by Ann Beattie
“Oh, great!” Beth yelled, as he rang the doorbell and “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. “Great, great, great,” she yelled, rushing to greet him.
As he remembered, she was short and thin, but her hair was now very pale blond, streaked with pink. She was wearing enormous gold earrings and a silver choker. She had on a tightly knotted white halter top that revealed half her rib cage, and striped sultan pants. Her toenails were painted bright pink. She leaped into his arms.
“Don’t say you didn’t get a warm welcome,” she said. The earrings swayed, making a cacophonous noise inside his head.
“Well, I appreciate it,” he said, returning her hug with slightly less strength.
“What is this, are you having some crisis like Gordon says? He’s gone to get briquettes to cook your dinner. You missed the clam pizza with white sauce last night. Best you’ll ever eat, brought all the way from Miami. Come in. I’m a little wired because I just got out of my step class. Come in, Gordon would hate me for holding you in the doorway.”
His first thought was that it was good Sonja wasn’t with him. His second thought was that he was surprised—inside, the house was in very good shape. He followed her through a long pine-panelled hallway with a central ceiling fan. He glanced into several small rooms on the right side of the hallway as he walked past. In the first, where the door was propped open with an iron Scottie dog, he saw a dressing table and mirror on a white shag carpet and several white folding chairs. That was the Mary Kay room, he thought. Next was a dark room with the door almost closed. After that, the bathroom, the track lights glowing, steam on the mirror, a pleasant, fresh, wet smell. The largest area of the house was the main room, a room about twenty by thirty, at the end of which were sliding screen doors, through which he could see a raised hot tub and black iron benches with flowered cushions. She pushed open the screen and motioned for him to follow. In several large terra-cotta pots on wheeled platforms, variously colored bougainvillea bloomed. A seven-foot-high wall surrounded the back deck, hung at intervals with mirrors, in ornate picture frames, that needed to be resilvered. Several orchids hung in pots suspended from a tree limb that stretched from the bodega’s backyard to overhang the deck. Standing beside him, she smiled brightly as he looked around. Beside the steps leading up to the hot tub he saw the mate to the high heel in the puddle outside the house. An aluminum garbage can held discarded liquor bottles and beer cans. On the redwood table, a pitcher held birds-of-paradise.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “A real surprise.”
“We’re going to eat out here tonight,” she said, ducking back into the house and turning down the volume of the boom box that sat on the kitchen counter. “He wants it so picture perfect, he even keeps the grill behind that fence, there.” She pointed to a bamboo screen.
“This is amazing,” he said. “How long did it take you to do this?”
“Helped along by my winning at blackjack,” she said. “No kidding. They might get me later, but that time I had the sense to take the money and run.”
“Well,” he said. “It’s really wonderful. You’d never think this was back here.”
“He wants to keep the front looking like shit so people won’t break in. I’ve got to get you to persuade him that stuff has got to go. There was a bathtub there until the day before yesterday. If people are going to break in, they break in. You can’t spend your life trying to protect yourself.” A little lizard darted from the hot tub to the bamboo screen and disappeared. Above them, the sky was a cloudless, deep blue. “I don’t see any point in fighting obstacles,” she said. “The climate here is perfect, as far as I’m concerned. And in the summer you just go from air-conditioning to air-conditioning. The bedroom’s air-conditioned,” she said. “So are we going to convert you to Key West? If everything goes right, your brother could be retired and a rich man and you could sit around on the back deck with him, shoot the breeze. I’m going to get you a drink. What kind of drink would you like?”
He began to think the parrot pitcher hadn’t been a joke.
“Corona,” she said, before he could answer. She walked to the long narrow kitchen bordering the living room. The floor was tiled a deep green-blue; a counter divided the kitchen from the rest of the room. A big ceiling fan stirred the air.
“Are you upset about Evie’s death?” she said, coming toward him, holding two opened beers. “Is that a subject I should avoid?” she said, before he had time to answer.
“No, not at all,” he said. “I mean, it isn’t a subject you should avoid. We both—I’m glad we found a nursing home that seemed like a good place. Sonja visited her often. I’m afraid I didn’t go as often as I should have.”
“I’m always making mistakes in what I’m not supposed to say,” Beth said. “Remember when I gave her a makeup kit? I knew when she wasn’t wearing makeup on her birthday, when we first walked in, that I’d made a mistake.” She relinquished one of the beer bottles to him. “I hope she used the lotion,” she said.
“I don’t really know if she used it,” he said.
“I like you,” Beth said. “That’s a good answer.” She fingered the silver choker. “She was very kind to remember me,” she said. “Is this something that has a history in the family? I asked Gordon, but according to him, he doesn’t remember anything.”
“The necklace?” he said, following her back outside.
She nodded.
“You mean it’s Evie’s?”
“Yes,” she said, a little put out. “You don’t remember it either?”
“I’m not the right person to ask. I don’t notice things like jewelry, usually.”
“Well, that makes two of you. You and your brother.”
She sat on the black iron bench. He sat in a chair. In the distance, he heard a dog yapping. A plane passing overhead.
“When did Evie give you the necklace?” he said.
She fingered it. “When she died. There was a nurse friend of hers who packaged some things from her room and sent them to us. I hope I haven’t said something I shouldn’t have said. This nurse said she was supposed to pass on things to both you and Gordon. She said Evie reminded her all the time, and they had a joke: the nurse would pretend to scold her, saying, ‘Is that the only thing you keep forgetting? You mean that’s the one and only thing you’re senile about?’ She’d promised her a hundred times she’d do it, she said.” She sipped her beer. “She seemed quite nice on the phone,” she said.
“Yes. I know who you mean. She was very nice. She did bring us things, come to think of it, on the day of the funeral.”
“I feel bad we didn’t come to Evie’s funeral,” Beth said.
He shrugged. “To come all that way for someone you didn’t really know,” he said.
“I know, but I was surprised Gordon didn’t go. He went and sat on the floor of the ocean. That’s what he spent the day doing.”
“Well,” he said, “that would have been a long way to come just for the funeral.”
“He doesn’t like to face some things,” she said.
“No, I suppose none of us do,” he said.
“But he just doesn’t do it. I had a lump in my breast biopsied last year. Everything was fine, but the day he was supposed to go to the doctor’s office—we weren’t even going to hear right then, it was just a biopsy—he had somebody call from work to say he’d gotten tied up. He didn’t even call me himself!”
“That’s unfortunate,” Marshall said.
“It is unfortunate. He has more capabilities than he calls on.”
Marshall nodded. He would just as soon not hear these things about Gordon.
“Maybe a lot was expected of him when he was young,” Beth said. “It was that way with my older brother. I have an older brother, too. He works for a conservation group in Africa. He’d do anything for an animal, but he doesn’t even send my mother a birthday card. Sometimes a postcard, but there’s never much information on it. She was going to visit him once, and he told he
r there were too many diseases, not to come.”
“He was probably telling her for her own sake,” Marshall said.
“Men stick together, they really do.” She sighed. “I don’t even believe that you believe that.”
“I don’t,” Marshall said.
“I like you,” she said again. She looked around. “I was thinking about getting a few ficus, or something like that. Do you think there’s enough greenery, or would more look nice?”
“It looks perfect to me, but I’m not very good at envisioning things when they aren’t in place.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Gordon’s very good at that, usually. You know what he does? He gets a piece of paper and he draws polka dots on it. He says doing that allows him to envision what things will look like before he breaks his back moving everything.”
He nodded.
“Did he tell you about the letters?”
“Letters?” He had been thinking about ficus trees. Were ficus the ones with small, wrinkly leaves? The ones they sold sometimes in the supermarket in New Hampshire?
“He didn’t tell you,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t suppose I thought he really had.” She slid forward, placing her feet together, the beer bottle half-empty. “Don’t tell him I told you,” she said.
“What about letters?” he said.
“The nurse. That woman, who was so nice. She called to say they’d be coming. I really shouldn’t tell you this, because you almost got the letters. Evie was going to give them to Sonja and you until just before she died. She changed her mind, the nurse said, and wanted them to be sent to me and Gordon. I hardly knew her, so she was sending them to Gordon, not to me.”
He frowned.
“Don’t tell him,” she said again.
“Okay,” he said.
“Well, she called to say how sorry she was, but to say she’d heard from the nurses at the hospital that she didn’t die a painful death, and all of that. Gordon told her we’d see her at the funeral. I was going to go. If he went, I was going to go with him. Anyway, the nurse was calling to say she was sending the things by Federal Express, because she didn’t feel right about putting jewelry in the mail and just mailing it. I told Gordon he should send some money to reimburse her, that that was probably what she was hinting about. Well, she did send it. This necklace was in its original box, from a jewelry store in Boston. I kept the box, because it’s beautiful too. I started to read the letters, but I didn’t understand anything in them. Sort of business letters, about somebody’s delayed arrival. They were boring, to tell you the truth. I put them aside and thought maybe I’d look at them again some other time, and then Gordon got home from work and started reading them. They were in three packages, tied with ribbon. He read about half of one pack and then he said, ‘You know, the truth of the matter is, I don’t much like surprises.’ He doesn’t, either. He likes to know in advance what I’m getting him for his birthday. He told me right out, when I hardly knew him, that if I ever gave him a surprise party, he’d never speak to me again. I wish you’d gotten the letters, because then I could find out if that stuff meant anything. I saw them and they didn’t look like love letters. I think he was just teasing. But he didn’t like having them, so do you know what he did? He took them with him when he made a night dive. He and his buddy went out together, and when he went down he tucked the whole pile of them under a rock on the bottom of the ocean. Littering the Atlantic! At first I thought he was kidding me, but then it turns out to be true. He took a bunch of her old letters and drowned them.”
“Jesus,” Marshall said. He remembered, now, the box the nurse had brought with her to the house the day of the funeral. With the exception of the necklace, Evie had given Sonja the entire contents of her jewel box. His father’s pocket watch had been in there. Sonja had given that to him. It seemed almost obscene that Tony Hembley had looked at it admiringly—that he had stood in the living room, joining the little cluster of Sonja and Marshall and the nurse, and peered into the pink satin jewel box and looked appreciatively at the watch Sonja drew out, his father’s octagonal watch dangling from its platinum watch fob. The nurse had done just what Evie had asked. Her timing might have been better, but he supposed that if someone other than Tony had gazed in, he wouldn’t feel so cantankerous. It was hardly a private matter, really: a box filled with an old lady’s brooches and rings, bracelets and necklaces, costume jewelry with only a few precious stones dropped in among the tangle, Sonja had told him later. It wasn’t as if the Hope diamond were hiding in there.
“I think maybe it made him sentimental,” Beth said. “Letters from so long ago.”
A bird began to shriek, its piercing cries making Beth spring up, grabbing the top of the fence and hissing at a cat that had begun to prowl the bird’s cage in the neighbors’ yard. “They hooked up some electronic thing that was supposed to keep that cat ten feet from the birdcage,” Beth said. “It works all day until late afternoon, and then I just don’t know. The cat’s right in there like there was nothing set up at all.” Next came a recorded voice, as he watched her, white-knuckled, clinging to the fence. “You have entered a secured area,” the voice said. “Oh, fuck you,” Beth said to the recording. “If I didn’t grab the fence and hiss, that three-hundred-dollar bird would be dead, and that would be a very happy alley cat.”
“Where are the people?” he said.
“Oh, they don’t ever do anything about their hair-trigger alarm. They’re probably inside smoking dope.”
“Really?” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know. The owners keep going back and forth between here and Boca Raton, and they’ve got some Rastas staying in there who don’t care about anything but dope and sunshine. Why they’d leave the bird that way, I don’t know. The guy really likes the bird. He’s out there every evening he’s home, trying to get it to say things.”
“What does it say?” Marshall said.
“It says ‘Margaritaville’ and ‘tropical breeze’ and things like that. Now it says ‘good weed.’ His girlfriend’s the one who rented to the Rastas. Now he’s gonna be furious at her.”
“Hey, beauty!” the bird hollered. “Helloooooooo.”
“I save your life every day. Can you say, ‘Save my life?’ ” Beth hollered.
Silence from the bird.
“I do,” she said.
Marshall sloshed the last inch of beer around in the bottle. He could see living this way: blue skies; warm winters; flowers.
“Hey, Marsh!” Gordon hollered, appearing at the end of the long hallway. He was backlit, just a shape, his features indistinguishable as Marshall went toward him. Gordon embraced him one-armed; the other held a bag of charcoal and a string bag dangling from his thumb, filled with things from the store.
“Hey, I hope the party didn’t keep you away last night. You didn’t check into a motel just because those idiots hadn’t cleared out, did you?”
“No, no,” Marshall said. Gordon smelled of alcohol. Beth stood smiling at him, having picked up both empty beer bottles.
“Corona, babe?” she said.
“Yeah, sweetie. Thanks,” he said. He put his arm around Marshall’s shoulder. “Very good to see you here, man,” he said. This time he sounded more enthusiastic. “Hey, quite the transformation, don’t you think?” he said.
“He never saw it before,” Beth said.
“Oh, right. Right. We were out on Duck Key when you and Sonja came down a few years back. Right,” Gordon said. “Well, nothing would do for Beth but to be a townie, hey, hon?”
“I didn’t want to live my life driving in from Duck Key,” she said.
“She doesn’t appreciate the fact I have to work for a living,” Gordon said. “She wants us to live like it’s our twilight years right now, today. Maybe I can hunch myself over and limp over there near the kitchen and get me a beer for my twilight years. Toast them the way we bring New Year’s in.”
“People retire in the United States before they’re old,” Beth
said. “What’s so wrong with having money and deciding how you want to spend your days? Some of us, rich or not, prefer to spend them kicking along parallel to the ocean floor. I guess I understand that by now.”
“Don’t give me that shit. You see me plenty. Plenty more than you want to sometimes. He’d shown up last night, I could get more of a report on what a party girl you are than you might provide me with yourself.”
“I have never flirted with a human being since the day we tied the knot,” Beth said. She had opened three beers and put the bottles on the kitchen counter. She opened a jar of peanuts.
“Vacuum-packed,” Gordon said, taking the jar from her. “Close as she gets to a vacuum.” Gordon laughed.
“This place is fantastic,” Marshall said.
“You got yourself a new house, didn’t you?” Gordon said.
“No. We’ve been in the same place since we moved to New Hampshire.”
“Is that right? I thought you’d gotten yourself another place.”