by Ann Beattie
“What was wrong?” she asked. They were walking down Fifth Avenue, having wandered far from the apartment after dinner. She had asked it not so much because she was convinced that Griffin was bothered by something, but rather because she was wondering aloud.
“Nothing’s wrong. You don’t like it when I’m moody, and when I’m not you act as though I am.”
“I didn’t mean to criticize you. I was wondering aloud, really. That’s all I meant.”
“Was it like other Christmases?”
“No. It was quieter.”
“Do they usually get along?”
“Who?” she said.
“Your mother and father.”
“They’ve always gotten along.”
He was swinging her hand, answering but not paying too much attention to the conversation.
“They’re always like that?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Then they don’t get along. Or they get along, but there’s something wrong.”
“What’s wrong?” she said, trying to remember if it was true that they always acted that way.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s a famous man and she’s his wife, and she’s in awe of him but also resents him.”
For the first time she lifted her head from staring at the sidewalk to look at him.
“Let’s not be serious on Christmas,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Later, on the walk home, she thought uncomfortably about her response to Griffin. It had been too deferential. Her mother, all her life, had been too deferential to her father. As they walked farther she thought that there was some logic to that at least: her father was Horace Cragen. But Griffin was only Griffin, and he shouldn’t declare her moods. Sorry that she had said she was sorry, she eased her hand out of his and plunged it into the deep silk-lined pocket of her coat.
They had just begun to live together.
In February her father sent her a new poem. Much of it she did not understand, but the allusions to their days roller-skating—the parts of the poem about her—she understood well. She left it on the table, with the morning mail, along with the letter from her father.
“What’s this?” he said, sitting at the kitchen table and trying to rub some life into his body. He had gotten little sleep, in spite of the fact that it was almost eleven o’clock, because he had gone to a jazz club with his friend Tony and then gone drinking at another friend’s apartment after the bars closed.
“Go ahead and read it,” she answered.
When he had come back at four in the morning, drunk, they had quarreled: hadn’t he said he wouldn’t drink to get drunk anymore? Didn’t he think she might worry—couldn’t he have called? He picked up the poem and read it, and then the letter, too. The letter asked her if she would come to her father’s favorite cousin’s remarriage on February 25—just the time she and Griffin had planned to visit friends up north.
“So what are you telling him?” he said. He shook the coffee jar but did not get up to make coffee.
“I think I should go, if you don’t mind delaying the trip a week.”
“Charlie and Inez will have to be out of the house then. They only rent it for February. The weekend after that is March.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I still think I ought to go. I haven’t seen them since Christmas, and he’s been depressed because his back has been bothering him.”
“I haven’t seen my parents since Christmas either.”
“I get along with my parents, and you don’t get along with yours.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said. “I sit like a stone with my parents, and you sit like a stone with yours.”
“That’s untrue! What are you talking about?”
“Forget it,” he said. “Go to the wedding. I’m going to Charlie and Inez’s.”
“Since you prefer getting drunk to being with me, I don’t see why you’re sulking.”
“Because I’m sorry for you, goddamn it. Because he’s ordering you around, and I don’t like that. Because he sent that sentimental poem about his baby girl, and after stroking her with the pen stabbed her in the heart and told her to come home.”
She looked at him to see if he could be serious. He looked very serious.
“You’re wrong,” she said.
“You are,” he said.
He went into the bedroom and dressed, and left the apartment without saying goodbye. Either he was crazy, or she was crazy. And she was sorry for him—he had looked so sick when he came into the kitchen. He had been sick from the night before. Since he was not there to talk to, she talked to herself. Through clenched teeth she said, “They are a poem and a letter.” She took them both with her when she went back to the bedroom and stretched out on the still-unmade bed. She did not go to class.
March was a good month for them, and April was, too, until late in the month when he lost his job at the library. His friend Tony got him a job selling shoes, and he needed the money (he no longer would accept anything from his parents), but he found the job unbearable. All day women would come in and try to fit into shoes that were too small and that the store did not have in their size, and Griffin was supposed to tell them that he would take the shoes in the back and put them on the shoe stretcher. The shoe stretcher was a mop handle which he inserted in the shoe, then whomped down hard: the pressure would break the lining in the toe, and the women would have a fraction of an inch more room. Tony, who worked in the store part-time and was always stoned, thought it was hilarious. But after a week Griffin was miserable and began to drink again—this time topping off the evening by smoking grass with Tony. He went back to the apartment and fought with her, and she went into a rage, throwing clothes into a suitcase, saying that she was not going to live with him any longer. But she looked back and saw him, pale-faced and probably sorry for what he had said—he told her so often that he was sorry for blaming her for things she couldn’t help and to please forgive him—and she threw the things from the suitcase to the floor, shaking her head at him and at herself: if she was leaving, why would she take the Equadorian sweater but not a nightgown? Throwing things so randomly into the suitcase, she could not even have appeared serious to him about going.
“I think about what my father did to me—about how he implied it was all right not to consider women’s feelings—the way he was to my mother, taking her along, taking her hand the same way he took mine—on his outings. And it’s no wonder it’s taking me so long to know how to act.”
He lit a cigarette. When he drank, or was hung-over, he had begun to smoke cigarettes.
“You’re obsessed with your father,” she said. Before, she had screamed that, but now it was such a familiar line that she said it quietly, perturbed but stating the obvious. “Forget about your father and live your life.”
“You know that can’t be done,” he said. “You know it. You know it when you pick up a magazine and read your father’s poetry, or when you see his picture in a bookstore window. And I know it when I read interviews with my father, when he sends me brochures about gallery openings and I read about the facts of his life. You know that you can’t forget that.”
She stood amid the scattered clothes, wondering if it could be true.
They broke up in May, but it didn’t last. Griffin went to stay with Tony but came back at the end of the week, and she agreed to try again. He came back sober and, he said, sorry for being the cause of so much of their unhappiness. She could tell even as he spoke that he still believed she did not realize how much her father had her under his thumb, but if he would only not say that, then she knew she could stand it.
She was surprised when, in June, he told her he wanted to marry her. Their relationship had always been up and down, and when he came back after their separation they did not come together with the closeness they had had early on. So she tried to tell him no as gently as possible.
“God,” he said. “Your loyalty is still with hi
m.”
“Don’t start that,” she said. “Please.”
“It’s so easy for me to see. It’s so clear, and sometimes I know you see it. I know you do, and sometimes you’ve even agreed with me. If you see it, then break away. Break the tie.”
“Griffin, I haven’t called or written my father for nearly a month.”
“But you don’t have to. That’s what’s so insidious about it. During that month he reminded you of who he was and how he was because his long poem was printed in the magazine you subscribe to. He was on your mind, even if you didn’t call, even if he didn’t call you. Jesus—at least admit the truth.”
“What do you want me to say? That I hate my father?”
“Admit you’ll never leave him—or you’ll leave him for somebody he approves of. Some man he’ll find for you.”
“Griffin, he has never told me who to date.”
“He has to approve, though, doesn’t he? And he doesn’t approve of me, does he? Did he like me there at Christmas, eating roast goose across the table from him, sitting next to his only daughter in his classy Village apartment? Did you think he radiated warmth?”
“He had just met you,” she said.
“And did he want to meet me again? You got the phone calls. Did he?”
“He’s never told me who to bring there and who—”
“He didn’t. Just give a simple answer.”
“Don’t tell me how to answer you. Answer yourself if you know all the answers.”
“Please,” he said, bowing his head and coming toward her with his arms outstretched. “Do you think I asked you to marry me because I hate you? Do you think I’m saying this because I only want to hurt? I’ve been through this too. Once you face it, you can get away from it.”
“I’m not going to let you make me hate my father,” she said. She was so confused, wondering now what her father had thought, why even her mother had not said what he thought. But maybe her father and mother weren’t getting along—Griffin had said they weren’t—and it had to be true that he was not saying these things because he hated her. He was standing and holding her, very sad; he was at least doing what he thought was right.
“It’s all so simple,” he said. His arms closed around her.
These were the things in their apartment: a sofa with two usable cushions, the other cushion ripped to shreds; one large pillow for floor seating; draperies at the window left by the former tenants; a kitchen table and two chairs, one of which always needed gluing; a bed in the bedroom and a bureau they shared. Nothing else. The clutter was not the result of trying to cram large furniture into small spaces, but piles of books, clothes, shoes and boots. They threw out little, keeping almost all the mail, stacked first into piles of a dozen envelopes or so, the piles later cascading, being walked over—letters getting littered across the floor. So when they were in the apartment and wanted to be close to each other, they gravitated toward the bed, the sofa with two cushions too small to stretch on comfortably.
Tonight they were on the bed—he at the far end, his feet under her thigh for warmth, she with a pillow behind her head, looking down at him. She was recovering from a cold and did not have much energy. She had been asleep when he came in, but had roused herself to ask about his day, to talk to another human being in the hopes that if she stopped drifting in and out of sleep, she might feel less sick. He had gone out with Tony two nights before and had come home sober. She had been grateful and happy, sure that he was changing. He hardly ever talked about Joseph Berridge, and she wondered if she had finally gotten through to him. But, to keep peace, she hardly ever mentioned Horace Cragen either, and she felt ridiculous omitting mention of someone she cared for and thought about. Her mother had sent her a letter saying that his back still bothered him, after two doctor appointments, and that he was not working well, and growing despondent. She had meant to call, but each time she thought of it Griffin was in the apartment.
“If you got a job,” he said, “with my dividend checks and my job, and your income, too, you wouldn’t have to take money from him.”
She held up a hand, palm toward him, to tell him to stop talking. His words flowed right through it.
“And you’re being childish not to do it,” he said.
“You don’t want me to take my parents’ money, and you drive around in a new Volvo your father gave you,” she said.
Whether because she was sick and he was sorry for her, or because she had just effectively silenced him, he said nothing more. In retrospect, she would continue to think just what she thought at the time: that he had shrugged off what she said. When he and Tony, drunk again, were in the accident—when Griffin, going thirty miles over the limit, went off the road and crashed the Volvo into a tree, she did not even think of their conversation in the bed two nights before. Tony was cut and scraped; Griffin, with a broken arm and a concussion, was pulled out of the car by Tony. She got the call about the accident from the hospital. She had no money to get a cab to go get him, so she called Louise. “Let him wrestle with his own demons,” Louise said, her own foot heavy on the pedal. “I’m glad you weren’t in the car.” That must have been what started her thinking about the conversation in which she accused him of accepting the car from his parents. But surely crashing it into a tree at high speed was an extreme response. He seemed almost desperately happy to see her, and was very polite to Louise, thanking her over and over for putting herself out for him. He did not seem disturbed—not disturbed the way a person who crashes into a tree would act. It was probably foolish to keep wondering if it had been deliberate. But il it had been, she should be more careful about what she said to him. He was more upset than she knew, if it had been deliberate. She would have asked him if he meant it to happen, but he seemed so peaceful after the accident that she didn’t speak. She was also afraid that he would admit to doing it to spite her, even if the car had really gone out of control. He was sneaky sometimes—or a better way to put it was that he was an actor: Louise had been right the time she told her who Griffin Berridge was when she said that he decided to be fucked up about his father’s fame.
A week later when her mother called, she felt guilty for not having called or written. She told her mother about Griffin’s car accident, by way of explanation, and her mother said only, “I’m sorry.” Her mother was calling to tell her that her father was suffering, that he would not take the pain pills the doctor had given him because they made his mind fuzzy, but that he couldn’t work or, some days, even go out, because the disc in his back bothered him so. She said that she had thought that Diana’s coming home might cheer him—or perhaps Diana could talk him into taking the pills.
Alarmed, she called the airline, forgetting she could not reserve a seat on the shuttle, even before she spoke to Griffin. Then she went into the bedroom and told him she had to go home, and why. She hoped that it would not result in a tirade—that for once he would be reasonable and see it as the simple situation it was.
He said, “That’s where your parents live. This is home,” and went back to his reading.
Her father was not very pleasant to her, which surprised her and disappointed her mother, she knew. He was glad to see her, but brooded that his wife had summoned her, when she had a life of her own. Did he protest too much—could he be doing it to make his wife feel badly? Diana was ashamed for wondering. Here was her father, depressed and hurting, and she was wondering if mind games were being played.
She stayed for three days, and once each day—as much as she thought he would tolerate—she tried to talk him into taking the pills. When, at the end of the third day, he still would not, she resented his iron will, his thundering “I will not!,” which made her back off, so far that she backed over the threshold to the living room, where she found her mother weeping. “He’s so damn stubborn,” her mother said, brushing away the tears. And it was not like her mother ever to disagree with her father; when her mother disagreed, you knew it by her blank face.
Tha
t night, when she left, a neighbor drove her to the airport. His name was Peter Jenkins—everyone called him Jenkins—and he could afford to live in the Village because of the money he got when his parents were killed in a plane crash. She could not remember how she got that information, but from the time she was small she had known it, and because people in the neighborhood talked about it often, she was able now to understand that they liked Jenkins, but they also looked down on him. Even calling him by his last name indicated that he was a little apart from them.
All Peter Jenkins wanted to talk about was her father (a great man, he always said—talented and also kind) and his difficulties, and what difficulties she might be having adjusting to life in Boston. She felt hypocritical presenting her life as interesting and peaceful. She knew that he would want to hear the truth, and she did not mean to be condescending to him—it was just that she did not want to think about the truth herself. She was doing badly in school and the man she lived with might have deliberately smashed up his car, and she had found her father remote, obstinate, wanting sympathy rather than help. She had felt sorry for her mother.
“Ever go rowing on the Charles?” he asked, weaving through traffic.
She told him she hadn’t.