by Ann Beattie
There was no longer any indication that the sitter and Henry were in the house. He took the animal out of the box and went to show it to her. He pushed the button. It sounded like a muffled alarm as it squirmed in his hand. It was ridiculous. You had to sympathize with Chinese workers. He placed it on the floor. After every few noisy steps, it slowed down, tilted its head back, blinked repeatedly, and screeched like a tropical bird. After the third screech, he turned it off.
“He’s going to like it. Thank you,” she said.
He scooped up the toy and stood it on a side table. “And Tate’s cookies,” he said, pulling the last thing from the bag. “Have you had them?”
“It’s like you thought you were coming to a picnic!” she said. “I’ve been known to binge after midnight.”
The bottle sat on the table with the toy, which seemed smaller when it was still. Which of these bucking, noisy toys would make it into a time capsule? He lifted the wine bottle from an absorbent coaster. “You wouldn’t want to take a walk before dinner?” he asked.
“You didn’t seem nervous before. What made you nervous?”
“I’m not good at small talk.”
“Who’d want to be?”
Was this his cue for moving in? He got no feeling that it was.
“You know what?” she said. “Let’s do it. I changed my mind.”
He raised his glass with its one remaining sip glistening in the bottom. He remembered Elin saying, “This is the point at which you refill a glass, not after you swallow the last bit.”
“We ordered a case of that,” she said. “I see you approve. If the pollen starts to kill my eyes, we can turn back. The steps behind the yard lead to a path that runs down to the center of town.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Unless you’d rather just drink.”
“No. I’d like to get out for a while before dark.”
“To enjoy nature?”
There it was: that little blip indicating amusement, though he didn’t understand why. He couldn’t say he’d never been awkward with women, but he felt disempowered by Kayla, by her surroundings—not so much because of what he was doing, but because of what he wasn’t doing. Maybe the idea behind houses like this one was to get lost in them.
Standing, she slipped into her pretty shoes long enough to walk to the back door, where she put a hand on his shoulder as she pulled on running shoes.
“So where did you go to college?” she asked.
“Cornell.”
“I’ll bet you got a free ride, right?”
“My father had to cover some expenses. A little of both.” Who talked about college anymore? “Too cold?” he asked, as they put on their coats and he opened the door. Too late, he remembered that Dale had informed him to ask a woman if she wanted you to hold the door, and if you opened it, ask whether she wanted to precede you. The wind was blowing so hard he almost lost hold of the doorknob.
“Hold hands so we don’t get blown away,” she said, slipping her hand into his. “It’s really sweet that you brought cookies and water. I have to ask, though: Are you disappointed I’m thirty-five?”
“Of course not,” he said, though he’d assumed she was younger.
“In two weeks I’ll be thirty-six.”
“Well, that changes everything.”
“Those are almost the exact words my husband used when he told me: ‘What I’ve got to say is going to change everything.’ And there I was, thinking, Well, whatever you’ve got to say, I’ve got the trump card, because, surprise! We’re going to have another kid.”
An image of Ginny holding Maude came to him. She’d come to his door to ask if Maude might have dropped her toy there. As Ginny carried Maude, they’d walked through the first floor, looking for Beanie Baby Bartleby—the tongue-twister toy that would always prefer not to be squeezed, let alone lost. His friend Daphne Randolph, who took pride in never going to college but owning a lucrative business (the secondhand-clothing store in town), had once, at her snarkiest, asked him if he thought Ginny’s unannounced visits to his house were planned—whether she might not have tossed a toy here or there so that she’d have an excuse to visit more than once in the same day. Ginny didn’t shop at her store; that was one thing that made Daphne suspicious of her. Her question had been paranoid, though, something LouLou might also have said, if he’d told her about the number of dropped toys.
“You and Amy—you’re the only kids in your family?”
“Right. No secret brother who’s a monk or a heroin addict. You?”
“I have a sister, Brenda. She’s a college professor. She got hired at the same place she went to school. We’re fond of each other, but we don’t talk that much. My mother died when I was young. My father’s dead, too. I think he killed himself.”
“You think?”
“Well, he had cancer, and chemo, and he wasn’t looking forward to the next round.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t think he ever recovered from my mother’s death. That’s what my sister thinks, anyway, but she’s got something invested in believing that.”
“I was actually happy when I had amnio and found out I was pregnant with a boy. By the way, I’m already thirty-six. But that’s all I’ve lied about. Now you know I’m a liar. What’s your secret?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sure I lie. Doesn’t everybody, sometimes?”
“That’s all you can come up with, sometimes you lie?”
Was this a cue? He said, “I’ll try to come up with something worse.”
“We’ve been talking around some subject, Ben. I just don’t know what it is.”
It raised the possibility that she was up for something more genuine. Good. Though they were sheltered by the trees from much of the wind, he continued to hold her hand. The path wasn’t steep. When his father did what he did . . . when he got up in the middle of the night, so weak and ill, who’d gone with him? He hadn’t been well enough to drive himself to the state park. Who’d agreed that such a plan made any sense? An airplane flew over. For his parents’ generation, the question was always, Where were you when Kennedy was shot? Now, it was, What were you doing on 9/11? Jasper had been on a bus. He himself had been asleep, then crowded into a room where the students and teachers sat in front of the TV, watching the world change. Jasper’s loss had been so much greater than his own. Odd, that they’d more or less fallen out of contact. He shouldn’t have let that happen.
“Give me a hint about what’s wrong. Something about a woman?” she said. “Guys never get bent out of shape about other guys.”
“A sort of complicated situation with an old friend, who’s gay. I’m close to her and her girlfriend.”
“They want you to father their child.”
“That is what she wanted,” he said. “How amazing you’d say that.”
“I’m good at guessing. But apparently not good enough.”
A birdhouse sat wedged between a tree’s trunk and a sturdy branch. No sign of an occupant, but the little structure seemed to be in good shape, welcoming. Maybe it was part of some child’s personal kingdom. Until it deteriorated enough to become dangerous, he’d played in a tree house a long walk from his father’s summer place, never knowing who’d built it, but imagining the lives that had preceded him. He felt like he’d been rewarded for something when he’d found it. Sometimes he sat there with binoculars, hoping to see deer. Deer browsed on pine, hemlock, maple, and swamp maple in the winter. He’d been a lonely kid, private.
“It’s okay that we left without saying anything to the sitter?”
“She’s super-reliable. I’d have messed up their dynamic if I’d intruded.”
“Good to have someone you can be sure of.”
“Meaning that I shouldn’t be?”
“No. Meaning just what I said.”
“And your friend, she used to be your girlfriend?”
“LouLou.”
“LouLou. You didn’t answer me.”
(LaVerdere: “A question is a proposition. Which you might waste time by addressing directly.”)
“People don’t have to be couples to be close.”
“Absolutely. I wish my husband had just remained my friend. Or better yet, my enemy. Then none of this would have happened.”
“You’ll come out of it okay.”
“LouLou,” she said again. “Actually, I don’t want to hear about her. Guys assume women are so curious. You know what? I’m over curiosity.”
“That was the one thing I was required to be. The school I went to was for bright, screwed-up kids. I never understood why my father sent me there, since I wasn’t a troublemaker.”
“I couldn’t stand for Henry to go away.”
“I didn’t want to go to high school where my dad and stepmother lived. Nobody wanted to go to that school. Even if it had been great, who wants to live with his parents?”
“Was she an evil stepmother?”
“Elin? No. No, she was fine.”
“I always wished I could live with Daddy,” she said. “But Daddy was in constant motion. Daddy was busy. I left home when I was eighteen. I moved in with my ex, my soon-to-be ex, too young. I decided to when we were snorkeling off Virgin Gorda—isn’t that perfect? I’d actually been a virgin when I met him. I mean, technically. But that’s enough about me. Aren’t there quite a few LouLous? Like Little Lulu.”
He couldn’t think what to say. Was she self-loathing, or was she angry at him? He’d felt sympathy for her when she’d said how much her son meant to her. Then she’d reverted to talking about LouLou.
“Hey,” he said, trying to change the subject, “I haven’t had a home-cooked dinner in a while. What are we having?”
“Tubby Tompkins,” she answered, momentarily confusing him. “We’re having ratatouille. Seared duck breast with porcini-mushroom sauce. Assuming you eat red meat.”
“That sounds great.”
“I couldn’t stand to make one more phone call and ask one more person, ‘Oh, are you vegetarian, and can you tolerate dairy, or should I get almond milk, and do you like bottled water, and if so, do you like it bubbly or still, and if the spring runs dry in France, is there any alternative?’”
“Good I brought my own.”
“I had a women’s lunch here to support breast cancer research, and somebody had her cook call ahead. ‘I’m Manuel, the cook.’ Then he started in about how the sodium content often isn’t listed on the labels of imported water.”
“It’s too bad more of these things aren’t funny in the moment.”
“Right! That could be the motto of our age: ‘This’ll seem funny later.’ You know what? I blew it by telling you we ordered wine by the case. Like we’re people whose wine has to be special. Like nobody’s got anything better to think about.”
“That didn’t occur to me, Kayla. I did notice that you keep speaking in terms of ‘we,’ though.”
“Let’s change the subject,” she said. “You don’t want to talk about LouLou, and I don’t want to talk about my ex.”
Something in her directness—a way of speaking that made it seem like she relied on talk that seemed confessional, at the same time giving him less of a sense of her, rather than more—reminded him of what it could be like to talk to LouLou. He decided to try his own digression, even if he hadn’t had enough to drink to make that interesting.
“Where were you on 9/11?” he asked.
“Yoga,” she said. “I’m sounding worse and worse.”
“What’s wrong with doing yoga?”
“I’m not sure I can tell when you’re kidding.”
“I just mean what I say.”
“Refreshing.” She stopped to rub dirt off her shoe. “On 9/11,” she said, “we had a dinner reservation. I’d woken up with the sense he was going to ask me to marry him before I got too old.”
“You obviously wanted that.”
“Well, I wasn’t controlling or anything. I just thought we might have been moving in that direction.”
“Did I say something to suggest I thought you were controlling?”
“After he left, he told me that at weddings, straight weddings, there were invisible darts being sent out between men, sexual darts. That women didn’t pick up on them; they were no-see-ums. Anyway, obviously that night we didn’t go to dinner.” She played with her hair. She said, “If you and I got married, do you think we could make it? Or do you think marriage is just impossible?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you only attracted to girls who are bi?”
“You’re teasing.”
“No. I’m like you. I mean what I say.”
“Really? So what’s your sense of it? Should we get married?”
“We’d probably get along pretty well, but I’m not looking for another husband. I feel like I’ve already wasted half my life. Well, I mean, I really have almost wasted half my life! I mistook him for things he just wasn’t. I thought his anxiety was energy, and I thought his lack of focus was because he had so many brilliant, conflicting ideas. He didn’t want children. I felt the same way. Like we could just dodge the baby bullet. When he started to say maybe we should try, I thought that made him so vulnerable—it was rethinking him, more than rethinking motherhood. Henry’s made me do that. I mean, I might not have loved him. I might have been one of those women who drove the baby into that lake.” She gestured.
“That’s somebody’s swimming pool.”
“Whatever it takes. A psychopath will find a way to get the car into the water.”
“Now you’re joking.”
“Ben,” she said. “Do you at least understand LouLou?”
Twenty
He thought that he did. He remembered the person she’d been at school and missed her, and those days. He’d finally talked to Jasper—you had to text your friends to arrange a time to talk—though after the initial rush of relief upon hearing Jasper’s voice, he’d found himself withholding. Petulant. Everything Jasper said was said dispassionately. After Stanford, where he’d given up the idea of being a doctor, he’d spent two years as an office manager at a sports store in San Diego before moving to Chicago to live with his neurologist-to-be girlfriend. He, too, now wrote software programs. Jasper was still running (“Why wouldn’t I be?”), though his knees weren’t in the best shape. One of his clients managed a gym with an indoor track. He went there for free three or four days a week. Jasper and his girlfriend had talked about marriage, but he was going to wait and see where she’d be doing her residency. Not that marrying hinged on that, but if he had to make a big change geographically, it seemed best to delay wedding plans. He’d move wherever she went (“Why wouldn’t I?”). Her name was Yuna. She’d grown up in Santa Barbara, riding horses.
“Who do you see from the old days besides LouLou and her girlfriend?” Jasper had asked. He’d asked quietly, as if whatever Ben answered, they’d be sharing a confidence. Ben said he’d seen Eleanor Rule once, at her instigation. Benson Whitacre. Benson, whose name had been in the paper when Lehman Brothers went under. They’d spent hours at a bar on Tenth Avenue as he’d listened to Benson’s self-justifying tale of woe.
The day Ben called Jasper, he’d intended to tell him that he had his father’s hat. Not that it was the elephant in the room. It was more like Ben sensed an animal hovering silently at the edge of the forest, listening acutely. The Man was the only person Ben had personally known who’d died in the World Trade Center. Soon afterward, Jasper had been orphaned, his mother living only a few months longer than his father.
In Ben’s town there were two men who were one hundred years old and who didn’t speak to each other, and a Hungarian woman who cut silhouettes, age nine
ty-nine. He’d read about them in the local paper, the two men flanking the birthday sheet cake the newspaper editor had bought for them, one standing with a cane raised in triumph, the other leaning against a walker with balloons on the handles. The female artist was seated, mugging for the camera with a toothless smile.
He still hadn’t called Elin to say that he knew about her and LaVerdere, though he’d found a way to decline her emailed requests that he visit. The news about Elin and LaVerdere was difficult to absorb. He thought it best to keep his distance. Elin sensed something was wrong, which for a while meant that she called more often; he’d gotten into the habit of looking more carefully at caller ID. Yet for all he knew, the affair began after his father died.
Kayla, he came to find out, had her off-moments, when she could hardly be engaged. She’d twice said she’d visit—she’d been the one to suggest it, but twice she’d canceled. They didn’t see each other for two weeks after the dinner. No sex had followed the meal. The first time she called to say she couldn’t visit, it was because the sitter got sick. The second time she and her ex-husband had to check out a Montessori school. For Henry’s sake, they’d planned to have lunch afterward. Did people believe their own stories? Was she presenting it to him that way, or did she believe it herself? He’d asked, as gently as possible, why visiting a school would interfere with seeing him that night. The answer had been that, for Henry’s sake, her soon-to-be-ex-husband and his mother would be spending the night at the house. Ben wondered whether the toy had vanished into the heap he’d caught sight of at the end of the evening, when he and Kayla peeked into the boy’s room to see the babysitter asleep on the rug, her feet splayed in those Doc Martens, which looked like diving weights, one of Henry’s old receiving blankets clutched over her chest, as if she were a soldier who’d been killed at the base of Toy Mountain.
The day after the dinner, he’d slept with Daphne Randolph. There was another name he’d omitted from the list. She’d called and asked if he could stop by to offer advice about dividing the changing area of her vintage clothing store into private dressing rooms. Guys had started to try on dresses, making her women customers uncomfortable. She ran the store out of her finished, above-ground basement, mannequins standing outside the door like sentries in drag, draped with boas and gowns shedding their sequins like snakes.