by Ann Beattie
She was looking at him. She looked tired. She was quite pretty, and he wondered what she was really thinking. Whatever she had been thinking earlier had been erased. He looked at the swirls and streaks of white on the blackboard behind her.
“What were you going to say?”
“Oh,” he said, looking back at her. “Sorry. I was going to say that she acted as if Vanity Fair was silly. I asked her how she felt about Dobbin and she seemed to think he was ludicrous. But later she said a very perceptive thing. We were talking about something else entirely, and she said, in passing, that Vanity Fair seemed to be about how things just fall into place.”
He realized that he was leaning quite far forward. He eased himself farther back on the desk. Looked at her, trying not to appear anxious. He was anxious. He was not sure about what. About what Mary had said, in part. He was wondering if that was true. Maybe things just fell quickly because of gravity, and when they stopped, you said they were in place.
That thought disturbed him so much that he stood up.
“You’ve read Vanity Fair,” she said.
He nodded yes. He did not tell her that he had just bought it.
“I wonder if you’d like to have lunch,” he said. “Have you already eaten? I mean, you might just want to go on with what you were doing, and not spend an hour listening to some student’s father–” He broke off.
She got up. “I’ll go to lunch with somebody who’s read Thackeray. Sure,” she said. “Just a minute.”
And then he was alone in the room. It seemed strange to be there alone—almost as if something dangerous might happen. He wondered what might happen, and smiled at the image that flashed through his head of himself, backing up toward the dusty blackboard as though a magnet were drawing him, getting his clothes dirty. He would have to wear this same jacket and this same pair of pants into the city.
Everybody he knew had problems with their children. They all had children who needed braces, or were doing poorly in school, or had run away. Last week, Metcalf’s eight-year-old son had fallen and broken his glasses, and Metcalf had brought them into New York to get new lenses made up. That morning he kept calling people into his office to see the glasses. He had put them on the corner of his desk, on a stand with a curved piece of brass that usually held a strange shell. A small pair of glasses, both lenses cracked, tiny cracks like the points of fire shooting away from a sparkler: a small pair of horn-rimmed glasses, useless to see out of, set out for people to look at like an objet d’art. “Eight years old, and blind as a bat without them. On my lunch hour I’m taking them to a place that can grind new lenses and put them in by five o’clock, and then I’m driving out to Sneden’s Landing with them and giving them to Paul, and he’ll put them on and see again. He’s a nice kid, and he’ll probably even thank me. He was upset about breaking them, and he cried. Eight years old, and blind as a bat. I’m the big-shot today. I give him his sight back for forty smackers. Costs that much only because the frames got screwed up, too. But he’s blind. Eight years old, and my kid is blind. When I was eight years old, I was blind, too. My wife has 20–15, my kid and I are blind.” Coming out of Metcalf’s office, Nick had turned to him and said, “I almost did it that time. I really almost walked over to him and smashed him. He tosses off everything as a joke, constantly. If he came back from the dead, you know what he’d do? Deface his own gravestone.” It had seemed irrelevant to tell Nick that years before, when he first came to work for the agency, he had gone out with Metcalf one Friday after work and they had gotten drunk, and Metcalf had gotten maudlin and talked about how he was going to be cremated, no stone, his ashes scattered over Korea, because he had liked Korea. Not the war part, but Korea. He had liked Korea.
“Okay,” Cynthia said, coming back into the room. She had combed her hair and did not look quite as tired. He suggested a restaurant a few miles down the road from the school, and she said she’d follow him in her car. At lunch, he was going to have to think of something to say to her, to find some way to get her to pass Mary. He would certainly never think of anything to say to Mary to persuade her that she should try harder. If he were Nick, he could dazzle Cynthia with all the knots he could tie. He smiled. Nick had sworn to him that that really dazzled women. That they would do anything for a man who could tie fifteen different knots.
All right: That was the truth of it. He found her attractive. She had Nina’s direct gaze, and she obviously deserved better than to be in that school teaching those kids, the way Nina deserved better than Lord and Taylor’s, and when he felt sorry for women a feeling of longing often got mixed up with the pity.
He turned on the radio, kept moving the dial. “And this one, you can be sure, is one of the best,” the announcer’s voice said. “This is a recording of ‘Don’t Worry ’Bout Me’ which was used as the theme song for a movie I’ll bet a lot of you have forgotten called End of the Road. Billie Holiday recorded this one in 1957, with the Ray Ellis Orchestra, and the man you’ll hear on alto sax is Mr. Gene Quill.” The announcer had a surprisingly calm, quiet voice—a late-night announcer’s voice.
Billie Holiday was singing. She was singing, and the lyrics, of course, were not to be understood as meaning what they were saying. When she sang “I’ll get along” it was painful; the restraint in her voice, the way she absolutely did not mean it, but not self-pitying either. Nina could do that: She could say something about her ability to survive that would shock him with her lack of faith in herself, but she wouldn’t give in. She really pretended to be a survivor, to the extent that at times he feared for her life, actually thought she might be dead when the telephone rang in her apartment and she didn’t answer. Nina hated him to talk that way. She said that he had been a Boy Scout too long, that she did not care to be helped across the street. But once, early on, surprised at the intensity of her feeling for him, she had gotten drunk at dinner. He had held her arm crossing the street, and she had not objected. She wanted to marry him. Nina.
He pulled into the parking lot outside the restaurant. Cynthia passed his car and parked farther down, on the opposite side. His parking place was closer: He should have left it for her, but he didn’t think of it. Or maybe Nina was right about his being too much of a Boy Scout. If they had taught him to tie knots in the Boy Scouts, he didn’t remember it.
The restaurant was air conditioned, and the instant he felt cool he wanted a drink. He asked her if she wanted a drink, hoping that she did. When the waiter came, she ordered a glass of white wine, and he ordered a gin and tonic.
“I was thinking, driving here, that I don’t envy you,” he said.
She smiled. She seemed to know what he meant, and he was glad, because after he said it, he realized that it might have seemed a condescending thing to have said.
“I was wondering why you weren’t at work,” she said.
“I had to have a conference today with my daughter’s English teacher.”
“Well,” Cynthia said, “I’m glad you took the English teacher to lunch. She was hungry, and she doesn’t like sitting around that classroom.”
“You write on the blackboard,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Quite a few teachers, I think… ”
“I just meant that I forgot that information gets communicated that way. I’m used to memos. I guess you couldn’t very well send the students memos about Thackeray and have them initial them and send them back.”
“What?” She laughed. She picked up her glass of wine and had a drink the minute the waiter put it on the table.
“Footing the bill, too?” she said. “The English teacher is almost broke.”
“Sure,” he said. “Of course.”
“This is odd,” she said. “This isn’t what I thought I’d be doing today.”
“I was hungry,” he said. “I was embarrassed, thinking you could hear my stomach growl.”
“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t,” he repeated. He picked up the menu. He wanted six cheeseburgers. If
he only had one drink, he would order a turkey sandwich. If he had two, he would order a cheeseburger.
“In answer to your question,” she said, “I know that your daughter can read the books and understand them, and that she can write about what she knows, if she wants to. I do not have that feeling about everyone in the class. I do have the feeling that she doesn’t care, that it isn’t cool to care, and that neither you nor I can probably make her care.”
“I like what you said about there not being one answer for things,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“You said, when I asked why she was doing poorly, that there wasn’t any one answer.”
“I know,” she said. “I mean, what do you think the answers are?”
“I agree with you,” he said. “They’re fifteen years old now and it isn’t cool to care.”
“And what else?” she said.
“She thinks Thackeray is irrelevant. It’s summer—”
“I don’t know if it’s important whether it’s irrelevant or not. I mean, I don’t think it is irrelevant, but those aren’t even terms I think in.”
She took a drink. He took a drink. He was afraid that if he asked her what she did think, she might tell him, and it might surprise him. It was too early in the conversation to ask what she was thinking.
“When I feel like giving up—not showing up to teach—when I’m in a bad mood, I see it their way. I see the absurdity of thinking about any time but our own. I can see wanting books to hit me over the head and tell me what to do about my problems. I don’t want to know what the Odyssey has to do, indirectly, with my problems: I want Ann Landers.”
“But Ann Landers is predictable. You have to distrust those answers because of that.”
“Is she?” Cynthia said. “I don’t read Ann Landers.”
She had almost finished her wine. It was a small glass. He got the waiter’s attention and ordered another glass of wine, and before he was tempted, another drink and a turkey sandwich to be brought at the same time. She ordered a salad.
“Why fight it, I guess,” Cynthia said. “It was predictable that I’d order a salad and you wouldn’t.” She fiddled with her napkin. “You can get caught up in that—thinking that because you can make everything seem ironic, that things genuinely are. You can put an ironic front on anything. I felt sort of the way they must feel—the way I think they must feel—when I was younger than they are. In grade school, when we used to go down to the cafeteria and sit on the floor and put our hands over our heads—what we were supposed to do if the bomb dropped, if the bell went off for real and a bomb dropped. Then we’d file upstairs and hear about Washington crossing the Delaware. But everybody’s had that experience, or a comparable experience. Constantly. I’m not so sure that these times are as mind-blowing as those kids pretend. I’m not sure that they aren’t just lazy, and that it isn’t easy to be lazy.”
While she talked, he looked at her hands. They were small hands, thin, with long fingers—a young woman’s hands. How was it possible that Louise’s hands were so much larger? How could hands get bigger as you got older? She was staring at the tabletop.
“What are you thinking?” he said.
“Oh,” she said, shaking her head in apology. She shook her head again. “I was thinking about a friend of mine who has nightmares about the bomb. Very specific nightmares. He dreams that it’s exploding, and he’s not supposed to look at the fireball.” She took another drink. “This is an odd conversation to be having. Did I start this odd conversation?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did we somehow get to Spangle and the fireball by way of your daughter’s problems in summer school?”
“Spangle?”
“That’s his name. He’s in Madrid, trying to talk his brother into coming back to the States to reenroll in law school. Ann Landers would say he’s doing the right thing, right?”
“I imagine,” he said. He was tapping the salt and pepper shakers together. “I’m glad you wanted to come to lunch,” he said.
That seemed to be the wrong thing to say. For some reason, that seemed to embarrass her, while other things hadn’t. She sat up a little straighter and didn’t say anything. He looked at some of the other people in the restaurant. It was definitely not a restaurant in New York at one o’clock. The middle-aged women leaned forward or sat close together like conspirators, and the few younger women in the restaurant seemed formal, stiffer, almost alienated from each other. He saw only two other pretty women, neither one as pretty as Cynthia. And he suddenly remembered part of the reason he had dreaded meeting her: that notice she had sent around, with a picture of herself on the top, like an egomaniac’s stationery. Perhaps she had done it as an ironic frame.
“On the off chance that I get drunk,” he said, “tell me what ideas you have, if any, about how Mary could pass the course.”
“Tell her to come see me. I asked her to twice, and she didn’t. If she and I could work it out privately—if nobody else has to know that she cares about passing the course but Mary and me—maybe she’ll be more willing to try. We can hush it up that she cares.”
“All right,” he said. He moved his hands above the tabletop, crossing one over the other. “Now you don’t see them,” he said, when his hands were over the salt and pepper shakers. “Now you do.” He moved his hands again. “You don’t care, and then you do.”
She was staring at him, with her mouth open.
“What?” he said, smiling nervously.
“What you just did,” she said. “What a coincidence. I was thinking about a magician, and that was such a strange thing to have happened.” She picked up her wine glass and put it down. “There’s a man in New Haven, where I’m living, who turned up last night. I met him a little while ago, at a laundromat, and last night when I was going out I bumped into him again, except that I had the spooky feeling that I didn’t really bump into him, that he had been out on the street on purpose.” She picked up the glass again and took a drink of wine. “Never mind,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t get much sleep last night because the damned fan doesn’t work.”
“No,” he said. “Go on.”
“Oh, he’s just a harmless eccentric, I’m sure, but it was so strange seeing him again, and he wanted to have the exact conversation we’d had before, in the laundromat. That didn’t make sense, because it was obvious that he recognized me. He stopped and said hello, and I said hello to him, and he turned and started walking in my direction, and he started to tell me all over again how he was visiting his mother in New Haven, that he lived in California. I was sure he had the same things to do tricks with in his pocket.” She shook her head. “This is silly,” she said. “Forget it.”
“What happened?” he said.
“Nothing, really. He just acted like we were old friends, or something. When I told him I was in a hurry, he just kept pace with me. So I got in a cab and got away. But it was strange, having him walk toward me on the street, and acting so casual, but when I was looking for a cab he seemed almost desperate to tell me things about some Houdini conference that was held every year, and to tell me what was behind Houdini’s trick of breaking out of chains when he was under water. I was really getting frightened. I just—I thought he was going to do something to me.”
“Christ,” he said. “I don’t think that’s nothing. I think you ought to stop going out alone.”
“New Haven’s full of nuts. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Really,” he said. “The way you describe it, it doesn’t sound harmless at all.”
She stopped running her fork over the top of her salad. She stopped, and ate some lettuce. He wanted to say more, but he didn’t want to scare her, and it was obvious that she wanted to change the subject. He picked up his sandwich and bit into it.
“You drive in all the way from New Haven?” he said.
She nodded yes.
“But you don’t like living in New Haven.”
“It’s close to Yale.”
“Do you live there alone?” he said.
“No. I live there with a man. The one who has the nightmares.” She laughed. “One of my students’ parents comes to see me and I say I’m living with a man who’s scared of looking at a fireball.”
“My heart can take it,” he said. “My sense of morality is not outraged.” He took another drink. “People should live together before they get married.”
“Except in the world of Vanity Fair.”
“Of course,” he said. “Of course not in the world of Vanity Fair.”
When they had finished eating, the waiter came and asked if they wanted anything else. He went away to add up the check. When he came back, he put the small tray with the piece of paper on it by Cynthia.
“He guessed wrong,” Cynthia said.
He reached for the check, took money out of his wallet. “Do you need money?” he said. He realized that even asking would be embarrassing, but if she did, maybe she would take it. Then maybe they would have another lunch sometime and she would pay him back.
“No,” she said, embarrassed. “I hope it didn’t sound like I was hinting for money.”
“Oh no,” he said. “I just thought you might need some money.”
They were both a little embarrassed, and he was embarrassed, too, in the parking lot when they had to shake hands. He almost always found it awkward to shake hands with a young woman. He also felt strange because her hand was so much like Nina’s, and he felt strange because there was a Nina, and strange that he had almost told Cynthia about her, but he had stopped short and only said that people should live together.
He drove into New York at sixty-five, sixty-eight, needle edging onto seventy at times, almost hoping that he would be stopped. He wanted to think, but he didn’t have time to stop and think. He was late for work.
He took a paper cup out of the dispenser by the water cooler and thought of two things: the robin’s egg (just as the cup seemed too fragile to hold water, the egg seemed too thin to have contained anything living) and the napkin, folded into a triangle in the Chinese restaurant, Louise carefully refolding it, putting it into the glass, walking out He had another throbbing headache and he would have to work until eight or nine o’clock to get everything done. The headache had come on him like a mosquito bite rising. His temple had suddenly been filled with pain when he opened his car door in the parking garage. He had gotten out, turned when the man gave him the receipt, and leaned back, touching the car, standing there with his hands curled into fists on top of the roof, supporting his head on them. The young black man working in the garage had hit him on the shoulder. “Don’t you grieve for it now,” he said. “Seven dollars and ninety cents, you can have it back any time.” The man had laughed at his own joke. Don’t you grieve for it. Certainly everything was not loaded with meaning. Why was he getting stopped by things so often? That things just fall into place. Because he wouldn’t be able to rest until the situation with Nina was settled.