A Wonderful Stroke of Luck

by Ann Beattie

  “Yes. If they don’t catch on that I’m a sublet and throw me out. I went to Florida to work on a book. I left Bailey to write it. This your chair, or is that not an operative concept here?”

  “Sit anywhere you like.”

  LaVerdere sat in Ben’s chair. “Every self-styled philosopher’s sure he has a great book in him, right? I found it a humbling experience. Have you kept after your own writing?”

  He’d intended to remain standing, shitty as that was. Worse, how transparent, his bid to retain control.

  “You remember wrong,” Ben said, sitting in LouLou’s favorite chair. “I wasn’t a writer.”

  “You did write, Big Ben! In that spiral notebook. You passed it off as notes about chess, but when Tessie found it and gave it to me to return to you, I confess I flipped through.”

  “Juvenalia.”

  He hadn’t known that Tessie had ever had it, let alone that she’d given it to LaVerdere. It had disappeared, then miraculously reappeared on his dresser. Tessie must have thought LaVerdere’s name scratched in tiny cross-hatches on the front cover, elaborately doodled during a particularly boring class on Shakespeare, meant that the notebook belonged to him.

  “I was happy to see it. I worried that I discouraged students from the arts, I spent so much time emphasizing science and talking about the techniques of debate. Well, none of us mistook Bailey for an art school, the parents least of all.”

  “I take it you’re happy to be out of there.”

  “Yes, yes. Terrible winters. I sold the house, though I should have hung on to it. Another mistake, acting too rashly. Florida’s not a real place. Ever been to Key West? You can stand at what’s called the Southernmost Point and gaze in the direction of Cuba. It’s a photo op, as so many things are. I suppose it was more romantic when it wasn’t as easy to get there. Or you can walk down Dick Dock—not named by me, but it does convey—and see the ocean from another perspective, the fishing boats off on the horizon line, WaveRunners with some of our brightest minds aboard.”

  “You won’t be surprised that I find it a little hard to imagine you in a place like Key West, from what I’ve heard of it,” Ben said.

  LaVerdere nodded. “I had a drink one night with a woman who worked on a boat that took people snorkeling on the reef. She said that two or three times a week, she’d find out that somebody all suited, ready to go over the side, didn’t know how to swim. They’d never considered it might be necessary. I really did assume I had a book in me, but then I thought: Why think in those terms? You wouldn’t want to have a tumor; it wouldn’t be pleasant to have a bump on your back that was the remains of the twin you’d absorbed in utero. So what’s so great about an imaginary, internal book? Writing a book seems, oddly, to be something our culture believes in—that everyone ‘has one in them.’”

  “LaVerdere, you could do stand-up.”

  “I knew Spalding Grey. We were once rather close. One doesn’t want to name-drop, especially when your friend drowns himself.”

  “I didn’t know you knew him.”

  “None of those Virginia Woolf rocks in the pocket. Anyway, I got myself to Key West in a car that died on a key called Sugarloaf. It had to be towed. I used your preferred mode of travel after that. I hitched. Once you’re in Key West you don’t need a car, so I suppose it all worked out. I flew back after I’d failed completely. I was lucky enough to get an offer to teach a philosophy course at The New School. Remember Akemi? She’s married to the head of the department. Older guy. Calls herself Alexandra Howe. She’s a resident at Bellevue. So there I went, back to winter, tail between my legs, tales unwritten.”

  No one else talked like LaVerdere. Ben felt a surge of fondness.

  “I’ve let you down,” LaVerdere said.

  “You haven’t done anything to me. You do seem to have orbited me pretty effectively, though. Elin. Now LouLou.”

  “I’m a mere mortal. Not part of the solar system,” LaVerdere said. “Which, by your analogy, would make you the sun.”

  “Yeah. Maybe it’s Freudian. Sun being a pretty conspicuous pun.”

  “Good one.”

  “Tell me, Pierre. Why, in a world full of people, did you have to get it on with my friends and family?”

  “I can’t say I might not think the same, if the situation were reversed.”

  LaVerdere hadn’t touched his drink. “Your father,” he went on. “He and I invested in a real estate venture. If word had gotten out, certain people would definitely have tried to stop us. They would have made trouble—that most usual of human instincts. Your father was concerned about some investments that hadn’t worked out and had affected his credit rating. When we decided to work together, I was the front man. We bought an empty mill. You never knew about that? We were going to divide it into condos, allocate the required number of units for so-called affordable housing in order to get a tax break. I’m sure you remember that Locke talked not about the pursuit of happiness—that was the notion of a man infatuated with the purported superiority of the French, Thomas Jefferson. Locke’s assertion called for ordinary citizens—though we know there’s no such thing as ‘ordinary’—to be guaranteed ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.’ The two of us formed a corporation. Then, like everyone else who does that, we left Mr. Locke and his ideas behind in the dirt.”

  “And you were having an affair with Elin at the same time.”

  “No,” he said. “Later.”

  “When did you get to know my father so well?”

  “He and I started talking at some start-of-the-year mixer at Bailey. It turned out he was looking for an investor, though we didn’t touch on that initially. He’d been worried about your not having any idea what you’d concentrate on, in your studies. It’s always affecting when someone who has real problems is still worried about his son. I told him not to worry because you were observant, you took time to reach decisions. That all things eventually got sorted out. Why would you want your son to believe that he could predict his future? The person who hits through the ball succeeds.”

  “This comes as a surprise. But how do we get from tennis to Elin?”

  “When I heard about his medical problem, I advised him to get treatment at Sloan Kettering, but he’d done his research and he’d set his sights on staying close to home, going to Dana-Farber. By then, of course, he felt a little guilty that our affairs were somewhat entangled. He wished Elin accompanied him more places, but you’d know better than I what sort of an understanding they had. We had a drink one night at my sister’s.”

  “LaVerdere,” Ben said, but the story continued.

  “Your father joked afterward that I’d taken him to a petting zoo. I’d had no plan except to make a family visit when coincidence brought us near. He thought—your father thought—my relatives had an enviable life. He’d gotten worse news than I knew. We talked about things. Had coffee at some late-night diner. He spoke wistfully about my sister and her husband. He asked me to look out for Elin. Your father and Elin knew so few people.”

  “They didn’t have friends?”

  “As it was presented to me, no.”

  “And by ‘look out for,’ you assumed he meant—”

  “Both of us should have known better. She doesn’t have many fond thoughts about me.” He stirred his drink again with his finger. “I wasn’t him. She loved your father. You knew she disliked your sister.”

  “Sure. You’re the one who told me to trust my intuition.”

  LaVerdere nodded. “My own sister and I aren’t much alike,” he said. “She had such a well-kept farm—I agree with your father’s perception, there—and the two of them were making cheese with milk their partners supplied, with more requests from food co-ops than they could fulfill. Then she started taking acting lessons. She told us about it. She was interested in doing stand-up. It’s interesting that when you were putting me dow
n, you came up with the same idea.”

  “I thought the point of the Honor Society was that everyone was particularly bright.”

  “Ben. It’s true I’d like to deflect your anger, but I’m trying to be honest.” He looked past Ben, into the distance. He said, “You don’t light the fire?”

  “It pulls heat out of the room.”

  “Good to be a person who anticipates problems.”

  “Sarcasm isn’t becoming, Pierre. You’re the one who taught me that.”

  “I didn’t intend it that way. I was thinking aloud.”

  “So you thought you’d drive here and go to the bar where I hang out and you’d look me up and discuss your relationship with Elin? I really don’t want details about what went wrong, by the way. It would never have occurred to me that you two would be a good match.”

  “I’m not your father,” LaVerdere said, taking a sip of scotch.

  “And LouLou. She just laid out her plans, and you thought, Sure, what the hell.”

  “She and I weren’t long into having a drink together when she brought up the situation, and what she was thinking about. It did flatter my ego. But I should never have said to her that if that was what she wanted, I didn’t see why we wouldn’t just get into bed and do it the usual way. I suppose that was offensive. Most of all, to her partner.”

  “What do you think it is about you, Pierre?” He’d begun to warm to using his first name. “Why do these things happen?”

  “I’m not sure. The request certainly took me aback. Her being gay surprised me more. I didn’t know that before we met up at the Knickerbocker. At school, it was obvious she had a crush on you. Undoubtedly, she did. In any case, she’s an intelligent—”

  “Yeah, and she’s attractive, too.”

  “She is. And I’m happy she lives a life she feels comfortable in. The whole idea’s over. I trust she told you that. I don’t know what I was thinking. Vanity. Hubris. I embarrass myself.”

  Why didn’t he burn logs in his fireplace? Because it would be too sad to sit alone in the cozy room?

  “There’s one more thing,” LaVerdere said.

  “Fine, but in about five minutes I’ve got to leave for an appointment.”

  “I would also want to brush me off. I understand.”

  He thought about lying. Even about calling him Pierre again. Instead, he said nothing. He should have had a drink with the man. Where did he get off, being such a prig, when someone had tried to be open?

  “You and Elin get along, right?” LaVerdere said. “You’ve gone there for Christmas?”

  “Sometimes.” He made a mental note that he should make a kind overture to Elin. His father had set her up. It was stupid, but he’d probably had good intentions. In any case, she wasn’t to blame for living her life.

  “I did a little exploring when I left Bailey,” LaVerdere said. “Key West can be rather disorienting, in that it’s land’s end. We don’t just project metaphors. We also internalize them. In Key West you can actually run out of space. You get to the tippy tip only to find there’s no more there there, to invoke a current cliché. You can go only so far, then there’s water. It has a disquieting effect. It makes you feel like a narcissist always drifting toward a mirror. The sun on the water provides a mirrorlike effect. And across the distance—what is it, ninety miles?—Cuba. If you look across the water long enough, things you used to believe take off like a swarm of butterflies. But back to what I came to say: LouLou and I met a couple of times while I was thinking things over. Once with Dale. I hadn’t read the book, but I have now. It reinforces my belief that experiencing real adversity separates the weak from the strong. Dale told me some stories she left out of the book. A rather lame, passive-aggressive ploy to retain power by letting me know what a victim she already was. She was trying to provoke me. She didn’t chip in on the check, which really makes you feel sorry that she thought that sort of protest meant anything. I went with LouLou to the doctor the next day. I had some blood work done. When the results came back, I found out I was HIV-positive. Well, worse than that. It had passed that stage. Sort of like trying to enlist in the military and finding out you’re color-blind. That broke the heart of a friend of mine. Couldn’t distinguish the sky from the water.”

  The man was full of surprises, some more awful than others. Why was he pretending to drop this into conversation as if it hardly mattered? When someone told you this, what were you supposed to say? That you were sorry? Might that be all he wanted to hear, then he’d go away?

  “These days, as you know, it’s not the end of the world. I take medicine. I jog around the reservoir. Make my weekly pilgrimages to Strawberry Fields. Down in the Keys, I’d started fishing and found it quite gratifying. But returning and getting the results of the blood test—it was quite a blow, let me tell you. Put quite a different perspective on my lack of energy. The night sweats. I’ve slept only with women, and for a long, long time—embarrassing as it is to admit—they’ve been married. The only drug I ever used was back in my own school days, smoking pot.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’ve actually been able to keep it together pretty well, but it’s a mystery where I got this. I don’t need to tell you how depressed this made me. I met my classes, but otherwise I just withdrew.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Now, you can say no to this,” LaVerdere said. “I completely understand that you’ve got your life here, you’re under no obligation, even though you’re skeptical about what I’ve said. About how oblivious I was. I do understand how much LouLou’s situation involved you, simply because our dear friends’ lives do overlap with ours. Much more’s invested in being someone’s close friend than in having a one-night stand. So I apologize for even considering sleeping with LouLou, for nearly deluding myself into thinking I might be doing something useful, when I wasn’t really thinking at all. But I’m not here to talk about that. You know what I’m going to ask, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Well—Elin. I’ve got to tell her. And I don’t have the courage to do it alone.”

  “Elin,” he repeated grimly. Of course. Elin.

  “I’m sorry to dump this on you. You have every right to tell me to deal with my own problems.”

  “I guess AIDS is the Lady and the Tiger.”

  LaVerdere ducked his chin slightly to the side. “Very astute,” he said. “Maybe better to leave both doors closed rather than risk anything more, hmm?”

  “Sorry. In fact, I’m really very sorry. I can’t remember the last time I was this sorry. I mean it.”

  “Thanks, Ben. When you interact with good people, you always get back way more than you put in.”

  “Oh, man, I really didn’t expect to hear anything like this,” Ben said.

  “Nor did I.”

  “LouLou knows? That’s why she gave you my number?”

  “I told you I was a coward. Thank god there was a blood test. Thank god we didn’t do anything.”

  “Right,” he said. “But with Elin . . . what do you think is the best way to handle this?”

  “Courage fails me in the same way I’ve failed my body. Can you imagine Elin picking up the phone and learning this?”

  “You know, I think I need a breather,” Ben said. “Is that okay?”

  “It’s always best to say what you want.”

  “Then could I also say that I like you, but I regret getting together? Some things are best left the way they were. I don’t know anybody who didn’t appreciate all you did for us. But I’m thinking that maybe when you’re not fucking former students or people’s wives, you should just stay The Teacher.”

  “I understand that reaction.”

  “I know. You understand everything, but that doesn’t mean people understand you.”

  “You’re angry.”

  “Since I already look like an idio
t who has no idea what’s going on with some of the most important people in his life.”

  “If I had it to do over again, I’d do it differently.”

  “Well, Pierre, you’ve got to congratulate yourself that you’re a guy who’s open to many possibilities.”

  “When I came here today—” He rubbed his cheek. “No. What I was going to say goes back to the same topic,” LaVerdere said. “I should leave.” He downed his drink.

  “What about Elin? She’s got to be checked.”

  “I’ll call her when I get home.”

  “You will?”

  “I shouldn’t have put this on you. It’s my problem to face up to what I’ve done. Please don’t hate me. I’m mortal. I messed up big-time. My ego got the best of me. I’ve obviously failed to figure out even the most basic things.”

  He stood. Though Ben wished he could look elsewhere, his eyes were riveted. There was more white in LaVerdere’s hair than he’d first noticed. What was he doing, being so unkind? Like LaVerdere shouldn’t have sex with anybody, like he was obliged to be pure, like Mommy and Daddy? The man had HIV! What the hell.

  He said, “What was I doing at Bailey Academy? I get why LouLou was there. She was flunking out of public school and constantly running away. And Hailey was obsessed with that musician she had a kid by. Jasper’s father totally overreacted to the barn fire, though I personally believe it was an accident Jasper decided to put a spin on and take credit for.” Once out of his mouth, the last statement sounded exactly like the lie it was. The fire had been no accident. Every medicine Jasper took, he’d needed. It was clear why Jasper had been sent to Bailey.

  “Ironic. His son burns the barn to the ground. Then the father dies when the World Trade Center goes up in flames. Do you talk to Jasper? He’s okay?”

  “Yeah, we’re still friends. I spoke to him a while ago. Since you’re straight, I guess I don’t have to worry about your looking him up to fuck him.”

  “I hate to leave when you’re still so angry.”

  “Then answer.”

  “Anyone whose son or daughter passed the interview and paid the tuition could attend the school, Ben.”