by Ann Beattie
“Pynchon.”
“Ah! Pynchon. V.”
Susan is filing a fingernail.
“Thank you, but I have little time to read novels.”
“I guess med school is really rough,” Charles says. “Susan says you plan to specialize in surgery.”
“Neurosurgery, yes,” Mark says.
“I read a thing in some newspaper about a doctor in some South American country who pulled a woman’s eyes out of the socket and cleaned them and picked off tumors and put the eyes back. TO cure her of migraines and double vision.”
“God!” Marks says. “That’s revolting. That’s not possible, I’m sure.”
“Oh God,” Susan groans.
“No wonder people are afraid of doctors when they read things like that,” Mark says.
“That’s sickening,” Susan says. “Did you make that up?”
“No. It’s in the same paper that has a denial from representatives of Frank Zappa that Frank Zappa had a bowel movement on stage.”
“Oh God,” Susan says.
“I follow those rags for kicks,” Charles says. “You know, they’re still full of JFK gossip. JFK jumping out of women’s windows when he was President, JFK a vegetable on Onassis’s island.…”
Susan puts down the fingernail file. “I’m going to have something to drink,” she says. “Is anyone else?”
“Oh. No.” Mark says.
“Maybe I’ll go to bed,” Charles says. “It’s been another long, though glorious, day.”
Mark stands. “Thank you very. Much for your kindness,” he says.
“You’re welcome,” Charles says.
“Good night,” Susan says, going into the kitchen.
“Good night,” Charles says.
In his dream that night Charles is sitting behind a desk—in his office, presumably—and Mark is standing in front of him. “Take a letter. Any letter,” Charles says, and wakes up laughing. The house is silent. He hopes they didn’t hear him. He lies there with his eyes open for some time, listening to the silence.
What if JFK is a vegetable somewhere? He closes his eyes and pictures Kennedy, round-faced and thick-haired, then sees him as a dancing green pepper, his smiling round face a little knob on top. He opens his eyes. Blackness. Kennedy’s favorite fiction writer was Ian Fleming. Ian Fleming was turned into a neurotic by his crazy mother. He closes his eyes and pictures Sean Connery driving a broad-nosed sports car that metamorphoses into a corncob. He opens his eyes again. He is hungry. He imagines dancing apples. There is nothing good in the house to eat. Tomorrow he will go to the Grand Union and buy all his favorite foods. Grand. Holden Caulfield hated that word. He thought it was phony. That cover illustration of Catcher In The Rye: Holden in a big gray overcoat, hat turned around, pointing down his back. Saw a movie once starring William Holden that was scary. Can’t remember the title or the plot, just the name William Holden. The dancing apples. “Aw, c’mon now, Mama.…” “Geoooooooorge Stevens!” George Washington. Famous portrait of Washington left unfinished because artist took on more than he could handle. Very ambitious artist. Washington who chased his slaves or Jefferson? Laura. Chasing Laura. “I’m gonna get you, Laura.” Cornered in the library. “Are you crazy, Charles?” Government employees. If I were a carpenter, if Laura were a lady. First of 1975. Guy Lombardo waving his stick around, head moving more energetically than the stick, old Guy up there, shaking his stick. Guy Fawkes Day. Firecrackers. Fanne Foxe, The Argentine Firecracker. “Ya-hoo, I’m just a country girl from Argentina.” The girl from the north country. She once was a true love of mine. Laura. Laura against the bookshelf: “What are you doing? Are you crazy?” “Aw, now, Sapphire, I can explain …”
SIX
“You don’t look like you had a very good night,” Betty says to him.
“I didn’t. There was a lot of stuff going on.” In my head, he thinks. I’m going crazy. My mother is crazy, but they’re letting her out of the bin today. This very day. Maybe she’s already out. Maybe at lunchtime I’ll get a phone call.
“This all?” Betty asks, taking two pieces of paper out of his basket.
“So far. More to come.” Looney Tunes: “T-t-t-t-thu-that’s all, folks!”
Betty walks out. She is not wearing the black boots; she has on a pair of brown high-heeled shoes. He is disappointed; he had come to think of the boots as part of an outfit. The boots made her look very … substantial. Damn.
He stops working on the report he has already stopped working on ten times, and fills out a requisition form for Steel City paper clips. In the third grade a boy hit another boy in the nose with a paper clip launched from a rubber band. The paper clip went flying across the room and went up the kid’s nostril. The school doctor got it out. The school doctor was a heavy middle-aged man who told the kids to call him “Doctor Dan.” Nobody called him anything. Once a year he weighed them and looked them over. “Doctor Dan finds nothing wrong with you,” he said. He always called himself Doctor Dan.
He goes back to his report, finishes it, and leans back in his chair before starting another. There are only four more to do. If they’re as easy to do as the last one, he can probably get half of them done before lunch. Of course, if he were going to lunch at eleven o’clock that wouldn’t be true. Damn.
He looks at the next report. He fills out the first line, then drifts away, thinking about what a mistake it will be for his sister to marry Doctor Mark. Why should jerks like that get to tell decent people that they have inoperable melanomas? If neurosurgeons ever get to say that. They must get to say it. Sure. “An inoperable melanoma near the occipital lobe.” He can just hear him saying that. Then he’ll go home and screw Susan. No, he’s probably just marrying her for respectability. He’ll tell some poor jerk he has an inoperable melanoma near the occipital lobe and then run off to a gay bar. Then he’ll run home to Susan. By then she’ll have a lot of kids and not care if he’s there or not. She’ll have a Maytag and probably be so dumb that she’ll let them take a picture of her with it—a green Maytag and several white-faced children. Her hair style will be out of date, her legs a bit too fat. One of the kids will not be looking into the camera. One will be in her arms. Doctor Mark will be to the far left, towering over his family: wife, children, Maytag. He will have a late model Cadillac: the Cadillac Eldorado. Where the hell is Eldorado? Probably some place full of humidity and peasants. Doctor Mark will probably be in one of those Dewar’s profiles:
HOME: Rye, N.Y.
AGE: 35
PROFESSION: Neurosurgeon
HOBBIES: Squash; attending concerts
MOST MEMORABLE BOOK: V.
LAST ACCOMPLISHMENT: Told some poor jerk he had an inoperable melanoma.
QUOTE: “I think everybody should go to med school and get a high-paying job and get the little woman a Maytag.”
PROFILE: Keen, aggressive. Plays squash and cuts brains with precision.
SCOTCH: Dewar’s “White Label”
He looks at the report again. He has been doodling on it. Christ. He gets a fresh form and starts again. Susan is right. He would like it if he were an artist. Then he’d know fascinating people instead of women who cry in bathrooms. Even Sam’s dog was more interesting than anybody that works in this place. Sam’s dog was so smart she could lip-read. “Go in the other room” Sam would mouth to her, and she’d look dejected and walk into the kitchen. “Dinner,” he’d mouth, and she’d run for one of her toys, prance with it in eagerness. One of them was a yellow squeaking bottle with a red dog face on the front called “Pupsie Cola.” Even the names of her dog toys are more interesting than the names of the employees: Stan Greenwall, Bob Charters, Betty … Betty what? Maybe just Betty—Betty of the erotic dreams, the ones it will be difficult to have, since her dresses stick to her. When he sees her later, he will find out her last name. Then he can call her for a date, and maybe when he knows her better he can have erotic dreams about her. Maybe that will even make Laura jealous. She said once that Betty hardl
y ever had a date. Who would she date? Recently divorced Bob Charters, who flicked the back of his hand against Charles’s shoulder when they were standing side by side at the urinal and told him now that he was divorced, he was looking to go yodeling in the gully? His own boss, who wears a button with the female symbol on it inside his trench coat and shows it to people with a laugh the way men turn over their neckties to reveal a naked woman painted in lurid colors? Or Bob White—he must have taken a lot of kidding about that name—who never says anything except in the elevators, when he says he’s sorry to be there or glad he’s leaving? What happens to girls like Betty if they don’t get married, and how do they ever get a husband? How do they ever get to move to Ohio and have a fantastically reliable Maytag? He proposed to a woman once. She said she was already married. She said it pressed up against a row of books in the library, whispered to him to get away, people would see and think he was crazy. He was always cornering her—in restaurants, when the coat-check girl turned to get their coats, on the Tilt-A-Whirl, pressing her to one side before the machine even started and tilted them there. Well, maybe it wouldn’t have worked out. Look where his mother and Pete’s marriage ended up: in a corner of the attic, pecked to pieces by birds. But maybe his marrying Laura would have worked out.
He begins to write figures on the piece of paper. He is not making much progress. He will never get a promotion if he doesn’t apply himself. When he was thirteen his mother made him take dancing lessons. They were given in a church basement that was always cold. The girls all had bad breath or big breasts he was afraid to touch. He was an awkward dancer, and he didn’t improve. The dancing instructor hated him. She’d clap her hands together slowly as he and the girl he was dancing with whirled by, meaning for them to get closer. She always showed her bottom teeth when she clapped her hands. The woman refused to give him his diploma. She sent a diploma in the mail about a week after the course was over, but in the space where his name should have been was printed: NOT YOU. “That awful woman,” his mother had said, and he had been flooded with relief that she sympathized with his inability to dance. “Dance with me,” Clara had said. “Let me see whether you can dance.” He told her that he couldn’t, but she still made him. She towered over him—no chance of running into her breasts, thank God. And after a few twirls his mother dropped the subject, except for telling his father that his money had gone down the drain.
Another report finished, he takes off for lunch. He has fried shrimp and a beer and mashed potatoes that can be lifted all in one mound with his fork. He eats part of the potatoes and plays with the rest, pays the bill, and walks back to the office. Passing the typing pool, he sees that Betty is eating at her desk. He goes in and pulls an orange plastic chair up to her desk. Two women at desks in back of her who were talking normally begin to whisper. There is a brown vase on Betty’s desk with four paper flowers in it. There are no pictures. There is a paperweight with a picture of a cat inside. Doctors tell old people, people whose mates have died, to get a pet—something to love. Betty must already have given up.
“Is that your cat?” he says.
“Yes. That was a Christmas present from my nephews.”
“My best friend had a dog that died not long ago,” he says. Why did he say that?
“Did it have heartworms?”
“What’s that?”
“Heartworms. They can cure a dog once, usually, if they get it in time.”
“I don’t know what it died of. It just died.”
Betty shakes her head. “Heartworms, I bet.”
Betty is eating cottage cheese. She is trying. She is trying to lose weight so she will get a husband and not have to rely on her Siamese cat. Poor Betty. If only she were Laura he would love her madly, blindly, forever.
“You’ll only have to type two more from me today,” he says.
“Have you gone to lunch?” she says.
“I’m on my way back.”
“Oh,” she says. “Okay. I’ll be down for them later.”
He leaves, convinced that there’s no possibility of romance. She should have said something witty. She is so dogged. But what could she have said witty? What’s the witty comeback about a dead dog? If she were Hemingway, at least she would have said something strange—that a dead dog lying in the sun was beautiful. But she is Betty. She says Sam’s dog died of heartworms, which can be cured once, usually. Unlike inoperable melanomas. He gets a drink of water at the water fountain, hoping to wash down the glutinous mashed potatoes. They are still right there, even after a long drink.
Why didn’t you even try to be a painter? he asks himself as he sits down to begin another report. Why don’t you paint at night? You could paint primitives—then it wouldn’t matter if they were sort of sloppy.
The sun is in the middle of the window. In the morning it is on the left, at noon in the middle, and to the far right before it gets dark and he goes home. He amuses himself by thinking that the sun rises and sets in his window, that it is confined to this rectangle, that the window is like one of those games they have in bars, with the little squares that beep from left to right. If he doesn’t find out Betty’s last name or her phone number, he will be spending another Friday night in a bar with Sam. He would ask Sam to come along, but the women always fall in love with Sam. Except Laura. She just thought Sam was nice. Sam didn’t fall in love with Laura either. Oh, hell—it was perfect. His best friend didn’t love his girlfriend. The three of them could have knocked around forever.
At the end of the day (4:25 today) he leaves the building. Bob White is in the elevator. He wants to say “Bob White! Bob White!” to him, chirp it at him, and he bites his tongue. Susan is right; he is infantile. “Glad to be going,” Bob White says. “Yeah,” Charles agrees. “Going to juvenile court with my kid tonight,” Bob White says. Charles looks at him for the explanation. “Threw a bottle through a window,” Bob White says. Bob White gets out first, quickly walks through the lobby to the revolving door and disappears. Charles stops at the blind man’s stand and picks up an Almond Joy. “What have you got?” the blind man asks. Sometimes, Charles is convinced, he just stops at the stand because the blind man’s question has such a nice ironic ring. Going out of the building, he wonders if Marsha Steinberg would defend him if he killed Laura’s husband. He has forgotten to ask Betty her last name. Well, all these things we forget are deliberately forgotten. Thanks, Freud. You probably would have forgotten too. The more exotic appealed to you. The more exotic appeal to me. He crunches into his Almond Joy.
At home, he sorts through the day’s mail: a letter from the Humane Society saying that kittens are being thrown in the trash, a note left in the mailbox from Susan, thanking him for “a good time,” a Burpee’s seed catalog. The bed that Sam slept in is a mess in one bedroom. He did not make the bed he slept in the night before. He goes into the bathroom, which is relatively uncluttered, and soaks a washrag in warm water, rubs it over his face. It is quiet in the house. He turns on the television and lies in bed to watch it. Sam’s snowmobile socks are hanging off each side of the bed rail. Like the coquette who forgets her handkerchief, Sam will be back for the snowmobile socks.
The evening news features a plane crash, the parents of a child who was roughed up in a Boston school, and a word about former President Nixon going golfing. There is a picture of the former President He looks like a lean old mafioso.
HOME: San Clemente, California
AGE: 62
PROFESSION: Retired
HOBBIES: Going out to Bob Abplanalp’s island, playing golf with ambassadors, shooting the breeze with Eddie Cox.
MOST MEMORABLE BOOK: Six Crises.
LAST ACCOMPLISHMENT: Surviving surgery.
QUOTE: “Y’know, I love my country.”
PROFILE: Aging, embarrassed, a crook. This man will not live long.
SCOTCH: Yes, and pills, too, but don’t tell anyone.
He turns off the television and goes out to the kitchen to fix dinner. The phone rings
.
“May I speak to Elise Reynolds?”
“Elise. Elise left a few days ago.”
“She did? To whom am I speaking?”
“Charles.”
“And is Susan there?”
“Susan left, too.”
“Where did they go? This is Mrs. Reynolds.”
“Oh, hello, Mrs. Reynolds. Elise left before Susan did. I thought she said she was going home.”
“This is the home, and I’m in the home, but Elise isn’t in the home. Just where do you think she is?”
“I can’t say, Mrs. Reynolds. Maybe she’s back at school.”
“Maybe you murdered her.”
Charles almost drops the phone. He sits down, eyes wide. Let’s see; she left the day before yesterday.…
“Mrs. Reynolds, get hold of yourself. I’m sure she’s back at school.”
“Did she tell you I was an alcoholic?”
Susan told him she was an alcoholic. “No,” he says honestly.
“I am an alcoholic, but it’s a popular misconception that alcoholics never sober up. They do sober up, and when they sober up they search their nest.”
“Is your husband at home, Mrs. Reynolds?”
“Didn’t she tell you he was dead?”
Oh, Christ, he thinks. She’s flipped out and there’s nobody there.
“Well, he isn’t,” Mrs. Reynolds says. “She exaggerates everything. She’s had him in the grave for five years. He’s considerably older than I am.”
“Okay, okay. I just wondered if somebody was there with you … if you’re worried.”
“I haven’t had anything all day but a Peppermint Schnapps, and I am worried.”
“Elise seemed to have had a fine time here. You know kids. They’re unpredictable. I’m sure she’ll return to your house or to school.”
“Excuse me. I didn’t realize I was speaking to an adult. I think we do understand each other. We know that when I looked in the nest, she had flown.”
“Try not to worry, Mrs. Reynolds. It will work out okay.”