by Ann Beattie
“Banyan! C’est terrible!”
“It’s right on target,” he said. “When they make their choices, they range from impulsive to irresponsible.”
“But you are very lucky that you find a mother who truly loves you!” Marie Catherine said. “She chooses to love you. That is even more of a compliment.”
“Put ’er there, Ma,” Banyan said, leaning his cheek toward Elizabeth. She kissed it.
“He is mischief,” Marie Catherine said.
“The ice cream’s melting,” Banyan said. “Let’s dish it up.”
As we followed them into the dark house, Elizabeth whispered: “Is this a big mistake? I shouldn’t say anything?” but there was no time for me to answer. Marie Catherine was gesturing toward the kitchen table, where white linen place mats and punchwork white napkins had already been placed. She had Grandmother Huntlowe’s silver flatware, as well as her silver pitcher, which sat on a trivet in the center of the table, filled with pink phlox. Banyan pulled out Elizabeth’s chair. He moved to pull mine out, but I beat him to it.
“How’s Donovan?” he asked.
“When last heard from, he was exactly the same,” Elizabeth said. “He was deploring television violence and wondering whether he should take early retirement.”
“What did you tell him?” Banyan said.
“He just wonders aloud. He doesn’t accept any incoming information.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“She thinks that your father, and some man who kicked his wife from behind and sent her crashing into a snowman, represent modern marriage,” Elizabeth said, sucking on a spoonful of ice cream.
“This is terrible! You know a man who is so violent?”
“I’m sorry I asked,” Banyan said.
“Do you think he should take early retirement?” Elizabeth asked Banyan.
“No. He doesn’t have enough interests,” he said, between bites of ice cream.
“Do you think I should make more of an effort to get a man interested in me?” I asked.
“Absolutely. I see it all the time: guys who burned out in their first marriage get into their forties and realize the errors of their ways. No more fanning the flames. They want a neat little bonfire to warm their hands over. They’re willing to try again.”
“And do you think we should get a dog?” Marie Catherine suddenly interjected, looking Banyan right in the eye.
“No,” he said. “We’ve already been through this.”
“Because he doesn’t realize, it could be a nice dog like that funny dog that was in your family that did the tricks.” She looked at both of us, in turn. Elizabeth looked noncommittal. I looked off into space like I’d missed the comment entirely.
“Well then, if I can’t have a dog, maybe one hundred thousand dollars, like your mother mentions?”
Banyan shook his head. “There was an old TV show called The Millionaire. The money only brought unhappiness. Some guy went around ringing doorbells—this was really the Dark Ages; now, he’d get blasted away, or at the very least they’d look through the peephole and tell him to beat it or they’d call 911. Anyway, he’d go into people’s houses and announce he was giving them one million dollars. From then on, it was nothing but misery.”
Elizabeth frowned, pursing her lips. Her expression was clearly not the result of sucking on a bitter cherry. “Wasn’t that show before your time?” she finally said to Banyan.
“We used to watch it on the VCR when I was at Yale. I think the joke to some of them was that it was just a million bucks,” he said, snorting.
“A soap opera,” Marie Catherine said, having decided what sort of a show it must have been.
Driving to the inn where we’d spend the night before continuing the drive home, I remarked on the obvious: Banyan and Marie Catherine seemed happy, but not foolishly happy. Why add anything to the mix—dog, castle, money—that might ruin anyone’s equilibrium?
“Well, that’s exactly what old stick-in-the-mud Dennis was arguing earlier, in case you don’t remember,” she said.
We rode a while in silence. Sometimes she sounded like our mother. More often—it was true—I tended to sound like Dennis.
“So what are you going to do about it?” I asked, finally.
“Hold on to it and see what happens,” she said.
“Like a spell you don’t cast?”
“Like a spell I don’t cast.”
We didn’t talk anymore until we pulled into the driveway of the inn. We’d stayed there other times when we’d visited Marie Catherine and Banyan. The owner knew us now; last time, for the same price, he’d given us the honeymoon suite, which had a Jacuzzi. We sat in it together, bubbling, amused at the many strange places we’d found ourselves, individually and collectively, over the years: moving to Maine; visiting Europe; the summer I went tubing with a man I thought I’d marry, except that it turned out he was already married. Also, the time we visited Miss Willa Walker’s Boston apartment, which was the grandest place we’d ever seen in real life. We’d gone there with Uncle Nate to trade a tire for her landscape. It had of course been inferior to the house Elizabeth planned to live in when she made it big as a famous model, but still: we couldn’t believe our eyes. In retrospect, the strange stalky plants must have been orchids. The music, which we’d never heard anything like before, had been the voice of Teresa Stratas. And so many strange things, all in one room: later, we would realize we’d been looking at Alex Katz cutouts, John Martini sculpture, Cornell boxes. We were with Uncle Nate, and he was delivering his tire, walking down the street from the expensive lot we’d eventually had to park in when he couldn’t find a parking place. The tire was in a plastic garbage bag. We’d been so excited, and Miss Willa Walker had been so nice to us. As soon as we arrived, she phoned her nephew and he came over and he and Uncle Nate drank champagne. Miss Willa Walker had iced rose-hip tea, which we drank, too, with heaping spoons of sugar, and absolutely loved. It was served to us in the same stemmed glasses the men drank from, congratulating each other on their trade: the landscape for the tire. But Uncle Nate got the better of the deal, and Miss Willa Walker’s nephew missed his guess: after Uncle Nate’s death, the tires didn’t appreciate in value. In fact, when they went up for auction, few were even bid on.
“You get the bags, will you?” Elizabeth said, handing me the keys to unlock the trunk. She was primping; though she had no real interest in the owner, she still compulsively made herself attractive when meeting any man she’d met before.
He was happy to see us. Real honeymooners were in the upstairs suite, he said, winking to us, but he had set aside a lovely room with twin tester beds that overlooked the pond. We must come down and have whatever drink we’d like from the sideboard set up in the library, and then he would tell us about the special dishes the chef had prepared for dinner. Though he offered to help, we had only two small overnight bags, one of which was slung over my shoulder. The bags, and the Bubble Wrapped landscape, which I had taken out of the trunk not because I thought there was any danger of its being stolen, but simply because I wanted to see it again.
The room was pretty: Laura Ashley wallpaper and white lace curtains. As he moved in front of us, still expressing his joy at seeing us again, he touched a button that activated the stereo: some very lovely music, probably Chopin. Then he moved around the room, turning on a light on the desk, using a dimmer switch for the recessed lights near the large bay window that looked out to the field and the pond. With everything about the room just the way it should be, he turned to us as happy, as satisfied, as Miss Willa Walker had been that day years ago, standing in her private museum. I felt like a little girl again, someone who barely knew what was going on—that was the truth; you could be a grown-up and know less and less about what was going on—but nevertheless experiencing a vague, happy anticipation.
“I never thought about it until now, but wasn’t it strange Miss Willa Walker had none of her own artwork hung on the walls?” I said, looking arou
nd the room once the owner had left.
“I think artists are like that. Musicians might be an exception. They don’t mind playing their own compositions. But think about it: writers talk about other writers’ books; painters hang work by other artists.” She sat on the side of the bed. “And anyway, are you sure?”
I knew because Dennis had been right in what he’d said during the argument about getting the painting appraised: I did have perfect recall. Uncle Nate had asked whether any of her work was hung and she had said no, once she’d painted her landscapes she didn’t want to think about them anymore. Meanwhile, her red-faced nephew had placed his new acquisition on a wooden cube that had been put in the room in anticipation of the new piece. He adjusted the lighting until the tire was its blackest black, and the hula girls and the cavorting tigers sparkled. Then he stood there and he did the most amazing thing: he laughed. It was a spontaneous laugh that was as surprising as an opera singer when she reached the highest note, though it lasted nowhere as long. I suppose it could have been an explosion of exhilaration, except that it was not. It was not a mean laugh, but a loud, surprisingly neutral laugh—and it deflated Uncle Nate as surely as a knife would deflate a tire. On the way home, we had sat quietly in the seat. Aware of the black cloud of Uncle Nate’s mood, we had both climbed silently into the backseat together.
“You see that the family keeps that painting we just got no matter what happens, and you hold it until it’s worth a fortune,” he finally said, as we crossed the border into Maine. “You mark my words. Whatever that cocky guy thought, I got the best of that deal. You girls see that that painting is taken care of, whatever you do.”
I could hear his words as I took an Audubon print of a bird down from above a reproduction Chippendale table and leaned it against a chair. I unwrapped the landscape and looked at it a minute, then lifted the wire onto the picture hook. I touched it lightly at one corner to balance it, then stepped back.
Hanging there, the landscape was luminous under the spotlight. It was almost as if the lighting had taken the painting into consideration. It was much more impressive than I’d remembered. It also looked perfect in the room: elegant and unique. Surely anyone would prefer this to a long-necked bird sweeping its beak toward insects. Anyone would be fascinated by the play of light on the water, echoed by silver molecules of mist. The figure of the rower suggested action: the curve of the paintbrush indicated a body moving forward. Around the bend, the painter had somehow managed to suggest, would be more of the same: open space; more water. You didn’t need to wonder what the front view would be like—what the rower’s expression would tell you. The rower was purposefully moving through water, moving through time, our last glimpse of him as definitive as anything we would see if we really stood on shore, watching him round the bend.
Elizabeth had been looking out the window, but as she turned away, she saw that I had hung the painting. She looked slightly perturbed for a second, seeing the Bubble Wrap on the floor. But then she came toward me. She backed up and stood at my side and saw it from my perspective, and eventually a slow smile spread across her face. As sisters, we had had so many unspoken agreements, and now she saw my point: maybe this was the perfect room through which the small silver-blue river should pass.
The Famous Poet, Amid Bougainvillea
HOPPER caught the ball the second time it was tossed to him; a victory, of sorts, since the day before the ball had gone through his fingers as if it were breeze passing through cobwebs. He caught with two hands, the way little kids try to catch. That was because the disease had made him a little kid: a little kid and an old man. Much of the population of Key West wasn’t doing even as well as he was, of course—the ones with AIDS, though surely there were other people on the island who, like him, had MS. And if not on the island, there were the much reported on Hollywood people: Annette; Richard Pryor. Well—at least nobody was writing stories about him, saying how goddamned courageous he was, interspersing the stories with little photos from his past, showing him wearing his Mouseketeer ears. Then again, he wasn’t famous, though his employer was. Until the disease began to take its toll, he had worked for fifteen years as the studio assistant of Carwell Craig Bowman, the expatriate British figurative painter whose murals hung in the hippest restaurants and private homes. In Komae City, outside of Tokyo, Carwell had painted a faux aquarium as the entranceway into a real aquarium, with a faux flood and faux broken glass marking the transition between the outer room and the inner reality. Hopper and Carwell—it was the same year Hopper met him—had been invited to the opening party where, at a sit-down dinner for twenty, they had dined on sashimi cut from living fish, held in a plastic press that allowed the insertion of a thin sharp knife. Afterwards, trying to make light of the ghastly evening, Hopper had suggested to Carwell that he inquire whether the host might not like to leave everything just as it was, and he would return, to paint the shocked American man who had fainted, lying on the floor near the not-at-all faux banquet table.
Hopper thought: you remember the past when you feel bad. Awful things seem remotely amusing. Amusing things seem remotely sad. Most of all, things seem at the same time vivid and remote.
“Going to keep that ball all to yourself?” Randy says.
“No,” Hopper says. “I thought I’d get out of the wheelchair and get in some batting practice. Enough of this Toss-the-ball-to-the-feeb; I’m going to get into a crouch, take that palm frond over there, strip it, and use it as my bat. Spring training commences.” As he speaks, he tries to throw the ball back. It goes about halfway, rolling several feet short of Randy’s foot. Randy is sitting at the side of Carwell and Modello’s hot tub. Randy can go in the tub, but Hopper can’t because of a new medicine he’s taking. It isn’t as if the tub could do anything for Randy— he had a stroke almost two years before that he recovered from as much as he is ever going to recover—but it feels good. The hot water feels good. At any given moment, tub or no, Randy feels better than Hopper, he’d be the first to admit.
The two of them have become the odd couple. Odd in all ways, because although both of their employers, Carwell Bowman and Mark Modello, are gay, Hopper and Randy are straight, yet they have become a sort of couple by default. A couple joined by adversity. After Randy’s stroke—which left him in a coma for two days, and in the hospital for almost a month, followed by another month in rehab—he had looked at Hopper (he had looked at everyone) in a new light. That was just before Hopper had to give up the canes and go into the chair. On the afternoon of Randy’s stroke, he had been on the telephone ordering from Office Max when he had slowly, dizzily realized that he was lying on the floor, listening to a woman say, “What quantity of Post-it notes, sir?” repeatedly, though his mouth would not move to shape an answer, let alone beg for help. Modello—the famous Italian furniture designer, whose pieces were, earlier in the week, shipped to the Sultan of Brunei—had returned from an afternoon at the Pier House Beach Club to find Randy unconscious, the phone emitting off-the-hook beeps, Giles the dog alternately growling at the phone and licking Randy’s forehead. “I was so disoriented, I thought Giles had rabies and had gone mad, or something,” Randy could remember Modello saying to him in the hospital. But on what day? A week into his stay? Two? When had Modello begun to make light of everything, accepting their changed lives with a shrug, invoking his own ineptitude, rather than referring to Randy’s obviously disastrous state? There had never been any question of shipping Randy back to Kansas; Modello let it be known immediately that he planned to hire another gofer, and a nurse for as long as necessary. They would proceed as always and hope for the best. The best turned out to be: no mental impairment; regained speech, with slurring no worse than many of Key West’s functioning alcoholics; coordination better than the witch in rehab had predicted; and—for amusement value—the male nurse had run off with the male gofer, the two of them leaving a note and disappearing into the night like love-struck teenagers. When he had his stroke, Randy had just celebrated his
fifty-first birthday. He did not smoke or drink (except for the occasional cold sake on a summer day), was not overweight, bicycled everywhere, and had always felt, as a Gemini, that he could not only conquer the world, but many worlds. Suddenly he found himself discussing the various pros and cons of hardwood canes with Hopper, aged thirty-seven. Previously, he had not exactly looked down on Hopper, but until he had his stroke, he’d had little in common with him, except for their subsidiary positions in their respective households, and who wanted to acknowledge that?
Randy had grown up as the eldest son of a doctor in Kansas City. He’d flunked out of med school, and then he had lived for a few months (it was supposed to be a few days) with his mother’s “bohemian” sister in Greenwich Village. He’d gotten a job at a bookstore, and he’d been told to deliver several architecture books to the Gramercy Park Hotel for Mark Modello. He had never heard of Mark Modello. But Modello had struck up a conversation with him, standing in the doorway of his room in his bathrobe, and to his own surprise, Randy had agreed to leave New York to chauffeur Modello to Miami, where they might both decide whether permanent employment might be mutually beneficial. Modello couldn’t do anything except make furniture: he couldn’t drive; he couldn’t make a sandwich. But he knew about things: he knew about the places he’d traveled to; he knew about food and wine, opera, architecture, books, writers, painters. All of which made more sense than knowing the routes of the vascular system, presided over by the heart, which was a hollow muscular pump, surrounded by the pericardium. It had been November in New York. The idea of sunshine—of Miami Beach, which was where Modello would be working for the next six months, or so—had been irresistible. “Is he homosexual?” his aunt had asked him. “I don’t know,” he had said. “Should I ask?” He could still remember the expression on her face, both quizzical and myopic, as if she could only squint hard enough, by looking through her own puzzlement she could visualize the answer. “If you don’t care, then I don’t see why you’d ask,” she had finally said. Now, he could see that she had raised the question as a warning—though it was also possible that she might have been actually wondering if he, himself, was homosexual. These were the things that in the not-so-distant past weren’t directly spoken of—except, perhaps, by black-stockinged “bohemians” who lived far from Kansas. He could still hear his father calling his aunt, so long dead, “the bohemian.” Later, he found out from a younger brother that “bohemian” had been his father’s polite term for “Communist.”