A Wonderful Stroke of Luck

by Ann Beattie

  “What?”

  “Do you think I find this easy? Do you think I want to know any of this? I’ll spare you the rest. He came and said what he had to say, and now he’s gone off to continue his life of self-righteousness and cowardice.”

  “What do you mean?” she said, quietly. “He’s in my living room.”

  “Tell me he is not in your fucking living room,” he said. “Tell me he’s not there to get you into bed again, without even telling you what’s happened.”

  There was a long pause. In his house, a cricket began to chirp. From where? Where was the fucking thing? How could they be that loud, but stay hidden?

  “Elin, for god’s sake! He tells me, but not you? He blows off his teaching job and won’t return calls? Go ask him. For all I know he lied. And that’s the best scenario.”

  “I can’t believe what you said. It’s like a bad dream.”

  “Elin!”

  “What should I do?”

  “I told you. And whatever the truth is, I’m very sorry. I’m sorry. I could rename myself Very Sorry.”

  “I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Don’t feel that way. But go talk to him, right now.”

  “This can’t be true.”

  “He’s so crazy, it’s not impossible he lied to me,” he said. “Good luck.”

  “Oh, please don’t say ‘Good luck’ like that. You’ve always meant so much to me.”

  He hung up. It was like talking to LouLou: Say it this way, don’t say it that way. Take cues from me, don’t think for yourself. Let me intimidate you with my neediness, if being aggressive fails. Or, in Arly’s case, let me manipulate you, let me make it seem like you’re the one who’s aggressive.

  The cricket was near the stove. Live and let live. He took out his phone. He turned it on, intending to call LouLou. Instead, he found himself scrolling through photographs. There was a whole series of Maude, investigating the tree, reared back in her mother’s arms, tickling Ginny with a stick topped by a monarch butterfly made out of netting. That was his favorite, the sunlight illuminating both mother and child. LaVerdere had long ago insisted, until Ben and his friends came to believe it, that there was no best, definitive moment of anything, except as time seemed to stop for someone already predisposed to love what he or she saw.

  He looked at the photograph approvingly. Then, after not having returned his calls for quite a while, he forwarded the picture, without comment, to Steve.

  Twenty-three

  He’d been thinking about his old school notebook, and trying not to, ever since LaVerdere’s visit. It lay on the shelf of the hall closet, along with The Man’s beret—a shelf he never reached up to because he kept his favorite baseball caps on hooks near the back door. The notebook had been fouled once he found out LaVerdere had opened it years before. It was as if the pages had been undeveloped film, and exposing it to light had obliterated the images. Stupid even to have kept it; he shouldn’t romanticize what had never been intended as anything but a sort of diary, or stories that never materialized. Some days Ben had only made a notation about the weather, or about a bird he’d seen that he couldn’t name.

  He lifted the notebook down. Something like this, as his friend Daphne would say, might do very well on eBay. It would be listed in the “Ephemera” category (a notion that had much amused him). When he’d dropped by her store recently, she’d been on the site, scrolling through junk from people’s attics, photographs of cousins they’d never met who’d been killed in the war; sailboat after sailboat, drawn badly on graph paper; a year’s utility bills; someone’s love letters, missing the replies. She’d shaken her head as she zoomed in on matchbooks, postcards of grim highway motels, flimsy pamphlets offering suggestions about what to prepare on your new griddle.

  He went into the living room to flip through, finding himself stopping in the middle of a story he’d written at Bailey in response to LaVerdere’s assignment to inhabit the mind of another character. He flipped back, now; his own handwriting was nearly unrecognizable. Predictably, he saw, he’d invented someone larger than life, rather than—say—trying to understand Jasper. Or Brenda. He remembered how happy it had made LaVerdere to pretend not to know how to distinguish fact from fiction. The way novels had begun to change had of course been an easy pitch right into LaVerdere’s outstretched glove. If so-called real historical figures appeared in the text, did that make it nonfiction? If a fictional character was recognizable—if a writer admitted using someone he or she knew as a main character—did that alone mean that you were reading nonfiction? Fiction writing, like poetry, was for girls; he wouldn’t have tried it at all, except that LaVerdere had intentionally mystified the genres, rather than drawing any lines. Maybe this was the assignment that had gotten LouLou in trouble when the head she decided to get inside belonged to her married lover. At least she hadn’t used his real name, so he couldn’t be tracked down. Boston was a big city. If some of her friends had heard her say that she was having an affair with a married man, did that make it this married man? LaVerdere hadn’t been the one to blow her cover, and Ben still wasn’t sure who had, though at the time it had been rumored to be Eleanor Rule. LaVerdere had became LouLou’s defender; of course she’d expected him to back her up about the “fiction” she was writing.

  Ben opened his notebook and flipped to a random page. It was a rough draft of a paper for LaVerdere, discussing simile. Not only was his handwriting very different now, he’d even drawn numerals in a different way. He turned a few pages, looking for something more interesting.

  . . . whether LaVerdere had been humoring Bob Cabot or not about the necessity of getting clarity by taking decisive action, he’d not only agreed (after three Guinnesses and a shot of Jameson), but been truly thankful when LaVerdere produced his own cell so he could call his brother in New York and see if they could talk.

  Now, reading his schoolboy attempt to channel The Man, something stopped Ben. He turned the notebook sideways. Written vertically, in the margin, printed in caps, was: V. REALISTIC. DAD NEVER GOT IT THAT YOU HAD TO ACTUALLY CHARGE YOUR PHONE.

  After his arrival, Mr. C. had at long last CLICHÉ decided to listen to his brother’s advice about uncomplicating his life. Also, he’d listened seriously to his new friend Pierre’s good counsel. He’d needed to hear LaVerdere tell him Jasper was doing fine, that the divorce wouldn’t scar the boy for life. He hadn’t taken to LaVerdere when they first met, but he’d disliked the other person at Jasper’s admissions interview even more—an Asian man who obviously wanted to be elsewhere, who said nothing. YOUR INTERVIEW NOT MINE. HA PRETENDED HE WANTED TO BE MY CHESS BUDDY SUCKING UP TO THE MAN.

  Bob Cabot had been wrong about LaVerdere. The guy was hardly French aristocracy: he’d been fathered by a Quebecois traveling salesman who’d spent most of his life, after leaving Montreal, in Ames, Iowa, with his Prom Queen wife. Pierre had left the Midwest as a fellowship student to attend the one Ivy League university that offered him a financial aid package, Columbia. BEN, GATSBY’S BEEN WRITTEN. Once there, his father had taken the train into New York to introduce Pierre to his half sister, the spawn FISH? of his father’s long affair with a woman in Hell’s Kitchen. She was six weeks older than Pierre. She was not his twin. YOU MADE THIS WEIRD SHIT UP? Everybody had a complicated life, everybody. At some point, you had to accept the way things were and move on. He hadn’t caused his wife’s cancer, and furthermore, she might beat it. She was determined, and tough, and she’d also had more than her share of luck with other things, including the bets she placed on the horses. GREYHOUNDS NOT HORSES DICKWAD. As LaVerdere had pointed out over drinks, optimists often forgot to factor in luck. So they’d toasted luck.

  Mr. C. stood on the corner, annoyed when a cab driver was too lazy to cut across from the other side. The Man got into another taxi and headed downtown.

  Ben flipped back toward the beginning, to a page unmarked by Jasper’s comment
ary: Orange juice squeezed by Tessie.

  Another page:

  Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: “Our romantic is a man of great breadth of vision and the most consummate rascal of all our rascals. I assure you—from experience. That, of course, is all true if our romantic is intelligent. Good Lord, what am I saying? The romantic is always intelligent. I only mean to observe that if there were fools among our romantics, they need not be taken into account for the simple reason that they had transformed themselves into Germans when still in their prime and, to preserve that pristine jewel-like purity of theirs, gone and settled somewhere abroad, preferably in Weimar or Black Forest.”

  Ben flipped back again and found it as he turned the page: 9/11.

  Next [a ripped-out page tucked back in]:

  Jasper fucked Aqua. Tessie saw them doing it in the laundry room. A. cried. Jasper talked Tessie out of telling Ha, who was supposed to be chaperone, which would have been talking to a statue anyway. Darius found out and put tacks in Jasper’s bed and walked up to A. in the cafeteria and gave her wrist an Indian rope burn. I think he loves her. If A. ever tells about the tree up past the jogging trail where Ray stashes Jasper’s weed, J. will get exiled to the Black Forest whether he wants to be deported or not. Then look out. He can burn down the forest too.

  Ben turned back to his attempt at a short story. There was the graffiti: Jasper’s big block-letter printing in his never-finished story—yet another set of comments by someone who’d invaded his privacy. Maybe the nature of the prank had been that Jasper had intended for the comments to be found later, though the kids at Bailey didn’t tend to play jokes that took time to pay off. He might have assumed the obvious and thought Ben would see them immediately, though apparently—what a geek he’d been!—he’d kept writing, without looking back. The drafts of his writing assignments had stopped sometime before graduation. What the hell. Arly had opened his mail, indulging her paranoia, throwing letters on the floor after she’d scrutinized them: Elin’s banal good wishes, mixed up with his underwear and dirty socks.

  He put the notebook aside, picked up his cell, and dialed. “Hey,” he said, when his friend got it on the first ring. “I’m not calling too early?”

  “No, no. I’m up. Everything good?”

  He’d thought he was calling for a simple reason, but Jasper’s voice confused him; he didn’t know where to begin. By blurting out disingenuously that he would have taken the bus with him years before to see his mother? How could he have gone with someone who didn’t tell you he was leaving? Jasper had always been a loner. Ben’s mother had died even younger than Jasper’s had. But they’d grown up, they’d lived through those years, Jasper would be marrying the woman he lived with.

  “Ben? You there?” Jasper said.

  “Yeah. I don’t know why I’m only telling you this now, because it’s not like I forgot about it, but all this time, the thing is, I’ve had your father’s hat.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The beret? Remember? LaVerdere was right about his being in the middle of a breakdown. He dropped it and I picked it up. I still have it.”

  “Oh. Is this some AA apology, or something?”

  “No. Definitely not. I wanted to know if you’d like me to mail it to you.”

  “Just toss it,” Jasper said.

  Well—he’d asked Elin for none of his father’s things. He could understand not getting sentimental.

  “Ben, hey, it’s not a great time. The coffeemaker just fucked up and I’m running late. Listen, let’s talk again, okay?”

  Only then did he realize that he’d wanted to tell Jasper about LaVerdere’s visit, what he’d found out about why he’d been sent to Bailey, maybe even let him know about LouLou and Dale’s request. He heard a woman’s voice in the background.

  “Anytime, man. Give a call,” Ben said.

  “Okay, later,” Jasper said.

  Ben went into the hallway. He looked at the beret on the hall table. How truly strange for Mr. C. to have shown up at Bailey looking like an expat on the lam from Les Deux Magots. Adults were so weird. Adults had no idea how to be a lot of the time. He picked it up—even touching it saddened him—and swirled it on one finger like pizza dough. Then he dropped it in the trash. It could sit there until he emptied the baskets into a big plastic bag he carried through the rooms every Sunday, gathering up things for Monday pickup. He shook his head at his notebook and tossed that in as well.

  What if he died (Elin’s rationale for buying new underwear before every long car trip) and someone found such juvenile posturing? He wondered if Arly thought about some of the things she’d left behind, including the porn magazines hidden in a pillowcase. Who but Arly would buy actual magazines? Where had he put those? They might have to wait to be discarded in the following week’s trash. When Steve still lived next door—that departure had been as quick as an arsonist running from a lit fire—and he’d gone to help uncrate the TV, he hadn’t thought Steve was lying about watching porn, just that he’d spontaneously told the truth. A private company removed his trash, as they still removed the trash next door, where a single mother now lived with her teenage daughter; she’d moved in one day after Steve, Gin, and Maude vacated the house. She had a dog that could only be distinguished from a football by its pointy ears.

  Jesus. He supposed he was now living in suburbia.

  He put on his jacket and went out past the nonexistent meadow to the shed, where there was still a small pile of firewood remaining from the half-cord he’d bought from Steve’s guy last year. He’d make a fire, even if it did draw warm air out of the house. Had he really said that, had he really been such an asshole that he’d given that explanation—even if it was true—to LaVerdere? He picked up a few logs, looking around for something to carry them in, but he didn’t see anything. A rag, or something, on the dirt floor. He pushed it with the toe of his shoe. It turned out to be a small felt toy with cross-stitched eyes that must have belonged to Maude. To his surprise, tears welled up in his eyes. Steve had given him—in what was one of Steve’s favorite expressions—a “heads-up” about moving to take a better job that he had to say yes or no to immediately (“heads-up,” in Ben’s experience, synonymous with This News Will Really Give You a Headache), but since Steve seemed so unfazed by the possibility of leaving, Ben had put it out of his mind until Gin appeared, crying. Full circle: She’d come alone the first time he met her, and eventually them; she’d come alone to burst into tears and announce their departure.

  A wheelbarrow with a deflated tire sat in the corner, another pile of wood inside it, along with dried leaves and a cluster of branches. He picked up the top two logs because they looked particularly dry, exactly the right length and width. He left, the smell of earth and mold stinging his nose, kicking the door closed behind him, pieces of bark falling, as well as some big bug that startled him as it jumped. Maybe the thing had been a frog. Well—it was all ridiculous. LaVerdere couldn’t have been serious about how nice the house was. Key West and Riverside Drive both sounded pretty good, and if you said the names of those places, people wouldn’t cock their heads in confusion. LouLou bringing her box of orchids! Those were certainly gone—as was LouLou, but he didn’t want to think about that. He’d become sentimental, like an old person who couldn’t relinquish anything—unless it was a few crappy juice glasses left behind, or a busted chair too heavy to get out the door. All these years he’d kept the beret, but good for him, for tossing it. The notebook, too, deserved singling out; that, he thought, he’d pull out of the trash because its pages could be used to light the fire.

  Twenty-four

  He left his job when the company in D.C., which seemed to think he was only a human calculator who loved to live in the realm of speculation, pulled itself out of a downward spiral and expanded west instead of south, where it had intended to go. He’d have to relocate to Seattle to stay in the game. Steve’s fathe
r had taken a trip to see a favorite cousin out there shortly before he died. Ben had been able to draw up papers with projected scenarios for the next five years, and the old man had picked the options he thought best, so that was taken care of by the time he’d died. All the bequests were in order: The Guggenheim Foundation was certainly pleased. Steve had recently sent, snail mail, an article about the CEO of a nonprofit his father had also favored, ripped out of Town & Country—good guess that Ben wouldn’t have stumbled on that, though he supposed he might have in the waiting room of the new, young female dentist in town who specialized in cosmetic dentistry. Steve had also included a beautifully designed brochure advertising townhouses in a gated community not far from where he and Gin lived that he hinted Ben might be interested in. Without the benefit of seeing Steve’s face, it could be very difficult to know when Steve was kidding. He’d included a photograph of Maude, wearing a necklace that might have been pearls—hard to say, but he hoped not. Had they moved to Texas and thrown up their hands right away, as Gin had worried they might? She hadn’t worried about their parenting so much as she’d worried that in such a big place, they’d fade into anonymity—that they’d kick back and stay where they’d landed, far away from woodland walks. No one could replace their friend Ben (as she’d said, pointedly).

  After he’d severed his connection to his old employer in D.C. (why were they so outraged, when every other student who graduated from college now could code?), he started working at a business in town, a job he’d at first felt defensive about because it was such a step down financially, but which he now viewed as providing something for the community, as fighting the good fight. Daphne Randolph’s fiancé, Ned, bought and expanded Ash Street’s failing greasy spoon, transforming it with his architect father’s help into a popular bookstore/café. Ned worked there on weekends, because that seemed to be when the interesting customers came in. It was closed Sundays and Mondays. Ben worked the other three days a week. On a recent Wednesday, William Kennedy’s wife had been pointed out to him, shopping with a young woman who might have been one of the Kennedy children. Ben had met Russell Banks, who said he had a place in the Adirondacks, and bought several hardbacks. The owner had gone off for a beer with Banks. A Vogue editor shopped in the store. A reality-show actress with a cult following. She’d sold her hair trimmings on eBay, Daphne told him, for a lot of money.