Follies

by Ann Beattie

  She fell asleep on the train and must have slept until the stop in Philadelphia. She sat up straight and put on her earphones and listened to a CD of old radio comedies. She listened as Rochester informed Jack Benny that he had made a mistake, and had showered using a peeled potato instead of soap. It kept her awake, and Ben Franklin, however interesting, put her to sleep. She looked around the car and noticed that almost everyone wore ugly shoes. Hers were Jimmy Choo. She studied them, the pretty laces that tied around her ankles, and decided they were worth every penny. She pretended that George would be waiting inside the station. She knew she gave too much time to thinking about appearances, but if you presented yourself well, you felt good about yourself. That had been one of her therapist’s points, and she’d decided it was correct, though it was silly to think that if she looked even better, George would be at her side. He was the one who called her neurotic when she talked about cellulite. He was the one who loved to kiss her toes. The woman in Charlottesville had to be involved with him. That was obvious. Rich had tried to see the woman, but she had resisted. They were going to have to see her, whether she wanted to meet them or not. How unhelpful to change her phone number. Rich had gotten the unlisted number with no trouble, though he was waiting to talk to her before he made a second call. He had hinted that the call might be taken more seriously if she placed it herself. It would be just like a man to say something to displease the woman; he had hinted that she’d “gone off” on him and didn’t know why. Probably because he’d been too aggressive, that was why. You had to establish contact first. Men thought you established contact by saying hello.

  One of her fondest memories of George was being in the bath with him. Slipping in and sitting behind him and embracing his broad back as if they were kids, sleigh-riding. Or as if they were on a motorcycle—which they’d been, when they lived outside San Francisco. The therapist had called to her attention the fact that she associated that locale strongly with the person. But come on: she knew a landscape was a landscape, and a person was a person. Admittedly, she’d had her fantasy about getting him to move back there with her. But she’d love him, anyway. How could you be this age and not be 100 percent certain that you loved someone? she wondered. How could you be certain that you loved your shoes and not be completely sure…but she never thought he’d been sure, either. He kept distance between them. In the bath, once, he had said the strangest thing. He had started talking about lynx. He had seen one, in a petting zoo, and an old woman had come along and gone into the cage with a dish, and she had said to George: You never, ever turn your back on them. If you can’t remember that, you deserve to be jumped from behind. She’d run one hand down the side of the cage in a clawing motion, watching the lynx all the while. “Imagine those claws in your back,” she had said. It had been a rather sad affair, the petting zoo: a lot of goats wandering around; birds that looked glutinous, it was so hot; rabbits with signs on their cages saying they were available for adoption.

  What she knew about her former fiancé’s former girlfriend was that she made jeweled fruit. She did not remember why the awful daughter had been talking about that, but somehow the jeweled fruit business had been brought into the discussion. It was a blessing when certain details disappeared off your radar screen. It was embarrassing to have been engaged to a man who loved (she assumed) a woman who made jeweled fruit.

  “L-l-l-linda,” she said, smiling, coming through the doors of the train station. Linda was where she said she’d be, standing there in Keds, hair pulled back in a headband. When Paula was prettier than another woman—which was often the case—she’d learned to rush the woman, to get her arms around her and seem to like her before the woman had time to become jealous. “So glad to see you again, Paula,” Linda said. “Your trip was okay?”

  Small talk. She let Linda buy her an iced tea at a little coffee counter before they continued to the parking lot. She was carrying everything she thought she’d need for a few days in one of George’s old nylon duffel bags. Like a psychic going to look for someone, she thought: she’d washed in his favorite soap (verbena); she’d dropped one of his pens in her purse; she’d even taken one of his suitcases, which, like others through the years, had migrated to her New York apartment and stayed there. Having some of his things around might somehow lure him back.

  Linda drove well, flipping on the directional signal and changing lanes as quickly as a short-order cook flipping burgers. She said, “Did Rich tell you about the wedding we’re having at the house over the weekend? I’m so excited. I knew about their relationship when it was still a secret.”

  “This weekend?”

  “Umm. He didn’t tell you? That is just like him. I was setting things up with the caterer today.” Linda’s hand dropped, and the car flew into the inside lane. “Trucks.” Linda sighed.

  “Whose wedding is it?” Paula said.

  “Sister Mary Matthew and Steve Shannon. I mean…listen to me! Mary and Steve. She left her order, and he never took his vows. Can you believe that he’s eleven years younger than she is, but he’s thrilled out of his mind? She was one of the nuns who received the children.”

  “What?” Paula said.

  “The children,” Linda said.

  Paula shook her head.

  “Well, forgive me for trespassing on one of their many important secrets—I will never know why it pleases men so much to keep women in the dark—but when George and Rich fly, they usually bring kids back with them. It’s been going on for years. They get the kids out, and the nuns have Catholic families to adopt them.”

  Paula had no idea what she was talking about, but was too embarrassed to say so. She hoped Linda would continue. This was certainly very informative.

  “Mary decided she wanted children of her own. What a big decision that must have been, to be forty years old and realize after twenty years in a convent that you wanted to be married and have kids! Not the nuns I knew back in school, I’ll tell you that! They never rethought anything. It was no joke that they thought boys could look at your patent leather shoes and see up your skirt. They were so sex-starved, it made them demented.”

  The signal blinked; they went into the next lane to pass an old Cadillac convertible barely going the speed limit. Two gray-haired ladies were driving, all smiles. “I take it you weren’t raised Catholic,” Linda said.

  “No.”

  “Lucky you,” Linda said. “It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t say anything about the wedding. There are going to be people setting up a tent, and everything. Anyway: enough of that. Tell me about you.”

  Paula froze. She never dared say she wanted to be a writer, but that was what she’d thought about, leaving California: getting back together with George; having a career that would be flexible, that would allow her to travel with him. She envisioned a novel based on her own life: a woman who’s the companion of a mysterious man…well, the part about herself wouldn’t be too hard, but the rest of the plot…how was she going to give a sense of who George was? Now she felt sure that if she kept quiet, Linda would explain a lot more about him than she’d figured out through the years. She said, “Oh, I’ve got two really beautiful sisters and I’m sort of the one in the middle. I’m just beginning to take myself seriously. Years ago, in school, I wanted to write, and I think right now the most important things to me are getting back with George and starting to do that. Write,” she said. It sounded just as lame as she thought it would.

  Linda looked at her. “Great,” she said. “It’s not so important when you get it together, it’s just important that you do. I really admire Mary.”

  “Isn’t it kind of a f-f-funny time for me to be coming?” Paula said.

  “Oh, the second Rich heard from you, you had to come,” Linda said. “He’s hyperventilating about George. Wedding or no wedding, he wants to be back in touch now.”

  “Do you think he went to Mustique?” Paula said.

  “Why there?” Linda said. So: Linda didn’t know everything. She
knew at least one thing Linda didn’t know.

  “Because he’s got land there. He was going to go there when he retired.”

  “Do me a favor,” Linda said. “Wait until after the wedding to ask Rich that question. Otherwise, he’ll get a plane and put you on it and you’ll be gone tonight.”

  “Okay,” Paula said. “I actually do think we should get that Nancy woman to talk to us. I mean, why would he just cut off contact with everybody, even if he was going away?” She feared the answer: because he was done with them. All of them. She had waited too long to join up.

  “I know,” Linda said. “This is going to sound really disrespectful, but I’ll say it anyway. My husband is a real creature of habit. He’s really unhappy because his favorite restaurant closed so some building could be built on the land, and he ate there every day. He had names he’d made up for the fish in the fish tank. He even called the rum buns they served ‘my rummies.’ He tipped so much, they loved him. Knew his order so he didn’t have to say anything—which is surprisingly important to some people. And then, no more does the restaurant close—I mean, they asked him if he wanted some of the fish. The fish swimming in the tank, I mean. Anyway, no more does it close than he loses contact with George. I mean, this wouldn’t put most people in a tailspin, but if you knew how much Rich depends on routine, you’d see how it would.”

  Linda turned left, into a housing development with a waterfall to one side, above which rose a sign: BEECHWOOD VILLAGE. Underneath it, someone had spray-painted on the rocks: SUCKS SHIT. “We weren’t able to have children because of treatments Rich had for an illness, long ago. We should adopt, you’d think. But I’ve never felt like doing that. If it’s God’s will that we can’t have children, maybe we should honor that. Not that it wouldn’t be a great idea and all that, but I just don’t really…the thing is, I’ve sort of said to Sister Mary Matthew that we’d do it, one day, but I really think it’s enough that Rich gets the children out. There are families waiting for them. I mean, lists of families. It’s just not something Rich and I ever talked seriously about doing, even though Mary sort of thinks it is. You know what I mean?”

  “You mean she assumes it’s going to happen, and it isn’t,” Paula said.

  “Exactly!” Linda said. She pulled into the driveway of a big house and touched a button on her visor. The garage door began to rise. “I mean, we let her think it, because she couldn’t imagine not thinking it. You know what I mean?”

  She knew, and had known since childhood: she meant that the course of least possible pain was to let somebody retain his view of how things were, even though you knew otherwise.

  Father Ambrose raised a champagne flute. “In the thirteenth century,” he began, “Saint Francis was blessed and privileged to live in times of compelling significance. Today, in times whose complexities we may dread, and in an age that may lack so many qualities we identify with Christian charity”—he drank most of his champagne—“with Christian charity,” he repeated. “But, like Francis, there are always those individuals who stand apart and distinguish themselves from others not through any feeling of superiority, but because they understand that they have been called. The message received may be humble. It need not be the case, as it was with Francis, who saw around him the disorder of the state and the paucity of honorable examples and felt compelled to take a stand. One’s being selected can come not as an epiphany, but begin as an enigmatic question, a thing confusing rather than enlightening.” A man stepped forward and poured more champagne into the empty glass. “Thank you,” Father Ambrose said. “As a longtime friend of the groom, I am here today to say that one must act according to one’s conscience, which may mean…”

  Paula wandered off. The next morning, the wedding couple would be gone and the three of them would finally set out for Charlottesville, the town where George had last lived, where he had met a woman who somehow persuaded him—she must have persuaded him, though Paula described him repeatedly to her shrink as intractable—to move outside his usual parameters. And what exactly were they? she thought, bringing herself up short. So much analyzing, when she had only limited information to go on. She supposed that if she thought like some of the people at the wedding, she would have to say that she had committed the sin of Pride. What a surprise to find out that he and Rich went to the aid of ailing honchos in places they shouldn’t be, the U.S. government—and even American Express, if she could believe what Linda had later told her—entering into bribes and blackmail with foreign governments, and if that wasn’t problematic enough, they got to be heroes by hauling back children, like remora, along with the sharks. What had she, with her brilliant novelistic imagination, thought he was doing? She had thought he was killing people, was the answer. She had not wanted to ask because she had been so sure. For years, she had assumed he was an assassin, and she had been relieved but also let down, as if his life were downright ordinary, when she began to piece the puzzle together from what Linda described and what bare-bones details Rich O’Malley assumed she knew.

  Father Ambrose was reading from something called Canticle of the Sun. He was a little tipsy, which added to the strangeness of the day. She shuddered to think that she had almost married the wrong man. If only she could see George again, she might think seriously about proposing to him. What she’d thought all those years she didn’t ask questions was that he was an assassin, and she had always assumed that because of his ability, he would be all right; now, even though she’d had it verified that he’d been involved in dangerous activity, she felt less sure that he was safe. There was her inimitable reasoning, as her shrink liked to call it: if he could kill people, he wouldn’t be killed. If he was just some glorified body snatcher, somebody might be able to kill him.

  She walked around inside the house, where it was darker and cooler, and the young bartender followed her with his eyes. What did he make of these people with their flushed faces and their purses stashed here and there, as if they were squirrels, burying nuts? Her own purse was upstairs, in the bedroom where she’d slept the last two nights, bizarrely papered in gingerbread wall-paper, with a mobile of gingerbread boys and girls suspended from the ceiling, as if the room awaited children. She had pulled the door closed when she went down to meet the bride and groom, so she was surprised to see it open when she walked upstairs to comb her hair. A teenage girl was sitting on the side of the bed, reading a magazine. She had stepped out of her high heels, and one foot was tucked under her, the other planted on the woven rug on the floor. The girl looked surprised. No—just unhappy to be discovered. She had been reading a thick issue of Vanity Fair, Paula saw; the girl put her thumb inside and closed the magazine.

  “Hi. I’m Paula.”

  “Shalissa Ray,” the girl said. Her black hair was pulled back in an elastic band. “Am I in your room?”

  Paula nodded.

  “I don’t like weddings,” the girl said. “My sister was killed the night of her wedding.”

  “How awful,” Paula said.

  “I know,” the girl said. Like many teenagers wearing their best clothes, she looked uncomfortable. “I’m not going to get married. Not because my sister died, just because you can just live with somebody.”

  “I used to think that way,” Paula said. “Then my boyfriend disappeared, and suddenly I’m missing him so much I’m thinking about getting married to him.”

  The girl shrugged. “How come you’ve got a room that looks like a kid’s room?” she asked.

  “Well, I’m only staying here temporarily, so it isn’t really my room. I came up because the ceremony didn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

  “Yeah. The stuff about Saint Francis taming the wolf.”

  “He was talking about Saint Francis. I’m afraid I didn’t quite understand the point, so I thought I’d take a breather.”

  “He practiced what he was going to say last night, at my parents’ house. He’s my uncle,” the girl said. “And his boyfriend’s my stepuncle, supposedly. I don’t
care if people are gay. I just don’t understand why weddings are such a big deal. I mean, I guess if I’d been a nun, a wedding would be a surefire way to let everybody know I was having sex and all.”

  “T-t-true,” Paula said.

  “My sister used to stutter. You didn’t even ask how she died. A tire came off a truck and turned their car over, and he lived, but she didn’t. Anyway: she learned how not to stutter by using puppets. She’d put on these little finger puppets, and they’d say everything she was saying, but it came out perfect. She didn’t do it in public, but she did it at home, so really all she had to learn was how to think her fingers were talking.”

  “Never heard of that,” Paula said.

  “Nobody’s ever heard of it,” the girl said.

  “Want to go back down together?” Paula said, combing her hair.

  “I guess so,” the girl said. “Especially if my uncle’s done with his speech. I never understand what he’s talking about. He’s obsessed with Saint Francis, though. He’s got a blind bird named Francis, which makes sense, with Saint Francis having so much trouble with his eyes and hiding in that dark cave and all.”

  “I went to Assisi once,” Paula said. “With the person I was telling you about. We went to a monastery because I wanted to see the garden.”

  “What was it like?”

  “The person who showed us around was very nice. He spoke Italian very slowly and gestured, so I could pretty much understand him. There was a cat there that they took care of. Everywhere else, the cats were starving. Pretty scary cats, actually. The guy who showed us around was there because the brothers had helped him to give up drugs. He wasn’t one of them. He was more or less just there to live a clean life.”