A Wonderful Stroke of Luck

by Ann Beattie

  Where other people had hung their diploma, or a photograph of their son or daughter, he displayed an autographed photo of Mama Cass, enormous in her shapeless hippie dress, microphone in hand, the photo cropped at her knees, that she’d inscribed to some other Ben (“To Benny with love. Tell me you’ll miss me!”—what a find). He’d bought it at a flea market on Sixth Avenue when he and Benson had gone poking around. It was slightly disappointing that no one who came into his office walked over to look at it, that everybody was so focused on work that they couldn’t see and often couldn’t hear; five minutes later they’d be back, rephrasing the same question. The best steak dinner of someone’s life. That sounded like one of those banal, suddenly funny, deranged thoughts in a Roz Chast cartoon.

  Before he left the city, Gerard’s final gesture of friendship and goodwill had been to give him the key to a former boyfriend’s studio apartment on East Seventh Street, now empty because the boyfriend had paid six months’ rent in cash, in advance, to get it, then had the good fortune to be hired as a sax player touring with a band opening for Wynton Marsalis—first stop, London.

  Friday night, alone, Ben walked out of a photography gallery on the West Side that he’d gone to as much for the high-end hors d’oeuvres as to see the art. He’d been invited by a PR person, a friend of Gerard’s, who seemed irrationally afraid Gerard might kill himself in Kansas—at least, she could provide no reason for what she feared. He saw the girl—the one he’d left in the bar—hailing a cab, a red umbrella threatening to blow inside-out. Did she ever have good luck? She didn’t see him. Actually, maybe that was the good luck.

  Time passed. He had his shoes resoled. He almost never thought of Arly. He got a call from Gerard, who said Kansas wasn’t bad. Gerard was going to take a course in hotel management, reconceive his career. Ben had never heard him use the word career and suspected the older man, whatever his name was—too embarrassing to ask—had planted the idea. Fine idea. Sure. He, too, was acting on an idea, which was that he could act. He made it to work on time, even if it required setting two alarms, but he began to feel claustrophobic in his office, not just in the elevator. He felt as if—how familiar was this?—he were being squeezed by the buildings of Manhattan, that really they were huge, fisted hands, even when he sat working inside, increasingly certain he was going to have to pop out of the grip or be crushed. Images of people jumping from the Twin Towers sometimes flashed through his mind.

  The opening he’d gone to had featured an artist whose sculpture dangled from near-invisible wire and depicted contorted forms in midair. A well-known vodka manufacturer—the stuff had been so clean, it had tasted like nothing—was bankrolling the reception, because the sculptor was the owner’s brother. All over the floor, there’d been plaster dust and broken glass.

  The idea of looking for a place to live outside of the city made him feel less anxious. Benson begged to differ: Every time Ben talked about “getting out” he seemed more agitated. He’d done so well, it was great what he’d done, getting an alarm clock, getting a job. It wasn’t acting to do what he was capable of doing. Okay, it wasn’t ideal, but people had jobs so they could move on to other jobs. He should take pride in being able to locate other people’s errors.

  “It’s easier than truffle-sniffing your own,” Ben replied. “What you really have to understand is that human error is just that, except for the times people deliberately build in weird shit or fuck up parts of the code, for their own reasons.”

  He’d accepted an unopened bottle of vodka from Jamie Renquist, the PR person (“Just put it in my Strand bag! Don’t be silly, take it. I’ll see you again!”) and gotten together with Benson—Jesus; had Jamie thought there’d been something between the two of them?—when he left the show. Ben’s regret about the girl in Chelsea—his being obsessed with finding her, and apologizing—showed that he did have a conscience, Benson insisted. (What was he supposed to do, apologize twice? Say he needed double forgiveness because he’d seen her grappling with an umbrella in the rain, and he’d walked away?)

  That weekend, in The New York Times, he’d read about the sculpture show, which was called “Memories of Meteor Showers.” The critic’s review was titled “Memory’s Shards.” Was the critic playing along with the artist’s title, intended for some reason to throw people off? The review ended without suggesting anything the artwork evoked, let alone mentioning the obvious, 9/11. The photograph, though, had taken some time to decipher, which was why he’d been so caught up in the image, he’d almost missed the review. You always heard that the photographers worked separately from the writers, and it was a very interesting photograph, though it hardly gave a feel for the actual show, as—he figured out—the shadows of the ostensible meteors bled into one another, orbs made more abstract, all of it a mishmash of shadowed shape on the floor, amid glistening glass. (“Broken plastic. Of course they wouldn’t use real glass!” he heard Jamie saying.) She’d called him twice, once asking him for coffee “because I just happened to be in your neighborhood.” He had no interest in her, but he met her anyway, just to double-check his perceptions. Yeah, she wasn’t all that bright. When he’d talked about the sculpture show’s allusion to 9/11, she’d called him “morbid,” punching his shoulder as if she could dislodge the truth and jostle sane thoughts into his head. “Nobody would put on a show about that now,” she’d insisted. Oh. Did all painters paint battles when in the midst of them? he’d asked. “Stop it!” she’d squealed. He’d pressed his point: “There’s a statute of limitations on trauma? Because it was years ago?” Their meeting for coffee had been followed several weeks later by an email invitation to another show in SoHo, with a personal note: “Unless you think an artist who paints horses is just doing it to remind us the frontier is gone!” At least he’d managed to plant a seed of doubt in her compulsive cheerfulness. He made no response. Strand bags were incredibly low-priced.

  The glass—it had been glass on the gallery floor, come on—there was no other reason to rope off the area; Arly’s knees, reddened by the pressure of kneeling on the rug; his mother’s body, flattened by the tree root; the carpet at Bailey, so scattered with cake and cookie crumbs it looked like someone had mistaken the students for birds; urine running in a little yellow puddle from under the table at the News Café. No wonder when people paused they looked at what was in front of them, or up—wasn’t it a tendency to look up?—to look into the distance and see the sky those times you could, when buildings didn’t lean in, blocking the view.

  How strange that it took him some time to figure out that he was experiencing claustrophobia. It wasn’t just present-day New York that was oppressing him, it was its recent history. Because everything and everyone had a legacy.

  He left his businessman shoes on the closet floor and began wearing his Adidas to work again. He read with interest pieces in New York magazine about people his age, or just a bit older, who’d decided to set up camp outside New York City. He admitted to Aqua, when she called unexpectedly (“The guy where you used to work gave me your number”), that he felt restless, as if he’d been captured. Saying that word had surprised him, because it was the first time he’d put a name on his anxiety. Her response had also surprised him: “Didn’t you win at chess more often than Jasper? I mean, even before his parents died?”

  On a weekend in late March, Ben rented a car to explore outside the city. Granted, other people had pregnant wives or husbands who’d lost their jobs, who’d always wanted to be beekeepers. (Sure. That came right from the mouth of one of his most forthcoming, intelligent female colleagues.) Elin had been noncommittal when he told her what he was thinking about. In a way, he appreciated her not saying what she really thought—maybe she’d be good at titling art installations—but at the same time he wished she’d be less guarded, less intimidated. In that, she was totally unlike any woman he knew. LouLou and Arly, if not always perfect friends, were perfect examples of women who never hesitated to tell him what th
ey thought, to let him know in what ways he was deficient. It was sort of amusing that Elin was a little afraid of him, or at least of losing whatever closeness they had.

  The last time he’d spoken to her—such calls were always at Elin’s instigation—she’d asked if he’d ever seen McCabe & Mrs. Miller. “I don’t remember,” he’d replied, not sure why he hadn’t wanted to simply say yes.

  It was spring, but he could close his eyes and feel the snowflakes, as if he stood among the actors in the film. He had a feeling he couldn’t figure out, except to identify it as recurring. It was as if he’d stepped out of something, call it “reality,” and into another life where, because he’d lost something, he had no credibility. The closest thing he could compare it to was a bad waking dream. He had plenty of those, too—anxiety dreams in which he was going to be called on when he hadn’t done his homework, or—this one was really strange—as if, instead of the way things had happened, he’d abandoned LouLou in the parking lot and returned to Bailey alone, only to find that no one asked after her, no one said, “Where’s LouLou?” As if no one believed she’d existed.

  Elin had seen the movie on television. Her own thoughts were pretty inarticulate. He’d stopped in a rest area to check the tires, because the rental car felt bumpy. He was leaning against the driver’s door, satisfied that nothing was wrong that he could see, when her call came in.

  “It was too sad!” Elin continued. “But I couldn’t turn it off. It’s a Western. Your father loved them. Well, it was a strange movie. In the end, Warren Beatty gets shot. You never think he will, because he’s Warren Beatty. And Julie Christie—do you know who she is? I think she was his girlfriend in real life. She plays Mrs. Miller, and when everything’s lost, she smokes opium—I felt like I was suffocating from carbon monoxide poisoning, in my own house! The camera just lingers on her face.”

  “Entertainment” popped into his head. He remembered so clearly what his classmates had looked like at the Sunday social, who was sprawled or sitting on those weird floor cushions that were never used again, as well as where he’d sat slightly apart, yet still in LaVerdere’s peripheral vision. The correct answer, stated as a question, had been “What is McCabe & Mrs. Miller?” That was the problem: The answer could so often be remembered. You could act in accordance with the answer all your life, but what happened when the answer took the form of a question?

  Was that true? He was watching a robin pulling up a worm near the curb. He looked up and saw another bird in a tree. A grackle? Or was the bird too large to be a grackle? It wasn’t the first time he was aware that he’d begun noticing things.

  “Hey, man,” Benson Whitacre said, when Ben—eating lunch at a diner—took his call. “Hey, something I want to ask. Jenna and I are getting engaged. I told you that? I didn’t? I must think you’re still crashing with me and I tell you everything. Okay, so, but, we are.”

  “Congratulations,” Ben said.

  “Yeah, well, probably she’s the one. I mean, she is the one. She’s great. You like Jenna, right? I thought so. Okay, it’s not an engagement party, there’s no ring, we’re thinking maybe only a major statement wedding band, she’s got such little hands. Her older sister wants to do a lunch thing up in Hudson, where she and her husband live. That’s not going so well, but that’s another story. There’s no third person. The thing is, I thought I’d invite you.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “But meanwhile, today’s my birthday! It is. I’m thirty. You know what? Where are you, by the way? Is this an okay time to talk?”

  “Eating lunch. Go on.”

  “Don’t you want to wish me a happy birthday?”

  “Sir,” the waitress said, pointing to a sign asking people to please turn off their cell phones. “If you could comply, I might not lose my job, please.”

  He stood immediately and walked outside.

  “Happy birthday, Benson. How can you be thirty, though?”

  “You knew I was older. I had that skiing accident that kept me out, then I didn’t get back to Bailey until my dad died, right? That’s why we were in the same class.”

  “I remember. Bladder cancer.”

  Cars whizzed by. He could hardly hear. He felt sure the waitress would throw away his food and coffee. She hadn’t liked him from the moment she’d seen him.

  “. . . in with Jenna. In . . . msburg. You’ve gotta . . . before you marry ’em, right?”

  A semi rattled by.

  “. . . didn’t have to live to see the World Trade Center come down, which would really have upset him, after being . . . and such a patriot and all. Flew the flag in front of the house his whole life.”

  “He was a lieutenant,” Ben said. He felt like it was his obligation to spout Benson facts, though Benson obviously hadn’t forgotten his own life. No. It was something else, that other thing, the one that scared him: the parallel reality in which he knew an answer, but not the question.

  “Okay, I’ve got to get going. We can continue this conversation later, okay? I’m—it’s great about the engagement, it really is. Happy birthday, man.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I just had lunch at a place off the Taconic. I had to get away.”

  “So this is like that . . . you’re riding the Taconic like it’s the streets of Boston?”

  “What?” Ben said.

  “Is somebody with you?”

  “No. No.”

  “You rented a car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “. . . did? You rented a car?”

  “Yeah. From Avis. Why does that matter? I don’t know anybody who has a car.”

  “Oh. I was going to invite you to Bowery Ballroom tonight. Hey, I’ve got two tickets and Jenna can’t come. Will you be back in time?”

  “No. I don’t think so. But thanks.”

  “Why won’t you tell me who’s with you?”

  “Benson, nobody. I told you.”

  “Just more of your crazy idea that you’ve got to get out of the city everybody else wishes they had the bucks to afford?”

  “Benson. You’ve never heard of anybody needing a break? Needing to get some distance on things?”

  “Right,” Benson said. “Call when you can.”

  They hung up. What was wrong with that conversation, he wondered, as he went back to find everything where he’d left it. He paid the bill and overtipped, hoping at least the waitress would have a good impression of him when he left. When she was at the other end of the counter, pouring coffee for another customer, he left. Something seemed very different. Where had the birds gone? There’d been so many. There’d been the robin (though the American robin was really a thrush), and now there was only a squirrel. What was with Benson’s hypersensitivity? Why had Benson’s voice changed so suddenly? Back on the road, as the grilled cheese sandwich sank heavily in his stomach, he wondered who was at Bowery Ballroom. What he might be missing.

  The real estate agent he talked to at the first town where he decided to stop was a single mother who joked that the influx of people trying to get out of the city was sure to increase her marriage prospects. There was no chemistry between them and they both knew it, but she flirted anyway.

  Soon after 9/11 formerly unlikely places like Portland, Maine, began to quickly absorb people in their twenties and thirties, but as time passed, the seepage spread locally. It never stopped. People Ben’s age fanned out over the Hudson Valley. Three miles down the road—after 9/11, even the dirt roads were named—a developer had bought the land behind a greenhouse that had itself gone on the market for an astonishing sum, the real estate agent had told him. There were plans to build a series of houses on half-acre lots that the planning board had so far resisted, but the person with the greatest clout had died over the winter, and his middle-aged son, who’d worked with him, had moved with his family to Saratoga. That left the niece-by-marriage of
one of the developers—quel scandale!—along with a bunch of do-nothing locals who chose to consider the threat standing right in front of them an opportunity. Money.