Secrets & Surprises

by Ann Beattie

  They are in a twin bed, narrower than he remembers twin beds being, lying under a brown-and-white quilt.

  “I’m not really sure,” she says. “She said that he was getting crazier.”

  “They both seem crazy.”

  “Bea told me that he gave some of their savings to a Japanese woman who lives with a man he works with, so she can open a gift shop.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  “I wish we had another cigarette.”

  “Is that all he did?” he asks. “Gave money away?”

  “He drinks a lot,” Penelope says.

  “So does she. She drinks straight from the bottle.” Before dinner Bea had tipped the bottle to her lips too quickly and the liquor ran down her chin. Matthew called her disgusting.

  “I think he’s nastier than she is,” Penelope says.

  “Move over a little,” he says. “This bed must be narrower than a twin bed.”

  “I am moved over,” she says.

  He unbends his knees, lies straight in the bed. He is too uncomfortable to sleep. His ears are still ringing from so many hours on the road.

  “Here we are in Colorado,” he says. “Tomorrow we’ll have to drive around and see it before it’s all under snow.”

  The next afternoon he borrows a tablet and walks around outside, looking for something to draw. There are bare patches in the snow—patches of brown grass. Bea and Matthew’s house is modern, with a sundeck across the back and glass doors across the front. For some reason the house seems out of place; it looks Eastern. There are no other houses nearby. Very little land has been cleared; the lawn is narrow, and the woods come close. It is cold, and there is a wind in the trees. Through the woods, in front of the house, distant snow-covered mountains are visible. The air is very clear, and the colors are too bright, like a Maxfield Parrish painting. No one would believe the colors if he painted them. Instead he begins to draw some old fence posts, partially rotted away. But then he stops. Leave it to Andrew Wyeth. He dusts away a light layer of snow and sits on the hood of his car. He takes the pencil out of his pocket again and writes in the sketchbook: “We are at Bea and Matthew’s. They sit all day. Penelope sits. She seems to be waiting. This is happening in Colorado. I want to see the state, but Bea and Matthew have already seen it, and Penelope says that she cannot face one more minute in the car. The car needs new spark plugs. I will never be a painter. I am not a writer.”

  Zero wanders up behind him, and he tears off the piece of sketch paper and crumples it into a ball, throws it in the air. Zero’s eyes light up. They play ball with the piece of paper—he throws it high, and Zero waits for it and jumps. Finally the paper gets too soggy to handle. Zero walks away, then sits and scratches.

  Behind the house is a ruined birdhouse, and some strings hang from a branch, with bits of suet tied on. The strings stir in the wind. “Push me in the swing,” he remembers Penelope saying. Johnny was lying in the grass, talking to himself. Robert tried to dance with Cyril, but Cyril wouldn’t. Cyril was more stoned than any of them, but showing better sense. “Push me,” she said. She sat on the swing and he pushed. She weighed very little—hardly enough to drag the swing down. It took off fast and went high. She was laughing—not because she was having fun, but laughing at him. That’s what he thought, but he was stoned. She was just laughing. Fortunately, the swing had slowed when she jumped. She didn’t even roll down the hill. Cyril, looking at her arm, which had been cut on a rock, was almost in tears. She had landed on her side. They thought her arm was broken at first. Johnny was asleep, and he slept through the whole thing. Robert carried her into the house. Cyril, following, detoured to kick Johnny. That was the beginning of the end.

  He walks to the car and opens the door and rummages through the ashtray, looking for the joint they had started to smoke just before they found Bea and Matthew’s house. He has trouble getting it out because his fingers are numb from the cold. He finally gets it and lights it, and drags on it walking back to the tree with the birdhouse in it. He leans against the tree.

  Dan had called him the day before they left New Haven and said that Penelope would kill him. He asked Dan what he meant. “She’ll wear you down, she’ll wear you out, she’ll kill you,” Dan said.

  He feels the tree snapping and jumps away. He looks and sees that everything is OK. The tree is still there, the strings hanging down from the branch. “I’m going to jump!” Penelope had called, laughing. Now he laughs, too—not at her, but because here he is, leaning against a tree in Colorado, blown away. He tries speaking, to hear what his speech sounds like. “Blown away,” he says. He has trouble getting his mouth into position after speaking.

  In a while Matthew comes out. He stands beside the tree and they watch the sunset. The sky is pale-blue, streaked with orange, which seems to be spreading through the blue sky from behind, like liquid seeping through a napkin, blood through a bandage.

  “Nice,” Matthew says.

  “Yes,” he says. He is never going to be able to talk to Matthew.

  “You know what I’m in the doghouse for?” Matthew says.

  “What?” he says. Too long a pause before answering. He spit the word out, instead of saying it.

  “Having a Japanese girl friend,” Matthew says, and laughs.

  He does not dare risk laughing with him.

  “And I don’t even have a Japanese girl friend,” Matthew says. “She lives with a guy I work with. I’m not interested in her. She needed money to go into business. Not a lot, but some. I loaned it to her. Bea changes facts around.”

  “Where did you go to school?” he hears himself say.

  There is a long pause, and Robert gets confused. He thinks he should be answering his own question.

  Finally: “Harvard.”

  “What class were you in?”

  “Oh,” Matthew says. “You’re stoned, huh?”

  It is too complicated to explain that he is not. He says, again, “What class?”

  “1967,” Matthew says, laughing. “Is that your stuff or ours? She hid our stuff.”

  “In my glove compartment,” Robert says, gesturing.

  He watches Matthew walk toward his car. Sloped shoulders. Something written across the back of his jacket, being spoken by what looks like a monster blue bird. Can’t read it. In a while Matthew comes back smoking a joint, Zero trailing behind.

  “They’re inside, talking about what a pig I am,” Matthew exhales.

  “How come you don’t have any interest in this Japanese woman?”

  “I do,” Matthew says, smoking from his cupped hand. “I don’t have a chance in the world.”

  “I don’t guess it would be the same if you got another one,” he says.

  “Another what?”

  “If you went to Japan and got another one.”

  “Never mind,” Matthew says. “Never mind bothering to converse.”

  Zero sniffs the air and walks away. He lies down on the driveway, away from them, and closes his eyes.

  “I’d like some Scotch to cool my lungs,” Matthew says. “And we don’t have any goddamn Scotch.”

  “Let’s go get some,” he says.

  “Okay,” Matthew says.

  They stay, watching the colors intensify. “It’s too cold for me,” Matthew says. He thrashes his arms across his chest, and Zero springs up, leaping excitedly, and almost topples Matthew.

  They get to Matthew’s car. Robert hears the door close. He notices that he is inside. Zero is in the back seat. It gets darker. Matthew hums. Outside the liquor store Robert fumbles out a ten-dollar bill. Matthew declines. He parks and rolls down the window. “I don’t want to walk in there in a cloud of this stuff,” he says. They wait. Waiting, Robert gets confused. He says, “What state is this?”

  “Are you kidding?” Matthew asks. Matthew shakes his head. “Colorado,” he says.

  Starley

  H

  is full name was Dickie Ray Starley, but he was Starley to everyone but his wife. She
called him Dickie, and told close friends that even though it was a silly, little-boy name for a tall grown man, at least it was better than calling him Starley. She didn’t like Starley’s friends, and would have resented anything they called him. She liked Starley’s best friend, Donald, better than the rest, because years before, when their daughter Anita was four, and they were all together for a weekend at the beach at Ocean City, Maryland, he had been very attentive to Anita, brushing sand from her knees before she got on the towel, taking her by the hand and walking with her to the cold gray sand where the water washed in. Alice knew that Donald was nice to Anita not so much because he liked her, but because he liked Starley. She didn’t care what his motives were. Anita was very disagreeable that year. She had held her hand out to Donald, staring up at him and saying, “Kiss me here.” “Wrong side,” he said, and turned the hand over and kissed the palm. “It is not! You kiss the back of the hand! Now kiss it right!” He hated to be ordered around. The only way he knew how to deal successfully with kids was to tease them, and she didn’t want to be teased. She had no sense of humor. He told her about “step on a crack, break your mother’s back” and she squinted and said, “That’s awful. And it’s not true. Anybody can walk wherever they want.” “That’s true,” he said. “This is a democracy, isn’t it? Can you spell democracy?” He had few ways of getting back at her. He knew she was a poor speller.

  Donald was not married. He had a son, Bobby, eight years old, living with his mother in North Miami, Florida. He did not get along with him any better than he got along with Anita, although he did not try to antagonize him. He brought his son gloxinia tubers, bubble-blowing liquid with a six-loop blower, a bird’s nest with a speckled blue egg broken into four neat pieces lying inside. He bought him a plastic bird to clip onto the nest, a flower pot for the gloxinia tubers, walked up and down the beach with him as he blew bubbles at the sea gulls, rushing them and shouting between each blow. At seafood restaurants he carefully picked through his son’s filet of sole for those tiny, invisible bones, worrying all through dinner that he might choke and die. Donald and Bobby were both Pisces.

  Things started to change in Donald’s life the summer of 1976. He had a girl friend, Marilyn, who was excessively kind. She made a lobster stew that made his eyes water with pleasure, and when they walked down the street together, she held his hand. She wore perfume that smelled like spice. She had a son from her first marriage, named Joshua, who was a problem: wouldn’t eat fish of any sort, and sat at the table as Marilyn ate her boiled lobster and Donald ate his lobster stew (Marilyn liked plain things), crossing his eyes, shaping his hands into opening and closing lobster claws. He disapproved of Donald. He was fifteen years old and he built big rockets that he launched from a hilltop in the park on the weekends—rockets so big that they shook and whistled in a frightening way when they were ignited and took off in a split second and vanished from sight. Joshua demanded that his mother come along on these outings. With Joshua there, Marilyn was embarrassed to hold Donald’s hand. They would sit side by side, she calling out approval to Joshua, Joshua grinning like mad and jumping up and down as rocket after rocket disappeared. It was a perfect place to hold hands, but she wouldn’t.

  In July, Donald had a two-week vacation, and Marilyn’s vacation (ten days) coincided with it. Joshua was in summer school because he had failed plane geometry, so they had every afternoon alone together. Donald had promised to go fishing with Starley on Chesapeake Bay, but he never got around to calling him. Joshua’s absence allowed them time to make love listening to music, go to the swimming pool in back of her apartment, walk slowly, holding hands, to the fish market for lobster.

  Things changed at the end of the month when it turned out that Joshua had again failed plane geometry. By this time Donald was staying at her apartment most nights, so he was there when Joshua came home crying. The two of them stood in the hallway weeping. She tried to embrace him and he shoved her away. That made her cry so loudly that she bellowed. Joshua swore that he had done his best, that the teacher was a witch who punished a student even when he tried and failed. He said that he didn’t care about the two sides of an isosceles triangle, and he would stab himself in the heart with the point of a compass if he had to take the course again. He ran out, slamming the door. Marilyn went around the house, moving in patterns that made no sense, trying to round up all the compasses. They were all around the apartment: rusted compasses, compasses bent out of shape, compasses empty of pencils; they looked ugly and evil, like something the Nazis would use. She eventually found four of them and held them out to Donald, the metal instruments shaking in her hand louder than dice, and told him to bury them. He buried them under a mock orange bush near the swimming pool, dropping a stub of a pencil that had been in one of them on top of the grave as a marker. He had not buried anything since his pet turtle died when he was twelve. When he went back to comfort Marilyn, things started to come apart: he told her that she was a good mother, and she turned on him and said, “How can you give advice when you know nothing about parenting? When you haven’t seen your son all year, except for one day last December?” Later that week she went to see the school counselor. She came home and told Donald that Joshua was “disturbed” by their living together, that he would have to go. “You’re going to let a fifteen-year-old tell you how to live?” Donald said. “What would you know, when you have a child you completely ignore? If you loved that child, and if he was suffering, and if you could help him, and if you … if you ever cared enough to help him, then you’d know, you’d. …” She stood there, trembling. Lobster stew was bubbling on the stove. That night Donald had two hamburgers at a drive-in restaurant and went home and waited for her to call and apologize. She didn’t call that night or the next night, and each night when the phone did not ring, Donald went to sleep praying that Joshua would have to repeat the course. At night he would awaken, sweating, stomach heavy, having been fooled by some slight noise into thinking that the phone was ringing. With only three days of vacation left, knowing he had to get himself together, he did what he always did when he was in trouble or feeling blue—he called Starley. Starley had been his best friend in college; he had taught him how to take apart a carburetor, had patiently tutored him in logic. Starley had taught him, late in life, to whistle. After college, they had gone to New York together.

  That night Starley and Alice met him for drinks at My Blue Heaven. They were late, so at the time Donald was to meet them, he crossed the street and went into the bar. He had almost finished his gin-and-tonic when they came in. He was sucking on the wedge of lime, and liking its greenness. The booths were padded in blue plastic, and there were silver-flecked blue Formica tabletops. Up near the ceiling were tiny twinkling blue lights. On the wall in back of the bar was a big cutout of Rita Hay worth, in a striped bathing suit; it had been stuck on a piece of board lettered “The One That Got Away,” which had formerly held the huge plastic fish that was now hanging at the other end of the bar, its snout pointed up the skirt of Marilyn Monroe, who was pouting and pushing her full white skirt down as if, unexpectedly, a wind storm had just started up between her knees. There was, next to this, an anatomically correct baby-boy doll, painted Day-Glo blue.

  “None of this would have happened if you had gone to the beach for your vacation,” Alice said to Donald.

  “I wanted to be with her. Her kid was in school. Everything was going fine until the little bastard flunked plane geometry.”

  “Get him a calculator,” Alice said.

  “Plane geometry isn’t the sort of course that a calculator would help in,” Starley said.

  “Give me a light, Dickie,” Alice said.

  He lit her cigarette.

  “I don’t think this place is as funny as I used to,” Alice said. Nobody said anything.

  “I’m in a bad mood, and I apologize for it,” Alice said. “All week I’ve been trying to give up smoking by smoking these cigarettes that are made of lettuce.”

 
“Why don’t you call Marilyn and see if she won’t come have a drink with us?” Starley said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why do we have to be here if he’s going to have a drink with her, Dickie? I’d feel awkward. I already feel sick to my stomach.”

  “Then put that thing out.”

  “I can’t. I need to smoke in social situations.”

  Years before, in New York, Starley had told Donald that his only misgiving about marrying Alice was her chain-smoking. The smoke made him cough. At the wedding reception there had been little silver trays with pastel-colored Nat Sherman cigarettes.

  They sat looking at the tabletop. The waiter was avoiding them. The waiter had apple-pink puckered cheeks like Howdy Doody.

  “Do you think you would do us a favor?” Alice said. “Dickie and I haven’t been out to dinner in so long that I can’t remember it, and the sitter could only come for an hour tonight. Do you think you could go stay with Anita?”

  “Alice!” Starley said. “He doesn’t want to be our baby-sitter.”

  “That’s okay, Starley,” Donald said. “It doesn’t matter where I brood. You go out and have dinner. I’ll go over to your place and watch Anita.”

  “Thank you,” Alice said.

  Starley rolled his eyes dramatically. He stood up, and then Alice bumped out of the booth. She looked heavier. Her skirt was wrinkled. Mascara had smudged under one eye. The summer before, he and Starley had picked up a whore after a day of fishing on Chesapeake Bay, and while he went at it with her, Donald had sat drunkenly on the floor across the room, casting his line into her hair. There was a little plastic worm attached to the fishing pole, and once he missed and she reached down and pushed the thing off of her breast, saying, “Ugh! Make him stop!” “She says she wants you to stop, Starley,” Donald said. Then the whore started giggling, and Starley frowned at him. “She says she wants you to quit it,” he said. He was drunk. He was naked. Earlier (this was in a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge) he had put his underpants on his head and marched around saying he was Ponce de Leon (Florida was on his mind; his son was on his mind). They played tag. The whore was easy to catch because she didn’t want to play tag in the first place, so she never really tried to get away. When she bumped into a table and nicked her shin, she refused to play anymore. They all sat around drinking gin-and-tonics. She flipped a coin to see who got her first. Whoever got “tails” got her. Much later the three of them stood, in towels, on the tiny balcony outside their room. In the parking lot a family was unloading their station wagon. There was a windblown mother, and a husband not quite as tall as she was who carried an infant in a baby seat, and a little girl, about five, who sat on the gravel and made demands as her father removed suitcases. The little girl started crying, and her mother fumbled her up in her arms, and they all marched into the Howard Johnson’s and disappeared.