by Ann Beattie
“If you think you’re going to play it for me,” I said, “I don’t want to hear your goddamn tape.”
“There isn’t one. There never was. But I pretended I had a cassette in the machine, and then she did her scene and I made my pretend recording. I don’t know exactly what I hoped to accomplish, because I admit it had been a long day, and some part of me simply wanted to be mean and go to sleep. But I pushed the record button and it was quite eerie: she was more convincing emoting for the machine. But when the time came to hit playback, there was nothing, of course. It was nasty of me, but when she was done, I cocked my head as if some infinitesimal sound on the tape meant it was about to begin, and then I frowned and looked very disappointed: my own best version of a disappointed person. I said to her, ‘I guess all we have are the sounds of exquisite silence,’ and she could tell from my expression it was no accident. And it discombobulated her. She was furious, but she turned the anger inward and seemed to get much drunker all of a sudden. She went into the bathroom, and I heard her puking, in fact. The water running. And I thought how much I had always hated it when I was a pawn. I thought that and felt very self-righteous and put-upon, but then I heard her vomit again and something made me go to the door, and when I did, I thought: Stay out of it. She can clean herself up and leave. Everything will be perfectly fine if you just don’t open the door.”
“Stop,” I said. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“But I told you it’s not what you might think. I didn’t open it, but I was standing there when she came out, and for a second we both looked at each other without any defenses, I think, and she looked so guilty, and I must have too. There were the two of us, in the middle of the night, and it was sort of pathetic. But at the same time, I knew I couldn’t embrace her because if I let down my defenses, she might make another move. Intoxicated as she was, she might relax just enough to try the next thing. And then she fell asleep in my bed. Clothed, as was I. She fell asleep, and in the morning she went away, trying to sound triumphant by saying that I’d been her ideal audience; that she’d appreciated the applause of one hand clapping.”
“You slept in the same bed.”
“Yes, well, as I tried to say: sympathy for her aside, I was thoroughly sick of being punished because I’d been caught up in someone else’s problems. It’s my bed. I sleep in it.” He looked at me. “What do you want me to do? Deny that her energy is sexy? She’s really out there. She is interesting. She just isn’t what she thinks she is.”
“That night…had you already written me off?”
“Jean, I entertained the thought that not only did she have designs on you, but that the feeling might be reciprocal,” Liam said. “In that light, your revelation about Gail could have been deliberately concocted to throw me off track—that you hadn’t known about Gail when everyone on campus knew. But you confused me later when you told me about her Chekhov letter. I could see you were genuinely distraught. So I thought that, well, maybe it was possible that you didn’t understand what she wanted from you. And I was in something of an internal struggle myself. Yes: I’d begun to sense things weren’t going to work out between us.” He looked at me. “It also seemed possible that it was a ménage à trois she was after.”
I could feel my face burning. Who cared what she wanted, or would settle for, or was determined to get?
“She showered in the morning. She undressed in the bathroom with the door open. She knows she has an attractive body. I’m not defending her. Quite the opposite.”
“But you get to be the good boy because you didn’t touch her.”
“It did take some courage to confess. I’m not saying I’m blameless. I’m just saying that since you like facts so much, I didn’t fuck your friend, who wanted me to fuck her. I’m telling you I was had. She made me desire her, at the same time I resented her because she was such a bad friend to you, and such an impostor. That’s the word for what she is: she’s an impostor, not an actress. But then I realized she was in bad shape. I picked up on her exhaustion, which was right under the surface. I thought that she should stay because she was tired. She was drunk. I realized the lateness of the hour.” He let his words hang in the air. “I thought about the unreliability of her car,” he added.
I cringed. It was too painful. I had intruded too long, cross-examined him when I should have realized that all he was capable of was rationalization. He continued, “What I realized with the light of day—you have to believe me—I believe she’s a succubus, Jean. That’s who I got involved with.”
Not only did Dara cast a spell when she spoke—people who had come into contact with her, in describing her, also cast a spell. At the moment Liam told me what he thought, in his hushed voice, wincing, the rude laugh I felt sure I’d emit stuck in my throat. It could have sounded crazy—condescending to the person he was telling it to, and as crazy as any lie Dara ever thought up—but if you thought about it not on a literal level, but metaphorically…. In that sense she did, indeed, have supernatural powers. Liam was only attaching a specific word to what we already knew.
He got up and sat on the arm of my chair, slipping his arm around my shoulder. I threw it off, as if the tentacle of some monster had reached out to grab me.
“You know that women distrust you, don’t you?” I said. “Can you understand why you’ve made another enemy? Are you even capable of understanding why I feel so deceived by what you’ve done?”
“Would it have been better to have fucked her? Then you could really indulge your self-righteousness. You and your friend aren’t entirely dissimilar, you know. You both stand your ground, and you both want what you want, whatever that requires putting other people through.”
I gave him the finger. It was the first time in my life I had ever used Frank’s favorite gesture, and the simplicity of it, the saneness of it, gave me a moment of pure peace.
I woke up the day after seeing Liam remembering no particular bad dream—the dog had not died; I had not been sucked into infinity—but my surroundings looked strange, slightly tainted, as if onionskin paper had once covered things, and then been peeled back. That left me with a darkly dusty rug, a splintered bookcase, and a front window crisscrossed with masking tape that looked like an X ray of a patient who has suffered nerve damage. At the very least, I could find another, more attractive place to live, where I would stop being a shut-away; ultimately, closing myself up in one room had probably only been my déclassé version of imitating Dara.
I took a shower and washed my hair, dried my hair, walked the dog, and left a message on Liam’s answering machine saying that, while he probably felt better for having confessed, it was my thought that he should rot in hell on a pitchfork. I referred him to his favorite Bosch print, hung in his bathroom. I went to class and listened to Gail lecture on To the Lighthouse. I ripped up my parking ticket. After class, I went to Gail’s office. She was talking to a student, but I scribbled a note for Joyce, who was visiting on a winter vacation, asking her whether she felt like taking a spur-of-the-moment drive with me: I would drop her in Wellfleet to visit her parents, and then continue on to Provincetown. We could return in a day or two. I was proud of myself for remembering where Joyce’s parents lived. It was also frustrating that I could retain trivia while I was oblivious to things transpiring in front of my eyes. I asked Joyce to go with me because I thought that having someone seated next to me who had no idea why I was really going to Provincetown would be empowering; I felt that I needed to deceive someone myself, rather than be the one who was always deceived, and my deception of Joyce would be harmless. Also—although I didn’t really believe it possible—her presence would mean that would not turn back.
Joyce called me that night, saying that it was a splendid idea. “Gail was slightly put out that you didn’t invite her, but I pointed out that she shouldn’t run out on a job she was trying to hold on to, and anyway, she gets more vacations than I do,” Joyce said. She had already phoned her parents, and they were delighted. She tried
to convince me to stay for dinner in Wellfleet, but family dinners were a part of my past.
The next day we hit the road, eating a picnic lunch as we drove, sharing it with the dog in the backseat. I was careful what I told Joyce about the reason for my trip to Provincetown. It seemed pleasingly ironic to describe what I was doing as “going to a party.” I also told her about breaking up with Liam, because I had found out he was every bit the ladies’ man Gail had described him as being. As I presented it, I had ended the relationship, not him. Since it might have been any woman I’d found out about his sleeping with, there was no reason to explain the fine points. No reason to mention that technically he had not had sex with her; no point in bringing up the painful double betrayal of his having chosen a close friend of mine.
“He’s probably pathological,” she said. “Beyond redemption.”
It was a long drive, but once we’d passed Boston the cars stopped tailgating and passing on the left and right, fanning out around my car like stampeding animals avoiding another animal that was limping. At a service area, we got out to go to the bathroom and to walk the dog. What I was preoccupied with was whether Dara had slept with Bob. I watched the dog peeing on a tree and identified with the tree. I was not the first woman to be betrayed by her friend, but when had the betrayal started, and with whom, and what was the extent of it? Even if I was on to myself, I could imitate Liam and rationalize anyway, like slipping my toes into a too-small shoe to see how pretty my foot would look.
Joyce drove the last fifty miles to Wellfleet. It was dusk when we got to her parents’ house. They were nice people—delighted to see their daughter, and they even pretended to be delighted to meet her friend—but I left as soon as I could, impelled by the increasing necessity of seeing Dara.
When I was back on the road, Sparkle came up front into the passenger seat. Soon, he curled up and went to sleep. His whimpering, and the jazz I listened to quietly on the radio, continued almost to Provincetown. I stopped at a convenience store and asked directions to Dara’s sister’s house. I was carrying an envelope Dara had sent me with her sister’s return address. A haggard woman, sitting on a stool by the cash register, put the chicken leg she was eating down on top of a newspaper and, licking her fingers, showed me on a map where I wanted to go. She handed me a pen with her greasy fingers, and watched me write down what she said. “Most people going the opposite direction in this season,” she said. “Hope you get some good beach weather.”
Though I thought I had written down carefully what the woman had told me, I had trouble finding the street from her instructions. The side streets were steep, narrow, and icy. Either snow had just melted, or there had recently been sleet. Street signs were bent or missing. Very few lights were on, so it was difficult to read house numbers. I sensed I was driving in the wrong direction and made my way back to the main street. Very little was open, but I parked by the Atlantic House and went inside and asked again for directions.
Before driving in the direction the woman sent me, I went outside and crossed the street to look at the water. The air was so cold that I saw the water through a haze of tears. I stared until my head started to ache. It was as if my frozen nose were exerting force on my forehead. My nose felt too large, too heavy—my face was distorting. I had a horror-movie vision of my changing features. I would be ugly—terrifyingly ugly—when I saw Dara, and that pleased me. She should see that not only was she monstrous, but that her vileness had begun to transform everything around her. I didn’t wipe away my tears. I stared at the ocean, thinking that in winter, it still had an odd, disquieting beauty, but that the water was not in any way inviting. People always romanticize the beach out of season: the strange, sculptural dunes; the choppy, inky water empty of everything but the sturdiest sea life. But what was so wonderful about the winter Atlantic? The sheer extent of it, its vastness, its putty blackness? When it could not be entered—when few boats sailed on it, and when no bodies swam in it—it could intimidate; that might be why people romanticized it. One way to feel less fearful was to ignore the fact that something was off-limits, unapproachable. I thought back to Gail’s class, to her discussion of the lighthouse in Virginia Woolf’s novel: that the characters were drawn to something that offered the possibility of transcending time because it remained a constant symbol. But a lighthouse seemed a rather grand symbol, something worthy of fixating on, while in my own life it had sometimes been inexplicably hard to look away from even the most ordinary things: the configuration of cracks in a windowpane; the impression made by the dog’s body when he rose from his pallet. I sometimes stared at things almost in order to come to no conclusion, letting objects and the banal physical appearances of things relax me the way worry beads preoccupy, and thus absorb worry. Which might have been patterned behavior, more an imitation of Elizabeth watching the night sky than anything about my personality that carried deep significance. She might even be amused if she had died and gone to heaven—if the heaven she maintained she believed in really existed, and she had a clear view down to me—that I was standing and staring at the Atlantic, which symbolized so much, and ultimately meant so little.
How long had I been there, freezing? A minute? Ten?
I had once thought about marrying Liam. I had thought we were on the same wavelength. I had thought that because he was having sex with me, he didn’t desire sex with other women. What was the lying way he had put it? That it was her energy he found sexy.
Her own excessiveness robbed other people of energy.
Dara had taken things from me.
Shivering, I went back to the car and began again to search for Dara’s sister’s house. This time I found it. The house was small and shabby, with two broken shutters leaning against the weathered clapboards and a rusted wheelbarrow by the front steps. It was also unlit and possibly unoccupied—something that had not occurred to me until I saw it, so silent and empty. Wouldn’t that be just perfect? To drive all the way to Provincetown, only to find that I’d been lied to again: no one there; everyone gone. I got back in the car and double-checked the address. I saw a light on several houses down, started the ignition, and coasted in the direction of the house. I got out and knocked on the door. After a while, a man with a beard came to the door. “I’m looking for a friend at number forty-three,” I said. “Do you know if people are living there?” He had on a nightshirt and a black vest. His cat ran out the door.
“Which one?” he said, peering around me. “The Feldstones’ house?”
“The yellow house,” I said.
“The Feldstones. I think there are people there. Were yesterday, anyway,” he said. “Do you need a phone?”
I said no and thanked him, then returned to the bar of the Atlantic House to try to figure out what to do. She was not going to get away with this. I was going to confront Dara, and I was not going to let her off the hook. I ordered a hamburger and a brandy. That seemed odd, but what the hell. It tasted wonderful—warm and delicious. I hadn’t realized until I ate real food how hungry I’d been. I looked around. Here I was in this unlikely place, at the start of my so-called party. There were a few men at the end of the bar, two standing and one sitting, though there were plenty of empty seats. There was a couple having coffee at one of the tables. There was very little business, so after serving me, the bartender sat at a table adjacent to the bar and opened a thick book and began to read. I ran through some possibilities: go back to the house and sit by the curb and wait; ask the bartender if there was any place open to spend the night, if that turned out to be necessary. There had to be someplace. Then all I would have to worry about would be whether they would take dogs. If I had to, I would wait until the next day to find her. I looked at a man sitting alone, drinking a beer and reading the paper. The crazy thought went through my head that I might pick up someone as a little adventure, as an oblique way of warming up for a fight—which is what I’d done once before, though I’d miscalculated because Derek had been too needy. That was when I looked up and
saw Dara, red-faced and windblown, race into the bar out of the cold, and then I saw her in tandem with herself, just to the side of where she had first walked, moving slightly slower, red-faced and windblown, and her dual entrance scared me to death because I knew I was hallucinating.
Except that I wasn’t. It was Dara and her twin sister, her identical twin, and I had no idea which was which. Of course, it didn’t take Dara long to realize she was being stared at. Dara was the one who stood completely still, staring at me with her mouth open, as if the wind had caught up with her and frozen her. Her sister was fussing with her own parka, trying to unzip the stuck zipper. My alpaca jacket was somewhere else; they wore the same dark blue parkas. They wore the same jeans. Only their shoes were different. Even their bright, windblown hair was identical.
Dara came toward me with her arms outstretched, but it was the slowest recovery I’d ever seen her make. She managed something, though. She got within a few feet of the bar stool before her expression changed and she stopped, putting her hands over her mouth. It was the oddest thing: on such a cold night, instead of wearing woolen mittens, she had on white cotton gloves, the gloves that ladies of our mothers’ generation had worn, and my thoughts turned to static, so that I saw an image of my mother, dressed to go to the wedding, interrupted by an image of Dara, windblown but oh so proper, and then another unexpected image: a photograph that had flashed on the TV screen at Liam’s, weeks before, as the newscaster explained that a woman from Pomfret had been killed in her backyard, hanging out the wash, when a hunter had mistaken her white mittens for the flash of a deer’s tail.