by Ann Beattie
Nick hadn’t succeeded in getting Benton and Olivia to leave the hotel. He was hungry, so he parked his car and went into a bakery. The cupcakes looked better than the croissants, so he bought two of them and ate them sitting at the counter. It embarrassed him that Benton and Olivia couldn’t stay at his house, but the year before, when they were in L.A., his dog had tried to bite Olivia. Ilena, the woman he lived with, also disliked Olivia, and he half thought that somehow she had communicated to the dog that he should lunge and growl.
He peeled the paper off of the second cupcake. One of the cupcakes had a little squirt of orange and red icing on top, piped out to look like maize. The other one had a crooked glob of pale brown, an attempt at a drumstick.
Nick was a friend of long standing, and used to most of Benton’s eccentricities—including the fact that his idea of travel was to go somewhere and never leave the hotel. He and Benton had grown up in the same neighborhood. Benton had once supplied Nick with a fake I.D. for Christmas; Nick had turned Benton on to getting high with nutmeg. Each had talked Dorothy Birdley (“most studious”) into sleeping with the other. Benton presented Nick as brilliant and sensitive; Nick told her, sitting underneath an early-flowering tree on the New Haven green, that Benton’s parents beat him. In retrospect, she had probably slept with them because she was grateful anyone was interested in her: she had bottle-thick glasses and a long pointed nose, and she was very self-conscious about her appearance and defensive about being the smartest person in the high school.
It had been a real surprise for Nick when Benton began to think differently from him—when, home from college at Christmas, Benton had called to ask him if he wanted to go to the funeral parlor to pay his respects to Dorothy Birdley’s father. He had never thought about facing Dorothy Birdley again, and Benton had made him feel ashamed for being reluctant. He drove and stayed in the car. Benton went in alone. Then they went to a bar in New Haven and talked about college. Benton liked it, and was going to transfer to the Fine Arts department; Nick hated the endless reading, didn’t know what he wanted to study, and would never have had Benton’s nerve to buck his father and change from studying business anyway. In other ways, though, Benton had become almost more prudent: “You go ahead,” Benton said when the waitress came to see if they wanted another round. “I’ll just have coffee.” So Nick had sat there and gotten sloshed, and Benton had stayed sober enough to get them home. Then, when they graduated, Benton had surprised him again. He had gotten engaged to Elizabeth. In his letters to him that year, Benton had expressed amusement at how up-tight Elizabeth was, and Nick had been under the impression that Benton was loosening up, that Elizabeth was just a pretty girl Benton saw from time to time. When Benton married her, things started to turn around. Nick, that year, stumbled into a high-paying job in New York; his relationship with his father was better, after they had a falling-out and his father called to apologize. Benton’s father, on the other hand, left home; the job Benton thought he’d landed with a gallery fell through, and he went to work as a clerk in a framing store. In December, six months after he married Elizabeth, she was pregnant. Then it was Nick who did the driving and Benton who drank. Coming out of a bar together, the night Benton told Nick that Elizabeth was pregnant, Benton had been so argumentative that Nick was afraid he had been trying to start a fight with him.
“I end up on the bottom, and you end up on the top, after your father tried to talk your mother into shipping you out to his brother’s in Montana in high school, you drove him so crazy. Now he’s advising you about what stock to buy.”
“What are you talking about?” Nick had said.
“I told you that. Your mother told my mother.”
“You never told me,” Nick said.
“I did,” Benton said, rolling down the window and pitching his cigarette.
“It must have been Idaho,” Nick said. “My uncle lives in Idaho.”
They rode in silence. “I’m not so lucky,” Nick said, suddenly depressed. “I might have Ilena’s car, but she’s in Honolulu tonight.”
“What’s she doing there?”
“She’s with a tea merchant.”
“What’s she doing with a tea merchant?”
“Wearing orchids and going to pig barbecues. How do I know?”
“Honolulu,” Benton said. “I don’t have the money to get to Atlantic City.”
“What’s there?”
“I don’t have the money to eat caramel corn and see a horse jump off a pier.”
“Have you talked to her about an abortion?” Nick said.
“Sure. Like trying to convince her the moon’s a yo-yo.”
He rolled down his window again. Wind rushed into the car and blew the ashes around. Nick saw the moon, burning white, out the side window of the car.
“I don’t have the money for a kid,” Benton said. “I don’t have the money for popcorn.”
To illustrate his point, he took his wallet out of his back pocket and dropped it out the window. “Son of a bitch, I don’t believe it,” Nick said. They were riding on the inside lane, fast, and there was plenty of traffic behind them. What seemed to be a quarter of a mile beyond where Benton had thrown his wallet, Nick bumped off the highway, emergency lights flashing. The car was nosed down so steeply on the hill rolling beneath the emergency lane (which he had overshot) that the door flew open when he cracked it to get out. Nick climbed out of the car, cursing Benton. He got a flashlight out of the trunk and started to run back, remembering having seen some sort of sign on the opposite side of the road just where Benton had thrown his wallet. It was bitter cold, and he was running with a flashlight, praying a cop wouldn’t come along. Miraculously, he found the wallet in the road and darted for it when traffic stopped. He ran down the median, back to the car, wallet in his pocket, beam from the flashlight bobbing up and down. “God damn it,” he panted, pulling the car door open.
The light came on. For a few seconds no cars passed. Everything on their side of the highway was still. Nick’s heart felt like it was beating in his back. Benton had fallen up against the door and was slumped there, breathing through his mouth. Nick pulled the wallet out of his pocket and put it on the seat. As he dropped it, it flopped open. Nick was looking at a picture of Elizabeth, smiling her madonna smile.
He drove back to the hotel to get Olivia and Benton for dinner. The lobby looked like a church. There were no lights on, except for dim spotlights over the pictures. Nobody was in the lobby. He went over to the piano and played a song. A man came down the steps into the room, applauding quietly when he finished.
“Quite nice,” the man said. “Are you a musician?”
“No,” Nick said.
“You staying here, then?”
“Some friends are.”
“Strange place. What floor’s your friend on?”
“Fourth,” Nick said.
“Not him, then,” the man said. “I’m on the third, and some man cries all night.”
He sat down and opened the newspaper. There was not enough light in the lobby to read by. Nick played “The Sweetheart Tree,” forgot how it went halfway through, got up and went into the phone booth. It was narrow and high, and when he closed the wood door he felt like he was in a confessional.
“Father, I have sinned,” he whispered. “I have supplied already strung-out friends with Seconal, and I have been unfriendly to an Englishman who was probably only lonesome.”
He dialed his house. Ilena picked it up.
“Reconsider,” he said. “Come to dinner. We’re going to Mr. Chow’s. You love Chow’s.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to her,” Ilena said.
“Come on,” he said. “Go with us.”
“She’s always stoned.”
“Go with us,” he said.
llena sighed. “How was work?”
“Work was great. Exciting. Rewarding. All that I always hope work will be. The road manager for Barometric Pressure called to yell about there not being any ch
icken tacos in the band’s dressing room. Wanted to know whether I did or did not send a telegram to New York.”
“Well,” she said. “Now I’ve asked about work. Only fair that you ask me about the doctor.”
“I forgot,” he said. “How did it go?”
“The bastard cauterized my cervix without telling me he was going to do it.”
“God. That must have hurt.”
“I see why people go around stoned. I just don’t want to eat dinner with them.”
“Okay, Ilena. Did you walk Fathom?”
“Manuela just had him out. I threw the Frisbee for him half the afternoon.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“I can hardly stand up straight.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ll see you later,” Ilena said.
He went out of the phone booth and walked up the stairs. Pretty women never liked other pretty women. He rang the buzzer outside Benton and Olivia’s room.
Benton opened the door in such a panic that Nick smiled, thinking he was clowning because Nick had told him earlier that he was too lethargic. It only took a few seconds to figure out it wasn’t a joke. Benton had on a white shirt hanging outside his jeans and a tie hanging over his shoulder. Olivia had on a dress and was sitting, still as a mummy, hands in her lap, in a chair with its back to the desk.
“You know that call? The phone call from Ena? You know what the message was? My brother’s dead. You know what the hotel told Ena days ago? That I’d checked out. She called back, and today they told her I was here. Wesley is dead.”
“Oh, Christ,” Nick said.
“He and a friend were on Lake Champlain. They drowned. In November, they were out in a boat on Lake Champlain. Today was the funeral. Why the hell did they tell her I’d checked out? It doesn’t matter anymore why they told her that.” Benton turned to Olivia. “Get up,” he said. “Pack.”
“There’s no point in my going,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “I’ll fly to New York with you and go to the apartment.”
“Elizabeth would hate not to see you,” Benton said. “She likes to see you and clutch Jason from the hawk.”
“Elizabeth is at your mother’s?” Nick said.
“Elizabeth misses no opportunity to ingratiate herself with my family. They’re not at my mother’s. They’re at his house, in Weston, for some reason.”
“I thought he lived on Park Avenue.”
“He moved to Connecticut.” Benton slammed his suitcase shut. “For God’s sake, I’ve made plane reservations. Will you pack your suitcase?”
“I’ll drive you to the airport,” Nick said.
“God damn it,” Benton said, “I don’t mean to be ungracious, but I realize that, Nick.” Benton was packing Olivia’s suitcase. He looked at the bedside table and sighed and held the suitcase underneath it and swept everything in. He put a sign about the continental breakfast the hotel served back on the table.
“I really love you,” Olivia said, “and when something awful happens, you treat me like shit.”
Olivia got up and Nick put his arm around her shoulder and steered her toward the door. Benton came behind them, carrying both suitcases.
“You were lucky you could get a plane this close to Thanksgiving,” Nick said.
“I guess I was. Forgot it was Thanksgiving.”
“Maybe people don’t go home for Thanksgiving anymore,” Nick said.
Nick was remembering what Thanksgiving used to be like, and the good feeling he got as a child when the holidays came and it snowed. One Christmas his parents had given him an archery set, and he had talked his father into setting it up outside in the snow. His father had been drunk and had taken a fruit cake from the kitchen counter and put the round, flat cake on top of his head like a hat, and stood to the side of the target, tipping his fruitcake hat, yelling to Nick to shoot it off his head while his mother rapped on the window, gesturing them inside.
“I hope you enjoyed your stay,” the woman behind the desk said to Benton.
“Fine,” Benton said.
“How you doing?” Dennis Hopper said.
“Fine,” the woman behind the desk said. She reached around Benton and handed Dennis Hopper his mail.
The security guard was sitting on a chair drinking a Coke. He was staring at them. Nick hoped that by the time he got them to the airport Olivia would have stopped crying.
“Want to come East and liven up the wake?” Benton said to Nick.
“They don’t want to see me,” Olivia said. “Why can’t I go back to the apartment?”
“You’re who I live with. My brother just died. We’re going to be with my family.”
“I wish I could go,” Nick said. “I wish I could act like everybody else in my office—phone in and say I’m having an anxiety attack.”
“Come with us,” Olivia said, squeezing his hand. “Please.”
“I can’t just get on a plane,” he said.
“If there’s a seat,” she said.
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “Are you serious?”
“I’m serious,” Benton said. “Olivia’s probably as serious as she gets on Valium.”
“That was nasty,” she said. “I’m not stoned.”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. Olivia looked at him. “About the plane, I mean,” he said.
“She misunderstands things when she’s stoned,” Benton said.
They got into Nick’s car and he pulled out onto the narrow, curving road behind the hotel. “I’ll call Ilena,” Nick said. “Are we going to miss the plane if I go back into the hotel?”
“We’ve got time,” Benton said. “Go on.”
He left the car running and went back into the hotel. The security guard was making funny whiny noises and shuffling across the floor, and the girl behind the desk was laughing. She saw him looking at them and called out: “It’s an imitation of one of the rabbits in Watership Down.”
The security guard, amused at his own routine, crossed his eyes and wiggled his nose.
The house in Weston was huge. It was a ten-room house on four acres, the back lawn bordered by massive fir trees, and in front of them thick vines growing large, oblong pumpkins. Around the yard were sunflowers, frost-struck, bent almost in half. Nick squatted to stare at one of their black faces.
He had seen the sunflowers curving in the moonlight when they arrived the night before and Benton’s mother, Ena, lit the yard with floodlights; the flowers were just outside the aura of light, and he had squinted before he was able to make out what they were. It was morning now, and he was examining one. He ran his fingers across its rough face.
The reality of Wesley’s death hadn’t really hit him until he got to the house, walked across the lawn, and went inside. Then, although he hadn’t seen Wesley for years, and had never been to the house, Nick felt that Ena didn’t belong there, and that Wesley was very far away.
Ena had been waiting for them, and the house had been burning with light—hard to see from the highway, she had told Benton on the phone—but inside there was a horrible pall over everything, in spite of the brightness. He had not been able to get to sleep, and when he had slept, he had dreamed about the gigantic, bent sunflowers. Wesley was dead.
The movie they had shown on the plane, which they stared at but did not listen to, had a scene in it of a car chase through San Francisco, with Orientals smiling in the back seat of a speeding car and waving little American flags. It did not seem possible that such a thing could be happening if Wesley was really dead.
Ena was at the house because she thought that assembling there was a tribute to Wesley—no matter that in the six months he’d lived there he never invited the family to his house, and that the things they saw there now made Wesley more of an enigma And they had already begun to take his things. They obviously felt guilty or embarrassed about it, because when the three of them came in the night before, people began to confess: Elizabeth had taken Wesley’s Rapidograph, for Jas
on; for herself she had taken a dome-shaped paperweight, a souvenir of Texas with a longhorn cow facing down a cowboy with a lasso underwater, in a tableau that would fill with snow when the dome was shaken; Uncle Cal had taken a picture of Ena as a schoolgirl, in a heart-shaped frame. Ena had taken a keyring with three keys on it from Wesley’s night table. She did not know what locks the keys fit, because she had tried them on everything in the house with no luck, but they were small antique keys and she wanted to get a chain for them and wear them as a necklace. Wesley was dead, drowned in Lake Champlain, two life vests floating near where the boat capsized, no explanation.
Benton came out of the house. It was a cold morning, and it was early; Nick did not feel too cold because he had found a jacket on a hook by the back door—Wesley’s, no doubt—and put it on. Benton, in the black velvet jacket, hugged his arms in front of him.
“I just realized that I dragged you here from California,” Benton said. “What are you doing out here?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I came out to look around.”
“What did you find?”
“Pumpkins still growing in his garden.”
At the back of the lawn, past a tangle of leafless berry bushes, was a fallen-down chicken coop. The roof barely cleared their heads. There was a cement floor, and most of the walls were still standing, but they were caving in, or missing boards.
“Long time since this was in operation,” Benton said.
“Imagine Wesley out in the country,” Nick said.
Most of the back wall was missing from the coop. When they came to the end, Nick jumped down, about five feet, to the ground, and Benton jumped behind him. The woods were covered with damp leaves, thickly layered.
“Although the shape that coop was in, I guess he was hardly the gentleman farmer,” Benton said. “What do you think about the way Ena’s acting?”
“Ena’s edgy.”
“She is,” Benton said. He pushed a branch out of his face; it was so brittle that it snapped. He used the piece of broken branch to poke at other branches. “I went into Jason’s bedroom and thought about kidnapping him. I didn’t even have the heart to wake him up to say hello.”