by Ann Beattie
We drove in silence for a few minutes. “Left at the store,” he said.
“Did your mother just leave?” I said.
“Just left. Yup.”
“That must have been pretty awful.”
“Yeah. Suddenly there you are with the old man, and he’s blotto.”
“My parents died,” I said. “My aunt raised me.”
“Yeah?”
I nodded yes. “She was good to me in some ways, but she had a gambling problem. I would have had some money, but she gambled it away.”
“Oh, man,” he said. “That must make you mad.”
“It used to. What I’ve wanted lately is for her to explain herself, but she won’t answer my letters. I used to visit her, but I’ve stopped. If she can’t even write back, now that we’re both adults, and—” I stopped talking. My voice was too high.
“That’s a real bitch,” he said. Then he said: “Left then right. First house on the corner.”
I turned left onto Dial Street, then right onto a street whose sign was missing. Chris’s house was a split-level, brown with white shutters. Two of the shutters had fallen off. There were several small dead trees on the front lawn.
“Not home,” Derek said. “Let me just see if he’s got cables in the garage.”
He was gone awhile. After a few minutes of sitting in the gradually cooling car I got out and stretched. Then I followed him into the garage. Instead of looking for jumper cables, Derek was sitting on a mattress on top of wooden crates. Beer bottles were at his feet. A car was on the far side of the garage, on blocks. He looked up when I came in, kicked a beer bottle, and sent it spinning.
I watched it roll. There was broken glass on the garage floor. Also, a gin bottle.
“Just great,” Derek said. “Just absolutely fucking great.” He picked up a beer bottle. “Just great,” Derek repeated. “Some woman who’s nothing but a cow to begin with, and now he’s back to communing with a beer bottle. It looks like he has them right here, too. Nice and secretive—no having a drink in, maybe, the living room.”
I sat on the mattress beside him.
“Beer?” he said, holding out the empty bottle.
I reached for it, but wrapped my fingers around his wrist, instead. “Talk to him,” I said. “He stopped before.”
“Stop, start. Stop, start,” Derek said. “Bad on the transmission.”
I let go of his wrist. He looked at it. He reached out and took my hand. We sat there like that for a few seconds, before I leaned back and he leaned with me. He tossed the bottle over his shoulder onto the cement floor. By the time it stopped rolling, he was kissing me. He got up after a few minutes and closed the garage door.
“What if he comes home?” I said.
“You don’t know drunks very well,” he said. “This is happy hour.”
“How do you know what he’ll do today?” I said, but that was my last protest. We would hear the car. We could jump up. My clothes were still on, except for my pants, around my ankles. He was kissing my thighs. I kicked my feet free, because that would make it easier to cover up, if Chris came back. What was I doing? What could I possibly be doing, with my pants on the garage floor? But I found it difficult to concentrate on that question. My other questions were: Will the mattress flip over, since it’s only stretched across a bunch of old crates? Will Chris return? Derek stepped out of his pants. He wasn’t wearing underwear. He knelt between my legs and ran his hands up under my sweater, cupping both breasts. I arched higher, into his hands.
“This isn’t happening,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m afraid it’s going to happen very fast,” he said. He kissed up my stomach to my breasts, burrowing under my sweater. He put my hand on his penis. He kissed my hair, my eyelids. When I stroked him, he wrapped his hand around mine, to still it. Finally, I guided him inside me. It was freezing in the garage, but our bodies were hot. We had orgasms as quickly as a car ignition starts. Then we did it one more time before we put on our clothes and he walked me back to my car.
“I really like things that never happened,” he said, leaning forward to kiss my neck. He was red-faced, tousle haired. This was Chris’s son, who had been at Grandma’s funeral not so long ago in his outlandishly oversize suit. Years later, when I saw David Byrne in one of his famous suits, doing a crazy dance with a weighted microphone that bent deeply left, then right, the memory of Derek would come back to me instantly, making it impossible to concentrate on the rest of the film. At that moment, though, I hardly believed the present was happening, let alone that there would be a future. I squeezed his hand, but I got into the car before he could kiss me, afraid that someone might be looking out a window, afraid, all over again, that Chris might pull up. I looked in the side mirror and saw him waving from inside the garage. Below his image were the words: NEAR, FAR. Halfway down the street, I rummaged in my purse for a tissue, but couldn’t find one. I raised myself enough off the seat to pull a mitten out of my pocket and push it into my crotch. Then I looked at the remaining mitten and felt myself blush. Could I really have done that? And next, could I really be about to stop at a pay phone to call my husband?
Instead, I went directly to the house, the folded mitten chafing me as I went up the front walkway, reminding me of my embarrassment, when I’d been a teenager, those days I’d had to wear a sanitary napkin to school, sure everyone would see the bulge, sure the blood would overflow.
When the door opened, Bob took me aback by reaching out and hugging me. It was a weird continuation of sorts, a further caress. I could return it because it was easy to pretend I was still hugging Derek. The harder I hugged, the easier it was to be transported.
Bob and I went out. We went to Corolli’s and drank coffee, talking quietly to each other. I was relieved that there were not going to be recriminations. I wasn’t sure exactly what I had expected, but he was matter-of-fact, almost detached. He surprised me by saying that he’d suspected at Drake’s wedding party in Boston that I was going to tell him I wanted to end the marriage. He admitted that he’d spent more time with Drake than necessary, partly as a way to avoid the long talks with me we should have had. He said there was no one else. He surprised me again by saying that marriage was more difficult than he’d realized when we first started out: Drake’s marriage was already in trouble. Though everyone’s relationship seemed problematic, didn’t it? It was a rhetorical question. “One small confession,” Bob said. “I asked Grace Aldridge to get in touch with you about that manuscript. I thought you’d be happier if you had something to work on, because you’d typed something else, and then it didn’t seem like anything was coming your way. It was stupid of me not to realize that it would just be a lot of crap. Her godson was working at the greenhouse for a while, cooking soil. Turned out to be a real pothead. He lasted about a week, and then he was getting dry heaves every afternoon, because he couldn’t smoke enough grass on his half-hour lunch break to keep going. Imagine that? Anyway: he’d been asked to type the thing, but he only knew how to hunt-’n’-peck.”
I shrugged. It didn’t bother me; it hadn’t been a bad impulse. “Nothing to worry about,” I said.
“There might be,” Bob said. “Recently, I ran into Mr. Dry Heaves, and he said there had been some section about Quill that Quill made her leave out. He thought things had gotten pretty ugly between them.”
I shrugged again. “I don’t know anything about it,” I said.
“There’s more,” Bob said. “Which is that Dara was at one point going to type it. She thought she’d have more time on her hands, I guess, but Van Sant put her to work at Snell’s once he found out she was going to freeload off of him.”
“He wanted her to move in. I was with the two of them when they announced it. He was very excited about it, Bob.”
“She told him she had all these plays she was writing. Like Trenton’s mystery woman: just one more day, just one more week, then the million-dollar sale. But what it turned out to be was that she holed up
in her room and read Ibsen all day.”
“She’s an actress,” I said.
“Yeah, and I work at a greenhouse,” Bob said. “But I don’t freeload off of anybody.”
“I already know you don’t like her,” I said.
“I’m making this too long. The point is, when the kid gave the manuscript to Dara, it had the Quill stuff in it. The old lady had pointed it out to him—shown him that was what some drag-out fight had been about, or something. He didn’t really read it; he just transported it to Van Sant, because he was switching over to Snell’s. Van Sant didn’t care who was a pothead and who wasn’t. Anyway: Van Sant gave the manuscript to Dara.”
“What about it?” I said. “What’s the point?”
“Jean—I’m trying to talk to you. Why are you so impatient?”
“It’s difficult to be here,” I said. He was acting like we were having a business meeting. He was the boss, I was the employee.
“Well, later Dara swore him to secrecy that she’d ever seen the manuscript, because she wasn’t about to type it, but the point is—don’t jump down my throat about this—possibly she read all about Quill and she was blackmailing him. Because when Grace farmed it out again, to you, the Quill stuff was gone. Then she fell down the stairs and very conveniently died, didn’t she? What I’m saying is that Quill might have quite a temper. He gave the kid a shiner before he found out the kid knew absolutely zip.”
“Bob—that’s crazy. You want me to think—”
“I don’t like, or trust, Edward Quill. You already know what I think of Dara Falcon. But notice that she’s there, in the background, or on the sidelines, a lot of the time. A lot of the time, Jean. And that her presence is always in situations that are problematic. Think about it. Dell’s not that small a place. What things are all muddled up that don’t involve her? Okay—I’m not a saint. I asked her not to tell you she’d ever been asked to type the stupid manuscript because I didn’t want you to think you were getting sloppy seconds. But if she tells you…whatever she tells you about the two of us being complicitous about finding you a little cottage industry, I want you to know it’s not true. That’s not the way it happened.”
“Okay,” I said. “Fine.”
I looked at a woman getting a real estate guide out of a holder. She went to her table and pored over it, pen in hand.
“Van Sant finally decided to live with Bernie and the baby,” Bob said. “Did you know that?”
I waited for Bob to also ask me for Dara’s ring, but he didn’t. He looked at the woman reading the real estate guide, and then he looked at everything on our little table—the salt and pepper shakers; the ashtray; my hand—but he said nothing about the ring. He began to talk about Barbara and Dowell’s plans to get married aboard a cruise ship to Bermuda in the spring. He shook his head and wondered again why his mother was marrying Dowell Churnin. “Maybe because she sees the lemmings all going over the cliff,” he said. “Frank’s taken something of a stand against Barbara’s endless requests and hoked-up crises himself. With a fourth kid on the way, I think he got forced into choosing between being the perfect son or the perfect father.”
We seemed like two people who had drifted so far apart that even other driftwood had become more interesting. I kept looking at the young woman behind the counter: her earrings; her bright lipstick; her tired eyes. For a few seconds, I was reminded of the way I had felt as a girl when Elizabeth had turned her back on me and stared out the picture window. Not daring to distract her, I had noticed, instead, every detail of her appearance from behind. I did the same thing now: Bob’s bitten cuticles revealed that he was nervous, even if he seemed unusually placid; his bad haircut let you know he took little pride in his appearance.
“I didn’t go to see your mother,” I said.
He shrugged. “I didn’t ask you to,” he said. “You came up with the idea of seeing everybody.” He fiddled with the salt shaker. “The other night I had an awful dream,” he said. “I always hesitated to tell you when I had a bad dream, but this one keeps coming back to me: We were on a mountain. The sort you ski down, but nobody had on skis. I went before you, and it was sort of thrilling, but it was also sort of scary. No trouble interpreting that, I guess. But then you didn’t come down, and finally I tried to look for you, but it was a foreign country, and I had a lot of trouble making myself understood. Then all the lights went off, and I was the only one there. I had to break into some fenced-in area and, when I did, I saw a little body curled up on the mountain, and I started sobbing, because I knew it was you. There was nobody to talk to, nobody to help me, and I was so scared I could hardly go toward you, because from the way you were curled up, I knew you weren’t just hurt. And I couldn’t stop sobbing.”
I looked at him. “Do you see what you’re doing?” I said.
“Doing? In the dream?”
“What you’re doing right now. You’re using a dream to try to manipulate me.”
Behind the counter, a plate clattered to the floor. The salesgirl cursed as she bent to pick it up. When I looked back at Bob, he was resting his cheek on his hand.
“What exactly did you come back for?” Bob said.
“To reassure you that I’m just fine,” I said. “That I haven’t fallen on my face and died, on a mountain or anywhere else. And also to say that I’d like some of the furniture. When I finish school, I mean.”
“The furniture,” he echoed.
“You know, for what it’s worth, Bob, I think you made a mistake by taking me for granted.”
“I took you for granted,” he said. He said it as if by repeating, he was testing something: water temperature; the sweetness or sourness of some unfamiliar food.
“You didn’t quite accept that I wouldn’t just go into the family business. Be a worker bee at the nursery. No matter how well I did with being dutiful, there was always the outstanding example of Janey, who ran in circles getting all the errands done while Frank had drinks with his buddies down at Rick’s, plus she had her patients, plus she had children. Didn’t you think I was inferior to Janey?”
“Not at all,” he said. He said it so immediately that it took me aback.
“Why didn’t I want those things?” I said. “Do you understand?”
He was quiet for a few moments. “Probably because you had a difficult childhood, and you were married to a man who was ambivalent about having children himself. I don’t think it was unique to our marriage that we didn’t discuss every disagreement all the time. At some point, all couples seem to have unspoken agreements about what’s negotiable and what isn’t.”
“Doesn’t your damnable sanity ever drive you crazy?” I said.
“What did you want, a husband who was insane?”
“Someone freer,” I said.
He laughed. “Forgive me,” he said, “but can you understand why I’d have trouble taking that seriously? You always let me know in no uncertain terms that I should do whatever Barbara wanted. That I should be at her beck and call. You got depressed when we couldn’t have dinner over there every week, for God’s sake. You never sympathized when I put in more and more time at the greenhouse. Even Janey nagged Frank about getting more help.”
I didn’t know what to say. When he put it that way, I could see why he felt the way he felt.
“I’ve started to meditate in the morning, before I go to work. It’s about pulling body and soul together, I guess you’d say. And I’ve begun to think about the importance of really connecting with nature. I’ve been hiking a lot. Next spring, I’m going to go camping more. The other thing I’ve decided to do is see a little of the world. I’m going to go to Europe at Christmas with a friend of mine. London, for the theater and all the sightseeing, and then Paris.”
“Really?” I said. “Who’s the friend?”
“Jason Moore,” he said. I could tell that he took great pleasure in being able to surprise me twice: that he was going to London and Paris, and that his friend was not a woman.
“Why do you think we never went to Europe?” I said.
“Where did you want to go?” he said. He said it pleasantly, with slight curiosity. He had me: I’d never seriously considered going.
“The same places,” I said.
He looked at me. “This isn’t like your saying you might go to law school because I thought about going to law school, is it?”
“No,” I said, immediately. The volley had begun. “I always wanted to go to the Tate.”
“I’d invite you,” he said, “but we don’t seem to get along anymore.”
Bam: his comment registered. It was gone. The marriage was gone. I had half expected he’d plead with me to come back. I had thought, at the very least, that I would be gratified by his anger in the face of my calm assertiveness. Had I just recently had sex with Chris’s son?
“We’re starting to get sad,” Bob said. “There’s no point in that, because we both deserve to be happy. Let’s go.”
“Are you sad?” I said. “You don’t seem sad.”
“It would do me no good to try to persuade you I’m not some unfeeling automaton,” he said. “Maybe you’ll eventually think more kindly about me. Come on, Jean: let’s go.”
Light-headed from confusion and caffeine and simple tiredness, I kept my distance from Bob, because I feared that otherwise I might lean on him on the way to the car.
“Send me a picture of yourself in front of the Eiffel Tower,” I said.
He looked at me. “I’ll try to be photographed somewhere that’s not that predictable,” he said.
I did well in my courses. I got a B-plus in history, an A in art history, and A’s in both my literature courses. Gail Jason decided to bump me up to a graduate-level course in Modern British Lit the following semester. She and I drank Constant Comment tea, sitting in her apartment, talking about what odd turns our lives had taken before we decided what our focus should be. She was divorced. She, too, had a dog she loved. It was named Winnie, after a character in Beckett’s Happy Days. She quoted Willie, from the same play: “Life without win a mock.” She said this while rubbing the dog’s ears and nodding to the dog that this was true. She wrote poetry that she wouldn’t show anybody, including me. It was important, she thought, to have things in one’s life that were private. She kept a journal and suggested I do the same, but after a few weeks of trying to infuse days with the extraordinary, I stopped keeping the journal and immediately stopped feeling so deficient. I wrote a few letters: to Bob, telling him that I was proud of him for taking charge of his life (I didn’t mail the letter, though, because I wasn’t sure myself whether I sincerely felt that); to Dara, telling her about what I was reading and thinking; to Elizabeth, saying that it had finally come clear to me that on some level she hated me. I wrote Derek, in response to two notes, telling him as kindly as possible that I didn’t want to continue seeing him—“seeing” being a euphemism for having sex. From Dara, in New York, I got a note that gave me no news, but said, simply: Write me a letter, my dear. I love your writing: when I see it, I grow cheerful. Besides, I shall not hide it from you. My correspondence with you flatters me. She thought it was corresponding to say nothing in reaction to what I’d written her about Samuel Beckett, to tell me nothing at all about what she was doing in New York? Still, having failed with my journal, I didn’t want to force her to write if she didn’t have the inclination. I also waited in vain for a response to my letter to Elizabeth. She was obviously glad to finally be rid of me, with miles between us.