by Ann Beattie
“No?” she said. “I’m glad you don’t think so. Lately I’ve been thinking back to certain discussions I had with Frank about how inescapable places become if you stay long enough. He thinks he hit a dead end, speaking of dead ends. So what does he do but procreate. I guess it’s his version of having a big party at the end of the road.”
“They all like to talk about how noble their suffering is,” I said. But I meant Bob; I didn’t really mean Frank. Frank always sounded more honest than Bob because he spoke more dispassionately. That was it: Frank seemed to be detached enough from his problems to sound like an authority.
Dara took my hand, the way she had at the Inn overlooking the beach. The way she had when she’d first examined my life line. “Tell me again that I haven’t hit a brick wall,” she said.
“You’re between acting jobs,” I said, holding her hand for a few more seconds before I let go. “This happens in your profession.”
“You sound so sure,” she said. “Maybe you’re the proof that the opposite of what you say is true: get out of town, and the world will become more manageable.”
“You’ve never had any trouble managing,” I said.
“Are you joking? I’m in debt. I don’t have a job. The man I might have married is shacked up with somebody else.”
“You weren’t really going to marry Tom, were you? I always thought”—what had I always thought?—“didn’t you sort of fall in together when you were both on the rebound? You as much as said that.”
Dara looked at me. “You listen too carefully,” she said. “How about giving me sympathy just because I’m asking for it?”
“You wouldn’t want that.”
“I wouldn’t?”
“No,” I said. “You’re always the one who wants to get on with things. When things aren’t going right, you do something: You take classes; you move from Los Angeles to a place you’ll be happier. You figure out how to get things done. You don’t sit around waiting for sympathy.”
“You’re confusing movement with progress,” she said.
“If that’s the confusion, I’m still glad it’s what I believe. I was stifled as a child, and as soon as I stopped being stifled, I stifled myself. I got married when I was nineteen. You always got out there and did things.”
She looked at me. “Maybe this is my fault,” she said. “Maybe when you’ve acted long enough, it gets ingrained, and people believe what they see.”
“Why do you want to make me doubt myself because I think you’ve got volition?”
“Volition,” she said. “Volition. That isn’t a word I’ve heard in a very long time. My mother used to accuse me of having too much volition. It sounds vaguely clinical, like some part of the body timid people would immediately give a nickname to.”
The phone rang. As she talked, I had the feeling that Dara was playing to two audiences—that she was playing to me, her visible audience, as well as playing to whoever was on the other end. “I’m so down in the dumps I haven’t been practicing,” Dara said. To me, she mouthed: “Lex.” It was the man from Boston—the drama teacher. “Well, maybe I will,” she said. “Maybe I will drive down the day before the class. It’s not as if my presence is needed elsewhere.” She listened for a few seconds, then spoke quietly into the phone, turning away so it was hard for me to hear. “I do remember,” she said, just before she hung up. “Why would you think I’d forget?” When she put the phone down, she looked at me. “Why would you think I’d forget?” she said again, with exactly the same incredulous inflection, but when she locked her eyes on me, I froze; it was as if something in the past that had happened between us was being alluded to, and I searched my mind for what, exactly, she had in mind. My discomfort made her smile. “Poor Lex,” she said. “All that matters to him anymore is that he was once the very best.”
She left it that way; she left me assuming that she was speaking of sex.
My next visit with Dara was a little before Thanksgiving, when she drove to Eastford in what she had come to call the Brown Bomb. She had no idea what she would do to get around if my/her car quit on her, and she was worried because the mechanic had made it sound like it was a ticking time bomb. She got a tune-up and two used tires and made the trip anyway, claiming to be worried about my isolation.
I didn’t think of it that way, though my initial elation about being on my own had dissipated. It was true that I had come to like the dog more than the other people in the house and saved my best rhetorical questions for the dog. That made me no stranger than a lot of people, I felt sure. I had had coffee twice with my favorite professor, but she managed to subtly communicate how busy she was; I also wasn’t about to sit around the ugly, depressing student union assuming I might meet someone interesting. So I had been working harder, staying up late reading supplementary texts, rereading things I had already assimilated. How could Dara pretend to be so upset with my single-mindedness when she herself had spent days shut in her room, reading and taking notes, which was exactly what I now chose to do with my days? I had asked her that on the phone, but I knew I wouldn’t get an answer. It was important to Dara to think we were soul mates, but anytime I compared our similarities, she either disagreed or changed the subject. If we were alike, Dara wanted us to be alike only in the ways she chose. The idea that I was a separate entity was ultimately no more pleasing a notion to her than it had been to Bob. Both of them had always given me the covert message that they liked me just the way I was, though I began to realize what they really meant was that I should not change, because the things I did were a convenience for them. If I was lulled into a sense of false security, I would not question them as much as I might otherwise. A Billy Joel song that was popular then had seemed at first to express a lovely sentiment—that the singer loved the person he sang to “just the way you are.” But they didn’t know—or care—what way I was, and for the longest time, I didn’t either. I had continued to hold on tenaciously to those things—okay: people—I had first latched onto for security. These truths had become apparent to me almost as soon as I left Dell, and I was so grateful to have realized them that by the time Dara visited, I was wary of falling under her influence again. She was right that I had hero-worshipped her. That had become apparent to me the moment I left New Hampshire, though I hadn’t told her that for fear it might seem unnecessarily insulting. My new awareness made me guarded. Her own guardedness only took a different, more flamboyant form: she appeared to be always involved, engrossed, performing in one capacity or another, more than living up to my previous expectations of her, whether or not a real stage was involved. She took more than her share of a room’s air is the way I think of it now. I think that for a long time I had been breathing shallowly, resisting the impulse to compete for air, even, when the person next to me was—I suppose I intuited this long before it came to me clearly—fighting for her life.
When she arrived on her self-proclaimed mercy mission, ostensibly rejuvenated by her acting teacher’s fucking and enthralled again with the world of possibility, she sat on the side of my bed, staring. She had gotten her hair cut, and the thick bangs and the evenness of the cut had the odd effect of making her look a little like a blond Louise Brooks. She had on jeans and a jade-green sweater with an enormous turtleneck she said Lex had bought for her at a shop in Back Bay. She also was wearing the alpaca jacket, which I didn’t comment on. I had on the ring, which she looked at briefly, taking hold of my fingers and saying “pretty” in a faraway little voice before she let go of my hand. She sat amid the tangle of covers, and I stretched back, leaning on my elbows. A fire was going in the fireplace. The dog was curled up beside me. Upstairs, somebody was knocking around. Soon we heard the Bee Gees, then the bedsprings creaking. Dara rolled her eyes. “I don’t know about this,” she said. “This big old dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere with people you don’t really—”
“But Dara,” I said, “it’s not as if you’re living in such a wonderful place yourself.”
“But darling, this isn’t temporary.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “That’s the point. There’s no way anyone who wasn’t rich could begin to restore this house. I don’t have to run errands or cook or celebrate their birthdays or even encounter them much. It’s nice, actually. I read all the time. I take Sparkle for long walks. I listen to music.” I nodded in the direction of the stereo with one speaker I’d inherited with the room—an exchange for taking the draftiest room in the house.
“But this place is creepy,” she said. She looked at the paint-chipped ceiling. At the masking tape over the cracked window next to the bed. At the furniture with peeling veneer.
“I like it,” I said.
She considered this. I’d indicated the coat hook when she came in, but she’d perched on the bed without taking off her coat. She was like someone nervously visiting a patient in a hospital. Finally, she got up and examined the books in the bookcase. “I’m going to take your Godot,” she said. “Then I can write you something intelligent about it.” She put it in her purse and sat again on the bed. “You know, Edward has just sublet an apartment in the Village,” she said. “He says I can use it whenever I want. I think maybe I should go to New York and make the scene, if you know what I mean. If I did that, would you want to come with me?”
“I’m in school,” I said.
“On the weekend,” she said. “I am a person who greatly admires our educational system—having achieved the rank of Phi Beta Kappa in college, back in those days when I could focus my attention on anything I thought could give me the answer to life’s mysteries.”
“He makes me nervous,” I said.
“Edward? I can understand that,” she said. She shifted farther back on the bed. She picked up my pillow and folded it, putting it behind her. She leaned back. She placed her hands across her stomach. I was being appraised. My living inelegantly clearly perplexed her.
“When he goes to London at the end of the month, maybe you can join me at the New York apartment.”
“What about your job?”
“Oh, that,” she said. “To be honest with you, I’ve quit. I borrowed a little money and I’m commuting to Newburyport to take an acting class with one of Lex’s old rivals, one night a week. It’s a lot closer than Boston. I’ve also started the Alexander Technique, which gives me the dreamy feeling that I am floating through life—at least, for the first hour after the lesson.”
In the old days, I would have said, You quit your job?
“Sweetie,” she said, “don’t you miss people? I mean, are you suffering and too proud to admit it? About Bob, and everything?”
“It was a mistake, trying to fit into that world,” I said. “I’m glad I realized it before it was too late.”
“He had dinner with me last night,” she said. “He says you won’t return his calls.”
“You had dinner with him?”
“At Trenton’s,” she said. “I didn’t have dinner with just him.”
“And?”
“He seems very sad. He called Trenton wanting to get together and have a barbecue Trenton had promised him, out on the back deck. Never mind that it’s November, and not exactly the time to have a cookout. But Bob always did want to collect his due, didn’t he? Those errands he kept you doing constantly, I mean. Things are always pretty quid pro quo with Bob. But anyway: I got the benefit of having a very good grilled steak. I think he was surprised when he showed up and I was there.”
“I’m sure he was.”
“Aren’t you curious about what I was doing there?”
“Dell’s a very small place. Everybody knows everybody else. I presume you met Trenton, and the two of you hit it off.”
She frowned slightly. “Are you angry at me about something?” she said.
“No,” I said. It was a disingenuous answer. I was put out with her—not angry, just put out—because her presence reminded me of what I’d left behind. And also because she disapproved of what I was doing.
“Well, I’m modelling for him,” she said. “He saw me in A Doll’s House and wrote me a fan letter, and eventually we had a drink, and he asked if I wanted to model. He said he’d thought of the idea long ago, but that strange girlfriend was apparently very territorial. She had to approve all his models! Can you believe that? I mean, even Trenton finally wised up about how possessive she was. He compared her to Jo Hopper—you know: the painter’s wife. Who apparently insisted she be in all his paintings, she was so jealous of other women. But don’t you think that at some point, even poor old Jo Hopper must have sat on the side of their tacky bed or slumped at some table in her god-awful clothes for the umpteenth time and figured, Fuck this. Anyway: she went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The mystery girlfriend, I mean.”
“Trenton’s a good painter,” I said.
“Sweetie, you seem so distant. It isn’t anything I’ve done, is it?”
“Do you want your ring back?” I blurted out. She was obviously surprised. So was I. My words hung in the air.
“You only left your husband. You’re not trying to leave me too, are you?” she said.
That was the moment when I could have said that I was. But it wasn’t at all clear to me that day that I wanted to leave her. Even though the ring was spoken of in the context of marriage, it didn’t come clear to me that it had become her love token to me, as well as Tom’s love token to her. There was the moment I could have disengaged; there was the opportunity to break off with her, however precipitous it might have been. That day, seeing her in person after I’d realized she’d levelled with me when she’d insisted she wasn’t living a unique, exemplary life, the spell had been broken, though what I said was a reflection of my own surprise at what I had almost set in motion. I said that of course I wasn’t trying to sever my ties with her. The second I spoke, her relief was instantaneous. “Thank God,” was all she said.
We took the dog for a walk, down past the farm at the end of the road. We talked about meaningless things: the weather; the area; the fact that she had recently begun to play indoor tennis. She had sorted out her confusion and decided to be quietly angry at me. I’d forced her to admit that I mattered to her. That had always been our implicit understanding, of course, but before she had always had the upper hand: we met to talk about her problems; she was the self-dramatizing, eccentric femme fatale, I was the dutiful little housewife; I was the audience, she the star; for too long, while I had gone on under the delusion that I had been the principal actor in the play that was my life, that play could more properly have been called My Life, Starring Dara Falcon. Then the balance of power had shifted, and as we walked, we both sensed it. But leaving Bob had made me—at least temporarily—more callous than I would have expected. I liked my newfound power, and I also didn’t mind her discomfort. For a long while I had been attached to people who had their own trajectory, in which I figured only when it was convenient. They didn’t bear me any malice, but the family—most of the family—was impervious to what I really thought or felt. Being away from them, I had begun to realize how they cued me to keep my distance: all Barbara’s sighs, letting the listener know she already felt overburdened; Bob’s remoteness, which he masked by presenting himself as a practical, plainspoken fellow; Frank’s immediate self-deprecation (“I am Superman”) to dissuade you from being the first to judge him insufficient. His drinking wasn’t to be spoken of. His affair with Dara. Maybe he’d let himself appear vulnerable to Bob, but he would never have said anything to me about his relationship with Dara, or have told me about the letters, or about how she frightened him suggesting a suicide pact. The guys: the brothers were the guys, with their own secret codes, their own rules of behavior.
“You know,” I said, deciding to be provocative myself for once, “Frank said something a while back to Bob that I’ve never gotten out of my mind. It was the strangest thing, and to tell you the truth, I have trouble believing it. What he said was that you had written him some letter proposing love and death. S
uicide, I mean. Having sex in some hotel. And then you’d drive off a bridge.”
She stood stock-still. I also stopped walking. Standing in the middle of the road, I turned to look straight at her. The dog sat down and, when no one moved for a few seconds, or spoke, whined. I patted the dog, then straightened up and gave Dara a look every bit as searching as the looks she’d given me so many times.
“Frank said what?” she said.
“That’s what he told Bob.”
“Then that would explain why Bob thinks I’m a nutcase,” she said.
“He does, actually,” I said. “You knew that?”
“My darling, I am not insensitive,” she said. “At dinner at Trenton’s last night, he looked at me like I was something in a petri dish.”
“He was always worried you’d do something that would—oh, what did he think?—he thought I should watch out,” I said.
“Amazing,” she said, slowly. “I wonder why Frank would invent something like that?” And then, with perfect timing: “And also, if Bob believed it, and if he tried to spook you about me, why do you think he would try to kiss me goodnight in Trenton’s driveway?”
“I don’t know,” I said, in the only quick comeback I could ever remember making. “Do you think he was drunk?”
The lines were drawn. I’d confronted her, and she’d confronted me. I don’t think she thought I had it in me—and probably back in New Hampshire, I wouldn’t have. There seemed every possibility that at the end of the walk she’d get in her car and drive away, and that would be the end of it. Which was suddenly confusing to me, because at the edge of my consciousness, I realized I wasn’t as angry at her as it seemed: that she’d caught the blame for what other people had done to me, for the way other people had acted.
“Let’s drive into Ashford. There’s a good coffee shop there,” I said. “I’ll buy us coffees.” It came out fine. Neutral. I felt the malice receding.
“Sounds nice,” she said, as if I hadn’t recently insulted her.