The Doctor's House

by Ann Beattie

  It helped that we met on neutral ground. She sent me a postcard with the name and address of a bar, which I tucked in the inside pocket of my leather jacket. At first Josie and I didn’t know what to say to each other, but it didn’t take long to relax. She looked much the same and said that I did, too. We sat side by side in the bar making small talk, though I pretty quickly turned to the painful subject I knew it wouldbe pointless to avoid: I brought up the time I was made to visit her in the hospital, and how much I suspected she’d liked seeing me, even though she hadn’t acted that way. I was not a secure or presumptuous young boy; if I felt that, it had been because something in the air, like the secret messages that went back and forth between Nina and me, had reverberated strongly. Josie agreed: she had been happy, but at the same time she hadn’t wanted to see anyone, she was so self-conscious about the way she looked. Imagine that, she said: she could deal with the physical pain she had after surgery, but her appearance made her acutely embarrassed.

  Her mother and my father had been having an affair. I hadn’t known it that day, though I soon figured it out, even if I could not immediately put it into words. That day his lover, Josie’s mother, had been trying to break away from him, which she physically enacted as I stood in the room. I could remember feeling Josie’s surprise and dismay. I ran because I knew that whenever my father had me as his audience he got crazier and crazier. It was as if my presence added gasoline to his fire. I knew that what was happening was somehow disastrous, and I also remember thinking that if I removed myself, there would be some chance he might not go up in flames. That he—that everything—might quiet down. He could never resist boasting, demonstrating his power to me. I now see that he was more insecure than I was. I thought that if I left, Josie might not have to hear it. It wasn’t cowardice; it was the first selfless thing I can remember doing.

  No: that isn’t true. It was my first gallant act toward someone other than my sister.

  A long time had passed before Josie and I finally spoke about our troubled childhoods and the way they had, yet hadn’t, overlapped. Her eyes filled with pain again; I felt the same impulse to go toward her, and to retreat.

  What details would Serena insist on here?

  This was happening in a bar in southern Vermont. Josie was there to visit a relative who lived in a nursing home. If she had been Serena, she would have wanted the two of us to go into a closet in the nursing home and have sex, but she was not Serena. She was a girl I’d known in school, now dressed in jeans and a turtleneck, having coffee, perched on a barstool. I had swiveled my stool to face her. I had ordered scotch. I hadn’t looked her up after getting the invitation because I had romantic feelings about her, though as I sat there, I calculated—just for the sake of speculation—how many more drinks it would take until the possibility of having sex became a moot point. I thought about having just that many drinks. Or not having that many. Meanwhile, she told me about her marriage, her children. What she said about her husband let me understand she wasn’t very happy, though she absolutely adored her children. She told me about their favorite toys, their favorite necklaces and junk food enthusiasms, their kittens—all the trivia that made up their childhoods. She apologized for being an adoring mother. I said I could imagine being the same way, if I were a father. That led me into talking about the breakup of my marriage. I tried not to misrepresent Caitlin, but the truth was, she seemed so completely gone from my life I could barely think of the specific things that had led us to part. I suppose it was somewhat funny that ridiculous details came to mind, none of which Iwas so stupid as to announce: that she had preferred Ajax to Comet; that she indignantly returned roses to the flower shop if they wilted too soon. It was much easier to tell Josie about my on-and-off, more recent, difficult relationship with Serena.

  As I spoke, I realized that everything I talked about sounded like a proposition. Though it was unintended, sentences seemed heavy with sexual innuendo, so that it didn’t seem like anything I said about the past did not apply to the two of us in the present. Serena herself would have analyzed the situation and decided that consciously or unconsciously, I did have a scenario for our meeting. How else to account for the air between us being so charged? It had also been called to my attention, by Hound and by others, that I’d gotten spoiled by all the attention that had come my way during Caitlin’s attempts to banish my memory of my lost love from high school, and later by Serena’s rather tantalizing impulsiveness. Serena was not the sort of person who would even remember to go to the store, let alone prefer one cleaning product to another. In the time we were together, I never saw her clean anything. If she had bought roses that died, she might have held a funeral for them. She was high-strung but very original—a difficult person to outguess, which was something she took secret pride in. Like Josie, though, I cut myself short. Details were nothing but details; they did not explain anything any more than generalizations did.

  “Don’t digress,” Serena would be saying, at this point.

  The point being that I realized I was going to have to take the initiative if anything meaningful was to happen between us. Regardless of what my sister would think, that meaningfulthing would not have necessarily had anything to do with sex. But I wasn’t sure that anything should happen. What I’d intended to do with Josie was to clear the air, since we’d never spoken about that day. Having touched on the subject, though, where, exactly, should I begin? I mulled it over with another drink, and we made small talk. She switched from coffee to wine, but when it came time to order again, she ordered coffee. She had actually been more forthcoming drinking coffee than wine, telling me that her husband was antisocial and wanted only to be with her and their children; he did not have one other friend, she told me, which she saw not as a compliment, but as a way of giving up on life. He had been particularly depressed after his knee was operated on unsuccessfully, and he could no longer take long hikes alone on the weekends.

  I still could not decide how to say what I wanted to say about my father’s atrocious behavior and about what must have looked like my own cowardice. Abruptly, she looked at her watch and said she should get to her aunt’s. I paid the bill and was pleased there was no silly feminist flurry of debate. As I held open the door, she surprised me by saying, “My husband isn’t the sort of man who’d be pleased that his wife had a drink with an old friend. I hope you’ll come visit us in Connecticut, but if you do, it would be better not to mention that we saw each other today.” I felt my cheeks turn hot. Was this my signal to do something, or was she making a simple statement?

  Unsure, I extended my hand, though kissing her cheek had been my impulse. “Oh, you know you were the most handsome boy in high school,” she said. “Stop making fun.”She leaned forward and kissed me briefly, on the mouth. “Call us,” she said. “You know, I was surprised to hear from you. I would have expected Patty Arthur to get the call, not me.”

  We had mentioned so many names in the time we talked. I had said the name still difficult to speak:Serena.She’d called her husbandHarry. We had mentionedMrs. Glessthe history teacher, andNona, her aunt in the rest home. She’d even told me the names of her children’s pets. But until that second, I had no idea she, or anyone except my sister, knew anything about my involvement with Patty. That was stupid of me. People always knew things they didn’t let on to, except for those people who couldn’t resist a last-minute provocation.

  “Are you just going to stand there and not react?” she said. “What I was trying to find out was whether you were still in touch. I’ve talked to her, but I’ve never mentioned your name.”

  I wasn’t in touch. Patty Arthur had become a sort of fantasy fairy of my past; I was smart enough to know that to get together with someone who had never been quite real—either because she was larger than life, or because for one brief period, she had effectively lifted both of us out of mundane living—was to risk disappointment. “No,” I said simply.

  “You didn’t really come all this way to see me, di
d you?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you on your way to see her?”

  I shook my head no. She looked down and looked up again. She said: “Then I’m giving myself one more guess. If I’m not second best, I assume you came because I survived, so I’m sort of like a good luck charm.”

  “I don’t believe in good luck charms,” I said.

  She walked up to me. She put out her hand. I took it. I stood there, confused, holding her hand. People walked around us. I thought that if I hadn’t had three drinks, I might better understand what was going on.

  “Alice Manzetti was always so smitten with you, but for you there was only Patty Arthur,” she said. “Isn’t high school painful? It’s good we didn’t realize that all that crap would follow us all our lives.”

  “Did Patty tell you about us, or did more people than I realize know?” I asked.

  She answered with a question. “What happened?” she said. “I thought for sure you two would be the couple from high school to get married.”

  “She went to college and fell in love with somebody else.”

  “And you were so devastated, you just accepted that?”

  “I never assumed we’d get married.”

  “One of her professors. Fifteen years older,” Josie said, shaking her head. “I thoughtthatwas the most shocking thing I’d ever heard of back then.” She took a step closer. Her limp was almost imperceptible, but I knew that she knew I noticed. We had said nothing about that. We had said nothing else about her surgery, nothing more about that dreadful day in the hospital. We also had said nothing about the one time we’d had sex, so long ago. I wondered if she might have blocked it out of her mind. For a long time—years—I hadn’t thought of it, myself, though now it seemed so momentous, I couldn’t think how I’d forgotten.

  “Don’t get into it again,” she said. “Advice from an old friend.”

  “I didn’t look you up to get back in touch with her. I didn’t even know you knew.”

  “Then I don’t get it,” she said. “You skipped the reunion, then came all the way from Boston to Brattleboro to talk to me about the past without really talking about it?”

  “I got caught up in talking about the things we talked about,” I said. I added, not quite truthfully: “It was interesting to hear about the kind of life you lead. The girls, your job.”

  “My hermit husband,” she finished.

  “I can tell you aren’t happy,” I said.

  “The person who organizes reunions is either ecstatic or desperate. There’s no in between.”

  “Let’s have another drink,” I said.

  We had been walking slowly as we talked. We were standing in front of a store. Behind my shoulder things were cluttered in a shop window: pig push toys; aprons patterned with maple leaves. Someone had assembled a pyramid out of plastic jugs of maple syrup.

  “Call Alice,” she said. “Alice has carried a torch for you all these years.” She closed the distance between us and kissed me a second time on the lips. “Believe me,” she said. They were almost her last words, and when she spoke again, there was no confusion between past and present; she was talking about Patty Arthur, not the two of us, standing, both slightly unhinged, on a sidewalk in a town neither of us lived in. “Stay away,” she said.

  Nothing could have made me more determined, though until that moment I hadn’t thought about looking up Patty. Why go through it? Everyone knows what it’s like: theromanticized figure has been changed by time, or more shocking still, you’ve changed.

  I let her walk a block and turn a corner. Then I followed. I couldn’t let her go without finding out where Patty was. What she’d meant by her warning.

  “Men are so predictable,” she said. “I came here knowing what you wanted, and sure enough, here it comes,” she said. “You want her phone number, don’t you?” I hadn’t said Patty’s name. All I had done was come up behind her, putting my hand on her shoulder. She looked at me. “Andrew, I knew what this was about and I came anyway, didn’t I? Maybe you should listen when I tell you that things aren’t great in Patty’s world, and that in my opinion you’d do well to keep away.”

  She was so emphatic, I only nodded. I even tried to make light of it, giving her a little chagrined smile and shrugging.

  “That day you ran out of the hospital room it was like I was on your heels, getting out of that miserable, overheated room, getting away from your father and my mother.Imagine the two of them, having a fight right in front of me, when I was so sick I couldn’t even keep water down. I want you to know that it gave me hope,” she said. “I figured if you had the guts to break and run, eventually I could, too. When you did that, you didn’t know what a big favor you were doing me.” She had been looking at the sidewalk as she spoke. She looked up. Her lips parted. She was about to say something else. Then she turned and began to walk away.

  It was the point in the movie where the music comes up. Certainly the point when a different person would havepursuedher.Ecstatic or desperaterang in my ears. That needed further discussion, even if Patty did not.

  But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it any more than I could get up from the park bench and walk to the clinic the day Serena went for the abortion. And before that, there had been the time I couldn’t press the button in the hospital elevator the night Mac died and I stood there leaning my head against the side of the elevator until a custodian got on and asked if I was okay. And before that, I had never been able to bring myself to walk out of my mother’s bedroom, as a child, until it was clear she had finished delivering her self-serving re-creations of her past. I seemed never to be able to do the things that most needed doing. Unlike Serena, I could easily let myself off the hook for not dealing well with complexity, but simple things? Continuing to walk after a friend, who all but begged me to follow her?

  Nina wants to know why I ever started looking up girls from high school. I’m equally curious about why she doesn’t consider getting together again with some of the guys. Because you maintain a real connection with those people, the same way you never really disconnect from your family. You can’t renounce the people who defined your adolescence any more than you can banish family members. Because they aren’t family, though, with time, the bullshit ends. The cliques dissolve, the girls grow up—they’ve all had the same hard knocks everybody’s had—and what it’s come down to is that most of them aren’t very happily married. It’s not about having sex with them, as Nina nastily insists.

  Or actually, she might be a little right. Everyone new you date mirrors who you are, but the high school girls mirrorwho you were. I know who I am, and Nina might be surprised to know that my view of myself is sometimes even more negative than hers. But the person I was then—that person still exists in the first meeting of their eyes with mine, the first spark of electricity when you touch their hand. Or kiss their cheek. Or brush a strand of hair off their face. There are those things that tell you: once you felt this; once you knew that. They’re the rock, and you’re the flint. They’re the mirror that proves you are not a ghost.

  When Josie was out of sight, I walked back to my car. I got inside and put the key in the ignition and turned it on. The needle of the gas tank rose to the half-full mark. The temperature gauge did not rise at all. The speedometer suggested the car could reach a speed of 140 miles an hour. I considered sitting there forever. I considered driving fast, seeing how close to 140 it would really go. I got out and went back to the bar. The bartender tried not to look surprised to see me again. Business was slow: only two other customers. “What’ll it be?” he said, trying to look casual. He had decided he didn’t want to get into it. Neither did I. Although I thought Josie and I had said almost none of the necessary things, I didn’t want to think about that. I certainly did not want to behave like some loser in a bad cartoon, blubbering to the bartender. “Coffee,” I said, though it took great effort not to order another scotch.

  I got together with Hound th
e day after I drove home and tried to describe what an odd encounter I’d had with Josie. He and I were also sitting in a bar, on our way to Coolidge Corner, having a beer. He kept fixating on the fact that I’d driven to Vermont to see someone who hadn’t even been a girlfriend.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’s something lots of people do, looking up people they knew in high school.”

  “Yeah, if they happen to be in the area, or if they’re real losers with women.”

  “Reunions are very popular,” I said. “You’ve gone to them yourself. People keep their yearbooks and look through them and get all misty-eyed. They hear some song on the radio and they call information in Arizona, to see if the girl they almost took to the senior prom still lives there. They join AA and call the fat girl and apologize for making her life a living hell. They put ads in the personals column and advertise their nostalgia, asking their former classmates to call.”

  “So are you in love with her?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Sleep with her?”

  “No.”

  “Plan to see her again?”

  He was asking every question I had asked myself while sitting at the bar, having my final coffee.