Follies

by Ann Beattie

  It was Pru’s name; Pru, Nelson’s girlfriend.

  “Did she go to NYU?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  Yes! Did I know her?

  “No. I just remember the name. I knew somebody who knew her.”

  In the Murano glass, bits of color seemed to swarm upward, like fish at feeding time.

  It wasn’t really surprising that so many years after I’d stared at a computer screen and realized I was dealing with a crazy person, I’d met someone who had a close connection to Nelson Crawford. Would I look up Pru when I returned to New York? I must have looked perplexed: Annette touched one of her blue, blue earrings to still it, as if it had been moving, as if pretty jewelry was responsible for diverting my attention.

  On a September morning two days after I’d returned, still jet-lagged, I walked to Café Risqué and took a seat. A young waitress came up immediately. I ordered a cappuccino, hoping that Pru was working that day. When an Englishman and a stylish older woman crossed in front of my table, Pru suddenly appeared with a menu. She did not resemble her sister. She had mousy brown hair and was a small, ordinary woman dressed in de rigueur New York black. Dark-rimmed, square glasses. Bangs, which accentuated her already magnified eyes. She looked tired, on a rainy day. I smiled as she started to leave me a menu. “Pru,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes?” she said, turning back.

  “I knew Nelson Crawford,” I said.

  Pru’s sister, to my surprise, had told her nothing about me. What I’d said to Annette had been sketchy: only that I’d known a friend of her sister’s. I’d let her assume that the friend had spoken warmly of Pru. I started to feel uneasy about what I was doing in the café. In part it must have been because I was still recovering from one of those evenings everyone has experienced—people wanting to connect; everyone’s love of coincidence, as if it added magic to the world.

  The day after Steven and I had flown back, separately, he’d called and said he wanted to rethink our engagement. What he really said was “I don’t think we connect. You’re always preoccupied. I took you to Paris to meet my sister, and all you could talk about was their taste in glassware. What am I supposed to think? That it’s just a writerly approach to life? I think we need to rethink our commitment.”

  Pru was standing there, staring at me. Finally she picked up a blue metal chair across from me. I had the funny feeling, because of the way she gripped it, that she might raise it, lion-tamer style. In my experience, women tended to pull chairs back, rather than lift them. “You know Nelson,” she said. “And why did you come here?”

  “I met Annette in Paris.” I added: “I’m a little jet-lagged,” as if saying something truthful might allow us to start again.

  “Annette thought I might like to meet a friend of Nelson’s?”

  “I guess…I’m not really sure his name came up.”

  From her reaction, I understood that I was about as welcome as the rain.

  “You’re here because he fucked you over,” she said. “Obviously, that’s why you’re here.”

  “I don’t know why I’m here. Because I met your sister, and…because my fiancé ended our engagement. By phone. Just the night before last.”

  She looked confused, but then, so was I. She fidgeted with the ends of her hair. She said again, as if prompting me, “Nelson fucked you over.”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “Well, I was twelve years old. In Minneapolis. He came to make a film about my cousin and me. In Minneapolis,” I heard myself repeating. “It was 1992. Would that be right?”

  “Right for what?” she said.

  I crumpled. I said, “I don’t really know why I felt like I had to meet you. I happened to meet—”

  “A twelve-year-old!” she said. “What kind of film?”

  “It never got finished,” I said. It was the first time I’d realized that was so.

  “Oh yeah? Well, the one of me did, but it didn’t exactly get distributed. My father got a lawyer. Nelson ended up plea-bargaining himself into a hospital in Connecticut. He’d tied me up and filmed me for twenty-four hours, like he was Andy Warhol and I was the Empire State Building. When he got out, he wasn’t allowed to contact me. A rather destructive person, I’d say. You talked to Annette about this?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Nineteen ninety-two?” she said. “Is that what you said? How interesting that I was still in his thoughts two years after they let him out. Those Connecticut hospitals are nothing if not liberal. Detox, and they think it’s the same thing as recovery.”

  “Could you help me?” the woman from the kitchen said. She had a dish towel over her shoulder. One hand was covered in something sticky.

  “Excuse me,” Pru said. “But don’t pretend to yourself he didn’t fuck you over,” she said over her shoulder, by way of good-bye.

  I stood and took my damp raincoat from the back of the chair, put it on, and smoothed it, though it retained its unpleasant shapelessness. Of course Pru’s information had upset me: it confirmed that Renny and I had had the misfortune of meeting a crazy person, and the good luck to have escaped him.

  Some of Nelson’s words came back to me. Dirty words. Slang I’d never heard for parts of the body. Nelson had e-mailed Renny that he should try what he called “a few tricks” with me. I could remember my cousin’s red face, his legs jumping nervously.

  I walked a couple of blocks before I realized I hadn’t paid for my cappuccino. As if to atone, I went into a Starbucks and ordered another coffee, saying the magic words to have it delivered to me in the biggest cup, with just the right combination of low-fat milk and my favorite flavoring. It was probably a bad idea to be drinking a sweet, caffeinated beverage when I was suffering from jet lag, I realized. I put my hand on my stomach and had an image of the melting snowman from years before: another Nelson legend, or lie: the snowman that would eventually be nothing more than its jaunty scarf and a carrot nose and button eyes. Though Nelson might also have invented a more original snowman, I thought, walking quickly across the street, against the light. The jet lag persisted, and by the next morning I’d convinced myself that my life was a mess. I began to think of calling Roy and telling him all about the game Nelson had played with us, even though Roy had recently been ill with complications from diabetes. I told myself that I should go to Minneapolis to visit, though I knew the real reason for that wouldn’t be concern for my uncle, but to purge myself by giving him information on the chance it might make me feel better. I knew better than to do it.

  A story: a woman finds herself in Savannah, Georgia, her older cousin seated at the end of an elegant, bird’s-eye maple table. He is a flag-flying Republican businessman whose life seems as pleasant as it is incomprehensible: a man whom she nevertheless loves. Also at the table are his nice wife, a daughter, an au pair, and a man (Renny’s friend), recently divorced, who often eats there.

  Behind her back, it is whispered that the woman seems unhappy and a little on edge. If she was aware that her cousin’s daughter was throwing a ball against the side of the garage, why did she jump out of her seat on a random thunk? Like the rest of the world, the woman had a difficult childhood. Her father left before she was born. She never knew him, but she was always aware of him: his absence made him constantly present. In philosophy class at Columbia—which philosopher was it?—she perked up when she heard that a thing can be known by what it is not. She decided that adulthood had to do with not being a child. She has no religious beliefs to sustain her (an area neglected by her agnostic uncle, who raised her). Until recently, she had been engaged to an (apparently) immature man who broke off their engagement.

  Dialogue: “Don’t you be silly, honey. That Steven wasn’t worthy of you. What would you want with a lawyer who was going to sit in his daddy’s lap all his life? People make jokes about lawyers. Come on down South. We love you.”

  The woman tells her cousin’s wife a story, beginning at a rather unlikel
y place: a New York café, in the rain. She segues into pointless detail about her raincoat. She believes the material actually absorbs water. The raincoat is a shapeless thing, and she needs to replace it. (Does she, or does she not, realize that she is saying she’s no longer comfortable in her own skin?)

  In childhood, she and her cousin Renny became involved in an e-mail correspondence with a would-be filmmaker who was previously hospitalized for mental problems. The man burdened them with provocative (and, she now understands, untrue) stories about his sexual exploits. E-mail was a good medium for such provocation. She and Renny had also tried on various attitudes simply because they seemed to be sent into space. Technically, they could be retrieved, reread…but really, they’d tried on different identities because e-mail existed to be used that way. For a while, they’d felt grown-up. They’d liked the thrill of scandal. A prolonged secret had been told to them; by implication, they must keep it.

  Flip forward: Paris. The woman learns that a woman in New York may be the clue to a puzzle that was not so much missing a piece as missing the entire picture, so to speak.

  New York. The woman meets one of the e-mailer’s purported girlfriends. Though one is rarely able to question people who appear in stories, she is able to ask questions. Did they pile into bed together and drink? No. Did he ever have sex with her in an airport? Well—who hasn’t? But in this case…no.

  So what, exactly, does this explain? Whatever the game had been, one player ended up winning, completing college with honors, marrying, moving to Savannah, having a daughter, while the other’s life remained unfocused.

  One night she goes downstairs and takes a sip of scotch from the bottle in the liquor cabinet and remembers this: Nelson and the girls in someone’s house…their having watered the liquor. The specifics come back: it was a ski chalet. She pours another shot, then waters the Cutty Sark, the water from the faucet twining down thinly. She sits at the kitchen table and cries. She has on her cousin’s wife’s nightgown, warmer than anything she brought with her. This part of the South has been having a cold spell. The nightgown is flannel, lace-trimmed. She wipes her tears with the hem and is disgusted to see that her mascara has rubbed off on the material. She feels like she’s melting into a dark smudge. She hears footsteps on the stairs. Her cousin comes downstairs for a drink of water. His face is flushed. He is surprised to see her. She can tell that he’s just had sex with his wife. “You’re just not present,” her fiancé had said to her on the phone. Who can be totally present on the phone? She has no idea what he was talking about. When they were apart, they spoke every day. She always held his hand.

  She gets Steven’s number from information and calls but hangs up, though he probably has caller ID. She starts eating again. Before the trip, eating had been neglected. Soon she has trouble buttoning her jeans. She has no faith in her writing talent. She looks at herself in the mirror, straight-on, and realizes she is unphotogenic. Her eyes seem glazed, unseeing, the way Gladys’s did when they teased her by holding her up to a mirror and trying to make her look at herself.

  She sleeps with her cousin’s friend the next night, knowing she’s just biding time, that she will leave and break his heart. (She does. That is not the story.)

  Alone with Renny (now called Reginald), she brings up the subject of Pru. He listens, but from his response she understands that he has not been focusing on various details of Pru’s life, but rather his own. She worries this may be because she was not a good storyteller; that she had trouble animating Pru, who, after all, did not spend her entire life in bed, bottoming out. He interrupts, and says that what Nelson did was “exploitation.” He calls it, “Exploitation, pure and simple.” He views the e-mails as analogous to pornography shown to an unsuspecting viewer. He points out that in their sheltered world, they’d had no idea their uncle was gay. He presents them as having been naive children who bonded as they put up a brave front about how little they meant to their parents. Bitterly, he says that his mother could have visited, but chose not to. At the same time he went to Roy’s, she took up with a man. He knows little about her subsequent life: his sister left the moment she could, when she turned eighteen; his mother and her boyfriend had a dog that bit a child and had to be put down. Saying this pleases him—perhaps because it makes Gladys shine by comparison.

  If Renny assumed she knew Roy was gay, she hadn’t. As so often happens, someone says something in passing, assuming the other person knows. But she’d never taken the overview, or the long view (and she is supposed to be a writer?). Had Renny not spoken, Roy would have remained their slightly eccentric uncle.

  Renny pours them each a vodka on the rocks with a splash of tonic. She is surprised to realize that she has a preference about what she drinks. She wishes he’d poured scotch. She notices that his hand trembles as he holds a lemon to cut it. He squeezes juice into his glass, makes a cut in the other section, and gently pushes it onto the rim of her glass so she can squeeze it herself. Right: they were raised by a gay man, and Renny picked up some of his mannerisms.

  Taking their drinks, they go to the attic. She has asked to see it many times. Renny converted the space: gleaming oak floor; massive workbench; horizontal files. A section walled off: his darkroom. She peeks in. A red light shines dimly. There is a not-unpleasant chemical smell. Outside, a loose-pelvised-Elvis clock hangs on the wall, legs doing a metronome swing. A clock is attached to the stomach: 11 p.m. They sip their drinks. It is quiet. Everyone asleep.

  He gestures to a rocking chair. He sits in a wicker chair with a bulging back. He says his friend introduced him to a woman who runs a gallery in Atlanta, who wants to give him a show in the spring, though (artists always say this) he is nowhere near ready (RennywhenUR). They discuss what visual art can do that writing can not, and vice versa. For a moment she thinks he is going to ask how things went when she went out with his friend, but he does not. There is a Balthus poster framed and hung on the wall: a girl in profile before a mirror.

  “I want to see something you’ve done,” she says. She can hear the pout in her voice.

  He tries to change the subject. He is like Steven: she seems to be on one track, he on another. He seems to want her to admire the space. It is as though she’s there for an architectural tour. She walks to the window, but there is no view. She can make out the outline of a gym set in the side yard, but only because she knows it’s there. The trees are pale in the night. She looks down on a willow. She likes willows. She once had a children’s book about a girl with an enormous comb who combed a willow’s hair. She has no idea what Renny photographs. She teases him: he’s read many of her rough drafts (she never finishes anything: what else could she have shown him?), so fair is fair. Another irrelevant late-night memory: one of the witches in Macbeth, saying, “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” What line follows? Renny is saying how embarrassed he is, because for so long he hadn’t realized what artistry was involved in developing and printing your own film. He had delegated the printing to a stranger. As a young man, he’d thought photography had to do with subject matter.

  “Show me something,” she says. “Don’t you trust me?”

  “Why wouldn’t I trust you?” he says.

  He gets up and opens the door of an under-the-counter refrigerator. So: he keeps a bottle of vodka in the attic. He cracks little cubes out of a blue plastic tray, asking silently, by raising an eyebrow, if she wants more. Roy had done that, in the morning, in Minneapolis, holding a box of cereal.

  Renny goes to a horizontal file. “Well?” he says. “The great moment of discovery is here.”

  All at once, she is holding what seems to be a photograph of the prow of a ship, waves lashing the sides. An old photograph, fragile, on yellowed paper, that she must hold so gently, most of her energy goes into being careful. She balances it lightly, carefully, on her fingertips. Another is placed on top: rigging, with a skeletal shred of flag hanging from a mast. Obviously, he is showing her things he admires. Things that inspired him. There a
re two photographs of the ship’s deck and…coiled rope. The next photograph shows, in close-up, a hand grasping a rope. The hand is burned. Bruised? There are more photographs on paper worn and stained, with tattered edges. She holds the pile gingerly, as if someone has placed delicate flowers in her hands. In the next photograph a broken ship is nosed into a beach, slabs of wood peeling, a gash in its side. Looking at the background, she tries to guess where the battered ship is beached. The next ones are heavily damaged: torn; a stain obliterating most of the picture. Renny leans in. These seem to interest him more. As if putting down the trump card, he places the last one on top: a sea chest amid scattered coins, covered with seaweed and barnacles. There are tiny holes in the paper. Rot? Silverfish?

  “Sepia-toned,” he says. “They’re printed on endpapers from old books. The boat’s a model. I rubbed some of the prints in my armpit and put them in the sun. Not a technique you’ll find in ‘Hints from Heloise.’ My daughter took her first steps across some of these. I started out with old postcards of seascapes and fooled around with filters. I finally realized I could create environments that were much more convincing than the backdrops I’d been using. It’s called exploration art. I wish I’d gotten there first, but I’m not the only one working this territory.”

  She looks at him. He has to be putting her on.

  “That’s my hand,” he says. “Why do you look so surprised? Did you think only women knew how to use makeup? You realize that a photograph like this one never would have been taken back then—right? Pictures were for documentation. They had nothing to do with art.”

  She waits to see if he’s kidding.