Follies

by Ann Beattie

  “Misplaced anxiety, I suppose,” she said. “I knew there was something unusual about you the day you hit me. It makes sense that you’d be CIA.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “I’m just not at liberty to explain. The simple version is that I take care of people, too. Sometimes medical personnel, as it happens.”

  “Doctors Without Borders,” she said.

  “You like to guess, don’t you?” He pushed his empty coffee cup to the side. “No, nothing like that,” he said. When he said he didn’t talk about his job, more often than not, people made the same guess she had. He and the people he worked with had a nickname for those yahoos. They called them “the Rotary Club.”

  A few days later, waiting for coffee to go, it came to her that he must have been flirting: pretending to be so concerned that her son had disappeared. Something seemed strange about the way they’d gotten into their long, oblique conversation. She began to think that he’d maneuvered her into guessing about what he did. CIA, not CIA…it all seemed suspicious, once she had some distance.

  But this much was certain: George Wissone did not belong to the Ivy Book Discussion Group that met the first Monday of every third month. He did not shop frequently, if at all, at Foods of All Nations (nicknamed Foods of Inflation). Increasingly, people moved to Charlottesville to retire to what they thought of as a pleasant Southern town, then didn’t know what to do there. You’d see them looking puzzled, examining expensive cans of lingonberries and octagonal tins of imported teas at Foods of All Nations, wondering what other people did, why the town was so popular. Their allergies would kill them. The plane service was terrible. People didn’t expect it to snow in the winter, but it snowed and snowed. The summers were so hot and humid you had to live in air-conditioning. Still, they came and drank the local wines, got excited by spotting celebrities who came into town from their so-called farms, saw foreign films at Vinegar Hill that gave them the feeling they were somewhere else—an illusion prolonged by eating at the adjacent restaurant, with its hillside garden filled with hops dangling from trellises, and sunflowers and lavender, so like a garden in France. There were stores that sold hand-shaped imported cheeses wrapped in grape leaves, oils in handblown bottles as expensive as if you were buying great perfume, satin baby booties hardly wider than a woman’s thumb. Grown women still walked around in pastel-colored flats; there were the Muffies and Buffies and Fluffies (their dogs). There were the Southern boys on their lunch hour, with tasseled loafers and starched pale blue button-downs. There were fewer of them than there had been when Nancy first arrived from the county, but they were still there, keeping an eye out for antique wicker porch furniture and old Oriental rugs, going to the same watch repair shop their granddaddy had gone to, watching the Kentucky Derby on their televisions the size of boxcars and drinking mint juleps out of silver cups, the fresh mint growing along the flag-stone walkways as steadily as fog rolled into San Francisco. She thought, sometimes, how amusing it would be to be one of those women; instead of the old TV program Queen for a Day, which really existed to let people weep tears of compassion as they maintained the class-divisive status quo, she could become “Southern Belle for a Day”—all the better if she could appear slightly pigeon-toed and carry a “cute” purse: something with a little brocade magnolia, or a silk-screened horse. She would have errands: buying bottled mixes for drinks; finding a broad-based lightbulb for the torchiere. Heirloom tomato seeds in packets beautiful enough to frame. Choosing among rosebushes named for the daughters of American presidents who “filled in” for their mothers, because they’d inevitably died so young.

  By summer Nicky was still missing, and the letters from the roommate’s fiancée had become increasingly bizarre, so much so that she’d begun sending them unopened to the investigator. There was not one shred of evidence that the girl had any idea where Nicky was. She was sure to be some confused, drug-addled liar whose paranoia was just another crowd-captivating embellishment, like chains on her wrist or a stud through her eyebrow.

  Katie Shroeder, the activities director for the third floor, had asked Nancy to go on her lunch hour to get crepe paper and other things to be used for Fourth of July ceiling decorations. Perversely, Nancy had thought about buying a bag of plastic dinosaurs from a rack near the checkout counter to flip out Mrs. Bell. She used the facility’s MasterCard to pay, got in her car, and, turning onto Route 29, saw a man in a convertible who resembled the man who’d hit her during the winter, though he was younger and more handsome in profile. In June, she had informed her ex-husband that she would no longer contribute to the cost of the investigator and put a down payment on a house in a development in Ivy. Interest rates were at an all-time low. She didn’t mind the commute. The town got noisier and more expensive every day. She liked the butterflies that fluttered near the ground, and the robins and mourning doves that came to her feeders, and the way the setting sun was reflected in the pond she shared with a few neighbors that needed its water lilies thinned. It had begun to reflect little, as if it were unsilvered glass. Most days she sat by the water in the morning and again in the evening and hoped that her son was not dead. Every so often, the private investigator—whose tone was testy, so her ex-husband must have told him she no longer contributed anything—would call with what she thought was a startlingly minor question. Nicky’s favorite color? Why bother to pay for the services of an idiot?

  She awoke one night from a disturbing dream in which her head had fallen forward like a rag doll’s and would not right itself, so that she could see only the distorted shadows of things around her (butterfly wings shadowed into airplanes). She had gotten out of bed and rubbed the back of her neck, rubbed her palms against her eyelids, puffy from sleep. She was lucky not to have gotten whiplash, she thought—which was the first time she connected her sleeplessness with the accident. She had believed for a long time, when he was in his teens, that Nicky had allergies, that that was why his eyes were often red and swollen. She, a nurse, had believed that, and wondered at the ineffectiveness of Seldane. She had been shocked when a doctor told her she’d been noticing, instead, her son’s reaction to heroin. She and her ex-husband had paid for him to go into rehab, he’d spent a month there before being discharged, then he’d relapsed and been sent to a private hospital. When he got out, she had found a job for him, working in town as a photographer’s assistant. Her ex-husband and his wife had rented a suite at the Hampton Inn and attended family therapy in the month between Nicky’s release and his employment (she had another nurse at Dolly Madison to thank for putting them in touch with her brother, who needed an assistant). Once Nicky was settled, his father and stepmother had returned to their condo in Aspen, and Nicky had met Claudine, who loved him until she threw him over for a good-ole-boy lawyer with a prominent practice in Lexington. That was when he’d started hanging out with the old crowd again. She was never sure exactly when that started, because he’d moved out of the house the moment his relationship with Claudine began and continued to live in her apartment, sleeping with the dirty laundry and subsisting on Gatorade and Snickers, for some time after she departed. If he’d had the money to pay the rent, he might have stayed indefinitely. He had pretended for months after it ended that the relationship was still going on. He apparently thought his mother was so stupid, she’d worry less and therefore bother him less with such dismaying ideas as dinner at a restaurant. She could remember him raging: “You don’t think this will last. You don’t think it will last because it’s a law of the universe that everything has to end badly. You think everything’s a big farce, because Dad had an affair and the woman had a baby we still don’t know was his. Who says that kid was Dad’s? Huh? You just know it, though, don’t you? It doesn’t matter how you know, it doesn’t matter that the woman won’t have a paternity test. You still think you have to be so noble and send it money. You like having to sacrifice. It makes you superior to everybody. You’ll never have another relationship as long as you live, and you don’t want me to, eithe
r—especially with some French girl. Why do you act like she’s a snob, when she isn’t? She brought you flowers. She’s going to be your daughter-in-law. That’ll be soon enough to dislike her.” The hula hoop of emotions spun, beginning become end, end become beginning, tilting precariously before slipping toward the ground when he at last became exhausted. Round and round: accusations, mockery, mockery, accusations. He had reverted to speed as the flip side of heroin.

  Mothers everywhere, she thought. Mothers in their schlumpy bathrobes, playing back the nastiness of their children. Was anyone on the mothers’ side? The drug counselor at the second rehab facility Nicky ended up in outside of Richmond had expressed surprise—quite judgmental surprise—that she claimed she could repeat verbatim Nicky’s outburst regarding her thoughts on his fiancée. He was also surprised to learn that she had made no reply.

  “When he became excited, what did you say to Nicholas?” the psychologist had asked her.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” she had said.

  “It might be productive to consider what his thoughts might have been when you were not responding after he expressed himself.”

  “His thoughts? He’s never had the slightest problem expressing himself.”

  He started again: “You’ve heard the term passive-aggressive?”

  “You’re as much of a bully as he is!”

  “Name-calling is completely counterproductive,” he had said, with the lugubrious gentleness she had seen when doctors were examining people who might, or might not, be in a coma.

  Mercifully, other details of that conversation had faded. She had talked to a psychologist she’d gotten to know over the years when next he visited Dolly Madison House, and he had applauded her for not caving in. She had examined her own heart and decided that she really had been avoiding an incendiary exchange with her son that would have gotten neither of them anywhere. She was not passive-aggressive just because she had not been sucked in. Claudine was just some French girl, but she had thanked her sincerely for the flowers, and she had hoped—for a long time before she met that particular girl—that some relationship would work out for Nicky.

  On a Sunday in July, she was standing behind her car as a teenager from a nursery lowered a spirea bush into her trunk, the bush in its burlap-wrapped ball looking enormous when separated from the others. “I like these,” he had said. “My sister had them in her bouquet when she got married. We were going to open our own flower shop, but she moved to Vancouver.”

  “Does she like it there?”

  “I guess so. Sometimes.”

  Was he waiting for a tip? That was probably why he was so chatty. He had talked to her all the time he’d wheelbarrowed the bush to the car. She unzipped her handbag. He watched the zipper move as intently as a lost driver seeing the route he must take pointed out on a map. “Your asking if she liked Vancouver,” he said. “She said I ought to come out. We ought to open up a place out there.”

  “Then I guess she likes it,” she said. She folded two dollar bills and extended her hand. He reached out with a big smile. “I delivered flowers to Dolly Madison at Easter,” he said. “I’ve seen you before.”

  “Well, say hello next time,” she said.

  “Oh, I always say hello once I’ve been introduced.”

  “Good,” she said. “Well—thank you.”

  She started to walk around to the driver’s side. Finally he said, “Mrs. Bell. You know old Mrs. Bell? She used to be our neighbor.”

  “Yes,” she said. She was practiced in not discussing the residents, whose privacy always needed to be respected, even when they were not compos mentis.

  “She’s in there, right?”

  “Yes,” she said, in a tone meant to end the conversation. “She’s doing well.”

  “Well, the ambulance guys came because I called them. I came home from school and she’d fallen on her front walk. You’d think in a neighborhood like where my parents live, somebody would have heard her.”

  She nodded.

  “The ambulance guys—they say they find people who’ve been down for days. Inside, outside. Sometimes it’s been days since they passed, but it doesn’t really matter, because their spirits already escaped.”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  “The spirit ascends,” he said. “Accompanied by the music of nature. The call of the birds; the rustle of the leaves.”

  “Thanks for your help,” she said dismissively. She went to her car door, opened it, and got in. He followed her and leaned toward the window. It was hot in the car, but she had no intention of rolling down the window. She put on the air-conditioning and looked straight ahead, waiting for him to take his hands off her car.

  “You’re a nurse,” he said. “I didn’t think saying something like how people depart the world would upset you.”

  She put the car in gear. There was something wrong with him. She’d been too slow on the uptake.

  “Come back if you want more bushes!” he called.

  Irritated that the nursery would have someone like that working there, she went home and popped the trunk open but did not remove the bush right away. She went inside and poured herself a Coke, listened to the two messages on her answering machine. One was somebody who’d reached the wrong number and didn’t realize it; the other was from Sally, asking if she could babysit that night. She did not want to babysit and decided not to answer the message until much later, when Sally would have made some other arrangement. She had gone to the nursery wanting to get a butterfly bush, but they were all out, and the spirea—which she feared attracted bees—looked so beautiful, so much like a fountain of white confetti, that she’d decided impulsively to buy it. She took a vitamin pill with the Coke, then decided to walk to the pond. She liked it down there, though she’d started to worry about the kudzu, which was creeping up a nearby telephone pole, and she was dismayed to see that someone had thrown the top of a birdbath on the grass…no: it was a hubcap. Litter everywhere. The pond had been discovered; none of the neighbors would have left McDonald’s bags or cans of soda near the rim. She picked them up and walked back toward the house with the trash. It was still too hot to sit outside and enjoy the day, and in any case, she should deal with the bush.

  “Can I help you with that, Nancy?” her neighbor, Henry Leterson, called. He was driving by in his blue truck and had seen the bush—larger than it had looked at the nursery—cascading from the trunk.

  “That would be awfully nice,” she said.

  He stopped and came down the hillside. “Pretty day,” he said.

  There had been a drought. It had been so bad the summer before that people who did not voluntarily ration water were in danger of having devices installed on their pipes. There had been so much building in recent years, and the year before it had rained so little, that there was simply not enough water. This year, though, things were better. You could buy a bush and plant it and water it.

  “Have yourself some lunch down by the pond?” he said, lifting the bush.

  “No. It’s trash somebody left there,” she said.

  He frowned and nodded. The bush sat on the ground between them. He said, “Where do you think you might like it?”

  He was a tall, muscular man. She’d always thought he looked like the bird in the Peanuts cartoon. His hair was thinning, pale blond, messy. His wife had been operated on a few months before for breast cancer.

  “I’d like it over there.” She pointed. “Under the side window. I’ll run ahead and find the place.”

  “Okay,” he said, and moved up the hillside almost as quickly as she did.

  She patted her foot on the ground, and he put the bush there. “I can move it a little, if need be,” he said.

  She backed up and looked. She imagined seeing it through her bedroom window. She asked him to move it a couple of feet farther away from the house.

  “Okay? That looks nice. I’ll come back with my shovel, soon as it gets a little shadier.”

&
nbsp; “Oh, I can plant it,” she said. “Thank you very much for bringing it up here. It’s quite a bit bigger than I thought when I bought it.”

  “No problem,” he said. “Well. You take care.”

  “You, too,” she said. She realized that it would be possible to speak in nothing but clichés and pleasantries with the man forever. He was nice, but she felt sure that no matter how long they talked, they would never say anything meaningful. She stopped herself from asking, as so many people must all day, “How’s your wife?”

  “All right, then,” he said, walking away. Did he feel her eyes on his back? She stared after him, thinking how often men appeared to her to be children grown tall and older. Which reminded her of her son. She walked to the shed—the previous owners had left the ugly thing behind—and dropped the litter in a trash can she kept outside. She took out the shovel, but her neighbor had been right: better to plant the bush when it was cooler. She leaned the shovel up against the shed. A wasp dangled past, seeming to come from nowhere. Again she wondered if the bush she’d selected attracted bees.

  Inside the house, she looked guiltily at the “1” flashing on her answering machine. She opened a drawer and took out a letter she’d gotten earlier in the week from the girl in London and decided to open it. As soon as she started reading, she realized she’d made a mistake. The entire note was nonsense, and upsetting nonsense at that. It was a notecard with a badly drawn thatched cottage on the front. Inside, she read:

  Dear Mrs. Gregerson,

  I am afraid I might not have put enough postage on the last note. When I wrote before, I asked if you could send $ so some of Nick’s friends could look for him. I am going to be honest and, say that he has been dating an American girl who has her own agenda over here and, that the two of them went to Leeds to get drugs to sell to a guy in Piccadilly Circus. We’ve figured out that he must not have come back from this trip, though the girlfriend who hates us is in their flat and won’t give us information. We think he may be staying in Leeds because when somebody asked her (girlfriend) in a bar where he was and, sort of insisted on finding out, she let on that he was still in Leeds on “business.” She told us to leave her alone because she’d call the police if we threatened her again and, Tony found out she sleeps with the police. It has been very hard to track him down because we are lacking in funds. I would go to persuade him to get out of this bad Leeds element and, also offer him a place to stay if he doesn’t want to stay with the American anymore. Tony has an uncle we could stay with only we don’t have the $ for a train which isn’t much. We need to have Nick back before he’s sucked into something and, also we don’t trust his girlfriend not to be insisting he stay there until a certain kind of drug arrives. We are going to go get him and get him away from this bad element and, I want to do this before my forecoming wedding. Please help us and we will help you because the most important thing is helping Nick express himself through his art. Thank you for your consideration. Even two hundred pounds not dollars would be a lot of help. Nick is a v. good friend to us and, we can talk to him better in person.