by Ann Beattie
“Hang it up, Richard,” Janet Lanier hollered.
The phone was hung up. When she spoke to him, the absence of background noise was stunning, almost surreal, like trees becoming still in the wake of a storm.
“I assumed you knew. Cheryl said you knew she’d been raped—how would she not have told you about her great savior Jack? Did you know Cheryl had been raped?”
“She told me,” he said.
“By one of the nicest people, I thought, I’d ever known. I have to believe her. I wish she’d said something at the time. But now I find that I was the last to know.” She cleared her throat. “Of course, I have to believe her,” she said again.
It was incredibly perplexing. So Cheryl had known McCallum all along? Known him when Livan Baker made her accusation? Known that he had come to be with her the night she came into Dolly’s restaurant, and that was why she was so troubled when she discovered both that Marshall was present and also that he meant to contact her mother? McCallum had instigated this trip knowing he’d jump ship in Virginia. Why hadn’t he just flown there? Why had it been necessary to involve him, to mislead him by saying the rendezvous with Cheryl was for his sake, too?
“You knew that he arranged financial aid for Cheryl, didn’t you?” Janet Lanier said. “All those years we kept in touch, and he was so helpful. So ‘supportive,’ I believe the current term is. He sent me so many letters years ago. Do you know, I began to fantasize we’d get together when he finished college. We’d get married, we’d have nice lust instead of backseat lust. All these years later, suddenly there’s Jack, standing in my kitchen. The two of them, come to set me straight about what I didn’t know. And the worst thing is, I forgive her. She’s foolish, but I’m stupid. Do you know what I thought as they stood there, my Cheryl so brazen, trying to change the conversation by blaming me for having her baptized and naming her a godfather, as if those things were the same as arranging to have her raped? I thought: He’ll stop at nothing. A boy from summer camp, who once taught me to swim. He used to stand out there in the water, hollering instructions, blowing his whistle, and then before we got out of the water he’d always do the same thing: the dead man’s float. He could hold his breath so long, we’d all race for him in a panic. I can still see him in the pond, not moving a muscle. Then he comes to Buena Vista and takes my daughter’s hand, claiming to be in love with her. Whatever she thinks she’s doing, I know he’s still doing the dead man’s float. What does he think he’s going to do to support her? He’ll have to take her back to New Hampshire. Is that what’s going to happen? Is she going to live with him down the street from you?”
“I don’t live anywhere near him,” he said. He was grateful that there was finally something he could say.
“A thought like this doesn’t even cross your mind. It reminds me that most murder victims know their murderer. Or is that an old wives’ tale? I think they know them, that they’re lovers or aunts or uncles or whatever they are. The same way so many people get broken bones from accidents right in their own house. People walk fine when they’re outside, then they slip in the tub. Have you heard this, or am I imagining it?”
He said, “I have heard that.” He wanted to get off the phone. He had called someone who was drunk, whose life was a mess, who had been deceived all her life and then slapped in the face.
“And to think: I used to write her letters asking if she had dates. I thought she might be at dances, or going to parties and building snowmen—the pictures I’d seen in the Benson College catalog. Are you sure you don’t want to come by so we can cry on each other’s shoulders? You don’t exactly seem to be holding up your end of the conversation.”
“I’m eleven hundred miles away,” he said.
“You are? Where are you?”
“Islamorada,” he told her again. He wouldn’t blame her for not believing him; it sounded like an invented name for an invented place. Islamorada. How about Uranus? Just some strange point on the planet where he was standing in a parking lot, talking on the phone. Why? Why had he not learned that McCallum and everything associated with McCallum did nothing but cause him pain. He was a compulsive liar. Dangerous, probably. Set on a trajectory he sucked people into, tossing them aside at his convenience. He felt humiliated for both of them—for himself, and for Janet Lanier. To know McCallum was to be humiliated by your own vulnerabilities.
In the parking lot, a windblown couple got out of an old Olds-mobile convertible, the woman taking off her visor and running her fingers through her hair, the man in a tank top and white Bermuda shorts bending forward and backward to stretch himself. Though the lot was mostly empty, it held quite an assortment of cars: a blue Miata with New Mexico plates that read GOERNER; a Jeep; Toyotas; BMWs. There were window boxes filled with bright pink flowers and drips of dark green ivy. Over one of the window boxes a monarch butterfly hovered. Two monarch butterflies. He thought of a photograph he had once seen of Vladimir Nabokov running with his butterfly net. He thought of Lolita. What a second-rate Lolita Cheryl Lanier had been—not particularly pretty, but most of all, distinct from Lolita in that she had not been genuinely needy; she was just another person who wanted things.
“Do you believe me when I tell you I didn’t have the slightest idea that McCallum and your daughter—”
“That makes two of us,” she said. “I’m glad to know it doesn’t have something to do with my lack of sophistication.”
“Sophistication,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a lack of sophistication. It’s just not possible to keep up with him.”
“You get thrown off by people who go to great lengths to explain themselves,” she said. “What I mean is, you take what they say to be explanations. I kept his letters explaining himself from the end of that summer until about 1975. I got rid of most of them when we moved. While I was packing boxes I reread them, and you know what? I was a grown woman by then, and I didn’t believe any longer I’d been the great love of his life, but I believed he still missed me. That I was special.”
“I’m sorry,” Marshall said. It sounded lame, inconclusive. It was probably the last time he would speak to Janet Lanier.
The man in white Bermudas came out carrying a bag of takeout food. The woman in the visor held his hand. An ordinary couple, he thought. Then he immediately wondered if there was such a thing as an ordinary couple.
“Your husband,” he said to Janet Lanier. “Is it true he’s got a girlfriend in Michigan?”
“True,” she said.
Why had he asked? He stared after the couple, the woman giving a little skip as she leaned into him and appeared to be saying something joking. He could not remember the last time he and Sonja had seemed close—close and casual about the closeness. They had let too many things from outside influence their moods: the routine of their jobs; Evie’s illness. Then he had an image of Cheryl Lanier, appearing like an apparition in the snowstorm, his pulling over to give her a ride, the moment when he involved himself in something from which he felt he was still trying to retreat.
“Why do you ask?” she said.
“Because I can’t believe anything either of them has ever told me. I wondered—generally, I sort of wondered whether you’re going to be all right,” he said.
Were those awkward words really the ones that came out of his mouth: “generally, I sort of wondered”?
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
“I’m sorry I’m so far from Buena Vista,” he said. “Right now, I think I’m probably the only person who could understand exactly what you’re saying, and you’re the only person who could understand—”
“That’ll change,” she said, a little abruptly. “Your wife will be very sympathetic about the hoops you’ve had to jump through.”
“We’ve had some trouble lately,” he said. “But you’re right, of course. She won’t believe the continuation of this story. Which I don’t think we’ve probably heard the end of, have we?”
“No. I can’t imagine we
have.”
“Your husband,” he said. “You aren’t worried about being physically harmed, are you?”
“What would make you ask that?”
“Well, clearly not intuition,” he said. “I don’t seem to have any of that.”
“Men don’t have it the way women do,” she said. “That’s true. But don’t blame yourself for not understanding Jack. Jack has to have an audience. He always did. He always finds it, too. Even if it takes doing the dead man’s float.”
“You were kids,” he said.
He and Janet Lanier had so clearly been an audience for McCallum’s madness. But he had been the audience for other things, too: if he stood behind a lectern and lectured on literature, he was still only speaking publicly about works for which he had been a passive, willing audience. As a child, he had followed instead of leading. It was always someone else—his mother, that night in the living room; Sonja, in a discussion he thought had been only that, an exchange of ideas, dropping the bomb about Tony; all the way back to Gordon, who had explained things, like Sherlock Holmes to the young Dr. Watson. He would have believed anything his older brother said. It was as if things were not real until Gordon discussed them. He could remember, with slight humiliation now, asking Gordon whether it was true it was going to rain the next day.
He said goodbye to Janet Lanier, vaguely aware that she had not answered his earlier question, but taking her evasion as a dismissal of his concerns. Cheryl had seemed so protective of her mother, but in thinking it over, maybe what she said, even about her mother’s physical appearance, had been untrue. Maybe she knew her mother was still pretty, but she wanted to pretend otherwise because she feared McCallum’s affections might waver. Maybe her hair was attractively gray, but Cheryl had needed to emphasize her mother’s age, as opposed to her own youthfulness. She was a seductive girl. He remembered sitting with her in the restaurant, her drinking his drink while he was on the phone. There he had been, telling a white lie to Sonja about whom he was with, while she had probably spent the day fucking Tony Hembley.
Everywhere he looked, there were couples in the restaurant. Couples in booths, everyone with someone else, only a few tables filled with people clustered together who seemed to be friends: the odd man out, the unaccompanied woman. The customers seemed happy, smiling, and tan, vacationers taking time out, intent on having a good time.
The waitress handed him the menu and a list of specials. He ordered a scotch and water, changed it to a gin and tonic before the waitress walked away. It seemed more tropical. He was somewhere called Islamorada. Out the window he saw the window boxes, the pink pansies, the monarchs, he saw now, plastic butterflies on springs, bobbing in the breeze.
21
DRIVING INTO KEY WEST he passed what seemed like endless shopping malls, filled with building-supply stores, open-air nurseries, discount liquor stores, stores selling aloe products. In spite of the state of the economy, the building boom was still on in Key West. Its advantage to Gordon was that it had allowed him to move off a distant key onto Key West itself, which Beth had been lobbying for since she’d married Gordon on a sailboat at sunset five years before.
The previous night, after talking to Janet Lanier, Marshall had called from the seafood restaurant. Beth had answered the phone after so many rings he’d been about to give up. A party roared in the background: the Byrds, he had decided, as the music overwhelmed Beth’s voice. The best he could make out was that Gordon and some friends had gone on a late-night sail. She urged him to come immediately, while there was still seafood pizza. He heard people yelling, splashing in the pool. “What will you give me.…” he heard. It was the Byrds.
He told a white lie. Told her he’d run out of steam, was stopping to spend the night at a motel he’d just checked into; he’d be in Key West before noon the next day. It sounded as if a tractor had toppled into the pool. “Oh God!” Beth said, the rest of her sentence drowned out by women shrieking and music overlaying the Byrds—live music, he guessed. He wondered who the neighbors were.
Gordon’s first wife, Caroline, had left him after five years, taking their daughter with her, moving to Mexico. Gordon had heard, from Caroline’s cousin Rawlins, who passed through Key West and went into the shop Gordon worked in, that Caroline had remarried another American while she was in medical school in Mexico, and that they’d gone to Rome to join a group of American and French doctors. When Caroline left the United States, Gordon decided to, as he put it, “cut my losses” and not have further contact with Caroline or with Julia. Caroline had been bitterly opposed to his having a relationship with his daughter. She had done everything she could to thwart him, but leaving the country had finally been successful.
Gordon’s second wife stayed married to him for about two years. She had a teenage son when they married, but the boy was in military school and visited infrequently, usually for a week or so during summer vacation. They’d lived in Fort Lauderdale then, and Gordon had been a late-night weekend disc jockey for the local radio station, as well as assistant manager of the bar Lissa worked in. Sonja had asked Lissa, when she married Gordon, what the boy’s interests were. She wanted to send him birthday presents. She was very thoughtful about that sort of thing. The answer, as best Marshall remembered, had been pornographic magazines and fencing, which had pretty much stymied Sonja in her pursuit of appropriate gifts. That marriage had also ended badly, with Lissa getting a quickie divorce and marrying a much older man. About that time, Gordon had started to work for the dive shop he’d stayed at until he started living with Beth. Then he’d gone into partnership with another person, borrowing money from Evie, which had slightly shocked Sonja, along with five thousand dollars from Marshall and Sonja after a desperate late-night phone call, which he’d paid back after a year, with interest. Sonja had returned the interest part of the check, and Gordon—whether he’d been sincere or meant to be funny—had sent a “thank-you” gift of a pitcher shaped like a parrot, a set of glass swizzle sticks topped with pineapples, cherries, and bananas, and a box of instant margarita mix. As far as Marshall knew, Gordon had lived alone in between Lissa and Beth. He’d married Lissa in a large wedding in her hometown of Memphis, wearing a rented tuxedo to accompany his bride, in an ornate white bridal dress she’d told Sonja her mother had kept on a dress form in her sewing room from the day Lissa turned sixteen. For her first marriage, Lissa had eloped, but her mother had never gotten rid of the dress. Once a week—this was true years after the second marriage and was probably still the routine—Lissa’s mother set her hairdryer on “cool” and blew air on the dress to remove any dust. The curtains were kept pulled in the room so the dress wouldn’t yellow. Sonja had related this to him with amazement, late one night in bed. He and Sonja and Evie had gone to the wedding, flying out of Boston and staying at the Peabody Hotel, which was famous for having a flock of ducks that got off the elevator and marched into the lobby to swim in the fountain twice a day. The day before the wedding, Sonja and Evie had gone to Graceland and bought plastic place mats depicting Elvis in his various jumpsuits, smiling. He could remember the place mats propped up on the window ledge, Sonja shaking her head at them as she sprawled on the big bed: all those views of dead Elvis in his sparkle suits.
He had only met Beth twice: soon after her wedding, and a year later, when she flew to New Hampshire with Gordon to attend Evie’s birthday party. She was now in her early forties, a short, slim woman with streaked blond hair and inch-long red fingernails who seemed to him a mixture of simultaneous shyness and extroversion. She had blushed and mumbled when anything resembling a personal question was asked of her, but she’d also brought a big suitcase filled with Mary Kay cosmetics, which she sold, and had insisted the women who had come for coffee and birthday cake stand under falling mists of various fragrances to see which most suited them. Evie’s birthday present had been a bottle of perfumed lotion and a small pink kit containing blush, eyeshadow, and lipstick. Evie wore no makeup. She gave it to Sonja after Beth left.
He passed the dive shop on Route 1 where Gordon used to work, recognizing it from the time he’d been in Key West years before, with Sonja. The dive shop was his landmark; Marshall set his odometer and began to look for the other markers Gordon had given him. In five minutes, he’d pulled onto Simonton and found the house: a white frame house with a new roof and rotten boards and broken shutters piled in the front lawn next to a banyan tree whose trunk took up half the front yard. Two long, splintered window boxes sat at curb-side, along with a recycling container loaded with beer cans and upside-down liquor bottles. One window box was empty, an end broken off. The other held one yellowish hemp plant. The brackets were on the back, rust bleeding through white paint. One high-heeled shoe lay on its side in a puddle. The front door was ajar. A rooster, bobbing out from behind water-soaked cardboard boxes thrown under a dead palm, crowed piercingly as Marshall approached the gate, surprising him so he jumped back, grabbed the sunglasses he’d just removed so hard he feared he’d broken the arm. He hadn’t. He blew on his glasses, cleaned them on his shirttail. Back on his nose, they were only slightly less smeared.
People on mopeds sped by. A truck carrying lumber, with a white handkerchief dangling from an end of a board, crept along behind the mopeds. Behind that came an elderly man pedalling a bicycle. He wore blowsy swim trunks, a white Isadora Duncan scarf dangling down his bare chest, and green clogs. A small brown dog hung its head out of the bike basket fastened to the front; behind him, he pulled a slightly larger dog in a basket on wheels. That dog also wore a scarf. A bandanna. What difference did it make? He moved backward to lean against the hood of his car and look at the house. A new window had just been set in beside the front door; plywood covered a hole to the left of the door. A wicker chair and a chair with several broken brown and beige plastic straps sat on the front porch, where a work table was also set up. A palm grew out of a plastic garbage can, pushed up against the plywood window. Above the door was a curved window of etched cranberry glass. From inside, music that sounded like the vocal equivalent of a whirling dervish floated out, though it was nowhere near as loud as the music from the night before. The neighbors, he saw, were a small bodega and, on the other side, a boarded-up house with a rotting boat in the front yard. Several cats watched him from the bow of the boat. A hula hoop was draped over one arm of a lamppost twined with faded red tinsel. A stocky man wearing a leather cap, leather jeans, and leather vest walked by, his chains jingling. Marshall looked back at the house. Three roosters followed their mother out Beth and Gordon’s gate, heading for the next yard. This was the neighborhood Beth preferred to the cluster of contemporary houses on the channel on Duck Key? The singer’s voice soared, repeating the same phrase over and over as he went up the walkway, trying to avoid tripping on scattered bricks and heaved-up cement. The first step was two thicknesses of board; the other steps were cinder block.