Follies

by Ann Beattie

  “That’s a lot more interesting than that myth about Saint Francis and the wolf,” Shalissa said. “One really lucky cat shut up inside a monastery, being taken care of—that’s something you can understand if you believe in good luck and bad luck.” She looked at Paula, to make sure that it went without saying that her sister was still part of the conversation; her sister who’d had bad luck.

  “What’s the luckiest thing that ever happened to you?” Paula said, dropping her brush in her purse.

  “Being rescued from Vietnam. But long after the war,” she added. “You might say I was lucky not to be born yet, during the war.”

  “You were rescued? Your sister, too?”

  “Yep. We went to Massachusetts, but I don’t remember it. It was really cold. I think that’s something I do remember, not just something I was told. But nobody knew we were sisters, and we weren’t reunited for a whole year. Then I went to live in Louisiana with Nora. They gave her an American name. I don’t know what, exactly, the point of my name is supposed to be. Anyway, they found out we were sisters, and then Sister flew with me to New Orleans.”

  “My boyfriend might have been the one who got you,” Paula said.

  “Really? Did he fly with Rich?”

  “Y-y-yes,” Paula said.

  “That would be way cool if I was meeting the girlfriend of one of the guys who saved me,” she said. “Worms were eating my intestine. I had to have surgery once I got here. I don’t remember anything about it, but Sister Mary Matthew kept me all that year, while my sister was gone.”

  “You must be very fond of her.”

  “She wasn’t all that nice. If my sister was alive, you could ask her. She was four years older than me. There was even a letter from Sister Mary Matthew to the people who adopted both of us, saying that they could give us back if we didn’t get healthier. I mean, what’s so nice about that?”

  “Wow,” Paula said. “You’re right. That’s not very reassuring.”

  “I think maybe I was fated to meet you,” Shalissa said. “Since I don’t much like Sister, somebody nice showed up that I could like instead.”

  “My new friend,” Paula said, putting her hand lightly on top of the girl’s shoulder.

  “So what’s your boyfriend’s name?” Shalissa said.

  “I’ve always called him George, but his real name is Larry.”

  “Then why do you call him George? I know! It’s his middle name.”

  “No, he—he has aliases.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An alias? It means you have an assumed name. A made-up name.”

  “A pen name.”

  “Well, yes. But I think you only call it a pen name if the person has written something.”

  “Hey, he should write about his adventures. Uncle Ambrose told me a couple of things when he was drinking, and I know they risk their lives to get kids and all.”

  Maybe he should, Paula thought. Maybe she could advise him. Help edit whatever he wrote. Wouldn’t that be nice? Just the two of them by the fireplace, as she held a pen in her hand and learned about his adventures. Well, that was obviously not going to happen. If they got together again, he would be just as secretive—perhaps even angry that she’d found out all she had. She flashed on an image of herself in the kitchen in California, taking the cookie sheet out of the oven. She had tried to be nice, to be liked by her fiancé’s daughter. That was what happened when you tried too hard: you usually got fucked. In a way, she was like George. Larry. She sometimes imagined scenes in which what she wanted came true, but she always made them so sticky-sweet (like the damned cookies), she always sensed the hidden cliché, she inflated everything until it became ludicrous, in order to dismiss the possibility of happiness, because she didn’t believe in it. She had picked a man who didn’t believe in it, either. His way of coping was to run away, while she sat still long enough to play out the fantasy, subverting it until its sugary unreality made her run, too. She thought again of California, with a shudder. And even in Sonoma…she had stayed there, but she was the one who’d bought the motorcycle to ride farther and farther from home. So far out into the country, and the sunshine, and the moonlight, and the breeze, that she really lost him back then, long ago. Even though she’d returned every time, it was during that time that she’d lost him.

  “I’ll tell you what,” the girl whispered. “Let’s say what we really think about people. I’ll go first. Mary’s fat, and her husband has nasty, narrow eyes. Now you say.”

  Paula looked around. Speeches were over, and an orchestra was playing. She finally located her host and hostess and said, “Those people are unhappy, and neither one will admit it. He’s looking at women out of the corner of his eye, and she’s scared she’s not pretty enough to keep him.”

  “She’s not pretty, is she?”

  Paula shook her head no.

  “It’s all about how a person looks. It’s a lie that it isn’t. Some people are never going to have what they want because they’re not attractive enough.”

  Paula looked down and saw that the girl had walked downstairs barefoot. Her feet were a child’s: soft skin on her heels; toenails badly polished—no doubt, she’d done them herself. Paula felt the sudden urge to hug her tight, to reassure her that she would be a beauty, but that right now—like a puppy—her paws were too big, and she had too much energy so that certain people who’d forgotten their own youth—or never really lived it—would want to punish her.

  In fact, she did say those things. She started by mentioning Shalissa’s sister, though. She said, “Was your sister beautiful? I’ll bet she was. And you worry you won’t be that pretty, or you worry she might have been punished for being beautiful, right? But none of it is true. People are in the wrong place at the wrong time sometimes, that’s why bad things happen to them. You’re going to be every bit as pretty as she was, and your feet will stop growing and you’ll learn how to make your hands look pretty by wearing rings and putting perfume on your wrist, and even if you don’t get married, there’ll be someone who loves you.”

  “How could you know that?” the girl said. “There’s no way you could know.”

  “I know it the same way I know those were the things you would have asked.”

  The girl looked at her. Hesitant, she almost drew back, but didn’t. The bartender from inside the house circulated through the tent, with a tray of salmon arranged on little rounds of melba toast to look like roses.

  “Don’t be fooled,” she whispered, high on her own certainty about what Shalissa thought and wanted and liked. Hands cupped around the girl’s ear, she leaned closer and whispered so softly she risked her missing what she had to say, “Don’t fall for it. It’s fish.”

  So, just like that, after having come from New York to Bethesda, Maryland, Paula didn’t continue to Virginia. She got up early and left a note thanking them for wanting to help. She thanked them for inviting her to the wedding, which she still thought it was extremely strange not to have mentioned. That thank-you was insincere: the only good thing about the wedding had been Shalissa, and she felt more than a little sorry that she would probably never see her again. Sure, they’d exchanged e-mail addresses, but friendship depended on gestures, and smiles, and whispered words, and how could you do that with e-mail? If she called, and got the girl’s parents, it might have been fine once, but beyond that, they would have wondered about her. She also thought—gratefully, not egotistically—that the girl had served her purpose. It had been in talking to her that she reconnected with her own hopes and fears at that age that still made her insecure. More than that, she had learned something from trying to console the girl. She had learned that her relationship with George—if it was ever to get back on track, which she seriously doubted—would require a lot of renegotiating, because she had ended it in Sonoma and only retained the necessary delusion that it continued. But that wasn’t something she wrote in the note. They wouldn’t have known what she was talking about. What did they know ab
out her relationship with George, and what could she have told them? Their own relationship seemed to be coming apart, and adoption was the least of their worries. If he spent so much time grieving for an out-of-business restaurant, then it was displacement, pure and simple. He was grieving something else.

  She snuck out of the kitchen and turned on her cell phone. There must be a Yellow Cab. There was a Yellow Cab everywhere in the world. Or she’d walk a little, take the metro back to Union Station. It was a beautiful day, and quite frankly, she was glad that Sister Mary Matthew was on her honeymoon and that she wasn’t. It would have been a disastrous mistake to marry her fiancé, and it would be equally disastrous, she thought, to propose to George. She had just been there for his convenience, and she was proud of herself for not following him to Charlottesville, and equally proud that she’d come to her senses and not gone there with Rich and Nancy. What was their plan? To waylay some woman on her way out of her house? To gang up on her and demand that she explain her relationship to the Mystery Man, who was obviously less of a mystery to Rich and Linda than he’d been to her all those years? She had some mild curiosity about what the woman looked like, and how much of a factor that had been in his taking off for London. Though she didn’t feel sure he’d really gone to London. She thought he might be in Mustique, and pictured him there, alone, hands plunged in his pockets, in Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, surveying his land with a builder at his side. If there was a woman, as well as the builder, she didn’t want to know about it. She had a strong suspicion that that was where he was, and she should leave him there. Let him return to her, if that was what he wanted. She had returned, but not returned to him, one too many times.

  The bartender had given her his phone number, but she was not going to call him. He was too young. The Demi Moore thing was faintly embarrassing. The Cher thing.

  She found the entrance to the metro and went down the stairs, following the crowd. It was probably too soon to get sentimental about the good times they’d had. She felt sweaty and wished she could have taken a shower, or a bath, but she hadn’t wanted to risk awakening Rich and Linda. Thinking about how refreshing water would have been, she remembered, again, hugging George’s back in the bathtub, and how it had provoked the story about the lynx in the petting zoo. Had it ever really happened? If so, what had taken him to a petting zoo? And what had the woman really been saying, as she clawed the cage like an animal, herself, giving the advice George would of course want to hear: that he should watch his back.

  Let him watch it in Mustique. Let him lie in the sand, where nothing more dangerous than pesky sand fleas would attack his back. He could watch his back, and from now on, she’d watch hers.

  All the way to New York, though, she kept thinking about him. If she’d known he was in Virginia, or that the woman could have pointed her toward him, would she have gone? She envisioned a woman much more attractive than Nancy Gregerson, pointing a finger toward a sunlit island paradise, and then she imagined that finger twisting into the finger of someone else: the woman in the animal’s cage. Finally, she looked at her hand and remembered the girl’s advice about puppets and thought that really, as advice went, it was rather interesting. She wiggled a finger, but had nothing to say, either aloud or simply where most of her dialogue happened—in her head.

  For days she wouldn’t speak, as it turned out. Confusion and guilt began to seep in about why, exactly, she’d run out on George’s friends, why she hadn’t at least let things play out. She would become increasingly doubtful about whether he’d made it to Mustique, and be surprised, also, that Rich didn’t call, and neither did Linda. Were they ever going to get in touch, or would she just be someone who’d passed through their lives on her way somewhere; or from somewhere, in a nursery that wasn’t a nursery, and then ran out before they could help her look up her boyfriend? Boyfriend. He wasn’t her boyfriend. He was an elusive man who made up stories that had a moral not so easy to decipher—nothing as easy as Saint Francis taming his wolf. What did it mean that all those days she passed in silence she could see the lynx up in a tree, looking down, and the woman, looking up, telling George that she knew how to outsmart it?

  The memorial service for Mrs. Bell had been attended by angels—people who dressed as angels and announced themselves to be angels—and among the mourners had been the blond boy Nancy had come to suspect was retarded—correction: mentally challenged—at the nursery where she’d once bought a bush and ever after avoided. He’d approached her, wearing his flowing white robes with high-set shoulders and wings folded down as if he were a sleeping bird, and explained that he and the other angels were making an appearance as “guardians of the spirit.” Mrs. Bell was still alive in what he called “every real sense” (“Riding on the back of Tyrannosaurus rex?” she’d wanted to ask), as was his sister (Ah: Vancouver was synonymous with heaven). She understood there was something wrong with him, though he stood amid four other adults with shortly cropped hair and pale faces she did not want to inspect closer for evidence of powder, their costumes lushly multilayered. While that didn’t make her think they were sane, at least she saw that he was not alone in his delusion. The minister was either a very cool customer, or the angels had made other appearances at memorial services. One thing they did do was sing very nicely. The boy’s tenor was joined by the stronger tenor voice of an older man, who—because he moved in with no space between their shoulders, and because he had the same sharp nose and thin lips—she assumed must be his father. The singing transported her back to her former neighbor’s children, whom she’d lost touch with…those stepladder little boys who had sung, well, so angelically every Christmas, the sheet music in their hands, their mother accompanying them on the piano, their father piping out inexact little notes from a flute and looking self-conscious. Well—whatever people needed to get them through the night, she supposed: the afterlife of Mrs. Bell; the reappearance of a girl who had died on Afton Mountain, alive again in British Columbia. By such reasoning, her son could be dancing with the Tin Man down the Yellow Brick Road, and maybe he was: those druggie friends had such odd nicknames for one another. Some scraggly speed freak would be Toto. The private investigator her husband hired had come up empty-handed, and her own brilliant idea had resulted in nothing but a lot of money lost in plane fare. Instead of a white shirt, perhaps the private investigator should have worn angel wings, and then he could just have announced where Nicky was. The man had come to Virginia and searched Nicky’s computer, which he’d given to a friend when he left town, since—like the majority of things the boy owned—it was perpetually broken, and in searching the hard drive had found messages back and forth from Toto and Tin Man and Judy Garland (if you suffered enough in life, were you awarded the distinction of being, simply, yourself?). What he found turned out to be nothing but drivel: code names for drugs that were so obvious, she could figure them out without being told; bleak jokes about the uselessness of normal people; plans to meet at boring places in the county deemed lively because they would grace them with their presence, and also because Sam Shepard was known to show up at the bar. Wade Butler, Private Investigator (he had handed her a business card on which was embossed the face of Sherlock Holmes), had hinted that he’d like to stay in her guest room, but she hadn’t picked up on the suggestion. She gave him a few phone numbers that she copied out of the phone book and a cup of coffee, and she also did him the courtesy of pretending he was a serious person, even though his questions continued to be pathetic: Nicky’s sports interests in high school (none); the name of the by now long-married girlfriend who’d gone to Lexington (she’d called Information). And pets—that was a good one! She did not say that he’d killed a turtle, while others might have tried to adopt it. She did not mention the neighbor’s cat. She lied and said that he had been very fond of Bernadine’s dog. If he’d asked a second time, she would have told him that blue was Nicky’s favorite color. Perhaps he didn’t remember that crucial question he’d asked so long ago.

  A
t the end of the service, which, to Nancy’s surprise, Jenny had attended with her older daughter (who rushed to Nancy’s side for a hug), the two women exchanged raised eyebrows about the angels. Mrs. Bell’s son from Richmond was there. Mrs. Bell’s doctor attended: a young man who had surprised them all by actually visiting his patient at the facility, instead of having her transported to his office. He seemed friendly with the son, and the two men stood chatting, ignoring the angels who milled about, telling anyone who would listen that death was just a journey.

  In a memo that had circulated back in December, it had been suggested that each nurse consider attending at least two memorial services a year, unless she was particularly fond of the deceased and wished to go more often. No: it hadn’t been a memo. It had been a brochure, with hypothetical questions written in italic type: What number of memorial services is it proper to attend? Perhaps they could revise the brochure to include: What questions is it proper to ask an angel? She had gone to more than her share of memorial services. Because she was one of the older members of the staff, she supposed she had some notion of setting an example.

  The day before, she had gotten a much-delayed response to the letter she had written the girl in London: Why pretend you’re interested in his well being? If there’s no money to send me on a train out to Leeds forget it. I can get there myself and, don’t think I won’t. What did you think I’d show you for proof? That I’d cut off his ear or something? I told you he wasn’t in London. I heard something happened where he worked that he didn’t want to be part of. Mrs. Gregerson keep your money.

  That afternoon, after stopping at her favorite grocery store to get some cookies she liked (a reward for being such a conscientious person), she returned to Ivy and knew the minute she saw the car in her driveway that it would be the man who had called long distance, who wanted to know where his missing friend was. She felt discouraged more than alarmed. When she saw a woman sitting on the grass outside the car with him, she felt relieved. They would be like two children she could appease, sharing her cookies with them, and then she would send them on their way because they would understand that she knew nothing.