by Ann Beattie
“No you won’t. Just tape a piece of paper over the drawing.”
The room was dark except for the frog night light on the table beside the bed. She had left the ditto master on the table when she got undressed and went to take a shower, and Spangle—bored, trying to twirl a Frisbee on his first finger—had picked up the pieceof paper and a pen and doodled Cynthia’s face. It was not a caricature; it was what he thought she really looked like.
“Believe me,” Spangle said. “Watch all the nice notes you get.”
“And you’re going to go to the garden party with me?”
“ ‘Can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself,’ ” Spangle sighed. “I am going to be on a mission of great importance, retrieving my brother from the mysteries of Madrid. Hoping he isn’t already married and that there isn’t already an olive-skinned infant and a maid he’s two-timing Rosita with. Hoping to get him back to law school. My esteemed brother. Have to be careful not to piss him off, though. I’m almost out of the money the old man left me, but he hasn’t run out of his. As far as I know.”
“Move over,” she said.
“Speak right into the microphone,” Spangle said, kicking back the sheet and taking his penis in his hand. “Do you think there are really tankers full of crude oil off the coast that the United States is stopping from making deliveries? Are you angry about gas rationing?”
“Get over,” she said, nudging him with her hip.
“Come closer,” Spangle said. “The mike isn’t picking this up.”
“I’m going to have to deal with your neurotic mother all the time you’re in Madrid.”
“Do you think… ” Spangle said, raising his pelvis in the air and pointing his penis toward her.
“God almighty,” she said. “If you want to play with yourself don’t let me interrupt.”
She pushed until she had enough bed space to lie down on.
“I’m a tanker,” Spangle said, rolling toward her, holding his erect penis, “and I’m steaming in to make a delivery.”
“Get off,” she said. “I’m not amused, Spangle.”
“What’s today’s date?” he said. “Tomorrow had better be an odd day, because I’ll never make it to Bradley Field on an eighth of a tank.”
Two
CYNTHIA DREAMED that she was falling. It was a late afternoon fright dream. When she took naps after teaching, she often had to wake herself up in the middle of some nightmare. At night she slept all right, but when she napped she was likely to have nightmares. It was worth the risk, though: When she slept, she forgot the students, and if she had a nightmare and shook herself awake, she was always glad to find herself in her lover’s apartment, instead of at the high school. Her sister had left her the key to her condominium while she was in Mexico for the summer, but Cynthia found the cramped New Haven apartment more comfortable. That, and that idiotic Mitch Auerberg—he was older than the rest of them, and had failed a similar course the summer before—who had followed her home one day on his motorcycle and gunned it and streaked off when she saw him. He was probably hiding in the bushes like Popeye, waiting for her to go out back of the building in her bathing suit so he could scare her—she did not think he was capable of worse than that. She went on the assumption that there was no great malice in those children, and that was what kept her going to work every day.
She found a joint on the night table and lit it, got out of bed and went into the kitchen. She turned on the window fan and undid her pigtails, putting the rubber bands on the counter. An ant ran around them and disappeared down the crack between the wall and the counter. Her lover, Peter Spangle, would not let her buy any chemical bug killers; his own nightmares were about being at the test site when an atomic bomb was detonated. He was sure that it was the odor of Raid that provoked his nightmares. Raid, he insisted: not all the acid he had taken; not the recent newspaper reports linking exposure to radiation with cancer.
Spangle was in Madrid, trying to talk his brother Jonathan into returning to law school. His mother had paid for the trip to Madrid. She had paid for his brother’s trip, too, not realizing that Jonathan had intended his vacation to be a year long. She was afraid, now that Peter was in Madrid, that he would stay too—that the country had some secret power over highly intelligent white American males. She called the apartment often, to see if there was any word on how things were going. She also complained that her new wall-to-wall carpeting was fuzzing, and that as soon as an avocado seed took root, it rotted. When Spangle had been in the apartment and his mother called, she only spoke briefly to Cynthia, to exchange a few banalities. Now that her son was gone and she had no one else to talk to, she sometimes called twice a night. Cynthia was tempted to pick up the phone and say, in her most faraway voice: “This is the spirit of Madrid, and I have captured your sons forever. Don’t watch for them in the breeze or in sunlight. I have their power. I have sucked their souls as empty as the inside of a straw.”
Enough dope smoking for the day. Strange how hard two tokes could hit. They could wipe you out when you were not yet wide awake.
She went to look in the refrigerator. She settled for leftover hummus and some pita bread and sat on the counter and dipped the bread into the bowl. It tasted like baby food. When she finished eating, though, there would be no one to wipe her chin and put her on her back to admire her while she kicked her legs. Instead, she would go to the laundromat—the one next door to the donut shop, to torture herself for having given up refined sugar.
How could the students not care about the pilgrimage to Canterbury? How could she care that such idiots did not care? How could Mitch what’s-his-name have had the nerve to follow her as she walked to her sister’s apartment and then make a twisted face at her, letting her see that it was him? Didn’t they care that she could take it out on them later, in the classroom? Didn’t they care that they were making such fools of themselves in front of an adult? She would have been mortified not to have appeared sophisticated when she was their age.
But where did sophistication get you? It got you selected for an education at a classy college, and when you graduated, this kind of part-time job was the best thing you could get, and the pay was no good, and your brain—after so much time realizing that she had a brain—was now being challenged by trivia. How can I kill bugs without using bug spray? Where is the best place to wash clothes? Should I or should I not go out to the swimming pool in back of my sister’s condominium? By the time her education was completed, her brain would be worn down to a little stub, pencil shavings on the floor.
“My hair hurts,” Spangle’s mother said when Cynthia picked up the telephone. “I had it in a rubber band yesterday, but this is the first time it’s hurt, so I don’t think it’s that. It’s Freudian, I guess. It feels like somebody’s tugged it.”
She was not calling about her hair.
“Tell me without my having to ask whether you’ve heard from him.”
“I haven’t. I told you that when he left, he said they’d be back this Friday.”
“One little par avion, you’d think. Anyway, I’m hoping they’re really coming back. I’ve lost five pounds. It’s a combination of worrying and eating nothing but poached eggs and drinking Perrier.”
“I was about to eat when you called,” Cynthia said. Anything to get her off the phone.
“Don’t tell me if it was fettuccine. I love all those coiled pastas, ready to spring into calories: tortellini and fettuccine and all those curlycue things like enchanted snakes.”
Heavy breathing. Cynthia would have been frightened if Tess Spangle had done that early in the conversation, before she identified herself.
“Who’s meeting their plane?” Tess said.
“Nobody.”
“It doesn’t seem right. Of course I wasn’t invited. I always let myself be taken advantage of, and I won’t put myself in the position of being made a fool of, too. Of course, if they don’t come on the plane Friday, and I’m there, who would kno
w but me that I was made a fool of again? My shrink would know. I’d tell the shrink. The shrink would try to make it all appear normal. He’s insidious that way. ‘Why blame yourself for meeting a plane?’ ”
“I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
“If a woman goes to the airport and no one knows she’s there, does she still exist at the airport? Do you play philosophical games with your students, or are they too young? How can anyone be young?”
“I see it Monday through Friday.”
“Poor dear. Friday the men will come bounding home.”
Bounding? Spangle? Pigeon-toed Spangle? He loped, and seemed always on the verge of tripping himself.
Hanging on the kitchen wall was a picture of Spangle that she was very fond of, taken the summer before at Provincetown. He was flying a kite, but all that was visible in the picture was the string. He was photographed in profile, hair wind-whipped, a look of complete astonishment. He had not realized she was there, with her camera, up on the dunes. It had been a very gray day, before a big rain, and there were few people on the beach. She had seen him from far off, and had run to come up behind him. She had time to focus, and that was about all. The picture was a little grainy. That surprised look of his, though—it had been perfectly captured. It was the same look he had when she struggled awake in the dimly lit bedroom to put her face in his and say, “Spangle-stop. There is no fireball.”
She saw that it was raining. That meant that she would have an excuse not to go to the laundry. She disliked the laundry next to the donut shop, the closest to the apartment, because a lot of crazies always hung out there. The last time she went in a magician had been there—a magician on vacation from Hollywood, visiting his mother in New Haven, washing his dirty clothes.
“Do you have change for a quarter?” he had asked her.
The change machine was not six feet from where they stood. She had assumed that he was trying to pick her up. Silently, she had reached into her pocket and taken out two dimes and a nickel. He pocketed the nickel and held his hands out to her, palms up, one dime in each palm. Silently, he had closed his hands, shaken them three times, then opened his fingers. There were two dimes in the palm of each hand. She stared at the forty cents. He smiled and pocketed the money. Then he took out one dime, showed her both sides of it, and tossed it in the air. Twenty cents came down. He pocketed that.
“How did you do that?” she said.
“If it wasn’t a hoax, I’d be a rich man,” he said.
He took a pink sponge-rubber rabbit out of his pocket. He showed it to her, then put it in the palm of his hand. He closed his hand, shook it, and when it opened, there were two pink rabbits. He closed his hand and opened it again. One pink rabbit. He reached in his pants pocket and came out with what looked like the same rabbit, and handed it to her.
“Squeeze hard,” he said, “and think of your lover.”
What she had thought of, what she had been thinking of as he spoke, was that she had put her red blouse—the one that bled—into the washing machine. Dumping it in, it hadn’t even registered what she was doing. Everything was going to have to be bleached. Spangle would accuse her of being stoned. As she opened her hand, she jumped back: Dozens of tiny pink rabbits leaped into the air and showered down onto the floor of the laundromat. The magician bowed, and presented her with his business card.
“Available for parties,” he said. “Be in New Haven most of the summer. My routine for adult parties runs differently from this one, as you might surmise. What I need to know is the name of a good dentist.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just moved here.”
“If I don’t find a dentist, I’m going to wake up one morning and open my mouth to brush my teeth, and my teeth are going to fly out like little bunnies.”
The man’s card had a California phone number, crossed out, and a Connecticut phone number written in. She put the card in the pocket of her jeans. When she got back to the apartment, she reached into her pocket to put her change and the card on the table. The twenty cents she could have sworn she did not use in the dryers was not there, and there were two cards with the magician’s name and phone number on them. The dimes did not reappear, and the cards did not replicate further.
There was also the time a young woman with a little boy asked her for three dollars so they could buy a pizza, and she had been so taken aback—the woman was nicely dressed, they both were rosy-cheeked—that she had given the woman three dollars. The woman had kissed the back of her hand as she held out the money. And of course there were always the usual crazies: Moonies, or whatever they were, who in exchange for money wanted to give her a paper flag on a toothpick; a drunk who went up to the dryer where her clothes were spinning and began waving his arm in a wild circle, imitating the motion of the machine. It would figure that Spangle would like living in New Haven. Before she knew him he had money and a nice house (anything with more than three rooms was by definition nice), but by the time he met her he had lost the house and the money. He had put up bail money for a friend who skipped the country. He had smoked it up and given parties in restaurants with Peking Duck for twenty. He had bought a Martin D-28 for a musician friend who was broke and who had smashed his own guitar against a cigar-store Indian he used as a coatrack when he broke a high ? string for the third time that day. He had paid an ex-girlfriend’s thousand-dollar telephone bill so she could calm down and get her head straight. He had given money to the dog pound, bought a sports car and crashed it up, paid high insurance rates when his broken leg healed and he could drive again. Money just disappeared. It went. It was nothing like a handful of pink sponge. Money did not respond to pressure. Squeeze it as hard as you could, and when you opened your hand, there would be less of it. A psychiatrist had taken two thousand dollars of the money to tell Spangle—in part—that he was afraid of money, so he had gotten rid of it. Spangle believed this, but also believed that he and his money were psychically attuned: It had not wanted to stay with him, either. His money had itched to escape into the drawers of cash registers, into the deep pockets of maître d’s.
Her sister had introduced her to Spangle when she was eighteen. Her sister worked for the phone company in New Haven, before she met a rich older man who took her on vacations; the price she paid was having her lingerie drawer sprayed with Chant d’Arômes, and their dinner napkins with Norell. She could never wipe away the smell of flowers and ferns because their bath towels were sprayed with Wind Song. Her sister had been behind the counter when Spangle came in, ex-girlfriend in hand, to slap down the phone company’s latest threatening letter and to pay, in quarters, the one-thousand-dollar-plus phone bill the ex-girlfriend had run up. They had brought the rolls of quarters in the girl’s Save-A-Tree bag. Cynthia’s sister had been counting quarters into piles when Cynthia came in to meet her for dinner after work. There were piles of silver all over the counter, and her sister had looked up at her sadly and she had said: “Here’s somebody who thinks I’m to blame for the phraseology of the phone company’s dunning letters, and that I deserve some shit.” Then her sister had stopped counting and said to Spangle, “What did you say your name was? So I can always remember you?”
“Peter Spangle,” he had said.
“Cynthia, meet Peter Spangle—a man who knows how to treat a girl who makes three-twenty an hour.”
It had ended with all of them cursing the phone company and hunching over the desk to count quarters together. Then they had gone out for a drink. Spangle’s ex-girlfriend had left the table after she had two gin and tonics and had tried to call Budapest, but during the ten minutes it was going to take for the call to go through, Spangle caught wise, realized what was happening, and managed to stop her. He had not seen the ex-girlfriend after that night, and the next day he had called Cynthia. Cynthia’s fingers were still sore from counting money, and once the effects of the alcohol had worn off, she was not sure that she wanted to see Spangle again. But finally she had said yes, and they had din
ner together. She found out that he had once had money, left to him when his father died; he found out that she had been a Bryn Mawr girl. Both of them were unclear about what they were going to be—except lovers, maybe. It was Spangle’s belief that, left alone at their typewriters, after a certain period of time—before or after they have written all the great books—eventually monkeys will become lovers.
The magician had been depressed. New Haven was an ugly city, and it looked doubly grim because he had just come East after a weekend vacation at a mansion in Ojai where he had made rabbits pop out of record executives’ shirt pockets and hypnotized people to bark like dogs until he had sniffed too much coke to continue. They paid him anyway. His mother didn’t have a washing machine, and his clothes were dirty. His mother did not approve of his being a magician, and she was taking it out on him by refusing to wash his clothes. The magician thought that his mother was more childish as a mother than he had been as a child. “Why don’t you just flick your wand like Tinkerbell and make the dirt go away?” she had said. So he bundled up the laundry and walked down the street until he found a laundromat. It was small and crowded—a fat lady with eyes that didn’t focus, as if they had taken a spin through the dryer, a comatose kid, about twenty, who came out of his trance to lift the lid of the washing machine and talk to the clothes, and several other uninteresting people. Naturally he selected the one pretty girl to show one of his magic routines to. She didn’t have a wedding ring on, but she wasn’t very friendly, either: interested, after a while, but not friendly. “You don’t know how to make a washing machine full of pink clothes go back to their original colors, do you?” she had said. People always wanted things from him that were in no way spiritual. He liked spiritual things, and real surprises: donkey tails sprouting from the seats of people’s trousers as they closed their eyes and turned around three times, candles that kept burning after you blew them out. People wanted the errors they had made fixed. They wanted the past to do over again. And of course they wanted money. The one girl the magician had ever loved had had a great sense of humor. She had been a cartographer, and she had been as interested as he was in magic tricks, because they were abstract problems to solve. She had drowned herself when she didn’t get a promotion she had expected. No barrel and chains and the rushing white water of Niagara Falls—just a jump from a rowboat into water so cold she died almost immediately from hypothermia. The girl he had met at the laundromat was nothing like her, except that he had a hunch that she was special. A laundromat was a very good setting in which to test people: If you got a strong vibration from someone in a laundromat, chances were that that person was interesting. So he had followed her when she left the laundromat. Awkwardly, because he knew nothing about sleuthing, but he didn’t think she had noticed him. If she had, she was being very cool. He had written down her address and put the piece of paper in his pocket, along with the multiplying rabbit and the flower that squirted liquid that looked like blood and a whistle only dogs could hear. He had not had the nerve to say anything more to her that night, but he planned to hang around some other night—just casually bump into her—and then he would ask her to have a drink with him. He had a totally harmless pill that he could slip into her drink, and as she sipped the liquid would form a head like beer and boil out of the glass.