Another You

by Ann Beattie

  Were there still discos? Did anyone use the word “hip” anymore? He’d wondered that when Sonja said it, and he wondered again as he pulled his robe off the hook on the back of the bathroom door and walked downstairs, heading toward the kitchen telephone. Raves, that’s what the students talked about: going to a rave. He had no image for raves, except that the idea of them made the kitchen look ridiculously banal, bleached as it was by morning sunlight, crumbs on the floor, white dishtowel dangling from the handle of the refrigerator so that the refrigerator seemed to be offering itself in surrender. He called student health and asked to speak to Jenny Oughton.

  “Dr. Oughton?” the young woman who answered replied. “She’s not available. May I take a message?”

  “I know she’s involved in research,” he said. “I’m the husband of her friend Sonja Lockard. I teach at the college. I need to speak to her about”—how to phrase it?—“a private matter.”

  “Certainly,” the voice said. He could almost sense the young girl drawing herself up to full height: responsive; businesslike. “Let me put you on hold.”

  He waited. He pulled up a stool and sat at the counter by the wall phone, resting his arm on a pile of newly laundered underwear Sonja had not yet taken to their bedroom. He found himself wondering if the women’s socks corresponded to their underwear. Perhaps, because Sonja’s usual socks, navy-blue knee-highs, seemed a practical accompaniment to her white cotton pants. She had gotten rid of her bikini briefs, she had told him when he asked, because she could easily tuck the T-shirts she wore under blouses and sweaters into her pants when the pants rose to her waist, but the T-shirt would work its way up if she tried to keep it in place anchored under bikini briefs. It shocked him, sometimes: how mundane, but how compelling, were the things his wife told him. Was it because he loved her that he could retain such information—even conjure it up apropos of almost nothing, while sitting on a stool and glancing over his shoulder, thinking about eating a banana? He wondered, idly, if there was any poem that contained the word “banana.” “Peach,” certainly: what Magritte had done for the green apple, Eliot had done for the peach. For a moment he thought how different, how absurdly different, the whole poem would be if Prufrock had wondered whether he dared to eat a banana.

  “Sonja’s husband?” a woman’s voice was saying on the phone. “Hello, Marshall. I’m on a speakerphone; that’s all there is in this room, and several people are here with me. I just wanted you to know.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. Was he talking to the woman with the socks patterned with roses, or the heavy-duty gray ones that men and women alike wore, with the band of red around the top?

  “What can I do for you?” Jenny said.

  The gray ones.

  “I’m actually wondering if there’s any time today I could stop by to talk to you briefly. It’s about a student—a slightly complicated situation, and I’m calling to ask you a favor, having to do with her seeing someone at student health.”

  “If this has to do with psychological counselling, I’d need to refer you to someone else. Sonja may have told you that I’m involved in research right now.” There was a slight echo on the line as she spoke the last word of each sentence. “Now,” he heard, in a quiet tinny waver.

  “Still, could I drop by?” he said.

  “Certainly.” Gray socks; he was right. “I usually take a break around two, or you could come when we close at five.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be there at five.”

  As he replaced the phone, it rang almost immediately. It was Sonja, calling from Littleton, ten miles away, wanting to know whether she had left her gloves in the basket by the door, or whether she’d forgotten them at the house she’d shown earlier that morning. He sprinted into the hallway and saw them there: the long suede gloves. “Weren’t you cold without them when you walked out the door?” he asked.

  “I was sleepwalking,” she said.

  The second call—it was probably best the calls hadn’t come in reverse order; it would have been difficult to withhold the news from Sonja—was that Evie had had some sort of seizure, not a stroke, a seizure, and was awaiting transfer to the hospital. For a long time he’d known this was coming, and yet he hadn’t known, had done nothing to prepare himself. He had conveniently pretended that Evie’s situation wouldn’t worsen; he had seized upon whatever encouraging news Sonja gave him after her visits: that Evie had laughed at a joke; that she’d suggested he might help out by baking cakes, which Sonja thought might have been a subtle joke on Evie’s part. He knew he had let her down in big ways as well as small. He wished, foolishly, that he had baked a cake for Evie. He wrote down the name of the doctor and the hospital’s phone number, thanked the person who had called, then stood with his hands in the pockets of his robe, looking out the back door at the white lawn, the white bushes. The wind was gusting, blowing the fine, dry snow upward as the sky sent down more in a gradual sift. If Evie died, he was going to be filled with regret, and Sonja was going to be very, very sad. If she died, he was going to feel guilty that he hadn’t accompanied Sonja on her many visits to see her: he was always secretly pleased when Sonja made the trips alone, relieved that he wouldn’t be expected to relive the past with Evie or, worse, be asked to read to her from her anthology of poetry: insipid, rhymed poems that were a travesty of the genre, as if he, a professor, were inseparable from the drivel any uninspired fool had written. A seizure: What did that mean? You lived in your body, but when something went wrong, you had to consult a doctor to tell you what had happened. It was absurd, how little everyone knew: it was like inhabiting a house while at the same time suspecting that if you peeked under the rug, you would realize the floor sagged because the supports had rotted, and what that meant was that you had several options. Inspect for termites, first off, everyone in agreement. Then, if termites could be ruled out, what? Surgery? The various degrees of pain imagined and computed, rarely referred to directly. Except that if the problems were bad enough, you could always—at least hypothetically—exchange one house for another, while the body was the only house you would ever inhabit, inescapable, the decor dealt out hereditarily, the gradual deterioration nothing you could do very much about. From his robe he took the note he’d pocketed earlier, in the upstairs bathroom, and looked again at Sonja’s simple house. It seemed, like all symbols, evocative and also mysterious—a serviceable image that would communicate simply at the same time it implied complexity: there was no such thing as a winding road that was only a winding road (thank you, Robert Frost; thanks, Beatles). As he pocketed the note on his way upstairs to dress, he wondered why he had fixated on the little drawing, decided that it had provoked his thoughts because Sonja’s hand had drawn it; he was appreciating not so much the drawing as the creation of his wife, his wife who simplified complexities, or who tried to. Come to think of it, the drawing was not much different from what she did all the time: keeping things running smoothly; assuming responsibility and not talking about all the trivia involved in getting so many things done—including her ability to deal with emotional issues he’d just as soon sidestep. Sonja remembered birthdays and anniversaries, Sonja dispatched flowers and thoughtful notes, Sonja got in the car every week and drove to visit Evie regardless of the weather, as long as the roads were passable. Though that particular drive might be one Sonja would not be taking in the future. It was slightly strange, he thought, that the bad news had shaken him so little; he worried more for Sonja’s sake than for Evie’s, imagined himself dutifully accompanying Sonja through the formalities of hospital visits or attending the funeral, saying the proper things, paying whatever bills needed to be paid. When Evie first went into the nursing home, he had gotten power of attorney. One of the first things he had had to do was get his name put on Evie’s checking account so he could pay her bills. The newly printed checks had come with Evie’s name and his printed double-decker at the top, with both addresses, but only his phone number. The checks themselves astonished him. When
he ordered the new checks they printed the information on Evie’s former choice of decorative checks: faded images of pirouetting ballerinas at the barre and larger dancers in the foreground swirling behind the line to write in the name and amount, their pastel tutus and long-legged pink torsos reflected in a rectangular mirror, the whole surface of the check filled with tornadoes of clashing colors so that only the deepest black ink could effectively overlay the pandemonium. With these checks he had sent payment for Evie’s diapers (payment made directly to the diaper service, not included in the regular monthly expenses at the nursing home), payment to the phone company for Evie’s monthly service (she dialled their number exclusively, he saw), payment for a tweed jacket she had asked Sonja to order from a catalog, and which he first had seen worn backward, like a straitjacket, because Evie had gotten confused dressing herself the morning he and Sonja visited. Looking at her in the chair, soon after receiving the gaudy checks, he had imagined the ballerinas surrounding her in her strange, Ivy League tweed bondage, seen them the way, in certain light, he had sometimes been sure he could see the currents of the air, shimmering at the edge of the shoreline or far in the distance, wavering above the mirage of a lake his car approached across long distances of hot asphalt. Those visits to Evie had seemed interchangeable with taking a long drive: time passing slowly, the speed of the car seeming slower than what the speedometer indicated, a drowsiness overcoming him until he found he needed caffeine, yearned to stretch.

  Evie had always loved him, but it was so clear whom she had come to love most, the light in her eyes sparkling when she looked from him to Sonja. He was at a disadvantage with Evie, of course, because when she became frail, it frightened him, and he backed off. And what did he know about women that age? Young women he did know something about, because he came in contact with them, but he never imagined his students old; it was not that he really thought of them as forever young, but that beyond a certain point, he knew whatever effect he had had on their lives would dissipate. There were not very many Darcy Barrowses. He would be mixed in with other memories, perhaps existing only as a person who provided a footnote to the fondly remembered campus. Or they might remember his name but not much else about him, as they remembered a line of a poem—time would erode the body of the poem and let linger, at best, a line or a phrase. He would no longer be as tall or as handsome, as original or funny, because they would have spent their adult lives inflating and deflating their husbands and lovers. Some would inevitably remember with embarrassment the silly gifts they had bestowed on him, the curlicued calligraphy written on cards with implied messages or, worse yet, cards that seemed humorous because they’d been young and had not yet heard all the jokes. Sometimes—a few times—students had tried to do it over again. The girl who had given him the dumb card of a pig flying over a rainbow writing a real note, years later, about how difficult her life had become and acknowledging what had once been her adolescent crush on him. The person who had given him a cute little plastic lion cub inside a geode now apologizing, in effect, by knitting and sending a conservative blue scarf. The strange cookies, studded with things no adult would want, like chopped Reese’s peanut-butter cups, or miniature marshmallows, replaced by a simple chocolate bar mailed from Paris. Though he got quite a few cards at Christmas—at least for a few years after they’d left, from those students who had particularly liked him—they usually thought of him not at holidays, but at odd times, such as when the line of a poem they’d studied with him was suddenly clarified by what they’d experienced, or when, in their travels, they finally saw a particular painting or sculpture that had been nothing but an allusion in a poem until the moment they stood in front of it and it shimmered. So many of his former students were out there, the ones who grew to his height, but who still thought he was taller than he was, the ones who would always see him running an impatient hand through bushy hair, though his hair was thinning, those who against all evidence continued to believe that he had unique insights, and that he had been speaking to them, personally. And this one thing was always true: in the letters and postcards they sent, they never thought to ask if he remembered them. No doubt that would have been as absurd, considering what he represented, considering their projections onto him, as beginning a letter, Dear Father: As you may remember, I am your son. Well—it was probably true that he simplified their young lives the same way they romanticized his. Or at least he had, until recently, when—without his at first realizing it—his students had begun to seem strange; strangers who were not recognizable, very young people whose motivation he didn’t understand, or feel at all drawn into. The gap had widened. Still, those who cared about him cared about him, but now there were limits to his concern, or even to his infrequent, vague affections. They weren’t even his children; they were somebody else’s children, who would go off and do whatever they did, and after so many years of teaching, he might as well admit he wasn’t doing it because of them, but for personal reasons—personal reasons, plus his salary. He was passing time among them because he liked to read books. Also, the lecturing made for a little excitement; he gave himself credit for impassioned yet overstated appreciations of poets’ rather ordinary terrains, for his dense explanations of matters just slightly opaque. And then he would turn his attention to the students who took the bait, to those whose eyes widened with incredulity. Continuing, just as outrageously, he would then smile slyly at Cheryl Lanier, or anyone else who caught on, at once acknowledging his outrageousness, but also making clear that he had favorites in the classroom, to whom he was speaking directly.

  He watched as Sonja’s car came slowly into the drive. It was not until he saw her car that his eyes filled with tears. The neighborhood boys had shovelled the drive early in the morning; otherwise, it would be impassable. They’d be around for their payment as soon as school was out: the big-eared boy the girls called Mickey Mouse and his younger, towheaded brother who was so diminutive they taunted him as Tinkerbell. They had their routine down, Mickey and Tink: Mickey shovelled first, followed by Tink, who widened the path by throwing snow off to the left and right, having the more difficult job but working fast enough to keep up with his brother.

  Sonja stepped out of the car, the wind lashing her hair across her face, her bare hand reaching up to pin it back. I have been standing around the house, staring out one window or the other all morning, Marshall thought. Now I’ll have to stare into my wife’s face and tell her Evie has had a seizure. He frowned as he thought of it. Maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe it was made up, invented for effect, as someone in his class had recently accused him of doing when he gave a Marxist interpretation of one of Robert Frost’s poems. Maybe Evie was fine. Maybe Sonja would tell him that.

  “I think I got a sale,” Sonja said as he came down the stairs into the front hallway to greet her. “Cross your fingers and hope this one goes through. The housing inspector goes there tomorrow, and I don’t think these people are kidding about being able to pay cash.”

  He embraced her, realizing as he did that she would misunderstand and think he was happy about the upcoming sale. He was stalling for time, though what help could a few seconds be? He pulled Sonja tightly to him and told her there was bad news: Evie had had a seizure. He could tell from her suddenly rigid body that Sonja believed this entirely. “But Marshall—I just saw her,” Sonja whispered.

  “They’ve taken her to the morgue,” he said, the word out of his mouth before he realized what he was saying. “To the hospital,” he said quickly.

  “Which is it?” she said, looking at him as if he were mad.

  He was so surprised at the stupidity his awkwardness produced that he didn’t dare speak again. He looked blankly back at her.

  “You think I can’t handle it if she’s dead?” Sonja’s eyes had filled with tears.

  “She isn’t dead, she’s fine,” he said.

  “Fine?” Sonja echoed.

  At that moment, all he could think to do was to throw himself into Sonja’s arms—thi
s time he was not embracing her so much as he was pleading with her to embrace him. Which she did, standing there sniffling, her head against his chest. Finally, she said, “Why are we just standing here?”

  * * *

  It wasn’t until five-thirty that he realized he’d forgotten to call Jenny Oughton, and when he did call, from a pay phone in the hospital lounge, he left his message, his apology, on the answering machine. The clinic was closed for the weekend. He would have to ask Sonja for Jenny’s home number, call her there, and explain why he hadn’t shown up. As he stood talking to the answering machine, he realized that he was looking at what had by now become a very familiar face: the face of a coyote on the wildlife magazine that always seemed to be thrown somewhere in his bathroom, the magazine that was also thrown on a tabletop in the hospital lounge.

  As a child, it had been his responsibility to keep the house tidy. Gordon was called upon for other services—the more difficult things, actually, such as fixing the toaster or planing the bottoms of humidity-swollen doors—but it had been expected of Marshall that he put things back in their places, replace burned-out lightbulbs, sweep. Evie had hated the sound of the vacuum, so most often they had swept, in unison, Evie accelerating the pace to see how long it would take him to catch on. And it had always taken too long: he had quickly fallen in step, and would have worked frantically if she had not eventually leaned on her broom handle and told him to relax, that they weren’t sweeping to win a race. A clean house had simply been expected: shelved books; straight hall runners; pots and pans in the proper place. He knew that now he had become disorganized. Most days he lost his keys, forgot to put money in his wallet, wrote notes about errands that needed doing that he then left behind. Sonja would shake her head in disbelief when he attempted to make the bed, the sheet hanging low on one side and the blanket hanging almost to the floor on the other, the bedspread with its design off-center, both pillows mashed together, half under the bedspread, half-exposed. He knew that Sonja and Evie laughed about his ineptitude, though now that he thought about it, that, too, might be rooted in an unconscious protest against having to straighten up the mess after a night’s chaotic tossing and turning, or—though it had become less frequent—lovemaking. What a thought: lovemaking. So very long ago: his father and Evie. The night sounds. The wordless activity he had drowned out, when necessary, by whispering made-up stories to frighten his brother. How anxious he had once been for silence, wanting both to hear them, and then to hear them become silent.