Perfect Recall

by Ann Beattie

  He got into his old yellow Mustang convertible and started it. Leonard Cohen, on the tape deck, was singing “The Future.” What he liked about the song—aside from the lyrics—was that except for the girl chorus, he could believe that Leonard Cohen might just be singing to himself in the shower. It was the sort of song that made you feel that the singer might have dropped a bar of soap in the middle of a verse, but gone right on singing.

  There was never a parking place on the small lane where he lived. Most of the houses had driveways just big enough to hold a car, but the two parking places on the street that belonged to no one had been claimed by a madwoman who put trash cans in the space she considered hers, to keep other cars out, and by a giant: a seven-foot man with a shaved head and a third eyebrow tattooed above and between his real eyebrows. He had hung a sign on a ficus tree whose roots had broken through the asphalt of the second parking place, making it almost impossible to park in, anyway, that said PARK AND BE KILLED. If you thought the police would go around and talk to the person who displayed such a sign, you didn’t know anything about Key West. So between the trash cans and the subtle warning, he never even tried to park on his street anymore. He usually found a place two blocks away, near where Roy Scheider used to live. Then there was the nightly internal debate about whether he should try to wrestle the top up; only the left side could be secured, and the zipper only closed over a fraction of the back window, but still: it was some help if it started to pour—especially if done in conjunction with spreading the old shower curtain in the back trunk over the front seats. But tonight he was too tired; even if he triumphed over bad weather, that wouldn’t mean he hadn’t still fallen down on the job about everything else—the look Sallie gave him at the airport had communicated that, beyond a doubt—so he chose to believe the man with his pointer: all through the night his car would be dry, and the next day, radiant Key West would continue to beam with sunshine.

  Miss May was eating an ice cream on a stick as he came in, carrying the leftovers. It was like bringing a lump of coal, when the recipient already had an amethyst-filled geode. The TV was on low. Miss May had been painting her nails: several little bottles were sitting on top of an In Style magazine she had carried off the plane. The aroma of acetone filled the room. Miss May said: “Oh, darlin’, I do hope you had as good an evening as the girls. Your little beauty has pink toenails and red fingernails, which she promises never to bite again. We had a tea, and I found the most adorable things in your cabinet. That beautiful etched glass decanter was our teapot, and for a strainer we used the toe of one of my ripped nylons, stretched over two chopsticks I found, and the tea itself was vanilla almond, which I brought with me from the specialty store in my neighborhood. We thought the little Japanese dishes were nicer than coffee mugs, so we took out those pretty square bowls and used them as our teacups, and then Hillary had the idea of going outside to get some lovely bougainvillea to put in the tea because she said—can you imagine?—she said: ‘Mommy’s friend Father Donovan puts an olive in his martini, so I need to put a pink flower in my tea.’ I went to Houston in September and he came to dinner. He’s quite the man about town. I don’t think he’s spending his time praying and making jelly . . . though I guess that’s the monks. I doubt if they’re playing poker!”

  As she talked, he sat in the wicker chair draped with a serape. He had found the chair on the street, the first of the year, when the landlords loaded out the possessions of their evicted tenants. The serape had been left behind—he had had Marcia clean it for him in Woolite—when a truck crushed a tortoise crossing Route 1, and he had almost slammed into the back of the truck that had stopped abruptly, but not abruptly enough. The woman in the truck’s passenger seat had jumped out and thrown a serape over the turtle, wailing something in Spanish that he couldn’t understand. The man had then become involved in getting the woman back in the truck. He had succeeded, leaving the serape behind, which Derek had slowly unfolded, as if he were inspecting a wound that had been under bandages for days. He had stood in the breakdown lane, considering the pulpy turtle, then the serape, and then he had placed the turtle several feet off the road, near a mango tree, placing a few fallen leaves over it, then folded the serape and put it in the backseat of his Mustang. The sofa Miss May sat on had come with the “furnished” apartment: meaning that there had been a mattress, sofa, and metal kitchen stool, as well as an overturned wooden crate draped with a tablecloth commemorating the state of Idaho. When Sallie sent Hillary’s drawings, he began to use the nails that were already in the walls to put them up, sometimes puncturing the sun, or the roof of a house, or some enormous bird or plane in order to hang them. The antique Turkoman prayer rug had been a Christmas present from his uncle George, in Istanbul. The club chairs he was storing for a computer repair person who either would, or would not, eventually return to Key West, depending on her guru Rama’s advice. His friend Tad, who was an electrician, had gotten the chandelier rewired, cleaned, and working. There was even a dimmer switch, which Tad had pulled out of somebody’s trash the day after Christmas, still in its package. The TV was something Marcia had loaned him, because it took up half the space in her bedroom, which was eight by twelve. He imagined that soon she would be repossessing it.

  “Did you and your friend Grant ever finish that screenplay about the lady who was abducted by space aliens?” Miss May asks.

  “He was working on that alone. I wasn’t part of that project.”

  “Wasn’t Troy Donahue interested in it?”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “What is that box on your lap, darlin’?”

  “It’s yellow rice and beans. I thought you might want it. There’s some garlic chicken, too.”

  “Oh no, anything with garlic is not for me,” Miss May says.

  “There was a great bit in Grant’s script about one of the spacemen giving Troy Donahue something that looked like a root, and Troy reaching in his pocket and taking out a little packet of Gummy Bears. Then it went into a fantasy sequence in which the root began to sprout and to wind around everything in the room, like kudzu, while the Gummy Bears came to life and were acting sort of like the June Taylor dancers, doing these bizarre kicks in sequence, while the kudzu kept slowly strangling everything.”

  “Sometimes when he was wound up, I could see that Sallie didn’t think he was proper company for a young child,” Miss May says.

  “Miss May, how did you raise somebody as conventional as Sallie?”

  “Well,” Miss May says, “I never did think she was a bit conventional, but in high school, you know, there were gangs and there were sororities, and she had to choose between them, and she chose the sororities. They all talked the same way in the sorority, and she began to talk the same way they did, which was sort of arch, if I had to describe it any one way. They used words to ward things off, the way the gang girls used spiky jewelry and the pointed toes of their black boots—all those girls in those ugly, expensive boots they spent their last dimes for. Of course, now I suppose they’d have guns.”

  “Tell the truth, Miss May. Didn’t you think she was being very conventional, getting married to an AAA travel agent who wore chinos and oxfords and volunteered at the soup kitchen on Friday nights?”

  “I thought you were a nice person. I still think you’re a nice person. You and Sallie both changed so much, it would have been a miracle if you’d stayed together.”

  “You know what, though, Miss May? I put her back in the position she was in in high school. I made her choose between the uptight world we were living in and the almost total freedom Wendell represented. She took one look at the craziness, and for the second time in her life, she opted for self-preservation, as she told me so many times. She had to rejoin the sorority, so to speak.”

  “Your friend Wendell I never took to, as you know,” Miss May says. “But it serves no purpose to speak ill of the dead. And if he might have known he had that disease, and lured you into his employ when he actually kne
w he’d be getting worse and more and more dependent, then I really do not think he was a good person at all.” She looks around the almost empty room. “How long is the money Wendell left you going to last? You were always a very energetic, self-motivated person, but I don’t see much of that anymore. You came here to . . . well, as I see it, you moved to land’s end. You might have come for Wendell’s sake, but he’s dead, and you’re still here. You’re going to have to settle on a job, eventually. It’s like you’re on an overnight camp out in your own home, Derek. Sleeping on an inflatable mattress . . .”

  “That’s gallantry. I’m giving you and Hillary the bed.”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve antagonized you,” Miss May says. “It just seems to me that a man who once created a lovely home outside Atlanta . . .”

  “Things!” he says. “They’d started to proliferate. It was like Grant’s script: one little root that expands like speeded-up time-lapse photography. You see the tentacles begin to creep outward. . . .”

  “Derek, dear, furniture does not grow in your house. You may decide that you’ve brought in too much furniture, but . . .”

  Actually, the divesting had been inspired by Wendell, whose own passing on of possessions began in the months before his death. He wanted to see that predictable mixture of anguish and appreciation on his friends’ faces. Even the washing machine was loaded off, their garbage man returning at night, with a borrowed truck, smiling gratefully. Wendell swore that that night he dreamed of diapers agitating, and that he saw them as beautiful: art in motion. In the cases where there were thank-you notes, he even divested himself of them, sending a husband the thank-you the man’s wife had sent and scrawling in the margin what a gracious, wonderful person the husband had married; forwarding the thank-you from a famous musician to the man’s agent, so he would be sure to see the musician’s elegance in writing, as well as in playing violin. It was a crazy time, but far more inspirational than John Lennon’s singing about imagining no possessions. Wendell hadn’t wanted to give things away in order to get rid of them; he had wanted to think that he had relocated them in the world where they should be, as if they were friends who would offer other friends new possibilities. In the Fantasy Fest parade the month he died, Wendell rode in a gondola atop a float of fan-agitated roiling blue-crepe-paper water; he was dressed as a mermaid, with his silver-gold sequined body padded with Bubble Wrap inside, because he was so thin. From the float, he threw small plastic fish he’d bought, as well as his entire collection of silver demitasse spoons. “If we were really in Venice, and people weren’t waiting on Duval Street to snatch them up, they’d sink to the bottom of the canal and over time they’d metamorphose into the things our civilization really prizes, like sneakers and beer cans. Or they’d be a miracle for some drunk who’d lost a shoe: he could dip his hand in and pluck out a mate. It would be a reverse fairy tale; instead of people getting silver, which nobody cares about anymore, they’d get Keds that could be dried out and worn, or beer cans the truly creative could make mobiles out of. Imagine the pyramids done over, built with Budweiser cans,” Wendell had said.

  Derek had met Wendell in Atlanta, where Derek had been a travel agent with a large national company. Wendell had been planning a trip to Venice, and when the plans were concluded, he had asked Derek: “Would you like to accompany me?” “I have a wife,” Derek had said. “The invitation extends to her, of course,” Wendell had said. “What did you have in mind?” Derek had asked. “Traveling with young, attractive, companionable people,” Wendell had said. “Spreading the wealth. It’s my mother’s money that I inherited. She would have been scandalized to think I’d take my travel agent and his wife!”

  Off to Venice. Even Sallie had been charmed by Wendell at first. If their child had been a boy, they’d intended to make him Wendell’s namesake. For a year, Sallie had cooked and kept house, and Derek had done Wendell’s bookkeeping and travel arranging, kept the social calendar, responded to requests from charities for Wendell’s time and money. Then he had begun driving Wendell to doctors. He had filed health insurance claims, written vague responses to charities hoping Wendell might appear at their fund-raisers, installed an answering machine so no one would have to immediately contend with the constant calls from friends and acquaintances, wondering why Wendell had simply disappeared on them. He had arranged for the move Wendell wanted to make to Key West. He had begun to read books on Wendell’s disease; to set up appointments with specialists; even to inquire about alternative medicine, other forms of healing. After the move, it was not too long until Sallie left, claiming, against all medical evidence, that she wasn’t going to risk having her baby become ill. “You’re the couple—you and Wendell. Not you and me. And forget the accident of Hillary!” she had screamed at him. “Are you really such a do-gooder, going from your one-night-a-week at the soup kitchen to assuage your liberal guilt to daily duty with a dying man, or do you just like the good life? Or maybe you think that when the end comes, you’ll be the beneficiary, because of all your damned benevolence. Look into your heart for the real answer,” she had railed. He had tried to look, actually, but he found his heart had turned to stone. That had started to happen as he read more and more about the disease. It had intensified in doctors’ waiting rooms, begun to shrink and to solidify during various trips to the hospital. So first Sallie went crazy and jumped ship, and then Wendell became truly demented, settling into his gondola for his last ride down Duval Street. Then Wendell had died, leaving him as one of the beneficiaries. He had met his second wife at the funeral home. Her father had died, and she was his only survivor. They had their grief in common. Also a love of kayaking, an interest in reading mysteries, a taste for Mexican beer, a desire to engage in sex as a way to mitigate pain. Those things would not a marriage sustain, as he quickly realized. Add to that the fact that she was from California and felt like she was living in a petri dish in Key West. How could people stand to creep around the little streets with all their stop signs, when there was a big world of freeways? Why did people aim spotlights on their perfectly ordinary palm trees at night? What was all the self-congratulation, as if people were getting away with something? There was great weather elsewhere in the world. People bedazzled with the weather? She was gone in a year.

  “Now tell me, darlin’, and I will never ask again,” Miss May says. “If there was a chance that you and Sallie could start over—both of you in a neutral place, I mean—isn’t there still some little part of you that says there’s still some real love between you? I cannot believe it doesn’t say something that Sallie will give no other man a ghost of a chance, and that you’ve gone in the exact opposite direction and let anyone who wants to be your girlfriend go out with you, though you refuse to have that mean anything emotionally.”

  “What I can’t believe is that Sallie would have put you up to that question.”

  “She didn’t. I’m asking because I think a reconciliation might be possible.”

  “Miss May, you never married, yourself. How come you think marriage is such an important institution?”

  “That makes no more sense than asking me how I believe people can jump high hurdles when I can’t jump high hurdles.”

  “How do you think Sallie and I could jump high hurdles, Miss May?”

  “Well, I think you both care for each other, and I think you found yourself in very unfortunate circumstances, where you had to devote all your attention to a dying man, instead of to your wife and little child, and now that that’s over, I don’t see why you couldn’t start again.”

  “What if I resent the things she said about my character? What if I resent the attitude she took toward the dying man? What if I discovered something about Sallie that would make me too skeptical of her ever to get back together?”

  “Well, darlin’, what else is ever going to be like that again? If you had it to do over, I can’t believe you’d do the same thing. Wendell took you in, darlin’. We’ve all had people take us in, but then we learn from o
ur mistakes.”

  “You and Sallie have always insisted that Wendell knew the day he met me he was dying. I know that isn’t true. I made his first doctor appointment, Miss May. We both found out together.”

  “He might have known without admitting to himself or anyone else that he knew,” Miss May says. “But a person intuits things. You’ll never tell me he didn’t intuit it. He hadn’t spent his whole life doing impulsive things, had he? His mother was dead and buried twenty years before he came to think it was so important to spend as much of the money she left him as he could. He had a lifetime in which he could have moved to Key West—why did he have to take the first offer he got on his house and give away his things and get to Key West as fast as he could? You know the answer as well as I do. It was intuition.”

  He thinks about it. “Do you intuit that I see your point, Miss May?”

  “I do, actually,” she says. “But a fat lot of good that’s going to do me.”

  His friend Tad comes with his truck, so the TV can be returned to Marcia. Marcia hasn’t asked for it—in fact, she’s never answered the phone when he’s called—but the big TV seems to reproach him, so he wants to give it back. He has the key to her apartment. He also has another TV that Hillary can watch just as well—though she has little interest in anything but Frasier.

  While Hillary and Miss May swim at the beach, he and Tad load the TV onto the truck. Tad covers it and secures it. They set off, listening to Tiny Tim’s Christmas album on Tad’s CD player. When Tad says, “Poor fucker,” Derek at first thinks he’s sympathizing with him: another girlfriend gone; even the big TV disappearing. Then he realizes that of course Tad is talking about Tiny Tim’s recent death.