My Life, Starring Dara Falcon

by Ann Beattie

  That same day, I withdrew money from the secret savings account that I had let sit in the bank ever since I learned of the payment that had been made to the families of the victims of the plane crash—what little was left after Elizabeth gambled it away. I had already applied to the University of Connecticut without telling anyone in the family I’d applied, and been accepted. I intended to study literature. A few days after Bob’s nasty outburst, I was there. I drove to the university alone. On a bulletin board, I discovered the ad that led to my sharing a house with four other students, in Eastford, Connecticut.

  I only saw it briefly before I decided it would be a perfect place to live. Like the pared-down set of A Doll’s House, there was little furniture to distract you, and it was old—consolingly old—with sloping floors and brass hardware and prints of birds framed and hung on the walls. Only one of the people who lived there was at home to show me around, but he had lived there the previous year and said it didn’t cost as much to heat as I might expect, and that they were desperate to find another roommate before school started. I could have my choice of rooms, including his, which he would move out of, if I liked that best. I followed him around, noticing the nice light, the bare floors.

  Janey helped me move, in Frank’s truck. Barbara wept and said her “oh my” mantra a thousand times. Janey also cried, but only because she couldn’t believe I would be living so far away. She said she envied me for breaking away. I think she found it so frightening to consider the possibility that someone could take a stand and leave the family that she immediately became pregnant again as a way of restraining herself. All the way to Connecticut, Janey engaged in double-talk: I was doing the correct thing—the only thing I could do. I might be doing the wrong thing, judging Bob too severely; I might be frustrated with the whole family, and I might have just made Bob the fall guy. We both agreed, though, that Frank and Bob were conservative, rigid people. She told me that in the spring of 1977, when Nixon was on David Frost, Frank had stood and cheered when Nixon uttered his infamous “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” She shook her head sadly. “You wonder what Pat Nixon thought, hearing that,” she said.

  “If he even told her it was on,” I said.

  “She tried everything to avoid marrying him,” Janey said. “You know, when she was dating other men, Nixon used to drive her wherever she was going and wait for her. He proposed more than once, and she said no. Then she must have been worn down. She’d had a very sad life. She must have thought that, at some point, marrying Nixon was inevitable.”

  “She could have resisted him. Why couldn’t she?” I said to Janey.

  “Not everybody has it in them,” Janey said. “And also, he’s sort of a malevolent force, don’t you think? God help me if I ever expressed that opinion in front of Frank, but that’s what I think.”

  “What does Frank think about my leaving?”

  “He thinks that for some reason you’ve decided you’re too good for us. He’s not angry at you. He’s confused. He thinks it has to do with Dara. Bob thinks that, too; that’s what he told Frank.”

  The implied question reverberated. She already knew I thought that was nonsense—that it was an easy way for Bob not to be accountable for his own lack of interest in the marriage. Who could believe that a husband who wanted to keep his wife would urge her to pretend to passion she didn’t feel? I told Janey about Bob’s outburst. She asked me to consider the possibility that my walking out on him had made him so frightened, he’d become vicious. “Maybe it’s because of their father’s death. His dying so young. So unexpectedly. If any of them think they’re being left, they sort of go crazy. I think Drake went crazy when his first wife went back to her country for a visit, and he ruined the marriage by insisting she’d deserted him and refusing to have her back. And Frank: Frank would have you think that I’m about to throw it all up and walk out the front door and disappear just because I think it might be nice to live in a milder climate. Sometimes when he drinks, he gets morose about it: how I’m going to be gone tomorrow. Bob probably came unhinged because he was being abandoned. Don’t you think that’s a possibility?”

  “Janey—you’re giving me Introduction to Psychology.”

  “Even so,” she said, “does that mean that because it’s obvious, it can’t be right?”

  I didn’t answer her. I didn’t want to fight with Janey.

  In spite of his best efforts Edward Quill could not convince anyone in New York to produce the play. This was difficult enough for Dara—she’d had to take a job at the checkout desk of the Portsmouth library to make ends meet when she left Tom’s—but she had also become Quill’s confidante, and he was a demanding confessor; when she called me, she reported that he had begun to call at least twice a day from New York, in at least two wildly different moods. He was not independently wealthy, as she had once assumed. Recently, he had told her about his bisexuality. He was having trouble finding what he called “a life partner,” but increasingly, Dara began to suspect that what was really troubling him was that he could not meet anyone of either sex who was suitably rich in New York. She got angry at him for confusing business with pleasure—he had slept with a man, a would-be producer, but the next morning the possibility of putting on the play had disappeared as quickly as the breakfast dishes—and, although Dara did not say it to me, she seemed slightly offended that while he professed undying love for her, it was platonic and, clearly, even at that, a masquerade. What did he want? she began to wonder increasingly, and her best guess was disheartening: that in being fixated on her, he was gaily buzzing around the Diva—that they were all a bunch of losers, and she was the best leading lady he could find to worship. (“I mean, sweetie, we have to remember that this is the man who was engaged to Grace Aldridge.”) What was disheartening to me was that while I had changed my mind about Grace Aldridge, Dara had explained to me that her portrayal of her had been a put-on: she hadn’t, in her heart of hearts, reinterpreted Grace—she had just decided that she could fool some of the people some of the time by unblinkingly transforming herself into a phoenix to rise out of the ashes of mediocrity. She had presented Grace Aldridge as the woman Edward Quill wished she had been. And now she had come to think, increasingly, that Quill was a foolish man. As she became more and more disillusioned with his inability to take their show on the road, she began to admit that he was not the person he claimed to be. Productions in converted barns in New Hampshire were one thing, but that would never sustain them, she said, making me uncomfortable by unintentionally echoing Bob. What was wrong with so many men? she wondered: Quill, deluded into thinking he had mercurial powers; Tom, bouncing like a ball between his house and the life he had once chosen with the woman he supposedly loved in New Hampshire, and his role as Sometimes Daddy in Chalybeate Springs, which she’d renamed Chilly Feet Springs because of his inability, even after so much time had passed, to decide between Big Bernie and the baby or her. She thought Bob was a simple coward for not having chased after me. In the end, in spite of my protests to Janey, I’d felt bad about leaving and tended to reflexively defend him when anyone said he sounded like a Mama’s Boy, or a self-absorbed jerk, or whatever people came up with by way of response on the rare occasions I found myself describing the husband I had left.

  Talking long distance, Dara and I would confer late at night. I had the smallest room in the house, with the largest fireplace, on the first floor. People coming and going with girlfriends and boyfriends, letting the dog, Sparkle, in and out, disturbed me early in the morning, but I stayed up later than anyone else, and from midnight on the house was quiet and seemed like mine alone. That was when the rates were low, and I would call Dara, who had become disgusted with Tom’s indecisiveness and moved back to Portsmouth on a month-to-month basis, and into a tiny garret apartment above a florist’s. She had left many of her things behind in the locked room at Tom’s, just in case he came to his senses; the apartment was sparsely furnished with whatever the previous tenant ha
d left behind. In our late-night calls, though, we would inevitably imagine living in more wonderful and exotic places where we would be surrounded by beautiful objects and be perfectly appreciated. I was going to work my way to the top; Dara was going to persevere until her talent was suitably recognized. In my first two months of school I had impressed my professors, or imagined I had, but I’d made no real friends. I was older than most of my classmates; this was not true at the house I lived in, but in class I didn’t quite look or act like everybody else. The last time I’d been in college, although I hadn’t been a hippie myself, the diverse people, the freewheeling style, must have put me at ease, I now realized; at the University of Connecticut, many of my classmates struck me as ultraconservative, relentlessly pleasant: they were paler, younger versions of Barbara, minus her dither and her maternal solicitousness. Dara assured me that it was never a virtue to fit in. I thought about Janey as an example of someone who had wanted to fit and who had—narrowly.

  I still had Dara’s ring. I wore it every day, even though the expensive ring was another thing that set me apart from the other students. Dara still had the alpaca jacket I had bought myself on impulse shopping one day with Janey in Boston, but I had decided not to mention it, assuming that if I didn’t, she might not mention the ring. It didn’t occur to me that it was actually Tom Van Sant’s ring—or, at least, that it probably should have been. While her relationship with him remained in limbo, the ring remained on my finger, and I didn’t give the slightest thought to who its real owner was. When anyone admired it, I said only, “Thank you.” Wearing it also underscored the fact that Bob had never even given me an engagement ring—or much of anything else by way of a present, when I thought about it.

  At night, I did think about it. I was rationalizing ending the marriage. I wallowed in self-pity because Bob had never given any thought to special days, or special songs, or meaningful trinkets or gifts. Would it have been futile to have tried to compensate, late, for my rather spartan upbringing? I had told him about it: he couldn’t have thought I’d had love lavished on me, let alone tokens of affection. It was only much later, long after childhood, long past my adolescence, shortly before she married, that I discovered Elizabeth had gambled away most of the money I’d inherited during the time she was my legal guardian. Aunt Elizabeth, who’d looked dazedly out the front window, as if my parents hadn’t died in the plane crash, as if, like the mysteriously disappearing and reappearing Mary Poppins, my mother, at least, might have bailed out to come drifting down with her special umbrella—Elizabeth had gone every year, on her birthday, to Las Vegas, until less than a quarter of my inheritance remained. She had told me this the summer before I went to the University of New Hampshire while we were eating hamburgers at a drive-in restaurant. I could never order Coke; she always brought a Coke from home, to save money. A milk shake was out of the question. Drinking my Coke, having asked her about setting up a checking account before I started college, I had somehow elicited that information. Living with her, I had just assumed that there had not been much money. I didn’t know about insurance payouts. And because I had tried so hard to put the tragedy out of my mind, I certainly did not give any thought to what survivors got when their parents died in a crash. I had assumed that she had always done her best—she had certainly insisted that she was always doing her best—but there we sat, in her old Chevy, eating our hamburgers, and something had made her confess.

  “What did you gamble on?” I finally asked her.

  “Blackjack,” she had said. She looked me right in the eye, her glistening eyes widening the way they did those times she meant to almost hypnotize me with the intensity of what she felt. The tip of her nose had wiggled slightly. It was as if she could sniff the money. But actually it had wiggled because she’d been about to cry. She had bent her head and let the tears fall, and even if I might have said something critical, that had stopped me cold. As she drove home, though, my half-uneaten hamburger still sitting on the paper wrap…I could remember pushing my finger around inside the bun, drawing out my finger red with ketchup and holding it up—holding up my finger and then pressing it to the windshield, drawing it down until the smear of ketchup paled and disappeared. She did not say a thing. She cleaned it off the window, also without comment. She must have, because the next day the smear had not been there. And that was one of the most distinct memories of my time with her: the smear on the glass. Many nights, the image still comes to me of Elizabeth at the window, the intensity of her gaze, the slump of her shoulders letting me know that nothing was out there: not my parents, not some storybook lady about to save people from their own helplessness.

  “That was so cruel,” Dara breathed into the phone, when I told her. “So cruel, to be a thief of your own loved one’s money.”

  With distance between us, it was easier to say things to Dara. Since moving, I had told her more about my childhood than I’d told Bob in all the time we were together. He and I had talked and talked when we first met, though even in the beginning I had been restrained: something had made me want to say only so much, to ensure that he didn’t pity me. Then years later, when I would have welcomed sympathy, I’d had no idea how to reopen such a discussion. He was my family, then, and—as he had said several times, when I’d brought up my odd, unhappy childhood—the past must be put behind me. The longer we were married, the more I resented his failure to make everything better. So out of some misplaced sense of propriety I had retreated. Like the runoff from a stream, though, my thoughts had eventually overflowed and trickled off—in the direction of Dara. She had a very literary bent; that analogy was the way she chose to express it. Because she gave me so much attention, and because she did not hesitate to express herself, I perceived in her the openness I hadn’t experienced in Bob’s family. They rarely discussed anything; they just acted, after they had determined what was best. Had Grandma ever talked to Barbara about her thoughts on being recruited, as such an old lady, as a replacement mother for Louise? Did Barbara ever confide to any of her children her thoughts about the pros and cons of marrying Dowell? Dowell fit right in: he was not so much an enigma as he was simply reluctant. They were all reluctant. When Bob and I separated, I got a note from Trenton saying that he hoped I would still consider him my friend. He said he understood that it must be very difficult to be married to someone who never asked questions, who didn’t even seem to question himself. I was taken aback by the note, because I had never thought Trenton gave me a second’s thought, much less that he had reservations about Bob. How interesting that one of Bob’s friends had misgivings similar to mine, though I was sure I would never have known that if Bob and I had stayed together. Everyone—me included—was complicitous in letting the family remain isolated. When Pete was a little boy he had once approached a snowman on the front lawn and said, “When it warms up, you know, you’ll melt.” Though Janey had been greatly amused when she heard Pete’s remark, his confronting the obvious was more than anyone else in the family ever managed.

  Pete, Janey, Barbara—I thought of them often when I was away. Dara wanted me to drive back to see her new apartment. Eventually, I did. Driving up, I’d debated whether to call Janey and see if I could drop by, but that day happened to be Janey’s birthday, and I thought that seeing me might make her sad. It was an odd experience, going back; I felt that at that period in both our lives, Dara and I were free floating, attached to no one, but too preoccupied to really be attached to each other either. The new apartment was a real step down from the unattractive apartment I’d seen that had once contained her wonderful inner chamber. She had not decorated it. There was only an alcove she used as a bedroom, with a cot set up to sleep on. Of course, there was no champagne. She made green tea, and we sat on Marimekko-covered cushions on the floor and sipped it, listening to the classical-music station on the radio, both of us feeling slightly martyred. I didn’t want to go out, because I didn’t want to meet anyone on the street I might know. I suppose I did feel ashamed, but I al
so felt angry: Dara and I had worked hard to attain something, then suddenly—because Tom had wanted a child, and in part because Bob had been so angry I had not wanted a child—our worlds had come unravelled. In Connecticut I had just begun to feel truly independent. Although I would have been able to be solvent even without Bob’s help, once back in New Hampshire I began to feel that my independence was real only to the extent that I kept away from the place; I feared that my will might vanish if I spent any more time in or near Dell. Both Dara’s solution and mine had been to throw ourselves into work; she had borrowed money and was taking voice lessons, as well as taking an acting class once a week with a man who had been her teacher in Los Angeles. In fact, the teacher had “floated her a loan,” as she put it. He had also said she could stay overnight at his apartment near Copley Square if she wanted to, but she was afraid that what that meant was that she would have to have sex with him. “Lest we forget,” Dara said, “men are not to be depended on—except, perhaps, for the uniformity of certain desires.”

  “Are you sorry you moved to New Hampshire?” I blurted out. Because I was obviously sorry I ever had. “You could get out if you wanted to, couldn’t you?”

  “Tomorrow,” she said, “with my vast reserves of cash. And with the nation clamoring for my unique talents.”

  “But you do have that,” I said. “All I have is the ability to study something and eventually know more about the subject. But I’m not creative. Nothing I’ve ever done has been creative.”

  “It’s overestimated,” Dara said. “Creativity only takes you so far.”

  “Don’t talk like you’ve hit a dead end,” I said. “You haven’t.”