Another You

by Ann Beattie

  When he left, she became quite composed. Quite calm, with Marshall in her arms, his chin on her shoulder, his legs dangling. She read to them from the Bible, told them she was going to die, walking back and forth in her nightgown. I thought it was a private moment between them, that I shouldn’t be there, but as I backed away I saw the look in Gordon’s eyes and lingered. I blotted the book dry. Because he’d used crayons, the drawings themselves were not ruined—except that later, the pages puckered. Not that he ever looked at the book again. Or that she ever read aloud from the Bible again. Though I looked at the 121st Psalm the other day, when Father Molloy brought me a Bible as a gift, and I could hear her saying the words, hear her voice as if she stood in the room. What would she make of such a room as mine? She, who had lived in such spacious houses. Lately an old movie has come to mind when I think about houses. Holiday Inn, with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, with all those wonderful songs by Irving Berlin. It was a movie about two friends who turned their home into a roadhouse, so they could perform for visitors every year. Fred Astaire did his Fourth of July number accompanied by torpedoes and firecrackers. I was told they had to call in technicians to build an organ that would set the firecrackers off electrically, so the organist could play the explosions at exactly the right moments, and the fireworks would be coordinated with Fred Astaire’s feet. If I think of the Fourth of July, I like to remember that movie, not what once really happened on the Fourth of July.

  My favorite nurse always gets involved in whatever old movie I’m watching on the VCR. Never to have seen Casablanca! Nineteen forty-two was such a vivid year, in part because that was when we first saw that unforgettable movie. The young are made weary by being told they’re young; it’s as rude, I suppose, as pointing out to someone old that they’re old. It seems so many young people are cursed now with weighing too much. Patty is a pretty girl, but she’s always worried about her weight—as well she should be. Sonja has stayed the same pretty, slender girl she’s always been. It wouldn’t have been insecurity about her looks that led her into an affair, I hope. I hope both boys were raised to give a lady a compliment when she deserves one. Who knows what Marshall really sees? Marshall is such a solitary person; it makes him self-absorbed. And Gordon is unobservable, like life on a star. There it is, shining, but you don’t know the first thing about what goes on there. Frustrating, not to be able to find out how time will change them. Yet beyond a certain point, I think the world changes so much that no one can predict. An old person’s intuition doesn’t operate as it once did, because the rules change, familiar faces disappear, the things you came to count on to provide a context aren’t there anymore—not even the music. No one ever hums “Moonlight Becomes You,” and it was one of the greatest songs of 1942. Even before that, Frank Sinatra singing “This Love of Mine,” the year Martin was born. That was also when we first heard “Blues in the Night” and Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Of course, there was also Ethan’s favorite: “There Will Never Be Another You.”

  It’s difficult to imagine that Gordon or Marshall have particular songs that evoke romantic feelings. Sonja loves classical music; Beth tells me she likes “New Age.” I thought to leave Miles’s letters to one of the boys—Marshall, I thought, at first, because he is a college professor, words are his love, his business, but hesitated because he already thinks too much about everything. Neither of them would know that landscape. That haunting music. The resonance of the world in which we lived. Giving the letters to either one of them would be like giving them a silent film, based in a foreign land. Which made me think that Sonja should have them. Yet she is dismayed, now, at how men act. They would only reinforce her skepticism. So: Gordon. Better to give them to Gordon, along with something pretty for his wife, and hope that the person who so patiently explained things in his youth—who explained to his brother, at the same moment he was improvising stories himself—would discover things in them worthy of his attention. Gordon has spent his life on the run. He might be interested to know that there was a period of his father’s life when he, too, kept himself apart from everyone. When he wished to reinvent his life.

  I’ve been wondering, lately, what it might have been like if I’d never left Montreal. That first day we spent together alone, when I was still a teenager: Miles jumped off the lift and spread his arms, stood at the top of the mountain and whispered Paradis, then drew his arms in tightly as if to embrace the air. If I had drifted away like hot breath hitting cold then. Or skied down the slope, away. What if I had never started with him, let alone been won back through the years by fragments of romantic melodies. Or by an avalanche of letters to which I added a P.S. that was not there: that he loved me. If I had not responded, on the ski slope, or later, sealing my fate as easily as I licked an envelope, I could have had a different life. I could have been the white space between words.