Perfect Recall

by Ann Beattie

  “Is he Brian McCambry?” Dale had asked.

  “Yes,” the doctor said. Again, she seemed surprised.

  Nelson had been the one who speculated that Dr. Anna McCambry might be the wife of Brian McCambry. Dale, herself, had read only a few pieces by McCambry, though—as she told the doctor—Nelson had read her many others.

  “I’ll pass on the compliment,” the doctor said. “Now back to the real world.”

  What a strange way to announce the transition, Dale had thought, though for her, her symptoms sometimes were the real world, crowding out any other concerns. What was more real than telescoping vision, things blurring and swarming you, so that you had no depth perception, no ability to stand. The doctor talked to her about alterations in her diet. Prescribed diuretics. Said so many things so fast that Dale had to call the nurse, later that afternoon, to be reminded what several of them had been. The doctor had overheard the call. “Bring your husband and come for drinks and I’ll go over this with you while they talk,” the doctor had said. “Drinks in your case means seltzer.”

  “Thanks,” Dale said. No doctor had ever asked to see her out of the office. She wondered how common that was.

  She opened the Fumé Blanc but left the bottle of St. Emil-ion corked. How did she know? Maybe Jerome would decide to go directly to the white French burgundy. What hadn’t seemed fussy and precious before now did, a little: people and their wine preferences. Still, she indulged the vegetarians in their restrictions, knew better than to prepare veal for anyone, unless she was sure it wouldn’t result in a tirade. Her friend Andy liked still water, her student Nance preferred Perrier. Her mind was full of people’s preferences and quirks, their mystical beliefs and food taboos, their ways of asserting their independence and their dependency at table. The little tests: would there happen to be sea salt? Was there a way to adjust the pepper grinder to grind a little more coarsely? A call for chutney. That one had really put her over the top. There was Stonewall Kitchen’s Roasted Onion and Garlic Jam already on the table. She had sent Nelson for the chutney, since Paul was more his friend than hers.

  She went into the downstairs bathroom and brushed her hair, gathering it back in a ponytail. She took off the white shirt and changed back into her cashmere sweater, giving it a tug she knew she shouldn’t give it to make sure it fell just right. She looked at her boots and wished it was still summer; she’d be more comfortable barefoot, but it wasn’t summer, and her feet would freeze. She remembered that Julia Roberts had been barefoot when she married Lyle Lovett. Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett: not as strange as Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley.

  Brenda entered full of enthusiasm about the trip to the Wedding Cake House. It was amazing, beautiful, somehow sort of weird— a little creepy, some woman living inside her wedding cake like the old woman who lived in a shoe. Then Brenda began apologizing: she had insisted they drive down the longest dirt road in history, to get a basket of apples. Nelson put the basket down on the kitchen island, which she’d soon need every inch of to do the final dinner preparations. She could no longer eat apples, or anything excessively sweet. She was sick of explaining to people what she couldn’t eat, and why. In fact, she had started to say she was diabetic, since everyone seemed to know that that meant you couldn’t eat sugar. There was also the possibility that the apples might be Brenda and Jerome’s, to take back to New York, so she said, “Nice,” rather than “Thank you.”

  It was a rented house, but the owners must have loved to cook. The kitchen was well laid out, with the exception of the dishwasher being to the left of the sink. Dale had become so adept at using her left hand to load the dishwasher that she thought it might be amusing to be both diabetic and left-handed. By the time she left the house, she might be an entirely different person.

  “It’s great to see you. Did you get my note? You didn’t go to a lot of trouble, did you?” Jerome said, squeezing Dale, then letting go.

  Brenda was still in a dither. “We didn’t mess you up, did we?” she said.

  “Not at all,” Dale said.

  “I shouldn’t ask, but I’ve been cooped up in the plane, and then in the car. Would there be time to take a walk? A quick walk?”

  “Sure,” Dale said. She had just put the roast in the oven to bake. There was plenty of time.

  “Would you mind if Nelson and I take a look at that wiring problem? I’m much better when there’s natural light,” Jerome said.

  “Oh, he’s on his kick again about how he can’t see or hear!” Brenda said. She added, as if they didn’t know. “He’s sixty-four.”

  “What wiring problem?” Dale said. She wanted to be barefoot. She wanted to be Julia Roberts, with a big, dazzling smile. Instead, she could feel the skin between her eyebrows tightening. Wiring problem? The way Brenda talked got into her brain; in her presence, she started thinking in concerned italics.

  “I was trying to hook up speakers in the upstairs hallway. I can get one of them going but not the other. Might be a bad speaker,” Nelson said.

  Nelson had spent a good portion of his book advance on new sound equipment. Their compromise was that when people arrived, there would be no music. So far, the day had consisted of bluegrass, Dylan’s first electric album, Japanese ceremonial music, an hour or so of La Bohème, and Astor Piazola. Dale had listened to the weather report and one cut from a Lou Reed CD that she imagined might be Jerome’s theme song. She was fond of him, but he did think he was God’s gift to women.

  “You’ll come, won’t you?” Brenda said. She was wearing shoes that would have been inappropriate for a walk, if she hadn’t been Brenda: brown pointy-toed boots with three-inch heels. This year’s hip look, while Dale’s had become the generic. Brenda had shrink-wrapped herself into a black leather skirt, worn over patterned pantyhose. On top was a sweater with a stretched-out turtleneck Dale thought must be one of Jerome’s. He had kept his collection of French handknit sweaters for twenty-some years.

  “Just down the road?” Dale said, gesturing to the dirt road that went past the collapsed greenhouse behind the garage. She liked the road. You could usually see deer this time of the evening. Also, because of the way the road dipped, it seemed like you were walking right into the sky, which had now turned Hudson River School radiant. Dale’s friend Janet Lebow was the only year-rounder at the end of the road. When the nasty summer people left, taking their Dobermans and their shiny four-wheel drives with them, Janet was happy not only to let Dale walk the No Trespassing/Danger/Posted/Keep Out road, she usually sent her dog, Tyrone (who was afraid of the summer dogs), out to exercise with her. Janet was divorced, fifty going on twenty-five, devoted to tabloids, late-night movies, astrological forecasts, and “fun” temporary tattoos, of things like unicorns leaping over rainbows. She was not a stupid woman, only childish and traumatized—Dale presumed, by the marriage she never talked about. Tyrone was a smart golden retriever, black lab mix. When he wasn’t in the tributary to the York River, he was wriggling in the field, trying to shed fleas. The dog and the kitchen were the two things Dale felt sure she would miss most when they had to vacate the house. They had it through the following summer, when the philosophy professor and his wife would return from their year in Munich. By then, Nelson’s book would supposedly be finished. She knew she was not going to enjoy the home stretch. Nelson had written other books, which inevitably made him morose because of the enormity of the task. Then the music selections would really become eclectic.

  Dale reached into the flour bin of the “Hoosier” cabinet and took out her secret stash of doughnut holes, which she bought on Saturdays at the Portsmouth Farmer’s Market. She did not eat doughnut holes: they were exclusively for Tyrone, who thought Dale had invented the best game of fetch imaginable. He would race for the doughnut hole, sniff through the field for it, throw it in the air so Dale could see he’d gotten it, then gulp it down in one swallow. She had taken to applauding. Lately, she had started to add “Good dog, Tyrone” to the applause.

 
“Is that cigarettes?” Brenda whispered to Dale, though Nelson and Jerome were already walking up the stairs.

  “Doughnut holes,” Dale whispered back. “You’ll see.” She plunged what remained of them, in their plastic bag, into the deep pocket of her coat.

  “I keep peanut M&M’s in my lingerie drawer,” Brenda said. “And Jerome—you know, he doesn’t think I know he still drinks Pernod.”

  “It’s for a dog,” Dale said.

  “Pernod?” Brenda asked.

  “No. Doughnut holes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on,” Dale said. “You’ll see.”

  At dinner—during which, Dale could sense, Brenda had greater respect for her, both as a cook and as a crazy woman (like the last moments of the Fourth of July fireworks, she’d sent three mini-doughnut holes up in the air at the same time)—they discussed the brass sundial Dale had placed atop autumn leaves in the center of the table. Nelson informed everyone that the piece sticking up was called the gnomon.

  “No mon is an island,” Jerome said. Jerome very much enjoyed wordplay and imitating dialects. Dialect from de islands was currently his favorite. They had recently vacationed in Montego Bay.

  “And this is the shadow,” Nelson said, pointing, ignoring Jerome’s silly contribution. “This is the plate, this the hour line, this the dial, or diagram.”

  “You are a born teacher,” Brenda said.

  “I broke that habit,” Nelson said. He had. He had resigned in order to spend his time writing books. She had left with him, retaining only two loyal students who drove hours each week to work with her in the darkroom.

  “Groton or no Groton, he had such an interest in knowledge that we had nothing to worry about with Nelson. I wore her down, and I was right to have done it,” Jerome said.

  The time would never come when Jerome would not want to be thanked, one more time, for having saved Nelson—as they both thought of it—from the clutches of Groton.

  “Which I thank you for,” Nelson said.

  “And, if I’d been around at your birth, I could have stopped her from naming you for a sea captain,” Jerome said.

  “Oh, Nelson is a lovely name,” Brenda said.

  “Of course, if I’d been around at your birth, people might have suspected something funny was going on,” Jerome said.

  “I thought you met Didi in Paris, when Nelson was five or six,” Brenda said.

  “He was four. He was five when we got married.”

  Didi had gone to Paris to study painting. Actually, she had gone to have an affair with her Theosophy instructor. That hadn’t had a happy ending, though Didi had met Jerome at the Deux Magots. No snail-like dawdling; by her own admission, she had struck with the speed of a snake.

  “I didn’t understand what you meant, then, when you said ‘If I’d been around,’” Brenda said.

  “I was just saying ‘if.’ If things had been otherwise. Other than what they were. If.”

  “But I think you implied that you knew Didi when she gave birth. Didn’t he?” Brenda said.

  “Brenda, you were a child when all this happened. You need not be jealous,” Jerome said.

  “I know I should let this drop, Jerome, but it seemed sort of strange to suggest you might have been there,” Brenda said. “Am I being too literal-minded again?”

  “Yes,” Nelson said.

  “Well, no, I mean, sometimes I feel like something is being said between the lines and because I’m a newcomer, I don’t quite get it.”

  “I’ve lived with you for six years, Brenda,” Jerome said. He said it with finality, as if she would do well to drop the subject, if she wanted to live with him another six seconds.

  Brenda said nothing. Dale gestured to the soup tureen, beside the sundial. Also on the table was a silver bowl of freshly snipped chives and a little Chinese dish, enameled inside, that Dale had found for a quarter at tag sale. People in the area did not value anything they were selling that was smaller than a beachball. The Chinese dish was an antique. Inside, there was a pyramid of unsweetened whipped cream.

  “Fabulous. Fabulous soup,” Jerome said. “So when are you going to let me bankroll your restaurant?”

  He wasn’t kidding. He’d wanted Dale to open a restaurant in New York for years. She thought, in part, so he could entertain clients there. Jerome had all the money in the world, inherited when his parents died and left him half the state of Rhode Island. Since Jerome was a part-time stockbroker, he’d managed to invest it wisely. Back in the days before Dale showed at the gallery in Boston, it had been more difficult to dismiss Jerome’s ideas.

  “So how’s the photography coming?” he said, when she didn’t answer. Brenda was still eating her soup, not looking up. Dale suspected he must have realized he’d offended Brenda.

  “I’ve got some interesting stuff I’ve been working on,” Dale said. “The woman down the road—” She gestured into the dark. Only a tiny blinking light from the bridge to Portsmouth could be seen, far in the distance. “There’s one woman who lives there year-round—heating with a woodstove—and I’ve taken photographs . . . well: it always sounds so stupid, talking about what you’re photographing. It’s like paraphrasing a book,” she said, hoping to elicit Nelson’s sympathy.

  “Just the general idea,” Jerome said.

  “Well, she does astrological charts for people, and they’re really quite beautiful. And she has amazing hands. You’d think she was a musician. Very long fingers. I’ve photographed her hands, as she works on the charts. The books she consults are quite beautiful, too. The clutter on the table. All the stuff involved in doing a chart.”

  The longer she talked, the more stupid she felt.

  “Have you had your chart done?” Jerome said. The stiffness of disapproval registered in his voice.

  “No,” Dale said.

  “I had my chart done once,” Brenda said. “I have it somewhere. It was apparently very unusual, because all my moons were in one house.”

  Jerome looked at her. “Didi believed in astrology,” he said. “She thought we were mismatched because she was a Libra and I was a Scorpio. This apparently gave her license to have an affair with a policeman.”

  “I’m not Didi,” Brenda said flatly. She had apparently decided not to let Jerome relegate her to silence. Dale was proud of her for that.

  “Will you carve the roast?” Dale said to Nelson. “I’ll get the vegetables out of the oven.” She felt a little bad about leaving Brenda alone at the table with Jerome, but Nelson was much better at carving than she was. She stood and began collecting soup bowls.

  “Does that woman with the earmuffs still see you?” Dale said to Brenda as she picked up her bowl. Very off-handed. As if the conversation had been going fine. It would give Brenda the excuse to rise and follow her into the kitchen, if she wanted to. Brenda said: “Yeah. I’ve gotten to like her a little better, but her worrying about losing body heat through her ears—you’ve got to wonder.”

  “All the world is exercising,” Jerome said. “Brenda has more requests for her services than she can keep up with. The gym stays open until ten at night now on Thursdays. Do you two exercise?”

  “There’s an Exercycle in the downstairs bedroom. Sometimes I do it while I’m watching CNN,” Nelson said.

  Jerome gave his little half nod again. “And you?” he said to Dale. “Still doing the fifty sit-ups? You’re looking wonderful, I must say.”

  “She can’t,” Nelson said, answering for her. “The Ménière’s thing. It screws up her inner ear if she does that sort of repetitive activity.”

  “Oh, I forgot,” Brenda said. “How are you doing, Dale?”

  “Fine,” she said. Things were better. The problem would never go away unless, of course, it spontaneously went away. Things had been so bad because the hypoglycemia complicated the problem, and that was pretty much under control, but she didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Remind me of what you can’t eat,” Jerome said.
“Not that we wouldn’t be too intimidated to have you to dinner, anyway. Better to reciprocate at a restaurant in the city.”

  “You don’t have to reciprocate,” Dale said. “I like to cook.”

  “I wouldn’t be intimidated,” Brenda said.

  Dale looked at Jerome, who was seated facing the kitchen. “You wouldn’t,” he said. “I stand corrected.”

  “It can be a problem, when you’re really good at something, that you never have people even try to do that thing for you,” Brenda said. “There’s a girl at work who gives the best massage in the world, and nobody will touch her, because she’s the best. The other day I rubbed just her shoulders, and she almost swooned.”

  “Taking up massage, also?” Jerome said.

  “What do you mean, also?” Brenda said. “This is about the fact that you don’t like me working late on Thursdays, isn’t it? I might remind you that if a client calls, whatever time it is, it’s nothing for you to be on the phone for an hour.”

  “No fighting!” Nelson said.

  “We’re not fighting,” Jerome said.

  “Well, you’ve been trying to provoke a fight with me,” Brenda said.

  “Then it was unconscious. I apologize,” Jerome said.

  “Oh, honey,” Brenda said, getting up, putting her napkin on the table. She went around the table and hugged Jerome.

  “She likes me again,” Jerome said.

  “We all like you,” Nelson said. “I, personally, think you saved my life.”