by Ann Beattie
We were both stunned, but Frank knew less than I how to respond. He stood in the entranceway, squinting. He looked as puzzled as I’d ever seen him look. He did not say anything, including hello, to me. I finally said, quite hollowly, “Hi, Frank.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Frank said. He turned on his heel and steered Max back through the door.
“Why did you do that?” I said. “Why did you do that, when you’d already talked to me?”
Frank’s car started. We heard two car doors slam shut, then the squeal of brakes, as he backed out of the drive.
“Look at how bent out of shape you are because I said something honest in front of Frank,” she said. “Barbara’s the one who thinks everyone’s feelings always have to be spared. What do you think about him sleeping with your friend? Just one of those things?”
“I think it was wrong. I’m sorry he did it,” I said.
“Did you ever tell him that? He thinks you’re his big buddy, I’m sure. You act like one of the guys with Frank. If you’re going to change your life, maybe you need to know that all too often you don’t back up the people who matter. Like me, for instance. Right now.”
“Janey—you want me to censure him for getting involved with Dara? That’s what it will take for you to feel better?”
“Don’t you see what you’re doing, Jean? When I tell you you haven’t put anything on the line for me, you react like I’m irrational. Like you should humor me, the way parents plop a pacifier in the baby’s mouth.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll say something to him.”
“Not to humor me. Because you should say something,” she said. When she spoke, she sounded, for an instant, like Dara, underscoring her words, pressing you to believe what she believed. How had it ever happened that Dara had come between me and Janey?
“Janey—Tom asked you to have me return the ring?”
“Let’s drop it,” she said. “I’ve got a headache.”
“Please just answer that one question, and I’ll drop it.”
She folded her hands on her lap. “It’s more complicated than that,” she said. “Bob got into some fight with Tom. I think that’s it—he ran into him over at Trenton’s. And he pretty much told him what a sonofabitch he was for everything: for sucking up to us—Frank told me Bob said that—and then sabotaging us with Snell’s. And apparently he also blamed Tom, which I admit is irrational, for introducing Dara into our midst, as if he’d brought in plutonium, or something. It ended up, somehow, with Frank stepping in, and then Tom said to Bob that if everyone wanted to set things straight, one way would be to have you return his mother’s ring, which he’d given to Dara. So of course Frank came home and reported this to me. For all I know, Bob’s already discussed it with you.”
I shook my head no. The baby was sucking a red rubber ball. Children’s voices screamed, then faded away. For a minute I thought a voice might belong to one of my nephews, but it didn’t.
“Just give the damn ring back,” Janey said. “It will earn me points with everyone. And it isn’t yours. It isn’t yours, Jean. It belongs to Tom. Tell her you had to return it. You’re not afraid of her, are you?”
I hated fighting with Janey. I got up and took a coffee mug off the shelf, filled it first with water and took a long drink, then poured coffee into it. I had gotten used to cappuccino; the coffee tasted bitter.
“Tell me about life in Connecticut,” Janey said, letting me off the hook. “Talk to me about something else.”
“I feel like a trained seal,” I said. “You clap your hands, and I—”
“I honestly want to hear about your life,” she said. “If that makes you feel like you’re some creature in a zoo, that’s your problem.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. The truth is I’ve been feeling unsocial for quite a while. Come to think of it, that’s why I even avoid my roommates. I don’t want them to ask me questions.”
“Because you’re uncertain about the future?” she said.
“Because I’m uncertain about the past,” I answered.
After a few sips of coffee, I asked to see the renovated basement. Janey raised an eyebrow, then decided I was serious. She got up and picked up Joanna on her way to the basement stairs. She handed Joanna back to me and, flipping on the light, walked slowly to the bottom, holding the railing. At the base of the stairs she turned on another switch, and the recessed lighting began to glow. There was a dropped ceiling. There were bookcases with baskets and boxes on them—very few books. The old dining room rug was on the floor, and there was a large desk for bill paying, covered with framed pictures of the family. Around the corner, covered with indoor-outdoor brown-and-russet carpeting, was a bar with two bar stools. Behind it was an aquarium, but as Janey turned on another light, I saw that the fish were plastic, sunk on transparent line with sinkers. A plastic fern stood in the center. A Farrah Fawcett poster was tacked up on one wall. On the other was a large blowup of Frank, Bob, Drake, and Sandra, the year Frank graduated from high school. Frank was standing in his cap and gown, and Sandra sat on the arm of the sofa, to his right. Next to her, in front of the sofa, stood Drake, the shortest, and Bob, who was almost as tall as Frank. He was holding a beret. When I’d seen the photograph before, I’d taken it to be a Frisbee, but then I saw the little nub on top, and knew it must be a hat Bob had once been fond of. I found it hard to imagine Bob—plain, always-simply-dressed Bob—in such a hat. Bob was smiling, but Drake was poker-faced. Everyone had been cut off at the ankles. They looked so young: so round-faced; their hair so fussed over, and so wrong.
“He loves to be down here,” Janey said. “Around the corner it’s still the same. Just the washtubs, and the tool bench. Five million jars.”
I pushed the door open. Joanna did not like this tour of the basement, and tried to climb down. I lowered her to the floor, but then she wanted to be picked up by Janey. I picked her up again. The rest of the basement did look exactly the same, and it smelled vaguely of wetness and of Tide. Broken toys waited for Frank to fix them. A sunburst clock ticked on the far wall.
“Frank’s inner sanctum,” Janey said.
Which made Dara’s room—her room in Portsmouth I’d seen once and the re-creation of that room at Tom’s, which she’d said was an exact replica—leap to mind. Now she’d moved to a one-room apartment. All she’d taken was books and clothes. How difficult it must be to have a private place disappear. I wondered why she hadn’t said anything about it. Having purposefully retreated to my own odd quarters, I knew how vulnerable I would feel if I had to move around the larger house. I could also understand how Frank would want to leave some of the basement just the way it had always been.
“What are you looking at?” she said. “The heart of the heart of the chaos?”
“It’s nice,” I said. “I find it reassuring, somehow.”
“You and Frank,” Janey said. “Come on upstairs. I’ll make fresh coffee.”
We did go upstairs, but I already felt jittery and decided against more caffeine. The more of the house Janey showed me, the more deserted it seemed. Probably it was the quiet—the unusual silence in the house—but the clutter made the rooms seem emptier, rather than fuller. I noticed the things that were thrown here and there: toys; clothes; shoes; magazines. They seemed more conspicuous than the furniture. More real. They were in transition, I supposed—on their way to the garbage can, or the recycling bin, or downstairs to be repaired, or upstairs to be put in toy boxes or mounded in the corners of the children’s rooms. I realized that the thought was melodramatic, but I identified with the pacifiers, and balls, and Magic Slates, and Life magazines. I’d pretty much thrown myself somewhere, when I thought about it. I’d flung myself away, and then I’d carved out a little nook. I could imagine reading about it in one of Joanna’s storybooks: the tale of the hoop that rolled all the way to a new life. A little songbird perched on the hoop on the last page, its musical notes floating over the pretty landscape, where the hoop leaned aga
inst a flowering dogwood.
When I left Janey’s, however, after many hugs, our eyes brimming with tears, I was just a body in a car. There was nothing magical about it: I had put my sweater and poncho back on, and I was back behind the steering wheel, no pretty birdie chirping, but some nice enough music on the radio, on my way to see Barbara and Dowell. I really intended to go there. Instead, I pulled onto the shoulder and looked into the distance and quite simply could not imagine walking through Barbara’s front door, sitting in the living room, saying polite things. It was asking too much of myself. What I would do was tell Bob that I had visited, and let him find out later that I hadn’t. If he thought I was crazy, so what? Maybe it would be a good example to him about noncompliance.
I went to a pay phone to call Bob. The phone was in front of the convenience store I had often stopped at to buy things for Bob and me, or for Barbara. The phone booth looked uninviting: people’s names had been sprayed on the outside, with lopsided black hearts adorning them, and a bag spilling garbage leaned against one side. It was getting cold, and what I really wanted was to be back in the car, with the heater turned up high. Still, I felt guilty—it would be one thing to skip out on Barbara, another entirely to postpone, yet again, a discussion with my husband…so I turned back to the car, intending to find another phone booth and, on the way there, to calm down and to think things over.
Instead, I drove all the way to the beach. It was the beach where Barbara’s kites had flown. Where I had walked with Dara the day we ended up at the Inn having coffee and talking. I had once been under the delusion that I would work part-time, doing clerical work for lawyers, which now seemed absurd. There had been the Red Riding Hood woman, but the beach had been pretty much deserted, as I saw it was again today when I parked the car and walked to the edge of the rocks. The water was slate gray. Only two figures in the distance, walking a dog, leaned into the wind. From the other direction, a man in a wet suit jogged through the wet sand, working his arms as he ran. How dare Bob have wanted so little for us, I thought. How embarrassed he should be—though I felt sure he was not—to have capitulated to what was easiest. Had he been genetically encoded to become dutiful, vigilant, unadventurous? In college, he had told me that Dell made him feel at peace with himself and with the world. Just a short drive away from the place where he’d grown up, he often became so nostalgic for Dell that I’d had to remind him we could easily drive there if he needed to reimmerse himself. But after he moved back he hardly used the region. He occasionally went kayaking, or hiking, but most of the time he devoted himself to work and assumed the world was there to be used by other people, and I had almost fallen into that pattern, too. Connecticut was the first place I’d lived where I thought the terrain was neutral, and therefore, possibly, mine: it wasn’t my aunt’s world; it wasn’t Bob’s. For the first time in years, I went out every day and looked at things. I went out for the purpose of looking. It was not true any longer that I might settle for catching a glimpse of something while I was getting groceries, or picking up my husband’s eyeglasses, or any of the other numbing activities I’d programmed myself to do. Now I went out with the dog to observe: frozen twigs; clouds; cows in a field.
The people coming toward me had picked up their pace. It was Chris’s son, Derek, I saw, and another boy who held a stick that a black dog constantly jumped for.
“Hey, Jean, how are you?” Derek said.
“I’m fine. I moved, you know.”
“Yeah. I did hear that,” he said.
I bent to pat the dog.
“This is my friend Steve,” Derek said. “This is Jean Warner,” he said to the boy.
The boy shook my hand. He looked like Bob had when he was in college. He had on the same sort of corduroy shirt Bob used to wear, and his longish hair was the same color as Bob’s. His hand was the same size, and when he shook my hand, he had Bob’s firm grip. It made me uncomfortable at the same time it interested me. Here I was avoiding my husband, and suddenly it was as if I were in a time warp.
Derek was talking to me. “Did you ever get the lowdown on those guys I had in my cab that day?” he said. “Those guys I brought over to get that lady’s book?”
“What makes you ask that?” I said.
“Because I ran into that friend of yours—the one who acted. And she said one of those guys was in love with her or something. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Edward Quill,” I said. “He’s a producer. A would-be producer, maybe. Did they really strike you as that odd?”
“Oh, yeah, absolutely,” Derek said. “I had the older guy and his wife in my cab the next day, and they were saying awful things about Edward Quill—that he was a con man and that what’s her name—”
“Grace Aldridge,” I said.
“That she’d been hoodwinked. That guy, Quill, had apparently gone into a rage with them about something in her will. They were all buddy-buddy in my cab, but not the next day.” He turned to his friend. “I tell you about that couple?” he said.
“You tell me about so many people I don’t remember.”
Just then, a black Ford coasted to a stop near where we stood. A pretty girl rolled down her window and said hello. “Hey—got to go,” Steve said. “See you later.”
The girl’s sudden appearance took me aback. I had been listening to Derek with interest, but I had been distracted by the Bob look-alike. Bob, as he’d been years before: my walking across a college campus with him. And then the car had pulled up and he was gone. It made me think that fate could always have intervened. Bob might have gotten into another girl’s car, fallen in love with someone else instead of falling in love with me. Then I would have no doubt met someone else, had a different life. While hardly profound, it was enough, on a day fueled only by coffee, to make me wonder whether, back then, that would have been lucky or unlucky.
“Quill had a big fight with them?” I said, trying to bring myself back to the moment.
“Yeah. The woman really hated him. She didn’t buy it that he was going to marry that woman—don’t tell me again: I’ll never remember her name. I guess the old guy was afraid of that Quill guy all along. That’s the way he talked, anyway. It was really odd stuff. I don’t get duos like that very often. Most of it’s pretty run-of-the-mill: take old so-and-so to the doctor; pick up somebody at Logan if I’m superlucky.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I’ve been doing work with Amnesty,” he said. “Amnesty is the hope of the future, I kid you not. I’ll do whatever’s necessary to have time to work with that organization. Listen, if you’ve got a minute, I’ve got a few photocopies in my car of some things you should read about political prisoners.”
I walked to his car with him. I didn’t see what else I could do. There was no point in being impolite, and running into Derek had been a good thing. Because of his friend’s being with him, it had been a good thing: now, I was thinking of Bob more fondly.
Derek gave me several pieces of paper, and an application to join Amnesty International. “Please think seriously about it. There are enormous injustices,” he said.
“I will,” I said, my serious tone matching his serious expression.
“Don’t take any Canadian nickels,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Give my best to your father.”
“Will do,” he said.
“Bye,” I said.
“Take care,” he said.
I walked to my car. I was thinking about a million things at once: the necessity of calling Bob; how our meeting might go; how wrong it was of me to have seduced him years ago, how needy I had been, how random I’d been in whom I’d selected. If I’d been Grace Aldridge, I would simply have taken who came along, but instead, I’d orchestrated things. Though how did I know she hadn’t? Maybe she had wanted people to think she simply moved from man to man, like someone dancing her way through a waltz. Maybe she had been angling as well as, say, Edward Quill. Maybe she had wanted his youth, and he had wanted her money. It wasn’t romantic,
but then again, the statistics tell us that romance doesn’t carry much weight. Unlike Grace, though, I intended to have no more husbands. It was going to be painful enough to extricate myself from the one I had. I was so upset at the prospect that I preferred to stand and stare at the ocean in the middle of winter rather than phone Bob and begin to unravel our lives.
I would have called him immediately when I left the beach, except that Derek’s car wouldn’t start. I heard the ignition grinding as I pulled out and made a U-turn and headed up the hill. Halfway to the top, I stopped. I listened to him trying to start the car. Then I put the car in reverse and coasted back, my foot on the brake.
“Goddamn,” Derek said. “I just got this back from the shop. They told me they fixed it.”
“Do you want to call somebody, or—”
“You don’t have jumper cables, do you?” he said.
I shook my head no.
“Would you mind giving me a lift to my dad’s?”
“No,” I said, because there was nothing else I could say. It was getting late. I had already kept Bob waiting too long. Though maybe I could explain skipping Barbara’s by telling him what had happened at the beach. Right. That’s what I would do.
Derek got into the car, clearly dismayed. The Amnesty information slid off the dashboard. He put it between the seats.
“Thanks,” he said. “If this really takes you out of your way—”
“It’s fine,” I said. “You’ll just have to tell me where to turn.”
“Yeah,” he said, dejectedly. “I guess he assembled a nice zoo for himself, but my dad doesn’t exactly have people over. I think the day my mom left was the last time I ever saw anybody in the house except our shadows.”
“I didn’t know him in those days,” I said.
“Those days,” Derek said. “That’s what they were, all right: those days. Now suddenly he’s got himself a girlfriend after—what? Fifteen years.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Yeah. Terrific. Except that she drinks, and now she’s got him started again.”