Love Always

by Ann Beattie

  ANN BEATTIE’S

  LOVE ALWAYS

  “Flatly a brilliant concoction.… Like Jane Austen, Beattie rides the surface of her characters’ lives with an amazing agility.… She’s funnier now than ever.”

  — BEVERLY LOWRY

  THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS

  “Through Beattie’s agency we are brought within sufficient sympathetic distance that our empathy is engaged. And that is how most good writing begins to achieve the level of literature.”

  — RICHARD FORD ESQUIRE

  “This shrewd and entertaining novel is finally about getting a handle on adulthood. Beattie’s sense of timing doesn’t fail her—she makes you care for her characters at just the right moment, and care a lot.”

  —GLAMOUR

  “Ann Beattie has filed yet another anthropologist’s report on a certain part of America, warts and all. Every bit of it is good entertainment—especially the warts.”

  — THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER

  “She stunningly captures the horror and beauty of life.”

  — ANN TYLER

  THE DETROIT NEWS

  “Her considerable intelligence, sharp eye, and arch humor rips into media madness and the so-called glamour professions.”

  — VANITY FAIR

  Also by Ann Beattie

  Distortions

  Chilly Scenes of Winter

  Secrets and Surprises

  Falling in Place

  The Burning House

  Copyright © 1985 by Irony & Pity, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1985.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., and A. P. Watt Ltd., for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. From The Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran: Copyright 1924 by Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats; and from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Macmillan London Ltd. Reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., and A. P. Watt Ltd. as agent for Michael B. Yeats and Macmillan London Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Beattie, Ann.

  Love always.

  Reprint. Originally published: New York: Random House, 1985.

  (Vintage contemporaries)

  I. Title.

  PS3552.E177L.6 1986 813′.54 85-40866

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76574-1

  v3.1

  For John Baer Train

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  About the Author

  1

  THE music was appropriate, although Hildon thought this particular version of the song was a downer: Barbra Streisand, singing “Happy Days.” His wife, Maureen, was listening to it to rev herself up for the party. The magazine Hildon had started two summers ago, Country Daze, had become the hit of tout New York, and today was the day of the annual party. Maureen was the hostess, and as she moved around the backyard, placing conch shells on the tables, she smiled to herself. It was a perfect Vermont day—the last day of June—and she was about to stage another perfect party.

  The only thing that galled her was that she had to invite Lucy Spenser. Not only was she sure that Lucy and Hildon were lovers, but she knew that Hildon had only married her when he despaired of Lucy’s ever leaving Les Whitehall. Hildon, of course, denied the affair. “She’s my oldest friend,” he had said to her. “Why don’t you try to understand the notion of friendship?”

  Maureen liked to give parties with motifs, and although Hildon’s staff did not deserve such pleasure, she decided on clever parties so that she, at least, would be amused. This time Maureen wore a sarong tied tightly above her hipbone. She served shrimp and lobster. Instead of a tablecloth, she draped an old tennis net over the long metal table. The paper napkins were patterned with little goldfish, swimming with happy smiles. She set out blue plastic bottles of sea salt and put on a record of the sounds of the ocean. The wine was Entre-Deux-Mers. Before everyone showed up, Maureen stretched out on the grass to survey the backyard. She smiled with contentment: Maureen the mermaid. Her hair was in a braid, clipped with a barrette in the shape of a blue starfish.

  Matt Smith, the new publisher—the magazine had just been sold, and at a handsome profit—was the first to show up. He was a few minutes early. Hildon was still inside, showering. She poured Matt a glass of wine and paid a lot of attention to him. He was the new boss. As she poured, Maureen beamed her best summer smile.

  “Take a sip. Do you like it?” she said.

  “I tell you, Maureen, to me, wine is crushed grapes. What I like best is that you don’t have to spit out the seeds.”

  She laughed, pretending that he meant this as an amusing remark.

  “What’s so funny?” he said.

  “Come on, Matt,” she said, running her finger around the edge of the wineglass. “You aren’t discriminating?”

  “I discriminate enough to know who means most to me. I mean most to me. I always did say that a man has to know how to play his cards in this world, and sometimes he’d better realize that the best game is solitaire.”

  Nigel, the photographer, had arrived, and Hildon was talking to him in front of the kitchen door. Hildon accentuated his handsomeness by appearing to be very casual. The shorts he wore were permanently yellowed from swimming in the crater lake. The cotton shirt was custom-made and cost $75. As Maureen watched, Lucy pulled into the driveway and hopped out of the car. She had on turquoise shorts, white running shoes, and a white halter top. It was perfect. Everything Lucy wore and did was perfect. Even Lucy’s lover’s departure had been perfect: dramatic, unexpected, the quintessential abandonment. The column Lucy wrote was also perfect; it was exactly the right endeavor for the society girl who wanted to stay sour. Hildon and Lucy greeted each other by touching their hands to the other’s biceps. Lucy had a way of looking around, taking it all in very quickly, as if hidden cameras were photographing her, every firefly a potential flashbulb. She saw Maureen and lit up with a flawlessly false smile. If Maureen had been Lucy’s orthodontist, she would have been proud. Lucy scampered across the grass, doing one of the many things that drove Maureen crazy. Two, actually, as soon as she spoke. Running like a faerie, on tiptoes, was bad enough, thirty years out of ballet class, but her polite dismissal of Maureen was even harder to take.

  “Are you giving another one of your perfect parties?” Lucy called. Everyone but Lucy had the good sense not to ask rhetorical questions unless they were directed to dogs or babies.

  “Of course I am,” Maureen said.

  Lucy shimmered. She acted a little like that woman, whatever her name was, whom the Great Gats
by had been in love with.

  “Look at how beautiful everything is,” Lucy said.

  Maureen swept her eyes over the party. She had fallen into Lucy’s trap—she had let Lucy point out to her what was beautiful, even though she had spent the day creating it.

  A boy from the high school had come to videotape the party. Maureen had had her doubts about that, but Hildon had made her feel downright paranoid. “No one will even notice,” he had said. “They’ll just continue to party. The kid needs to practice taping a crowd. It’s not going to interfere with anything.” How did Hildon meet all these people who wanted something from him? She found it hard to believe that he spent as much time working as he said he did; he must have encouraged these people—suggested that he had a lot to give, that he was very loose. No one would think that Hildon, so casual he seemed not to have the power necessary to grasp his gin and tonic, had that very morning called the shirtmaker in New Haven to rant and rave about the imperfection of the collars.

  Lucy moved off, to faerie skip to Nigel. He held his arms open to receive her. Nigel had the ability to turn any conversation into an interrogation. Like an analyst, Nigel, when asked what he thought about something, would either ask why you asked the question or what you yourself thought. It was possible that Nigel never thought anything. He was talking to some woman Maureen had not met. The woman seemed a little drunk. She was trying to remember the punch line of a joke about a nun who stole a jet plane and the penguin who waved her in for a landing. When she couldn’t remember how the joke ended, Nigel put his arm around Lucy and began to tell a joke about an Indian chief. He did a very extravagant imitation of the chief, puffing up his chest and changing his voice to an impossibly low register whenever he spoke in the chief’s voice. “Oh, I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” the woman said, clasping her hands. Nigel and Lucy smiled at her. “It’s that … it isn’t the nun who’s in the jet plane, but the penguin, and …” Nigel exhaled. He waited a few beats, politely, then puffed up and continued his own joke, as if the woman had not spoken.

  “You know,” Noonan said, clapping his hand around Maureen’s shoulder and taking her by surprise, so that she jumped, “the last party I came to, when you didn’t offer me the leftovers the way you usually do, I stole half a wheel of cheddar that was on one of the tables. I put it under my jacket and took it home. Did you know that?”

  “I had no idea,” Maureen said.

  “I grated it and made soup,” he said. “You know—that excited me, taking that big piece of cheese. I could have bought it in a store and it wouldn’t have meant anything to me, but all the time I was grating it, I felt so excited I couldn’t stop grinning. If anybody’d seen me, they’d have thought I was a crazy person. And you know what? When I was a schoolboy, I used to steal things from the drugstore near my house, and it gave me the same lift.”

  Nigel was trying to write down the woman’s telephone number, but she couldn’t remember the last two digits. She put her shoulder bag on the ground and began to rummage through it. “I know I have it in here,” she said. “Just give me a minute, and I’m sure I can find it.” She dumped the contents onto the grass. Maureen saw three brushes and several wallets. There was also either a jump rope or a piece of clothesline. Nigel bent and began to examine the contents of the bag, fascinated: a flashlight, a notebook, a large-beaked blue plastic duck.

  The record of the sounds of the sea had ended, and Maureen went onto the porch and turned it over. She lowered the needle back onto the edge of the record. She sat in one of the wicker rockers and stretched her legs: they were long and golden, recently waxed. The Korean woman who waxed her legs, patting on the warm wax with a little wooden paddle, spoke no English, except to say, in unison with Maureen, “ouch.” Noonan joined her on the back porch. “I also look through people’s medicine cabinets,” he said, “although I guess that’s common. I like to know about people’s secret pains.”

  The student with the videotape machine walked onto the back porch, camera grinding away. Maureen and Noonan both looked as if they had been caught at something. It infuriated Maureen: this was what Hildon thought was no intrusion? She put her hand up in front of her face. Carrying the camera on his shoulder, without comment, the boy crouched slightly and moved into the house. He was like a soldier in slow motion, creeping through enemy territory.

  “Tomorrow I’m going to give Hildon the big news, but I’ll give it to you first,” Noonan said. “I got another job. I’m going to be working for a paper in San Francisco. It excites me,” he said. “It excites me to talk about a lot of things, but I’ve always exercised restraint. I’m a very uptight person. I’m not going to be that way once I get to San Francisco. I want to be truthful from here on out. I told you about the cheese. I’ll tell you what’s in your medicine cabinet, too: Dalmane, patent medicine, Valium, and Tylenol with codeine.”

  “Noonan,” she said, “I’ll tell you something. The people you work with wouldn’t be surprised to hear you saying these things. ‘Murky’ is the word they often use. They think you’re murky.” Waves lapped at the shore.

  “I was surprised that Hildon took Valium,” Noonan said.

  “He was having periodontal work done.”

  “You’re protecting your husband. I like that. That’s a good thing about heterosexuals—that they stick together. Fags move on like flies when they smell meat.”

  “That’s pretty awful, Noonan. Do you feel that bad about yourself?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It excites me to talk about it. It excites me to be honest.”

  Another car pulled into the driveway. It was Cameron Petrus, one of Man’s reporters. Cameron had come here from Boston, after having a heart attack at thirty. He had recently taken up javelin throwing. Ever since his wife left him, he had been giving Lucy Spenser the eye. Cameron had on gray jeans that made his legs look like tree trunks. The bright green fishnet shirt he wore made him look even more like a tree. She said hello to him when she went out to the backyard.

  The food had been disappearing fast. The whole crowd really liked to eat and drink. They were laughing and bobbing in and out of groups; in their bright summer colors they reminded her of voracious, exotic birds. At the edge of the lawn, Lucy Spenser and the girl who had been too drunk to remember her phone number had linked arms and were doing a chorus line kick for the camera. Suddenly the boy began to turn, slowly, as if a pedestal rotated beneath him. He panned the crowd. Maureen found herself stiffening, trying to appear picture perfect. She would probably be the one who looked like a fool, not Lucy, who had kicked off her shoes and who was now talking to another couple, her mop of hair thrown forward, doubled up so that her forehead almost touched her legs. The girl she had been kicking her legs with was talking to Nigel again. Hildon went over and joined their group, pouring wine into Nigel’s glass. The boy continued videotaping. He turned the camera on her, and Maureen raised her hand again.

  “This is the best party I’ve been to all summer,” Cameron Petrus said.

  “Summer’s hardly started, Cameron.”

  “Your party certainly is the official beginning of summer, to my mind,” Cameron said. “What an evening. Look at those clouds off on the horizon. Simply wonderful.”

  Cameron was so boring that it almost drove her mad. Apparently he had only two modes: the violently aggressive way he acted when he interviewed people and the mindlessly polite way he was now, ready to sink in the quicksand of his own small talk.

  “You’re looking very lovely tonight,” Cameron said. “Thank you,” she said.

  “I had some of those spiced shrimp a minute ago. Did you make them yourself?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You really do know how to give a party,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Say,” he said, “I hear it’s going to be good weather on the Fourth.”

  “I’m glad,” she said.

  “It’s a relief,” he said.

  Noonan joined them. One
large shrimp was curved over the edge of his wine glass. He dunked it in the wine and ate it.

  “May I join the conversation?” he said.

  “Cameron was just saying that it’s supposed to be good weather on the Fourth,” Maureen said.

  Across the lawn, Matt Smith choked while he was laughing. A woman Maureen had never seen before patted him on the back.

  “You know where he got all his money?” Cameron Petrus said. “His great-great-grandfather or some ancestor of the great-great-grandfather invented the jump rope.”

  “The jump rope?” Noonan said.

  “Wooden handles,” Cameron Petrus said, spreading his arms as if he were about to conduct an orchestra. He twirled his arms and jumped on his toes.

  Hildon was walking the length of the large table, lighting citronella candles. Two of the writers were stretched out on the lawn, arm wrestling. The woman standing with Matt Smith dropped her glass and jumped back as the wine splashed. Maureen looked around. A year before, the party had been in a big canvas tent. She had worn a toga. She had served pita bread and hummus. It had rained on the Fourth of July. Two days later she had been on the phone, ordering a set of glasses from the Horchow collection, when she suddenly felt blood soaking her pants, and miscarried, without having known she was pregnant.

  2

  THE day after the party, the heat came on so suddenly that the Green Mountains almost disappeared in the haze. Lucy Spenser sat in the grass, on her side lawn, feeling a little sorry for herself. This had been the time, five years ago, that Les Whitehall had gotten a job teaching in Vermont once they had moved here. He had been gone for a year, though the mailbox on the road across from the house was still marked Spenser/Whitehall. It had caught her eye as she returned from her morning walk, and suddenly she had felt the heat, the flies seemed to buzz louder and to be more persistent, and the air seemed as dense as icing.

  Since Les had taken off, she hadn’t figured out how to get her life going again. It was not that the two of them had had specific plans that had been interrupted, but that when he left she realized that she had lived so long without thinking of the future that now it was difficult to imagine what she should do. There was really no routine to her life except that once a week Hildon drove to her house to pick up the column. It still amazed her that her oldest friend had started a magazine on the $50,000 profit he had made selling land, and that it had become so successful that it had just been bought by a corporation.