by Ann Beattie
In his kitchen, he brewed some rose hips tea for the two of them. He put out the sticky jar of honey and the little wand with the curlicueing end that had been a gift from little Maude, the neighbor’s child, on his last birthday. Adults loved to find presents to bestow that seemed like toys and made everyone realize their inherent childishness. Who better to give such a gift than a child?
He and Elin talked about her life. Things were often reversed, in that he took the initiative and asked to hear what was going on with her, whereas (except when she was on the telephone) she was tactful to the point of silence when inquiring about his life. After his father’s death she’d decided to sell the house in Brookline and go somewhere different, not too far away. She’d thought about Concord, New Hampshire, but instead she’d moved to Portsmouth. Did she still like it there, even though everybody said Portsmouth was overrun with young people?
“Yes. Certainly. You’ve seen where I live. It’s nice, I think. I like the secondhand bookstores. And it’s becoming quite sophisticated, with all the new restaurants. The young people come only on weekends. And now. Summer.”
“Then that’s a yes?”
“I don’t know,” she said, fingering her pearls. “I like seaside towns. I never liked being inland at your father’s place. There was the pond, but I prefer the ocean. New England winters are no pleasure, but what would I do? Move to Florida?”
“I don’t think I have much of a sense of what your daily life was like with him,” he said, surprising himself. He really didn’t want her to enumerate the tedium of their life. He hated small talk. It didn’t matter what Portsmouth was like. None of what they were going to talk about mattered. It was as if his sister hovered in the room, proving to him that Elin was vapid. So of course Elin turned the tables. She said, “I never told you, Ben, but once your father hit me. I mean, he didn’t knock me down, but he hit me, and then he was so sorry. His shame was worse than being struck. I believed him that he’d never do it again. I really did.”
So much for small talk. He said, “He hit you once?”
“Yes, of course. Only that one time, but he was so unhappy. It made him so unhappy to have done it. You look shocked. I’m sure it doesn’t compute with you any more than it did with me. I can only think that he was frustrated in some other way. That whatever we were arguing about, which I’ve blocked out entirely, I really have . . . that, you know, he just did it, did such a thing, that he knew was terrible.”
“I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“I shouldn’t tell you when he’s gone, but that did pop into my mind when you said—what was it you said? What our daily life was like. We did what other people do. Errands! We always had our evening meal together, and we discussed—did you know we talked about having a foster child? Perhaps opening our home to, well, to a foster child. That might have been what our disagreement was about.”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
“It wasn’t a particular foster child. I mean, we never met the child. We just discussed it.”
“Where did he hit you?”
“Here,” she said, pointing to the side of her head.
“That’s really awful, Elin. I had no idea he’d ever do anything like that.”
“I shouldn’t have told you, but I’ve always felt we’ve had a special connection, and I suppose . . . What am I saying? I don’t want you to dislike your father for doing it, I just felt you should know. We should move on to some more pleasant subject.”
He frowned. He said, “My former girlfriend Arly—you remember Arly. I think she’s psychotic, actually. She wrote on the mirror with—” He stopped. “With blood. When she left. I’m really, really glad she’s out of here. That the two of us are having a cup of tea, and those crazy vibes are out of the house. It was stifling.”
“Something seemed strange when I walked in,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“There seemed to be some, I don’t know, some tension in the air. I picked up on it the minute I walked in.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I wouldn’t say so, otherwise. I knew something wasn’t right.”
He could hear Brenda’s voice in his head: “You don’t think she’s the one who’s off?”
“So, I don’t know, you’re okay?” he blurted out. The question circled the question he wanted to ask, but he hadn’t been able to think how to phrase the real question, or exactly what it was. He was thinking that when women viscerally disliked other women, you could never convince them otherwise. Was it some survival mechanism? Something left over from caveman days, when the men went out with clubs and the women were skeptical of one another?
“It’s none of my business,” she said, “but that other girl, J.J. The one who came with you to Thanksgiving. Did you hope things would work out between you?”
He remembered that visit. He’d told Elin there was nothing romantic between them. Still, she’d been surprised when Ben made clear he’d sleep on the sofa. Which he was very glad he’d done, because in a less frantic way, J.J. had turned out to be every bit as crazy as Arly. He’d been the last to figure out that she’d wanted more than mere conversation, but for him there’d been no real attraction. He’d never slept with her. Being with Arly had messed up his mind about what attraction was, though the more distance there was between them, the saner he felt, and the saner, the lonelier. It was very nice to have Elin sitting with him at the kitchen table, though he had no idea how to explain to her what had gone so wrong with J.J. It had ended shortly after she met Elin, when she went to San Francisco and met a Japanese painter who’d confronted Ben, demanding to know why he hadn’t slept with J.J., saying, “She is a beautiful woman, with great talent. What’s wrong with you?” Now, the man’s aggression seemed funny. Which was more than he could ever say about Arly’s.
“She got together with a Japanese guy. I met him once,” he said. “They’re living in California, I think. She and I just didn’t have any chemistry.”
“I see. Well, I understand that. No one wants to have sex with someone they’re not attracted to.”
He was so taken aback, his cheeks started to burn. He said only, “The guy she got together with was really strange. I saw them in Architectural Digest, as a matter of fact. They had on skinny jeans and matching shirts, and had a little dog with hair flopped over its eyes. They were standing like paper dolls on some perfectly level yard outside their house in Marin, I think it was. It made me feel better about being in a doctor’s waiting room.”
“Do that again,” Elin said with delight.
“Tell you about them again?”
“No. Do that gesture with your fingers, when you made it seem like their little dog was with us in the room. You really are funny, Ben.”
“No,” he said, embarrassed. He took a sip of tea. For a few seconds, she continued to look at him hopefully. Then she also took a sip of tea and changed the subject. “I like the new man who’s come to work at the firm. I think I told you about him. He has a very nice wife who’s a nurse. They asked me to dinner a month or so ago, at a vegetarian restaurant. He insisted on picking up the check. I had a lovely evening. I don’t know why I don’t reciprocate, because I really should.”
Had they really returned to the banal subject of good dinners and friendly people? He looked down. He’d been looking at her, puzzled. He took a sip of tea he didn’t want. It had cooled enough that steam no longer rose from the mug. He smiled insincerely, raised his mug as if there were something to toast.
Elin clinked the rim of her mug to his. She looked so hopeful. About what? That he’d stumble into asking another loaded question?
“We don’t have anything to toast, so let’s toast that!” she said. “To nothing important to say. To quiet rapport!”
She tried so hard to be forthcoming, it brought tears to his eyes. The other question, he supposed, was s
omething she might not know, and if she did, would she admit it? Had his father ever struck his mother?
Fifteen
What the fuck!” Ben’s neighbor Steve said. “You’ve got one woman after another coming to visit, like they’re doing one-person interventions. Your stepmother just comes out with the news that your father hit her? I mean, it’s very sad, but is there anything women won’t say to you?”
“How would I know what they don’t say?” Ben asked. He’d wandered over to Steve’s house to get untethered from his computer for a while, hoping they could hang out. His own house always seemed emptier when someone visited, then drove away. Steve and Gin stayed away when they knew he had company. He’d heard Steve’s loud voice outside when he went out to get the mail the day after Elin left. Two men were loading a new gas stove into Steve’s house. They said they’d return later with an electrician. They’d already discovered there was the wrong kind of outlet in the wall behind the stove. Steve, as always, was reciting his “Nothing is easy” mantra. Ben’s story about Elin’s visit, though, effectively distracted him. They went into the kitchen and sat down.
“She just comes out with, Oh, she can understand not having any sexual attraction! Man, that was not a heart-to-heart I would have had with my mother, god rest her soul.”
“She wasn’t wrong that J.J. was interesting. I could tell that was who Elin wanted me to get together with. She was actually a very original thinker, even if she did decide to marry a loser.”
“And she has her new boyfriend debrief the old one, huh? Are you kidding me? Also, tell me one original thought the woman ever had. Do you remember even one? Their thoughts disappear when they do, I’ve discovered. I love Gin to pieces, but at the end of the day, I don’t know what she’s been talking to me about for hours.”
“She thought it might save the reefs to do transplants. Introducing plants that repelled certain bacteria that affected living coral. That idea’s started to catch on now, but she was the first one I heard it from.”
“Reefs? You remember that she talked about transplanting stuff into reefs? I mean, can pillow talk get any more exciting than that?”
He’d pretty quickly become friends with Steve and his wife, Ginny, though Steve was as skittish as a kicked dog who couldn’t resist wanting affection, at the same time he was poised to recoil. It was Ginny who’d sworn Ben to secrecy about Steve’s losing his previous job. Ben took it in stride that Steve had something invested in seeming paternal. That the imbalance of power always tilted Steve closer to the sky, when Ben’s end of the seesaw clunked on the ground.
They moved from the kitchen into Steve’s den, which made Ben feel old, and as if he was failing because he’d never smoked and didn’t drink during the day. Neither did Steve. It was all about staying fit, playing tennis, not dwelling too much on his only moderately successful career outside the city. Earlier in the week, they’d played tennis while Ginny was at yoga and their daughter had been dropped off at a playdate.
“Reefs,” Steve said again, indignantly. “I always forget you had that fancy education that made mush of your brain. Listen, Ben: You’ve gotta look at people and think, Might these people be about to move to Marin? And if they are . . .”
Steve would have loved living in California. Gin had told him that.
“I don’t pass judgment on you for being a stockbroker who helped sink the economy, Steve.”
“I’m gonna let that goose and the egg it mighta laid pass right on by, Ben. Not even worth shooting down.”
He and Steve had gone the week before to Steve’s father’s house when the old man needed advice about an addition he was having built. There’d been an enormous fountain on the front lawn and, in back, an Arts and Crafts studio where he went to carve wood instead of what he’d called “wasting my time with insomnia.” He spent time in the studio in the winter, sitting under special lights that relieved his SAD, but in summer he was always in a better mood. It had been interesting to see how courtly Steve acted toward his father. There’d been little joking. A small woman older than Steve’s father, Ernestine, had brought a tray with sugar cookies on a plate and a teapot brewing tea. The cups reminded Ben of the ones he’d habitually broken at Bailey, where the solution to his clumsiness had been not to embarrass him, but to replace the cups with mugs. What a strange place, with people going out of their way to make sure the students weren’t embarrassed, at the same time they hired LaVerdere to teach them.
“You should get together with Gin’s sister. Give it a chance,” Steve said.
“I’ve already told you, she’s fine but there’s no chemistry.”
“Gimme a break. I’m not your stepmother that you’ve got to explain yourself to. And anyway, that’s just shit you tell yourself. Stop thinking of yourself as an empty beaker some magic chemical’s going to boil up in, abracadabra, perfect bliss and endless orgasms. You had ‘chemistry’ with that Arly woman, who went Helter Skelter. As Gin says, we’re willing and able to audition the next girlfriend. Hey, we can help you decide whether or not you should let her slip away to Marin. By the way, do you want our old TV? She tried to donate it to the school, but they didn’t call back. Really rude, so fuck ’em.”
He didn’t want their TV. It was fine with him to watch repeats of The Sopranos at The Spotted Rick. (He’d had to explain the joke implied in the bar’s name to Steve, who never picked up a pun. It didn’t help that he’d never heard of the dessert.) Rick—their pal Rick, with two-for-one wine and beer nights whenever a TV series routinely brought in a crowd—had a goiter and extreme freckles. Rick had been flipped out when a writer for New York magazine came to write about him and his bar; to Rick, such attention signaled the beginning of the end. He’d avoided talking to the guy, as well as begging his regulars to keep quiet.
After tapping his iPhone several times while considering their making a Monday tennis date, Steve said, “Lemme call you. Getting some free time might be harder than I thought.”
“Sure. Let me know,” Ben replied.
He and Steve hadn’t instantly taken to each other. Steve had sent Ginny alone to welcome him to the neighborhood. Even after that, they hadn’t gotten to know each other until Ben, working at home one day and looking out his back window, had watched a guy who came with Steve’s lawn service launch toy rockets half the day when he should have been working. After some hesitation, he’d called Steve and told him what had been going on. Then, later that same day, he’d run into Steve and Maude (long ago, those days she’d hidden from him) at the library one town over. They’d been coming down the steps, Steve holding his little daughter’s hand, and suddenly Ben had felt more warmly toward him. The next evening, Steve had invited him to the house (“I like spontaneity”) and they’d had a beer in what Steve called “the den” and his wife called “the library.” He’d never before seen a child take pillows off the furniture and fall asleep sprawled amid the adults, sucking her thumb, her mother’s cardigan pulled over her, but that, too, had seemed charming.
Though Ben had tried and pretty well succeeded at pushing thoughts of Arly out of his mind, today was her birthday. She’d played dollhouse with Maude a few times—an activity Steve insisted killed brain cells—and once at a playground she’d looked for a long time at a little girl hesitating at the top of the slide. The child had finally twisted around, maneuvering to descend the stairs to the ground. “Smart kid,” Arly had said. “It’s not like Alice in Wonderland awaits if you get to the bottom.” Back then—before then—Steve had finally told him that Gin had misjudged Ben. She’d thought he was very guarded. Standoffish had been her way of expressing it. Probably a trust fund kid, she’d told Steve. She was suspicious that he lived alone, had wondered aloud to Steve about whether he did drugs.
He remembered that conversation well. “You don’t answer questions unless you’re directly asked, do you?” Steve had said, after summarizing Ginny’s initial reaction to him.
“No, I guess I don’t,” Ben had replied. Which cinched it, oddly. Some time had passed in silence there in the den—Ben was never really good at judging time—during which time Steve himself must have been figuring out if he liked Ben or thought he was an asshole. Not long after that, they’d played tennis. Soon after that, Steve had mentioned the possibility of Ben’s setting up a better program for his father’s nonprofit.
When he left Steve’s, he decided to go to the store and get his errands over with. He was a little surprised to see a hidden camera aimed at the miles-long shelf of toilet paper—especially when the packages were so enormous they looked like shrink-wrapped football fields. When he’d first moved in, he’d had to drive fifteen minutes to get to a convenience store. Now, after a five-minute drive, he could get a lawn chair and a bottle of red with a Wine Advocate recommendation and a rating of 90.
He checked out with soap, black pepper in a disposable grinder, paper towels, and a container of grated Parmesan after a long delay while the customer in front of him waited for a price check on gummy worms. He drove home in the fading light listening to NPR—always a melancholy time of day, but now no longer a time when talk ceased. He remembered how much he’d once liked the word twilight, how delighted he’d been with the word gloaming when he read it. He’d still never heard anyone use the word in conversation. Certain words seemed to remain magical, in part because they belonged to the language of stories. Outside that realm, they weren’t heard, like perfect Victorian children.
“Ben!” a woman called, as he was unlocking his car door in the parking lot of the convenience store two days later. He’d left the milk out and it had soured. He never thought ahead.
He didn’t know who she was. She picked up on it immediately. “Claire Morris,” she said, extending her hand. “Tatiana’s mom. You—”