by Ann Beattie
I’m actually writing you for four reasons. One is to apologize if I did anything that made you feel bad or in case you thought it was all meaningless to me. It wasn’t. Also, I don’t think you meant what you wrote to me last, so let’s just forget it. I want to let you know that I’ve moved. My new address is 160 West Neck Drive, apt. 2. The last reason is that I’ve been going to meetings of ACOA. If you haven’t heard of that it’s Adult Children of Alcoholics. It’s helped me a lot. I’ve also wondered about your aunt. Do you think she could have been a secret drinker? The things you told me about her make me wonder now that I know more.
My father is doing better but sometimes backsliding. I would like to see you again.
Your friend,
Derek
I was afraid that Liam would see the note; that Derek was going to be harder to shake than I’d thought. He was a kid: What was this about? Why didn’t he understand that I no longer wanted to see him? He had friends—why was it so important that I be his friend? I doubted that was what he really wanted. An image came to me of Derek, kneeling between my legs. It made my legs go weak. I had only done what I’d done because I’d been depressed and confused. I certainly didn’t want to see him again. He must have told Trenton. Otherwise, why would he have given me the note when Liam wasn’t around? From the minute he’d seen me in the elevator, he had been holding the note, waiting for the right minute to sneak it to me. That was proof that he knew what the contents were. I read the note again, hurriedly. I was embarrassed I had confided in Derek. Regardless of what he thought, we didn’t have any common bond. Both he and Trenton had been correct. I hadn’t wanted to be friends. I wanted to keep to myself. But with both of them, strangely, I had crossed my own boundaries. Just half an hour or so ago, I had resolved not to be drawn into conversation with Trenton, and a few minutes later, my thoughts were all of taking him aside and demanding to know what he knew. Why would the two of them have been talking about me? It aggravated me that I occupied space in their minds. It also embarrassed me that Trenton knew about something I had done privately. It was just like men to talk.
The performance never resumed. The host never arrived from the airport. His wife, though, continued to be hysterical. After the police had spoken to the people upstairs and left, loud music started, but it didn’t really matter: there was no performance anyway. A woman who had gone into the kitchen—damn it! that was where I would have been, if Trenton hadn’t given me Derek’s note—said that Dara had disappeared down a back staircase, using the emergency exit. Two people said they had seen her go. She was not crying, according to them: she was furious. “Who exactly was that actress?” I heard one woman ask another.
The lavender programs were left behind on chairs. People soon began to talk about things other than the performance. Like people in the wake of any disaster, they stood around talking about what they had in common, trying to feel some connection to one another. They also talked about trivia and gossiped and laughed. Somewhere among them were the would-be patrons. Dara had told me the drama critic from the Village Voice would be there. Had he been? They were all strangers to me, except for the unmistakable Edward Quill. Except for Liam, who was talking animatedly to a pretty young woman who was laughing about something, and Trenton, whom I cold-shouldered.
People began to mill around, hoping for champagne anyway. The place became a blur of overheard conversations, a cluster of strangers—no place I fit in; no place I wanted to be. If the ripple of disapproval in New Hampshire had been discouraging for Dara, imagine how she must feel tonight. Yet I had the lingering suspicion that even if she had performed, she would have been performing for a very different audience.
That night, on the way back to Connecticut, I disliked the audience for being too sophisticated, just as I had once disliked the audience in New Hampshire for being unsophisticated. What didn’t occur to me until we reached New Haven, and Liam began responding to my description of the text—my typing it; laughing over it with Dara and Tom; the absurd Edward Quill, whom Dara was hoodwinking—was that Dara was not so much a victim as a victimizer, who had gotten her comeuppance.
“In a way, the show Dara put on back in the barn in New Hampshire was analogous to a book published by a vanity press,” Liam said. “But even there, you can assume the book is something the author cares about. But what’s the virtue of acting so well you trick people into believing they’re being offered something of quality, when they aren’t?”
I understood what he was saying; there was something unsavory about Dara’s having agreed to do the performance as an existential act. She had been exploiting Edward Quill, who was delusional. She had led him on, and she had had the hubris to think that her acting ability could convince people that a fatuous text was actually important. She hadn’t been wrong about that—or, at least, she hadn’t been entirely wrong, if she considered her audience. In the piece I had written for the New Hampshire paper, I had been under her spell; even though I had seen the magician put the rabbit in the hat, I had still been stunned when the magician pulled it out. We had both known, instantly, that Grace Aldridge’s text was as ridiculous as Bob’s Buddy Holly glasses. But now I saw that what Dara had done was even worse than my taking money to type a worthless text.
But then again, who was to blame if other people were desperate and foolish? Edward Quill was a grown man, and he had convinced himself Grace Aldridge’s life meant something.
Or had he? Might he also have known that her life was inconsequential and vaguely pathetic? Even without the fight upstairs, the bubble would have had to burst eventually. Why had he put his trust in Dara, who was vain enough, in turn, to trust her ability to seduce even the smartest people?
“Say something,” Liam said. “Don’t start pouting just because you and I have different perspectives on something.”
“I don’t have a different perspective anymore,” I said. “You’re right. They’re both contemptible.”
“Foolish, perhaps,” he said.
“Don’t pretend to be moderate, Liam.”
“I’m not pretending,” he said. “I rather pity those caught up in self-deception.”
“You never deceive yourself?”
He thought about it. “Depends on the day,” he said. “Sometimes I pretend that I’m succeeding just because I’ve left England. That I’ll write a great book one day. That you and I have a future together.”
I was so surprised, I couldn’t speak. I only looked at him.
“When I look at things rather grimly, I think we’re stepping stones for each other,” he said.
“What about when you’re more optimistic?”
“I guess what I’m saying is that I really am not very optimistic any longer.”
He was telling me goodbye. For whatever reason, that was what he was doing. Driving along on the highway, both of us tired and shaken up by the New York expedition, he had maneuvered the conversation to a point I hadn’t anticipated. My ribs suddenly felt heavier, my head lighter. It was the odd, scary feeling of being lassoed: as if once his words tightened around me, those words would have the power to drag me out of the car, into the night air. I decided to see if I could speak.
“Is it something I did?” I said.
“No. Rather more that I don’t think we’re that well suited. Two moody people probably don’t do one another much good, with one always catching the other’s moods.”
“Did you know you were going to say this tonight?” I said.
“Yes, I suppose I did. I shouldn’t have said I’d go. I might have been thinking that we’d have a wonderful time and that would change my mind.”
I didn’t go to class. I asked Megan to walk the dog. I alternated between being furious at Liam for calling things off so precipitously and furious with myself for having put myself in a position where Dara’s problems had become the backdrop for the end of my relationship. I was flooded with resentment, going back all the way to my aunt Elizabeth—I was not so crazy I blamed my p
arents for dying—and continuing through all the people in the recent past I thought had done me wrong, which was quite a long list. What had Bob meant, that we both deserved to be happier? He had meant that he deserved to be happier, which meant trips to Europe he would never have taken with me, and hiking in the woods with the guys. Out of sight, out of mind: When was the last time I had heard from Janey? I had been nothing but a diversion for Liam (wasn’t that what Gail had warned me about?). I resented the way he had confronted me with his interpretation of Dara’s insincerity. So my friends were imperfect; his were so much better? Because they lived in Stonington and went to parties at James Merrill’s, they were superior people?
I walked the dog. I went out with no scarf, and with only one mitten in my jacket pocket. I had thrown away the other after the encounter with Derek. The encounter that probably every man in Dell now knew about.
The dog was annoying, trying to dig rocks out of the frozen ground. He ran to the ailing butterfly bush I always took care to chase him away from, raised his leg, and peed on it.
If Elizabeth hadn’t gambled, I would have enough money to live in a beautiful house, alone.
If I had gone back to college earlier, instead of serving Bob and Bob’s family, I would already have a career.
If, if. If I did, then what? Then I could be as unhappy as everybody else. As unhappy as Dara. She would love it if she could really insinuate herself so I would think of her incessantly. She had almost managed to bore into my brain permanently. What good luck it had been that I had moved away, gotten some distance. There was even one good thing about having been with Liam: he had helped me to see things differently. I thought of the countless times she’d asked for something and I’d responded, starting with the time I’d driven her home from the optometrist’s, right through the night before, when Liam and I had set off in bad weather to see her perform in a farce masquerading as a drama.
The sky was white, the road I walked down already heaved up because of the winter’s ice. The broken asphalt looked like giant black anthills, sent lopsided by some boy’s well-aimed kick. The dog was being stupid, poking his nose in brambles and yelping, backing up, and tripping over his own hind legs. When I called him to my side and knelt and stroked him, it was an effort to be kind—to try to soothe him out of the anxious clumsiness he’d nervously fallen into, picking up my own anger and awkwardness as I mentally thrashed around. Nothing was going right for either of us, but while he sat and I stroked him and he became calmer, a fierce wind suddenly whipped my hair across my face, stinging as it lashed into my eye. What did it matter? I was crying anyway.
Just because I had returned the ring to Tom Van Sant didn’t mean that Dara could keep my warm, comfortable alpaca jacket forever. Why hadn’t she offered to give it back? It had been a loan, not a compensation prize. As I walked, hugging my arms around me, I lamented the loss of the coat. Though Bob had divided the money from our savings account and sent me half, he had not sent anything from the house. I had written him, asking for only a few things, all unbreakable, but he had made no response at all. Why not? Did a person have to emote like Dara to get attention?
Back at the house, there was one message on my answering machine. “Hello, this is Bob,” the voice said. “Please call as soon as you get this message. Please,” he said again, more emphatically. What did he want? I didn’t soften when I heard his voice. What could I “please” do for him now?
I stretched out on the bed. The dog sensed not to jump up with me. He went over to his bed and curled into a little ball. I was fighting back tears. I was angry that I had let Liam matter so much to me—and that it had happened without my even realizing how much he had meant. Was I only capable of seeing something when the rug was pulled out from under me? I felt like some young novice, taking instruction about everything: the actual meaning of letters I received; needing to be told point-blank when someone no longer cared for me. It reinforced my worst fear: that I was so naive, so needy, that people had no choice but to overcome their own hesitancy and, for my own good, bluntly confront me with whatever it was I didn’t know or needed to know.
When the phone rang ten or fifteen minutes later, I got up, in a total funk. It would no doubt be another call for my own good. Frozen with resignation, I picked up the phone.
That was when I found out one of the worst things I have ever had to hear. It took me longer than it should have to shake myself out of my own self-absorbed despair to realize that the voice that was trying to speak to me, chokingly saying my name so quietly, over and over again, was Bob. “I don’t know how to tell you,” he said. “All I can do is say it. Frank’s dead.”
The external temperature of my room dropped twenty degrees. I looked in the direction of the dog, without really seeing him. Eventually, as he came into better focus, I saw that he was looking at me with a strange expression on his face. He slapped his tail once or twice, then stopped. The sound seemed to be amplified. On the other end of the phone, Bob continued to cry. I found it very hard to follow what he was saying, and he must have known that, because as soon as he said something, he repeated it, trying to speak more distinctly. Eventually, his words began to come clear: Frank had died just before dawn, in his car, going at high speed. He had hit a stationary crane in a cordoned-off construction area on the highway, head-on. No one had seen it happen. They had had to cut open the car to get to him. He was dead at the scene.
I shook my head no, but I didn’t say the word to Bob. I managed, instead, a flood of words that asked only the most inane question: What had Frank been doing on the highway before dawn?
This elicited an outpouring of information, though none of it answered my question. It answered the unasked question of whether he was drunk or sober. He was drunk. Very drunk.
“Janey—” I said.
“Janey’s at Sandra’s. What is she doing there? Those two can’t stand each other,” Bob said, then began to cry loudly. “My fucking sister,” I thought I heard him say.
“Bob—”
“Yes?” he said. He choked back a sob. “Yes?” he said again.
All I could say was, “It can’t be true.”
He began to cry again. I heard him through a roar in my head that was almost like a white-noise machine; I heard him as I tried to choke back my own tears. So that was it: Frank was dead. I thought back to the time when Bob had told me what Frank had said about Dara’s having wanted to check into a hotel, make love, then go over a bridge. Which she had denied. Which she had said simply was not so. Regardless of who had been telling the truth, now Frank was dead. I could hear Dara distinctly, the day we had taken the walk, saying: “Frank said what?”
In my mind, while there was only the sound of Bob’s crying on the other end of the phone, I invented the gory crash scene, then tried to erase it. I pictured the highway empty of cars, the sun just coming up. It was so vivid, I felt I could reach out and touch it. What was I thinking of? Why would I even want to touch a highway?
“Bob,” I said, “It’s unbelievable.”
“Listen,” he said, “don’t say anything about his carrying on with that bitch, nothing about—”
“No,” I said.
“No is right,” he said, sniffing deeply.
I looked around the room. I suppose I realized I wouldn’t be in it much longer. I was already back in Dell. But what was I going to say to Janey? What was I ever going to say to her?
“I’ve got to go,” he said. “You can imagine what pandemonium it is. Are you going to come up here?”
“Don’t you want me to come?” I said.
“Of course I think you should be here, but I’ll think of something to tell them if you can’t do it right away.”
“Come get me,” I said.
There was a pause. I could feel Bob’s surprise. Why was he surprised? My knees felt like rubber, and the white-noise machine was scrambling sound in my head. Did he think I didn’t ever need him? Could it have been my mistake to have always seemed more s
elf-sufficient than I was?
The news had focused my attention. Whatever happened with Liam didn’t matter at all, in the long run. The ups and downs of relationships just didn’t matter. What was important was being at Janey’s side, and I was equally sure that the thing I most dreaded was seeing Janey.
“I need directions,” Bob said to me. “I don’t know where you live.”
“Jean,” Dara said to me on the phone when I had returned to Connecticut, “I thought you’d call.”
She surprised me. First, because she’d used my first name. I think it was the first time I ever heard her address me that way. Second, because she was right: it was strange I hadn’t called, but days after the cremation—which was what Frank had wanted, so Janey did it even though Barbara was horrified—days later, I would mean to do something and confuse that with having done it.
“Are you there?” she said.
“I’m here,” I said. I forced myself to be calm. “It’s really, really horrible. I don’t know what to say.”
“It was one of the worst moments of my life. How could you know what to say?”
A cold chill went up my spine and spread across my shoulders. She didn’t know about Frank. She was talking about the play. She was calling to talk about her silly play.
“Edward was ridiculous, insisting the show must go on. I mean, the vibes were horrible before the people upstairs started fighting. Do you know that a lot of them were opera patrons? There was a whole contingent of them staying at the loft. Then there were other people involved in bringing art to New York from Caribbean islands. I don’t know what Edward thought we were doing, performing for those people. He promised me the reviewer from the Village Voice was going to be there, which he apparently based on the man’s having sent him a form letter saying he didn’t attend performances on request. Sweetie, I have been dealing with someone with the brain power of a thistle. And I am so, so embarrassed.”