by Ann Beattie
“Yes, please, so sorry, thank you,” he said.
I ran up onto the front porch, folded the wooden chair, and carried it to where he stood, sweat beading on his forehead. I’d found the chair curbside, then worried it might have termites, so I’d never taken it inside. Joe sat down and rubbed his hand over his face, then down the leg of his jeans. “So sorry,” he said. His breathing was less frantic, but he stared straight ahead. If he’d been Superman, he would have been looking through the clapboards into the gorgeously swirling tent, where my flowers sat center stage. I stood at his side with my hand on the top of the chair. I felt a little rattled myself. I no longer seemed able to think beyond the next minute.
Time passed, and he got better. I went in to get him a glass of water. We chatted about his guests’ arrival—how soon they’d be there, that sort of thing. “I was going to sit in the reading room of the library,” he said, tilting his head to look at me.
“Well, when you feel ready, we’ll have some tea, or whatever you’d like.” I tried to sound encouraging, but I wasn’t sure he’d ever make it into the apartment. I was worried that the famous people would show up and we’d be there, gawking.
We did make it inside, we had tea, and afterward Joe agreed to lie down for a minute to rest. He stretched out on the sofa and fell asleep. He snored a bit. The sun came out from behind the clouds, and I thought the light would awaken him, but he threw his hand over his eyes and continued to sleep. As the day went on and it got colder, I considered putting on the space heater, though the thing made an awful crackling noise, and I was afraid it might wake him. I lightly placed the afghan over Joe. I picked up the book I was reading, In Transit by Mavis Gallant. The stories were very involving, though every now and then I’d look up to see if anything was happening across the street. Gradually I let the worry I’d tried to suppress take over: What if they never came at all? Though he did—we did—have the money, at least. What would it matter if Xanadu sat there, unseen? I went on to the next story. I was so engrossed that I forgot about dinner, as I’d forgotten about lunch. To be honest, I might have been reading a bit desperately, as a way not to think about what was—or, more accurately, what was not—going on.
When Joe woke up, we had tomato soup, and we moved one of the chairs so we could sit side by side in the dark, watching a bit of late-night TV, trying to pretend to each other that we weren’t watching his house. Not long before midnight, an enormous white shape appeared in front of the windows: a white stretch Humvee limo. We couldn’t have been more surprised if Moby Dick had beached himself. We sucked in our breath. We raced to the window in unison and closed the curtains, then peeked from either side, as if we’d rehearsed this. “There they are!” he said. “My God! They’re here!” I whispered. It was like being a little child looking in on Santa Claus. This was no Santa, though. As I’d read in the tabloids at the checkout line, she was very curvaceous. She had on a long white strapless gown, plunging in the back and looking I don’t know what way in front, because she got out on the side near the curb and I never saw anything but her coxcomb of fancifully upswept hair, her long neck and back. A fur stole was handed out of the car, and then, on the same side from which she’d disembarked, with the chauffeur now holding open the door, the husband emerged, quite a bit shorter than his wife, reaching up to place the fur around her shoulders. She didn’t stop walking, so instead he carried the stole like a pet. I was trying to remember every detail as if it had begun happening hours ago: for instance, that she’d gotten out of the limo before the chauffeur had managed to get to her door. “Look for the key, it’s in there!” Joe whispered. The chauffeur was reaching around in the mailbox for the key. He pulled out the day’s mail—hadn’t thought about that as an impediment to finding the key!—then he found it, we could see that. He and the husband stepped in front of the woman, who had on very high heels, probably as high as they could be made. She took several perfect backward steps and finally swept up her stole and tossed it over one shoulder. Then they were inside and the door was closed. The chauffeur was in there with them. Behind the limo, someone tried to inch past, realized it was impossible, and began backing up. The limo glowed brightly under the lamplights. We said nothing. Some people passed by, commenting on the limo. They stopped and stared, but since nothing was going on, their loud voices drifted away as they continued walking.
The chauffeur came out, closing the door behind him, putting on his cap. He went quickly to the trunk and took out an ice bucket and a stand. “They didn’t say they wanted anything,” Joe whispered, hurt. Our eyes met, but we didn’t want to miss anything. With a bottle of something—champagne?—tucked under his arm, the chauffeur went back in, carrying the ice bucket in its stand. “There’s no ice,” Joe said. “I locked everything but the bathroom.” I shrugged. “Well, you said they didn’t tell you they wanted anything,” I said uneasily. The chauffeur exited in about three minutes. He stood on the porch looking left and right, much the way Joe did at night, and then, removing his cap, he bounced down the stairs and got in the driver’s seat and pulled away, some car honking behind him, a bicyclist, alone, sliding through the narrow space between the Humvee and the parked cars. Then there was darkness.
“Did you see the height of those heels? You don’t see those down here, unless it’s drag queens,” I said.
He looked at his watch. “She has a phenomenal ass, if that isn’t too crude to say,” he said. “It’s after midnight. How long do you think they’re going to stay?”
“At least as long as it takes to drink a bottle of champagne.”
“Let’s open the curtains,” Joe said. “They won’t see us if we turn off the TV.”
We did, then continued to sit in the dark. I wondered whether the two of them might be in there all night, and what that would mean in terms of Joe.
Then the big white limo pulled up again, and the chauffeur, putting on his cap, got out and went around to . . . what? He lifted a big bag of ice from the floor. He carried it in the crook of one arm, and I saw how powerful that arm was. He went into the house and was out in another few minutes, in time to move before the car behind him with its pulsing, deafening sound system blared its horn again.
Joe yawned. I got up and turned on the space heater. I offered him the afghan, but he insisted I have it. I spread it over my legs. I had never known it to be this cold in Key West. She must be freezing in her low-cut dress. And doing what, inside? They didn’t seem like the type who’d get down on the floor, but you never could tell. I wondered if Joe was thinking the same thing.
“Smelling the flowers, drinking champagne, dancing,” Joe said, as if reading my mind. Then: “I hope neither one of them smokes. The ad very specifically said no smoking. I go outside, myself. They’re probably not smokers, though,” he said. “Although a lot of those people are.”
“Did you make it clear that they had to leave at midnight?”
“It was very clear. Confirmed with the secretary.”
“Why do you think they came so late?”
“Those people have no sense of time,” he said.
Wait! The husband was standing on the street, talking on his cell phone. He was hunched over in the wind, hand to his ear, then he was reaching behind him for the hand of the woman descending the stairs, who threw the bottle into the bushes! Good God, it disappeared right into the hibiscus. Joe and I looked at each other. The man and his wife clasped hands as she leaned her head, with its big tower of hair, on his shoulder—having to duck down a bit to do so. The stole was fastened around her collarbone. She bent a bit to kiss him. He slid his hand down her back as their lips locked. He clutched her but kept looking past her shoulder. Then she stepped out of her shoe and handed it to him. He dropped his cell phone in his jacket pocket and held her shoe. His other hand remained around her waist. She bumped down again and handed him the other shoe, and he tried to return it, but she put her hands behind her back. The dress had to be satin. Her husband stood there with his funny little
pencil mustache, holding the shoes by their heels, searching the street. The limo pulled up, and the driver jumped out with another bottle of—I guess—champagne, but the husband put his hand up like a traffic cop and turned and pulled open the back door. His wife’s shiny, amazing ass tipped into the air for a second, then she was in, headfirst. He tossed her shoes on the floor, rearranged something. He hopped in the back seat, and the limo idled for a minute, then the chauffeur got out, went up the stairs, put the key in the mailbox, returned, and drove away.
Joe and I were both so tired, we were rubbing our eyes. The question was: Could he make it back across the street? Or: Would I really prefer that he stay, just in a neighborly way, of course. Or did I simply dread taking the chance and being caught out in the cold again, with Joe unable to take another step? The same thoughts had to be going through his head.
“Your son that you were telling me about earlier,” Joe said. “You think he gets scared and can’t continue speaking? Did you mean he suddenly seizes up, or—”
“I don’t know. I guess I don’t want to think he’s drunk or stoned.”
“He could be having panic attacks, you know. It sounds like he’s finding himself in some strange situations—not that the most ordinary thing can’t provoke an attack. I could talk to him. They have a lot of new drugs for that. Not that they’ve done me any good.”
He’s forthcoming, and he’s willing to address my problems, and I like that. Maybe this is it, I thought. How much do I need to go out gallivanting, when I’m happy to take an afternoon nap and am yawning by midnight, even in the midst of a fairy tale? Also, he’s proved he’s no deadbeat. Between us, we’ve just made what used to be my entire year’s salary. You miss out on life for years and years, and then you meet the guy across the street, who thinks you’re a genius, and you’ve got money again, and love . . . well, it was hardly love with Joe, but it was clear that even though this was the last thing I expected, it was the way things did conclude for two citizens of Planet Earth, and in spite of all odds, I had a partner. I had a partner on a night when foxes sang and danced in the moonlight, and the old people sat and stared.
SAVE A HORSE RIDE A COWGIRL
Heidi and Bree were rear-ended on Route 1 by Sterne Clough, driving his brother’s Ford pickup. Neither girl seemed hurt. Sterne, though, felt the oddest sensation. It was as if someone had clamped an ice bag under his right armpit. It felt frozen and burned at the same time. Your body pulled all sorts of tricks on you when you turned sixty, and now he was seventy-four, so those tricks were less like pranks and more like extended jokes. He groped under his arm with his good hand but felt only sweat. Nothing accounted for the pain, which was worse in his knee. Damn! His bad knee had banged the dashboard when the little car in front had accelerated and then stopped with no warning just as the light turned green.
He got out of the truck, his knee none too helpful. It was distracting to have to stand there scowling at the damage while his armpit felt like a smoldering coal. Maybe later he could run a bamboo stick through a piece of steak and cook it in there. Meanwhile, he had some awareness that the car’s driver was still sitting in her seat, not even looking over her shoulder. The other girl stood by the mashed-in bumper of the car—at least the thing had a bumper—her hands on her hips.
“Are you too senile to be driving?” Bree asked Sterne.
“Want to tell me why your friend started off and then stopped dead?” he asked.
“Because a squirrel ran across the road,” Bree said. And because she’s a total asshole, she thought, but she wasn’t about to tell the guy that. They’d been headed to the outlets in Kittery to stock up on jeans, and maybe see if the Puma store had gotten in the shoes she’d seen in an ad earlier that summer. They both went to UNH, where the fall semester was about to start. Now this. Compounded by the fact that Heidi was currently outside the car, retching. Everything put Heidi in a tailspin, which was her way of ensuring that she wouldn’t have to take the blame for whatever had gone wrong: another girl threatening to attack Heidi for having stolen her boyfriend; the produce manager at the market irately insisting that she help him pick up the bin of mushrooms she’d sideswiped with her elbow. Now here came the cops, sirens blaring. A total shit situation.
* * *
Sterne’s younger brother, Bradley, was a lawyer. Within a few hours, he was able to find out that, at the moment the squirrel dashed in front of the car, the driver was texting. That, and the year before, she’d been on academic probation for physically fighting with another girl. Plus, she had an unpaid speeding ticket and had been cited in June for throwing a Coke can out of a car window. It had been observed at the scene that she was driving barefoot. “Turn that off,” the cop had said of the music on the car radio as Bree, not Heidi, complied with his request to see the car’s registration, since Heidi kept gagging.
Bradley was upset that his brother had been involved in an accident, but a little damage to his old truck didn’t bother him much. And a couple of phone calls had already guaranteed that Sterne was going to be fine. At worst, the insurance rates would go up. But it was six P.M. and Sterne was still fixated on the accident, cursing both girls as he helped carry the bookcase he’d been transporting into Bradley’s new house.
Two years earlier, Bradley’s wife, Donna, had been given the wrong medication at a hospital in Boston and died as a result. Bradley had wanted to stay in their house, but the cliché was true: There were too many memories. With the settlement check, he’d bought a smaller place, across the river from their old house, in a location that Donna would have loved. He’d gotten rid of a lot of their books—her cookbooks, along with her collection of poetry books, which he’d donated to Smith—but he still had a few left, and the new house had no built-in bookcases or built-in anything, so he’d kept an eye out for useful shelving at Leeward Landing Thrift Store, where lovely furniture appeared at the end of each summer.
Sterne had borrowed the truck because he needed to buy several large bags of mulch, and he had volunteered to pick up the shelf on the way. Almost every weekend, for one reason or another, Sterne borrowed the truck. He always brought it back with a full tank of gas, even if there’d been only a quarter tank to begin with.
In the house, the bookcase looked smaller than Bradley had expected. They’d positioned it between the living room windows that looked out toward the river, but now he thought that it might be better in the dining room, which had a lower ceiling and not much furniture. Decorating was not his strong suit. What he wanted, basically, was to get the remaining books shelved. Sterne had finally quieted down about the day’s events and was assessing the bookcase with his hands clamped under his armpits.
“It doesn’t look right there,” he said.
“Maybe when it has books in it,” Bradley replied vaguely.
“Where are they?”
“Upstairs. The movers carried all the boxes up to the second floor by mistake.”
“Why didn’t you make them carry them down?”
“I wasn’t here. I had a trial. Margie Randolph’s niece came over to supervise. She needed the money because her babysitting job disappeared.”
The Randolphs, Bill and Margie, had been Bradley and Donna’s neighbors on Seagull Way. Bradley and Donna had had the corner lot, which gave them the advantage of great air circulation as well as a peek at the harbor. Their next-door neighbor, Miller Ryall, had spoken to no one, and no one had spoken to him, though his house sat between the Cloughs’ and the Randolphs’. It was said that after losing his job on Wall Street, Ryall had sold his New York condo and moved his family into their summer house, though the wife, Constance, had quickly decamped with their two-year-old son and the Haitian nanny, and Miller had lived in the house alone for years. He kept the blinds closed, though sometimes in the evening he walked barefoot onto the front porch and sat in the porch swing, bare-chested and wearing his bathing trunks (although the pool no longer contained water), revealing the same perfectly sculpted body th
at the wives had all noted when the Ryalls first moved in.
Through Donna’s binoculars, which she had used to watch birds, Bradley could clearly see their old house. Maybe it was a little maudlin, but he liked watching his old home disappear into the darkness every night, and he liked equally well the interior lights on either side of the second story that came on at dusk and remained lit until ten P.M. He was asking a lot for the house and was not inclined to come down on the price.
“What say we check out that new oyster place in Portsmouth?” Sterne said. “I hear they’ve got twenty local brews on tap, and I owe you, after crashing your truck into those bimbos. It’s on me, bro.”
Odd that Sterne had become obsessed with beer in his old age. The same substance he’d disdained in college—all three colleges he’d attended, starting with Michigan and ending with Bates, and not even a degree to show for any of it after seven chaotic years. Neither alcohol nor food held much attraction for Bradley after Donna’s death. He ate just to keep going. But it was a nice offer—an apology and an attempt to cheer him up, no doubt—so he said jokingly that if Sterne would drive, he’d enjoy such an outing very much.
“You don’t enjoy anything very much, but a few oysters and a brewski might help you get back on your feet,” Sterne said.
“Back on my feet? Do you remember that I won a trial last week that was a grand slam? I can pick and choose any case that interests me.”
“You want to avoid the subject. That’s fine. Not my place to nose in. I’m only thinking of you. Nobody knows what to do for you, me included.”
“Nobody has to do anything. Life goes on.”
“I don’t think you think it does,” Sterne said, “but I’ll keep my big yap shut.”
* * *
Portsmouth was sort of a nightmare, though they found a parking place in a bank lot where somebody had taken down the chain. Bradley felt sure they wouldn’t be towed. They started off toward the center of town, a boy on a skateboard clattering the wrong way down a one-way street as a couple of girls watched. What tattoos they had. What crazy earrings, feathery hippie things that hung to their jawbones. One had on a necklace of black skulls. The other wore flip-flops on her enormous hennaed feet. “Make way for two old men,” Bradley said, using his arm, Darth Vader–style, to cut through a cluster of boys who were smoking and holding their iPhones to the sky, jostling one another, checking out the girls. Sterne remarked on how much Portsmouth had changed. Bradley had to agree with him. In Prescott Park, a wedding was concluding, two little girls in lavender skirts so long the material almost tripped them as they threw flower petals everywhere they shouldn’t.