by Ann Beattie
“Je-sus,” Nancy say. “What is wrong with her?”
“Well, don’t get on your high horse,” Jerri says. “You didn’t have to tell her how mean and spiteful she was.”
“I didn’t say that. I only said she was jealous of me and Les.”
“Who’s Les?” I ask.
“I don’t see why we should be talking about this now,” Nancy says.
“You mean, you thought we were having a conventional date?” I ask.
“No, I didn’t . . . I mean, we’re going to a party, aren’t we? We stopped by here because Jerri had to check the damned alarm.”
“She wanted an excuse to say mean things and run off,” Jerri says. “It pisses her off that Nancy and I can discuss things and be really honest with each other, because she introduced the two of us, and she’s got some weird thing about how each of us has to have her as our best friend, so we’re not supposed to care that much about each other.”
“I can’t follow all this. Maybe we should go to the party,” I say.
“I feel bad,” Jerri says. “I should have tried to cool her out.”
“Why should you feel responsible for Bea’s state of mind?” Nancy says.
“Let me get a picture of you two,” Jerri says. “Souvenir of our wonderful evening, so far.”
She goes to a safe and turns the combination lock. When the door swings open, she takes out a Polaroid and fiddles with the camera. I’m still wondering: Who’s Les? How long has he been gone? And: What constitutes goony shoes?
Nancy seems quite shaken by Bea’s exit. She is fighting back tears, I see, as Jerri gestures for us to make a choice: for a couples shot, it’s either American Gothic or the Pilgrim couple. Nancy, sniffing, moves behind the Pilgrims. I stand beside her, crouching so my face peers out where it’s supposed to.
The camera spews out the photograph. We both converge on Jerri, to watch it develop.
“Let me get you with the president. Go on,” Jerri says, gesturing for me to stand next to Clinton.
“You know, she can really be a terrible bitch,” Nancy says. “But now I feel like everything’s all messed up.”
The flash goes off. Jerri takes the first photograph out of her pocket and nods approvingly. The second photograph—the one she just took—begins to quickly develop. There I am, probably closer to the president than I’d ever have gotten if he’d come to the house, and obviously on much chummier terms. Probably just as good as meeting him, the photo op being interchangeable with real experiences in recent years.
“You’re mad at me for dragging you into this,” Nancy says. Tears are rolling down her cheeks.
“No, it’s just one of those things that happened,” I say.
“One of those things that happened?” she repeats. She seems confused. “You mean, you think this was okay? It’s okay if somebody insults you and if the person you slept with the night before turns out to be in love with some other guy?”
It takes me a minute to respond. “I didn’t know until now that you were in love with him,” I say.
“I am! And I think that if the mere mention of his name, by that bitch, can make me this upset, maybe I should swallow my pride and go out to Montana and get him. He didn’t hate me, he just hated New York.”
I raise both hands, palms up.
“That’s fine with you?” she says.
“What can I do about it?” I say.
“You know, I think that once again, I’ve found an apathetic jerk,” Nancy says. “I guess it’s all for the best that this happened, because this way you and I won’t waste any more time with each other.”
“I cannot believe this,” Jerri says. She puts both pictures in her shirt pocket. She walks over to the safe, shaking her head. She replaces the camera in the safe and shuts the door. “Lights out, kids,” she says, tiredly.
“Yeah,” Nancy says. “I think I’ll be the first off to dreamy dreamland. I think I’ll just spend the night alone with my fabulous new scenario.”
We watch her go.
“I suppose I should have gone after her, but I couldn’t see the point in it. I think she meant everything she said. So why would I go after her?” I say.
“Is that really a question?” Jerri says.
“Yes,” I say.
“In my opinion, you did the right thing not to,” she says.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You don’t have to thank me. I wasn’t trying to flatter you. I was just saying that I think you made the right decision.”
“What do you say, if you don’t say thank you?” “You don’t have to say anything.”
I consider this. “I think I’ll drive home, but if you’d like a lift anywhere . . .”
“You know, you really didn’t deserve that. You really seem like a very nice man.”
“With dorky shoes,” I say, extending my foot.
“Top-Siders are dorky? Millions of people wear Top-Siders.”
“But I can see that they aren’t exactly cool.”
“We’re not teenagers anymore,” she says. “I don’t think any of us will perish if we don’t have the exact newest thing.”
“No,” I say.
“Thanks for the offer, but I think I’ll just walk over to a friend’s house.”
“Fine,” I say. “I’m sorry about all this, too. It’s a lame thing to say, but I sort of appreciate the fact that at least one person is still talking to me.”
She shrugs. “You take care,” she says.
I’m out the door when she says, “Oh, wait. Take your pictures.”
I turn around, and she puts the photographs in my hand. For the first time, I see that they’re joke Pilgrims: the woman excessively big-breasted, the man with his fly unzipped. Stallone, of course, you wouldn’t dare joke about. And Marilyn is almost a sacred cultural icon. People who don’t like James Dean would nevertheless realize that he was the embodiment of cool. But the Pilgrims, I suppose, have become so anachronistic that there’s no harm in joking about them. I hand that photograph back to her. “Two turkeys and one big-breasted babe,” I say. “I think I might as well pass on that one.”
Then I’m out on Duval, going around the corner to the street where I parked the car.
A guy in dreadlocks walks past, bouncing on the balls of his bare feet. On the steps by a guest house, a man lies sprawled on top of a coat, a small pile of clutter next to him. He’s wearing a beret, shirtless, and almost trouserless. His pants are down around his hips. He’s lying on his side, mouth lolled open. I walk past a store selling silk-screened bags with tropical birds on them. I stop to admire a traveler’s palm in someone’s front yard, spotlit. As they pass by, a middle-aged woman says to the man she is walking with, “So what part of town did they film Key Largo in?” In a shop window, I see a verdigris crane, flanked by gargoyles in graduated sizes. Just as I get near the car, someone’s light sensor is activated by my presence and floods the street with light, and I feel embarrassed, as if I’ve been caught doing something bad. Or as if I’ve unnecessarily caused some commotion. But the light blinks out after I pass, and the whole block—surprising, this close to Duval—is eerily quiet. It gives me more time than I want to hear the voice in my head telling me that I’ve done everything wrong, that years ago, I took the easy way out, that if I think I’m indispensable to Lowell, that’s only a delusion—like the delusion that I’m a nice-looking man, or at least ordinary, wearing inconspicuous clothes and conventional shoes. What must it be like to be the president? Pictures in the paper of you jogging, sweating, your heavy legs caught at a bad angle, so they look like tree trunks? Cry at a funeral, and they zoom the lens in on you. “It’s love,” I hear Kathryn saying sarcastically. Well, no: it certainly isn’t, and apparently wasn’t going to be. But what version is Nancy going to give Kathryn, back in the great city of New York? On the other hand, what do I care? What do I have to be embarrassed about?
I get in the car, not much looking forward to joining the weekend traffic ex
iting Key West. It seems that half the world is intent upon getting to the southernmost point, and half the world is intent upon fleeing it. Half an hour up the Keys, there’s a police roadblock. A cop standing in the street is motioning cars over to the side, but thank heaven: I was feeling so sorry for myself, and so preoccupied, that I was creeping along, barely going the minimum. Once past, I turn on the radio. The tape deck has been broken for weeks. I fiddle with the dial and find Rod Stewart, singing “Do you feel what I feel/Can we make it so that’s part of the deal,” which reminds me of the party the night before, which reminds me of after wards, at the Casa Marina. Bad luck, I think. Bad timing, bad lady, bad luck.
“A Whiter Shade of Pale” comes on, which really takes me back. I’m probably among the few Americans who first heard that song in a bar in Tangier. I think about returning to my room, my VCR, my travel tapes. It seems a pleasant notion. And if I’m lucky, there will be leftovers to eat while I take the nightly imaginative voyage.
Then I see it: the police cars in the driveway. Police on the front steps. Police standing by the rose garden, writing whatever they’re writing. The grating noise of their radios seems to stab the quiet of the night. I catch Kathryn, like a stunned deer, in my headlights. Then, suddenly, she is on her way back to the house, accompanied by a policeman. Lowell. Something terrible has happened to Lowell.
“What?” I say to the first cop I see. I only say that word; I can’t manage a full sentence.
“Who are you?” he says.
“Lowell’s assistant,” I say.
“His assistant? You live here?”
I nod yes.
“There was an accident,” he says. “The gentleman fell out of a tree.” “Fell?”
“Fell,” the cop says, his shoulders going a little limp and his knees slightly buckling as he slumps toward the ground. “From a tree,” he says again.
“What happened to him?” I ask.
“He was airlifted to Miami,” the cop says. “I wouldn’t want to speculate about the extent of his injuries.”
“He’s alive,” I say.
“He might have broken his neck,” the cop says. He swivels his head and puts his ear as close to his shoulder as it can get without actually touching the shoulder.
I go in the house, where every light is on.
“They wouldn’t let me on the plane,” Kathryn says, turning toward me in the glare. Then she collapses in tears. “That stupid whore you’ve taken such a liking to, with her mangy kitten. She just turned it out and then . . .” Tears interrupt Kathryn’s story. Then she pulls herself together, or tries to imitate someone who’s pulled herself together. She looks into my eyes. “You knew she left the God damned thing here, didn’t you? It got away, and she just left it. She told me to find it, like I was her servant, or something.” She stops. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything personal. Oh, God, if he lives, I’ll never be awful again. I really won’t. All I’m saying is, why am I supposed to find some scrappy cat and get it back to her in New York? That’s something perfectly normal to expect, like she left an earring here, or something? She didn’t even tell you any of this, when the other morning it was such a crisis I thought she was going to jump out of her skin if the ratty thing didn’t come back?”
I shake my head no. This can’t be happening. Just a few hours ago, everything was fine.
“It’s impossible,” Kathryn says to a cop who passes by. “This morning we were talking about the president coming here for dinner.”
I reach in my pocket and take out the photograph of myself with Clinton. I stare at it, as if it’s evidence of something.
“Hey! You and President Clinton!” the cop says. He’s young. Blond with blue eyes. He looks like he’s barely more than a teenager. But can he really be so unobservant that he doesn’t know it’s a joke photograph? My head begins to pound.
“It’s my fault for ever bringing her here,” Kathryn says. “She let her cat go, like it was a dog that would come back from a walk.” She turns to me. “He was fixing dinner, and I saw it. It ran up a tree, like a squirrel. Lowell was inside. He turned off the stove and went out on the deck, and eventually we got the ladder and put it up. Lowell was trying to coax it down from the kapok tree. Then he started to climb, and the next thing I knew, he was in the water, but he wasn’t moving. I thought he didn’t move right away because the fall had stunned him. I waded out and got him. Otherwise, he would have drowned. You don’t live where there’s anyone who can help you in any emergency. I could have screamed my head off, and nobody would have come. He went after that stupid cat, and now they think something horrible happened to his spine.”
The young cop has listened attentively to this avalanche of information. Finally he turns to me. “Was he also a friend of the president’s? Should someone let the president know?” he says.
Is he possibly making some bizarre joke? I look at the photograph again, as if I might be the one who’s missing something. Clinton, in a gray suit, stands smiling, his arm, with its inexactly cutout hand, too stiffly extended to really appear to be clasping anyone’s shoulder.
Words tumble through my mind, as I imagine the letter I might send: “Dear George, I enclose a photo that’s as close as I’ll ever come now to the real thing. This evening Lowell was airlifted to Miami, with serious injuries: quite probably, a broken neck. Which leaves me wondering—if things go as badly as they seem to be going at the moment—what a person who has always been a maverick in this country is supposed to do when the comfortable life he more or less stumbled into unexpectedly disappears out from under him. The first woman I dated in years turns out to be in love with another man. . . .”
I open the kitchen drawer. There is the wine pull, foolish contraption that it is. An item guaranteed to be puzzled over if found years hence in a time capsule.
“How you doing, big guy?” a cop I haven’t spoken to before says to me.
“This is a joke,” I say, removing the Polaroid from my pocket and holding it out. “You see that, don’t you?”
“Sure,” he says slowly, as if I’m playing some sort of parlor game. He studies my face. “I had a picture taken of myself one time in one of those fake stockades. Used it as a Christmas card. One of those ‘From Our House to Yours’ things. Turned out pretty funny.”
“Thank you,” I say, so quietly I can barely hear my own voice. I put the picture back in my pocket, clamping my right hand over it as if it might fly out and disappear. As if I were a boy again, in one of the many schools I attended, dutifully reciting the pledge of allegiance. Those days when life consisted of ritual, wherever we lived; ritual was the one constant, as predictable as my father’s patriotism, as inevitable as my mother’s church-going. I would get away from all that, I vowed. And I did—researching hotels and restaurants around the world, booking flights, arranging for any necessary letters of introduction, Lowell and I greeted by interesting and important people wherever we journeyed—people with whom we drank wine and dined. And now, it seems, that travel has concluded in the Florida Keys.
The note—the note in response to the letter I do eventually write to George Stephanopoulos—is very brief. It is addressed to Lowell, naturally enough, not to me. It concludes, in a heartfelt, yet predictable way, yet in a totally sincere way, if you know George: “You are in the president and first lady’s prayers.”
Mermaids
THOUGH they usually spent Christmas with James’s relatives in Pennsylvania, this year they had decided to see the family at New Year’s and had taken a last-minute trip to Key West. James was finally going to enact his dream of spending Christmas Day fishing. Miles Hetherly was driving three hours south to get aboard the charter boat with him. She planned to spend the day by the pool of the Hilton Hotel. It would never have occurred to her to tell Hetherly that they’d be in Key West at the same time he was visiting his relative, but it had occurred to James. Later, he swore he’d just said it out of nervousness—th
at he never knew what to talk to Hetherly about on the phone. Hetherly was her friend. She was not all that good at keeping friends, so their contact over thirty-some years had been more his doing than hers. Hetherly had never forgotten that she had written him during the time he was in Vietnam. That she alone, among their friends, had been the only loyal correspondent. She still cringed to think that she had sent him copies of the very antiwar SoHo Weekly News, as well as cocktail napkins from trendy restaurants she had gone to on dates. All that seemed so ludicrous, in retrospect; it had been rather insensitive, though the truth was, she’d been engaged and she had no more idea what to write him than her husband had now about what to say when he talked to him on the phone. It was a source of some amusement between them that neither could say exactly what Hetherly did. James maintained—only half jokingly—that he must be a spook.
Hetherly had jumped at the chance to drive down the Keys early Christmas morning to get aboard the boat. James had not actually invited him, but logically enough, Hetherly had assumed that James had brought up the trip for that reason. Passing through the room, she had overheard James saying that, well, if Hetherly wanted to start driving in what amounted to the middle of the night, then sure: he’d be welcome aboard the 7:30 A.M. departure of Treasure Trove. For her part, she was going to sun and swim. She would see James and Hetherly—she supposed they would have a big Christmas dinner at the hotel—upon their return.
“He’s always been a little in love with you,” James said, as they settled into their room.
“No he hasn’t,” she said. She had thought about it before, unprovoked, and the answer, she was sure, was that he was not a little in love with her. Indebted, perhaps. Appreciative. But more than that? No. “Thank you for pretending to be jealous, though,” she said.
“And you might be a little in love, too, except that I know how much you disapprove of men who shirk their responsibility,” he said.