reflexively. The cat scrambled backwards, mewing loudly. He felt awful, actually apologized to the cat, but in moving toward her, the phone toppled to the floor. The cat dashed from the room, and Fiona rushed after her. Only Jimmy was still there, looking at him with willed composure.

  He gave the operator his credit card information—good thing he’d never notified the credit card company to change his billing address—and felt much better, as if the bad black karma cloud had lifted, and lo and behold, it was only a gray day. “Sign it, ‘Forgive me, Carleyville, ’” he said softly.

  “C as in Calm?” the operator said.

  The Big-Breasted Pilgrim

  OUR HOUSE in the Florida Keys is down a narrow road, half a mile from a convenience store with a green neon sign that advertises “Bait and Basics.” Lowell’s sister, Kathryn, called to get us to arrange for a car to drive her from Miami. She considers everywhere Lowell has ever lived to be Siberia, including Saratoga, New York, which she saw only once, during a blizzard. TriBeCa, circa 1977, was Siberia. Ditto Ashland, Oregon. In all those places, Lowell had what he now calls “The Siberian Brides”: his first and second wives, who gradually became as incomprehensible to him as foreigners: Tish, who lived with us in Saratoga and later in TriBeCa; Leigh Anne Leighton—a name so melodic he always speaks of her that way, even though it seems inordinately formal—who lived with us for a month in Ashland before flying to Los Angeles for her grandfather’s funeral, from which she never returned. This was no case of riding forever ’neath the streets of Boston, however: she got a Mexican divorce and remarried a youth Lowell and I recently saw on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, playing soprano sax with a group called Bobecito and the Brazen Beauties.

  My own life is nothing like Lowell’s. The joke is that I am his Boswell, and to the extent that I used to take dictation in Lowell’s precomputer days, I suppose I have been a sort of Boswell—though I doubt the man, himself, ever scrubbed down a shower with Tilex, or would have, even if shower stalls—to say nothing of the excessively effective cleaning products we have now—existed. Nor, say, did we mistake Ashland for the Hebrides, though Lowell and I have inevitably arrived at pithy pronouncements as a prelude to packing up and leaving place after place.

  I, Richard Howard Manson, was an army brat, living in thirteen different locations by the time I started high school. The one good thing about that was that it made me pretty unflappable, though at the same time, it’s given me a wanderlust I’ve tired of as I’ve aged. Lowell makes fun of me for trying to decondition myself by accepting vicarious travel in place of the real thing; I subscribed to almost every travel magazine, and view cassettes of foreign cities, or even silly resort promo tapes, almost every night before bed. Lowell calls this “nicotine patch travel.” Passing in front of the TV, he’ll drag hard on an imaginary cigarette, then toss the phantom cig on the floor, grind it out, and slap his right arm to his left bicep, exhaling with instant relief. As it happens, I quit smoking—I mean real cigarettes—cold turkey. The travel addiction has not been so easy to break, but since I like my job, and since my employer is terminally itchy, he has often been pleased to take advantage of my weakness. The way wheedling wives have talked husbands into second and third babies, Lowell has persuaded me to give a month at the Chateau Marmont, or a few years in a rented Victorian in upstate New York, a try. He never claims we’re staying, though he doesn’t present the trips as vacations, either. When he had a larger network of friends—that period, about ten years ago, when everybody seemed to be between marriages—our ostensible reason for going somewhere would often be that we were on a mercy mission to cheer up so-and-so. Once there, so-and-so would be found, miraculously, to have cheered us up, and so we would stay for a longer infusion of friendliness, until so-and-so became affiliated with the next Mrs. So-and-so, who would inevitably dislike us, or until that moment when a blizzard hit and we thought of being in the sun, or when summer heat settled like an itchy, wooly mantle.

  In most of the places we’ve lived, there have been constants, Kathryn’s visits among them. Other constants are a few ceramics made by a friend, a couple of very nice geometrically patterned rugs, and our picture mugs, depicting each of us sitting on camels in front of pyramids. There’s also the favorite this, or the favored that—small things, like jars of home-grown herbs, or the amazing sea nettle suntan lotion that can be ordered by calling an 800 number that relays a request for shipping to the apothecary in St. Paul de Vence. Our Barbour jackets are indispensable, as is a particular wine pull, no longer manufactured. When you travel as much as we do, you can seem to fixate on what looks to other people to be trivia. I make it a point to be casual about the wine pull, letting other people use it whenever they insist upon being helpful, though I often awaken in the night, convinced that it has been thrown away during the cleanup period, and then I go downstairs and open the drawer and see it, but return to bed convinced that I have nevertheless had an accurate premonition of its fate following the next dinner party.

  Lowell is a chef, and a quite brilliant one. He has one of those metabolisms that allows him to eat anything and remain thin. I, too, can and do eat anything, my diabetes having been miraculously cured by a Japanese acupuncturist, but unlike Lowell, everything I eat increases my weight. At six feet, I am two hundred and seventy pounds—so imposing that the first time I hurried inside to pick up some items at our “Bait and” convenience store, the teenager behind the counter raised his hands above his head. This has become a standing joke with Lowell, who sometimes imitates the teenager when he and I cross paths in the house, or when I bring the evening cocktails to the back deck.

  Lowell and I met more than twenty years ago, when I was driving for my cousin’s private car company in New York
City. Lowell was in town, that evening, to be a guest chef for the weekend at the short-lived but much admired Le Monde d’Aujourd’hui. I picked him up at La Guardia in a downpour, and on the way in—he was coming from a birthday party for Craig Claiborne, in upstate New York—we talked about our preferences in junk food, rock and roll, and—I should have been suspicious—whether any city that was a state capital had any zip to it. But this gives the impression that we chattered away. We spoke only intermittently, and I had little to say, except that I liked Montpelier, Vermont, very much, but that was probably because I’d only visited the state once, during a heat wave in New York, and it had seemed to me I’d gone to heaven. This brought up the subject of gardens, and I heard for the first time, though others no doubt knew it, the theory of planting certain flowers to repel insects from certain vegetables. On the streets of Brooklyn, you didn’t hear about things like that—Brooklyn Heights being the place I had settled when I was discharged from the Marine Corps. I was living in my uncle’s spare bedroom, driving for my cousin’s car company, making extra money to help support the baby that would be born to Rita and me—that was going to happen, whether she left me or not, as she was always threatening to do—though less than four months from the day I picked Lowell up, my twenty-two-year-old, in-the-process-of-becoming ex-wife, as well as the child she was carrying, would be dead after a collision on the Merritt Parkway. In the years following the accident, this has never come up in conversation, so even if I’d been able to look in a crystal ball, I would still have chatted with Lowell about Sara Lee chocolate cupcakes and the extraordinarily addictive quality of Cheetos. I do not care to discuss matters of substance, as Kathryn has correctly stated many times. Both she and Lowell know the fact of my wife’s death, of course. My uncle told them, the time they came to a barbecue at his apartment, six months or so after I met them. By that time, I was in Lowell’s employ, and he was working on the second of his cookbooks, trying to decide whether he should take a very lucrative, fulltime position at a New Orleans hotel. I had become his secretary, because—as it turned out, to my own surprise—I seem to have a tenacity about succeeding in minor matters, which are all that frustrate the majority of people, anyway. That is, after some research, I would find the telephone number of the dive shop in Tortola that was across the street from a phoneless shack, where the non-English-speaking cook had used a certain herb mixture on the grilled chicken he had served to me and to Lowell that Lowell felt he must find a way to reproduce. (Not that these things ever struck him in the moment. He often has a delayed reaction to certain preparations, but his insistence in deciphering the mystery is always in direct proportion to the time elapsed between eating and doing the double-take.) My next step would be to send Chef Lowell tee-shirts to the helpful salesman in the dive shop, one for him, his wife, and their two children, and—FedEx’s ideas about not sending cash in envelopes be damned—money to bribe both salesman and chef. It was a minor matter to get a friend of a friend, who was a stewardess, to use her free hours before her flight took off again from Beef Island to take a cab to the dive shop and pick up a small quantity of the ground herb concoction, which chemical analysis later revealed to be powdered rhino horn (one could well wonder how they got that in Tortola), mixed with something called dried Annie flower, to which was added a generous pinch—as Lowell suspected—of simple ginger. Of course I see these small successes of mine as minor victories, but to Lowell they seem a display of inventive brilliance. He describes himself, quite unfairly, I think, as a plodder. He will try a recipe a hundred times, if that’s what it takes. But to me that isn’t plodding; it’s being a perfectionist, which, God knows, too few people are these days.

  Tonight, before Kathryn arrives, Lowell’s new love interest will be arriving for drinks. She has no idea that he is a famous chef who has published numerous cookbooks, writes a monthly column for one of the most prestigious food magazines, and teaches seminars on the art of sautéing in St. Croix, where we are put up annually at the Chenay Bay Beach Resort. I have met this woman, who has a name like something out of a cheap English romance, Daphne Crowell, exactly once, when I stumbled into them—literally—on the back deck. It was a moonless night, exceedingly dark, and the two of them had gone downstairs to observe our neighbor’s speedy little boat coming around the point with another load of drugs. She had been wearing my bathrobe, which she simply helped herself to, after taking it from the hook on the back of my bathroom door. There she was, leaning against the rail at the edge of the deck like a car’s hood ornament, when I awoke from slumbering under a blanket on a chaise longue just in time to see her untie the sash and pull off the robe, giggling as she held it forward to flap in the breeze—my robe—like some big flag at a parade. I’m sure the silly gesture was equally appreciated by our neighbor, whose own “secretary” wears night goggles for land-to-shore vision, in case the police are waiting in ambush with their panthers, or whatever intimidating beasts they currently favor. Anyway: Daphne is a fool, but nobody ever said Lowell didn’t like to waste his time. A recipe he will fret over forever, but any woman will do—particularly on a night when Kathryn, whom he is still intimidated by, is arriving, all big-city bluster and Oh, how are you doing out here in the boonies? Since starting a graduate program in writing at the New School, she treats everyone as interesting material. She has been trying for years to see if she can make me mad by insisting that I read The Remains of the Day, which—I have not told her, and will not—I have, in fact, viewed on television. I understand completely that she wishes me to see myself as some pathetic, latter-day servant who has wasted his life by missing the forest for the trees. If she thinks I live to serve, she’s wrong. I simply live to avoid my previous life.

  “Everything ready out here?” Lowell calls. He has opened the French doors and is propping them open with cement-filled conch shells. Everything ready, indeed: he’s the one who set out the cheese torte, under the big upside-down brass colander. All I had to do was bring out the gallon of Tanqueray, the tonic, and some Key limes. My Swiss Army knife will do for slicing, and even mixing.

  “Are you going deaf, Richard? Half the things I ask you, you don’t respond to.”

  He’s mad at me not because I haven’t answered, really, but because I refused to drive to Miami to get his sister. The ride wouldn’t have bothered me, but two and a half hours with Kathryn in a car would be more than I could take, by approximately two hours and twenty-five minutes.

  “Richard . . . is there a possibility that not only do you not hear me, but that you have no curiosity about why I’m standing here, moving my lips?”

  “I thought maybe you’d just had something tasty,” I say.

  A pause. “You did hear me, then? You just chose not to answer?”

  “What’s the point of these random women?” I say.

  He walks toward me. “I don’t know why it upset you so much that she borrowed your robe,” he says. “Anything that smacks of exuberance, you insist upon as seeing as drunken foolishness.”

  “Remember the Siberians,” I say. “And the one you picked up in South Beach, who wanted to sue for palimony after one weekend.”

  He looks at my knife, open to the longest blade, next to the bottle of gin. “This was your idea of a stirrer?” he says.

  “She’s so spontaneous and uninhibited,” I say. “Let’s see if she doesn’t just use her finger.”

  As if that were a cue, we hear the crunch of gravel under Daphne’s tires. Since today is Friday, she will have spent the day making fruit smoothies for tourists. On Monday and Tuesday, the only other days she works, she has been substituting for a dentist’s receptionist, who was mugged in Miami during her ninth month of pregnancy. Six weeks after the mugging, the woman has still not given birth. If nothing happens by Monday, they are going to induce labor—though apparently what the woman is most afraid of is leaving her house. I know all this because Daphne phones the house often, and when I answer she always feels obliged to strike up a conversati
on.

  Much ooh-ing and aah-ing at the front door: such a lovely house, so secluded, such beautiful plants everywhere. The unexpected delight of seeing roses growing in profusion in the Keys, blah blah blah.

  She has brought me—the absurd cow has brought me—a plastic manatee. She has brought Lowell three birds-of-paradise, wrapped by the flower shop in lavender paper, which she pronounces “coals to Newcastle.” But the manatee . . . we don’t already have one of those, do we? No, we don’t. We don’t even have a rubber ducky to float in the bathwater. We’re so . . . you know . . . old.

  Behold: she has on gold Lycra pants, gold thong sandals, and a football-sized shirt with enormous shoulder pads. The material is iridescent: blue, shimmering gold, flashing orange, everything sparkling as if Tinker Bell, in a mad mood, applied the finishing touches. The sparkly stuff is also in her hair, broken lines of it, as if to provide a passing lane. All this, because she put a heaping teaspoon of protein powder into Lowell’s smoothie, gratis. I see Lowell slip his arm around her shoulder as the two of them walk to the edge of the deck. I go into the house to get glasses and ice.

  When I return, with the three glasses on a tray, she is in midbanality: the loveliness of the sky, etc. Well: Kathryn’s pathetic butler would bow out at this point, but in our house, the servant drinks and eats with the employer. The employer has no real friends except for the servant, in good part because he is given to sarcasm, periods of dark despair, temper tantrums, and hypochondriacal illnesses, alternating with intense self-appreciation. Similarly, the servant has been co-opted by a life of leisure, a feeling of gratitude. Lowell is far easier to take care of than a wife, certainly easier to care for than a child, much easier to look after than the majority of dogs, by which I mean no disrespect to either party, as a dog was the one thing I ever had a strong attachment to and deep admiration for. The Marines, I found out, were sociopaths. Imagine the days of my youth when I thought I would prove my manhood and patriotism by outdoing my army lieutenant colonel father by joining the Marines. Sir, yes, sir! And Lowell thinks there might be a problem with tracking down a particular herb mixture? I could kiss his feet. Though I settle for shining his shoes—or did, in pre-Reebok days.