Another You

by Ann Beattie

  He could remember distinctly lying in bed, a twin bed far more comfortable than the bed he was lying in now, taxing Gordon’s patience by wanting everything the adults had said that day verified or refuted by the one person he trusted absolutely. What a reluctant interpreter Gordon had been: caught in the middle, Marshall now understood, having to decide whether it was better that Marshall believed what they said, because that would make things easier on everyone, or whether he should respect his little brother’s intelligence and give him more information, allowing him to see through the adults’ rhetoric, their shaky scenarios passed off as absolutes, their parents no more convinced what direction to take than their mapless children. For years, Gordon had pointed out the fallacies in their parents’ logic, kept from sleep by the necessity of setting Marshall straight: the parents needed to believe in Santa Claus, so it was best to pretend; their father had sent them from the table not because they’d had inappropriate fits of giggling, but because he wanted time alone with his wife. In retrospect, he had been a burden—more than he’d suspected, thinking over their nighttime debriefings this many years later. He could remember Gordon saying, She’s really dying, and He doesn’t think you’re a sissy for playing with paper dolls, he wants someone to blame for her getting sick, because he can’t blame her and he can’t blame himself. You just happened to have your stupid paperdolls out. He could also remember climbing into Gordon’s bed, when no amount of reasoning would work to make him feel better, and Gordon’s deep sighs, as if Marshall’s presence were a boulder rolled onto his tiny island of mattress to displace him, though another part of him knew that Gordon was flattered to have him there. Yes, she’s sick; she’s dying, he remembered Gordon saying, whispering it with real urgency, but there’s something else, he had said. I can’t figure it out, but there’s something I don’t know.

  It was Marshall’s last conscious thought, sliding lower in the bed, fastidiously turning back the green bedspread he automatically assumed was soiled, settling himself in the bed’s deep crease as well as he could, the hum of a headache boring into him. The idea of being on his way to see Gordon was at once comforting and discomforting; he had asked so much of Gordon—probably too much. And then when they became adults they had drifted apart. He had drifted away from the person who had been his life raft, yet he had the idea now that he needed, at least temporarily, to return; that even if McCallum hadn’t seized on the idea of a trip, he would have made the trip alone. It was a time in his life when Gordon shouldn’t have any power over him; everyone knew that at some point the complexity, the sheer accumulation of experiences, evened out age differences between people. He supposed it was not so much his insights that he wanted as his guaranteed sympathy: his burdensome friend; his disenfranchised wife. Though he wasn’t talkative on the phone, face-to-face he would become again the Gordon Marshall had always known, the brother he could still turn to.

  He looked across the room, as he had when he was a child, though instead of seeing the reassuring sight of his brother asleep—the explanations all registered, Gordon leading the way even into sleep—he saw the lumpish mass of McCallum.

  18

  MARSHALL—the note from McCallum began. I wouldn’t do this if I thought I’d really be leaving you stranded, but I’m afraid I’ve been getting you down. I do have to see Janet Lanier, but am not going to end her marriage (I guess that’s been done already) or force myself on her sexually, and if I do, I won’t tie her up (joke). Got up a little after five, found diner across the highway just opening. Looked at my horoscope. Scorpio must “trust those from the past to provide knowledge about your present.” I don’t suppose I have to justify this to you, but it’s pretty hard to see myself as Prince Charming—Cheryl’s wrong about my power—but what I’m hoping for from Janet is some acknowledgment I’m not a monster, either. I got some money out of the cash machine (behind 7-Eleven, if you’re interested; it’s one of those new ones. Screen says HELLO, MR. MCCALLUM when you slide in card) that I’m going to press on her. Not my cock, my money. As if I could get it up feeling this bad. One more addendum, slightly embarrassing: the same way you were telling me you still look up to your older brother, I look up to you. I know there are problems in your marriage right now, but I also know they’re going to blow over. Hey—at least you didn’t marry Susan. If she loved the kid as much as she said, she wouldn’t have gone after me, landing herself in jail, leaving him stranded. Can still hear the old lady’s gasp when I called her from the hospital and told her what her daughter had done.

  Marshall turned to the other side. He looked at McCallum’s little arrow, surprised that McCallum might think he wouldn’t have the sense to turn the bag over. On the flip side, McCallum’s writing became smaller, sloppier.

  About Boston: felt guilty cheating on Susan, though as you might suppose, our sex life wasn’t great. That trip wasn’t the first time Livan and I had sex. Afterwards, I had a nightmare in which Susan’s greatest fear (along with doing anything positive to help the kid, that is) materialized. I was Prince Charming, or at least somebody richer than I am, and Susan was a bag lady, which is always what she feared she’d end up. She wanted me to join the Masons, so she’d have a decent old age home to go to if I died. Not in the dream, in real life. We had fights because I wouldn’t join the Masons. A guy who writes in “Gore Vidal” on every Presidential election ballot, a hippie who spent his college years in SDS, and she wanted me to join the Masons. In the dream, I was kissing Livan, walking pretty much where we actually walked, area around Boston Common, and the b. lady threatened us with a gun. I talked the b. lady into dropping it. Then I kissed her, and suddenly it was Susan standing there. I grabbed her hands. Then she was handcuffed by the police for causing a public disturbance. Livan woke me up because I was grabbing her wrist. Bits and pieces of what Livan later accused me of are true, but they weren’t done to her the way she said, they were things I’d described to her from nightmares.

  You’ve been more of a friend to me than anybody since I lost Livan. No kidding: I once thought that despite her age, despite the fact she was a girl, she was my best friend. Trust you know me well enough to know that I know what I’m doing. This afternoon will get ticket back north from Roanoke, try to pick up pieces. I appreciate everything you’ve done.

  What do you sign a note written on two sides of a takeout bag? Best Wishes? Best wishes, Happy New Year next year, Hang loose, God bless.—McCallum

  It was an incredible document. The obvious thing to do would be call the Laniers’ house. McCallum would be glad to hear from him, reassured to know Marshall worried about him after receiving the note; he’d also no doubt want him to go there and sit around the kitchen table, listen along with him to the woman’s story, or even—God forbid—he’d want him to listen to more of his own. He sat in the car, where he’d been sitting since he looked through the window and saw the note on the driver’s seat. The first thing he noticed was that without a passenger the car was quiet and seemed infinitely spacious. He tossed the bag in the backseat, rubbed his hands over his face. McCallum had mentioned Roanoke. Where was Roanoke, and how had McCallum known there was an airport there?

  He went back into the dingy motel room. A maid’s cart sat on the blacktop outside, and a fat black maid was cleaning in the room next door. He wanted to be gone from the room as much as the maid wanted him gone. He decided to forget about shaving and tossed the few things he’d brought in with him into his duffel bag. As he picked up his shaver, he saw that one of McCallum’s dirty shirts hung on the back of the bathroom door, and when he saw it a feeling went through him almost as if he’d seen the ghost of McCallum. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Neither was he proud of himself for leaving the shirt hanging there until he felt ashamed—of course he would have to turn around and get the shirt. He zipped the duffel bag and picked up the shirt, exiting the room just as the maid came to the open door. He said good-morning to her; she returned his greeting. He tossed the duffel bag on the backseat—no more Mc
Callum, who’d stretched out there for naps periodically—and got halfway to the office, on foot, before he realized McCallum had taken his denim shirt. It had been in a plastic bag on the floor of the backseat, a last-minute grab on his way out of the house in New Hampshire, Sonja thoughtfully having decided to go to the cleaner’s the day before he left. His next-to-favorite blue shirt, and McCallum had just helped himself.

  Behind the desk was a thin woman with a missing front tooth. She stood behind dish gardens and potted plants that had a lavender Gro-Lite aimed at them from a bulb clipped near the top of a coat-rack. He saw that a philodendron had been trained to grow coiled around a toilet plunger, which had been painted white. At the top, with nowhere else to climb, the plant looped down and was headed for a pink ceramic elephant with a begonia planted in its back. Small pots of African violets were dotted amid the larger plants, rounds of cotton underneath the bottom leaves, padding the rims. Stuck in some of the pots were drink swizzle sticks topped with pink plastic mermaids, or bright green sailboats.

  “Your brother paid the bill,” the woman said.

  Was it the woman’s supposition they were brothers, or had McCallum told her that? If he had, he’d probably guessed there was a good chance the woman would repeat the information.

  “Just need the key. I already given him the receipt,” she said.

  “My brother,” Marshall said. “Was he able to find out from you where the nearest airport was?”

  “Would have been, but didn’t ask,” the woman said. He saw that there was also a tooth missing on the bottom.

  “Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “Thank you,” the woman said.

  He went back to the car and drove to the diner across from the motel. Climbing the steps, he saw at the top a plaster rabbit and three small plaster bunnies clustered around an empty terra-cotta planter into which someone had thrown a beer can and a used rubber. Inside, on a metal stand, the local paper was piled up, with a canister attached to the side of the rack marked 25 CENT HONNOR SYSTEM. A child’s doll lay on the bottom shelf, its blue dress folded under its head. He passed through the fog of cigar smoke rising into the air from the man paying his bill at the register and walked to the back counter. A short man in a denim jumpsuit was crumbling saltines into a bowl of tomato soup. Two seats away, a woman looked straight ahead and puffed a cigarette, a full cup of coffee in front of her.

  “I’d like one of those bran muffins,” he said to the waitress, pointing into a hazy plastic container on the counter, “and a coffee to go. Light.”

  “Tuesday,” the woman said. “Second muffin, Danish, or cream horn half price. Only one cream horn left.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Then I guess I’ll have a Danish too.”

  “Apple raisin strawberry.”

  “Apple, please.”

  She poured coffee, put the top on the container. With plastic tongs, she lifted an apple Danish from a tray, centered it delicately on a precut piece of foil she pulled from a box, and wrapped it. Then she opened the container that held the bran muffin, lifted it with the tongs, and dropped it, unwrapped, into a white bag. She carefully placed the pastry in the bag, closed the top, and handed him the coffee separately. “Cream’s at the register,” she said.

  “I think my brother came in earlier,” he said. “Walked a little funny? Nice looking, about my height. I wondered how he was feeling this morning.”

  “Feeling like he meant to leave town!” the waitress said. “I gave him our biggest takeout bag to write on, and I thought: I never seen a man write for so long about how to get to the airport. Either that is the most forgetful man in the world, or I gave such detailed directions I scared him to death.”

  “Let me have a beef barley soup and more of these crackers,” the short man down the counter said.

  “Let me once in my life live someplace where people eat breakfast at breakfast and lunch at lunch and dinner at dinner,” the woman two seats away said to the waitress.

  “I heard that at Donald Trump’s Atlantic City casino, if you’re winning big you can call for poached eggs on toast at two in the morning and have them carried right up to you on a silver platter as long as you don’t push back your chair and walk away with your winnings,” the waitress said.

  “You thinking about rejoining the fire department?” the woman said. It was the first indication she knew the man.

  “Might,” he said.

  “Silly snit, if you ask me. This isn’t a community where one person taking exception to another person can ruin things to the point where we don’t have enough firemen.”

  “Beef barley,” the waitress said, lifting the pan off the burner and pouring it into a bowl. She put the bowl on a plate and carried it to him, doing a deep knee bend to pick up one package of crackers on the way.

  “I order more crackers, tell me no,” the man said.

  “That’s what I like,” the waitress said. “A man who tells me what to tell him. You want to put the words right in my mouth, Randall?”

  “ ‘Oh, Randall, you look so handsome today,’ ” Randall said in falsetto.

  The woman on the stool laughed.

  “Hear me repeating them?” the waitress said. “Then everybody’d really have something to laugh about, because Betty would have finally lost her mind.”

  Marshall smiled, taking the bag and coffee container to the cash register.

  “What do you think it is about banana nut?” the woman said, peering into the bag, then punching cash register keys. A dollar and fifty-one cents came up, and the woman automatically reached into a dish for a penny as she gave Marshall two quarters. He pocketed them, thanking her, then took two small, wet half-and-half containers from an ice bucket. “Used to be everybody preferred banana nut.”

  In the car, he broke off a piece of muffin and ate it while looking at the map. He wasn’t sure that he shouldn’t call McCallum and wish him well, just for the sake of closure. There was a phone booth in the gas station, beyond the diner, but someone was inside. Marshall moved his finger along Route 84 toward this day’s destination: somewhere in South Carolina. It couldn’t start to get warm fast enough. Just walking from the diner to the car, his feet felt frozen. He scuffed them back and forth on the floor, trying to warm them a little with the friction. He turned on the radio and searched for a station, stopped when he heard music he thought was Beethoven. The person was still in the phone booth. He took another bite of muffin, dropped the remaining lump in the bag. He peeled back a little rectangle of plastic from the top of the coffee container and sucked up mostly air, deliberately, testing to see how hot the coffee was. Hot enough to make him shiver, because his body was so cold. No McCallum up front, so he could leave the map unfolded on the seat. On the floor, he saw one of McCallum’s pens. Thinking about that, and about the shirt, he had the sudden image of a snowman that had melted and could be conjured up only by the carrot on the ground, the black coal eyes. That brought to mind the snowman and snow woman on campus he had seen when he went back after Evie’s funeral. He thought briefly about the snow woman’s breasts with their spoutlike nipples, then remembered Sophia Androcelli’s irate letter to the newspaper, preceded by her equally irate comment to him that he shouldn’t dismantle the snowpeople when he went outside. The person was off the phone, so he started his ignition and drove onto the road, then immediately turned off, coasting to a stop in front of the phone booth. When he got there, he was sure he didn’t want to call McCallum. Instead, suddenly and surprisingly on the verge of tears, he dialled his own number, to talk to Sonja. His hand was shaking. An automated voice asked him to reenter his card number. Then the call went through, and he heard the familiar double ring of his home phone, over and over, ringing in the empty house. She wasn’t there. It seemed more than possible she wouldn’t be, but it made him suspicious that she might be with Tony. It seemed completely far-fetched she would be buying groceries. Ludicrous to assume she would have returned to the dry cleaner’s so quickly. Then, tak
ing a deep breath, he hung up and began rationalizing another way. What if he had reached her? What was there to tell her? More about McCallum’s odd behavior; chitchat in a diner. He drove away, but was only on the road a few minutes when he decided he’d made the wrong decision; it was the sound of her voice he needed to hear, not Beethoven, not his own roiling thoughts, the silent conversations he’d begun having with himself. He dialled the area code, but couldn’t remember the number of Hembley and Hembley. The thought of Tony made his fingers tingle, so he took another deep breath and reminded himself that except for calling, he wouldn’t need to have anything to do with Tony ever again. Even Sonja was fed up with Tony. Hadn’t she said that? Forcing calmness into his voice, he reached New Hampshire information and asked for the number, tracing the numbers on the dusty metal shelf under the phone. His fingers were so sweaty, the numbers were perfectly legible. He called the number, hoping Tony wouldn’t answer the phone. Gwen, the other agent who worked there, answered, but he didn’t want to talk to her either; he disguised his voice, finding it very little trouble to sound tremulous and slightly high-pitched. And she was there. Sonja had gone back to work. Sonja was there!

  “I’m so glad I got you,” he said. “I miss you. I’m standing beside the highway sweating, and it’s not that hot here. I’m—”

  “I know you hate it when I do this, but I’ve really got to put you on hold,” she said.

  Her voice sounded official. She did not sound delighted to hear from him. Probably Tony was standing right in front of her. Probably she and Tony were having a discussion. Even Gwen might be in on it.