by Ann Beattie
At the restaurant, the brothers were told that there was only a half-hour wait if they were willing to sit at the bar. Sure. What was half an hour? They sat on a stone wall with the buzzer the hostess had given Sterne. Bill Randolph and his daughter from his first marriage wandered over to greet them. A nice girl. Peggy? Patty. She lived somewhere far away, like Newfoundland. Somewhere Bill had to take a ferry to get to. Margie was attending a therapy session. She’d insisted that they go out and enjoy the lovely summer evening; she’d even thought to make a reservation for them at Mombo.
When Bill and his daughter first approached, Sterne had hopped down off the wall to greet them as if he were the former neighbor. Bradley had gotten down, too—rude to sit there like Humpty Dumpty—but although he was glad to see Bill, he didn’t really know what to say. Bradley didn’t think this daughter had ever married, and he wondered if she might be gay. Her hair was cut like a man’s, though many women her age wore their hair that way. He’d need another clue. Which would be what? A T-shirt emblazoned with the rainbow flag? Yes, he did think she was gay, standing there smiling a big unlipsticked smile, her feet, in Tevas, planted far apart. Donna would have figured it out in a flash, but there was no Donna, no flash.
Bill said that he missed having Bradley close by. Not that he’d moved far, but still, with him gone, there was only crazy Miller Ryall and all the noise he was causing.
“Noise from what?” Bradley asked. It was some sort of adult jungle gym that he was constructing, Bill said. The swimming pool was intact, but it had a different lining. Bill could see only a sliver of it from his attic window, peering through Tarzan’s jungle. (Ryall had wisteria growing on arbors all over the property, plus trumpet vines and roses that made his front door all but invisible.)
Eventually they took their leave, Patty clomping, Bill quite demure beside his big-boned fortyish daughter. Sterne picked up the suddenly madly flashing, vibrating black box and held it as if it might explode. Bradley found himself hoping that there wouldn’t be loud music they’d have to try to talk over, though sitting at the bar was good in that situation. They’d be close together. Donna . . . she could hear a whisper across a room. No, of course she couldn’t if someone was blaring music, but in the silence of the house she could hear—really—she did once hear the sound he made while using a toothpick on his back teeth behind the closed bathroom door.
Oysters, yes. Fried calamari. An order of steamers. They ate so much they decided to share a main course. Sterne ordered a hard cider. Bradley agreed to another T and T, even though the tonic had been borderline flat. It was a fine idea, coming to the new restaurant. The noise level was atrocious, but after a while you got used to it. He felt proud of himself for knowing that it was Macy Gray on the sound system. Interesting to observe this summer’s fashions: clothes splashed with orange; cashmere scarves carried so that you could bundle up in the AC. Bradley knew the difference between cashmere and other wools. On their long-ago trip to India, Donna had bought the loveliest cashmere shawl. His secretary had taken Donna’s clothes away, promising she’d donate them. Somewhere tonight, someone else could be wearing one of Donna’s dresses. How bizarre would that be, to see another woman in Donna’s clothes.
They decided on grilled swordfish with a mango compote (“compote” basically meant a little cup containing not enough of a substance), french fries, and lemon-peel arugula “slaw.” Why the menu put the last word in quotation marks was open to interpretation. When they finished eating, Sterne grabbed for the bill. Bradley wondered if his brother really would pay for dinner, or if he’d expected Bradley to insist on picking up half the check.
* * *
Bradley dropped Sterne off at home and took his leave. At his own front door, he turned on the hall light, then turned it off again and stared into the house, wishing that he could feel the new configuration of hallways and stairs and rooms. In the old house, he could have maneuvered well even if he’d lost his sight—it was all so familiar. He turned the light back on and went into the living room and sat facing the windows, though he could see nothing through them. Well, now he could have things his way: no blinds, no curtains. He sat there trying to make up a little jingle, but nothing seemed to rhyme with “curtains.” Exertions, maybe? Lately everything seemed to require twice the energy it had when Donna was alive. He closed his eyes but didn’t sleep. That would have been depressing: falling asleep after a big dinner, sitting alone in his living room. He sprang up, switching on the table lamp, but didn’t know what to do next.
He decided to get the iPad and look up the pictures he’d taken the week before, when, with almost no warning, the temperature had dropped and hail had begun to come down—hail the size of mothballs—a totally bizarre August hailstorm in southern Maine. When it finally stopped, he’d taken pictures of hailstones filling the birdbath and the recycling bin like Styrofoam peanuts. It had done in his new hostas. According to a phone call from Margie, Miller Ryall had come out on his front lawn during the storm, wearing Jockey shorts, not even bathing trunks, raised his hands to heaven, and laughed and danced like some deranged freak on Twin Peaks, whooping and pirouetting. She’d taken a picture of that through her front window. Bill was already joking about using it for their annual Christmas card. Now Miller Ryall was building . . . what was it? Something with high crossbars and netting slung beneath, a weird exercise system where the pool used to be. It sounded like a contraption Bradley might have seen in Vietnam, either for the troops to exercise with or, more likely, to torture prisoners.
He placed the iPad on top of the bookcase and popped open a can of seltzer. He should review the long message a client had sent him earlier in the day—he knew he should—but the weekend was coming, and that would be soon enough. He sorted through some mail, threw out half of it unopened, took another sip of seltzer.
I am dull, he thought. He knew he was. But there was something to be said for not feeling conflicted or tortured, just empty. Done in. He picked up the binoculars and looked at his old house. It must now be past ten P.M.—yes, it was—because across the river, his upstairs lights had gone dark. Aiming the binoculars downward, he saw two figures swaying. At first he thought he was seeing low-hanging tree branches. But no, out in front of his old house, two people were dancing down the middle of the street. This was impossible. The entire block was asleep. So what was he looking at? It was Ryall. The stars cast enough light that he now saw Ryall’s long, thin nose highlighted—but who was the woman? On the same day he’d found out about the adult jungle gym, he was now seeing the reclusive Miller Ryall dancing outdoors with some woman? He thought about calling Bill and Margie but didn’t want to wake them. Also, he didn’t want to seem to be fixated on his former neighbor because . . . well, because he disdained Ryall.
He finished his seltzer, peed, and undressed, draping his clothes on the bedpost. The next day was Saturday, so he’d wear them a second day. He’d go to the market and buy a few locally grown healthy things. Take care of himself. You had to at least contribute to a depression lifting. You couldn’t just stare into the darkness with binoculars, looking at your old life, or at foolish people outside your old house, which you once occupied with your wife, your wife who was killed by an inept twenty-five-year-old nurse. What the hell was Ryall doing, though? The guy usually stayed hidden like a rabbit in its warren. And all that construction noise certainly wasn’t going to help sell his house. Not that Ryall ever thought of others.
Bradley turned back the covers and slid into bed. He’d be up in two or three hours to pee. That happened when you drank: You thought your bladder was empty, but it filled up as soon as you lay down. And he’d had seltzer on top of the drinks. And ice water at the bar. He was never going to sleep, he thought. It was his last formed thought of the night.
* * *
“In a million years, you are never going to believe what I have to tell you,” Margie said to him at the market the next day. He was standing there with kale sprouting upward from his bag li
ke green fireworks. The tomatoes weren’t well enough cushioned at the bottom. They’d bruise. Perhaps the skin would break. He’d also bought a bunch of flowers, because some kid was trying to raise money to go on a trip with the high school orchestra. They were things you’d find alongside any road: Japanese knotweed, Queen Anne’s lace, and some limp-stemmed vine with a few dark-purple flowers that would probably drop off immediately. He looked at Margie neutrally, though he was eager to hear what she had to say. He’d cultivated this blank expression for the courtroom, and over the years it had become incorporated into his response to almost everything.
“Ryall’s got a live-in girlfriend,” she said. “He met her through Match.com. She waved to me and walked right over and introduced herself. I was seeing my niece off, and suddenly she held up a hand and ran over, so I had to shake it. Her name is Bree. Daniel is her middle name. You’ll never believe this: She was named for some woman in an old movie starring Donald Sutherland.”
“Klute,” he said.
“Cute? Well, I wouldn’t say so—but with him, the presence of any woman is cause for wonder.”
“No, no. The movie Klute. Jane Fonda played the woman. She was a prostitute, I think. Go on, Margie.”
“She told me she was working at a store in Portsmouth, so she got a discount on the clothes. She was wearing a very swirly skirt that looked expensive. She’d dropped out of school and was going to be living next door. She brought up Match.com. I almost asked her if she knew that he didn’t speak to any of us. But then I thought, No, she’ll find out soon enough. That is, unless he’s decided to be a human being. Isn’t that amazing?”
“I suppose it is. Do you think there’s any connection between the contraption he’s having built and his new girlfriend?”
“You were born to be in your chosen profession, Bradley. That’s an interesting question. You’re thinking she might be an acrobat or something? One of those high-wire performers?”
He splayed his hands to pantomime not knowing. (“Stop pretending I’m a jury. I’m your wife,” Donna would have said if he’d gestured that way in her presence.) He was tempted to tell Margie about what he’d seen the night before, but he couldn’t imagine what she’d think of him, just happening to have binoculars, just happening to see the first real sign of life at Miller Ryall’s in whatever it was, ten years. Also—and this was the real reason he decided not to say anything; he was quite aware that Margie wasn’t likely to judge him—he’d awakened that morning with a very disconcerting thought. A really troubling thought that, for a few seconds, he’d felt entirely convinced of. Shaving, he’d continued to think, Maybe it was Donna. Maybe she came back, and I wasn’t there—there was only Ryall—so she had her elegant, life-affirming dance with him. Such a thought was odd, he knew, even as he thought it. Yet it lingered, and he’d already decided that he’d jump in the car if he saw dancing again.
Now, after time had elapsed and he’d had two mugs of coffee, it occurred to him that the idea had popped into his mind because of some of the stories he’d heard in Vietnam—bizarre things that the Vietnamese believed about ghosts who could be seen only as long as you looked at them, who vanished if you so much as blinked. By implication, the Americans were not only killing but blinking people away. Blinking them back into invisibility. He’d heard this from a nine-year-old boy who’d befriended him. He wondered what had happened to that boy, with his bloody knee and broken thumb, splinted with a tree branch, while at the same time he knew. That whole village had disappeared, though not while he was there; its end was not something he’d had any part in.
He and Margie said goodbye after a peck on the cheek, and he started down the well-trampled hill with his bag of vegetables he didn’t really know how to cook. He should have kept at least one of Donna’s cookbooks. He’d boil water and drop the stuff in. The corn would cook just fine, and if the kale wasn’t edible, he’d know better next time. The Queen Anne’s lace was dropping tiny flecks of white, like dandruff, on his car seat.
He drove out of the lot, a stream of tourists’ cars facing him at the intersection by Stonewall Kitchen, where they came off the highway. Maybe he should invite a tourist over for dinner. He could be like the squeegee men in New York City, setting upon drivers stopped at lights, rubbing filthy water over their windshields and demanding tips. But he would ask them to dinner instead. After all, in a world where people met their life partners on something called Match.com, what would be the harm in accepting a mere dinner invitation? Free food! Kale boiled with corn. Sliced tomato sprinkled with garden basil. He also had a package of chicken sausages. Sure, come on, happy summer people, enter into life as it’s really lived in Maine! The idea was starting to amuse him even as it made him feel horrible, like a condescending, ill-tempered human being.
To his surprise, he found that he had driven not to his new house but to the old one. When he saw where he was, he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. On autopilot, that was how. Abashed, he pulled into his driveway, only to find himself fenced in: Emil Andressen, his real estate agent, had pulled in behind him in a silver Infiniti, transporting a couple of potential buyers. Bradley got out with a faint, false smile. Emil was not happy to see him. This was bad timing. He’d been warned: Buyers wanted to see nothing personal inside a house, no framed pictures, no scraggly plants, no memorabilia—and certainly not the owner. They needed, according to Emil, to have no obstacles to imagining themselves there. Anything could throw them off and ruin their imaginative projection—even the wrong fabric on furniture.
So then why had Emil blocked him in? Why hadn’t the man at least parked at the curb, or where a curb would have been, had one existed? The second he realized he was angry, another thought occurred to him: Bree? The Match.com girlfriend was named Bree? How many Brees could there be? What would it mean if it were the same young woman whose car his brother had hit in the fender-bender? Could it be that small a world?
“Awfully sorry,” he managed to say to Emil. “I was just going to take a look around, make sure everything was okay.”
“Are you the owner?” the woman said, throwing open the car’s back door. “If you are, will you give us a special tour of your lovely home? It’s number one on our list of places to see. We’re hoping it’ll be our forever dream house in vacationland.”
This squealing woman seemed disastrously stupid. The sort of woman he couldn’t abide. Donna had been able to talk to anyone, but he had no facility for casual chatter. A forever dream house in vacationland?
Emil’s body jerked as if he’d been hit by a big wave he’d turned his back on. His scrawny arms were actually flailing.
“I’m sorry,” Bradley said, addressing Emil rather than the woman. “Why don’t you back up and I’ll go on my way, Emil?”
“Oh, no,” the woman insisted. “Don’t y’all think that is too silly, having everybody disappear as if nobody owned the house, as if we couldn’t possibly learn anything from y’all?”
Her husband, texting, got out of the car. He looked at Emil. “This is the house’s owner, who lives across the river now,” Emil said. “As he says, he was stopping by to check on things, but we should probably—”
“You should, but you’ve got me blocked in, Emil,” Bradley said, more testily than he’d intended.
Emil was a former tae kwon do instructor turned nurse’s aide, as well as a part-time real estate agent, supporting his girlfriend and her ten-year-old son. He was also a four-years-and-counting member of Alcoholics Anonymous. A friend of Bradley’s—a twenty-year A.A. member—had recommended Emil when Bradley decided to sell the house. Why he hadn’t listed it with Sotheby’s, he couldn’t imagine, but he had only himself to blame.
“And what all is that?” the woman said, twirling to look at the couple dancing in formal attire up the road. It was not yet ten A.M. God, they’d danced out from under the massive bowers of wisteria without a sideways glance and were doing a salsa, or something hippy and swiveling, up the middle of the roa
d.
“Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers,” the woman said, grabbing her husband’s arm. “We are gonna have to refresh our ballroom-dancing skills to live in y’all’s neighborhood!”
“What’s that about, do you know?” Emil said to Bradley rather urgently. “A prank? They’re playing a joke?”
The young woman dancing with Ryall had long bleached-blond hair and bony knees and wore black high heels with straps—official dancing shoes—and if everyone standing in the driveway was lucky, she and Ryall would do their pas de deux around the block, and the couple would indeed assume that they’d been the victims of a practical joke. The dancing woman was so obviously not Donna—just some foolish girl, probably either drunk or stoned, enjoying her sudden romance with a guy who, out of a job or not, had big bucks and was putting her on big-time by pretending to be up for anything, full of exuberance.
“Oh, I like this place already!” the woman buyer said, bouncing on her toes.
Emil was backing up his car. For a quick second, Bradley caught his eye, and that glance said it all. It said, I am my family’s only source of income. It said, Get out of here now. It said, I will lose this sale. It said, Jack Daniel’s with two cubes and a cherry. Then it said, No, no, no.