by Ann Beattie
“I don’t want to take the coat because I’m not sure that I should take something when I don’t know if I’m going to be around or not,” Cynthia said. “This isn’t my idea of living together this summer, that he disappears to Madrid and sends me one one-sentence post card.”
“You’re mad,” Spangle’s mother said. “I’m mad, too. It’s my money and your time. That gives us a common bond. The mouton would give us another one: I’d give a fine present, and you’d be indebted. If the next lump is malignant, I could count on a visit from you.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say. You know I’d come to see you.”
“I think that when called upon, most people fish out a travel brochure.”
“You insisted that he go to Madrid.”
“Oh no. You’re mistaken there. I insisted that he track down his flesh-and-blood brother to bring him back to this country. He has a responsibility to his brother. His brother has followed his example for years. If Peter told him to sniff nutmeg, he sniffed nutmeg. I’m not exaggerating. All of a sudden the Hardy Boys books had a dusting of nutmeg over them.”
“Then grass and drugs,” Cynthia said, finishing the sentence for her.
“Sports cars, grass and drugs. My God: I used to measure out little spoonfuls of medicine and wobble forward to their little-baby mouths with them, and I cut aspirin in quarters, and they grew up and jumped into a sports car and threw away their money on houses they never wanted and women they hardly knew and drugs—they’d try anything. My God: He told me he wanted to go to Bard College because it was a small place—it was so pretty there, and he wouldn’t just disappear in the system. Bard College.”
“I’m sorry,” Cynthia said, “but I’m very tired. I want to hang up and do some things before I have to go to bed.”
“Oh, I know. I’m from another world. What must you think about a woman who grew up getting another pearl for her necklace every Christmas and birthday? I was so embarrassed that the chain filled up so slowly with pearls. I don’t know where I put that thing.”
Cynthia hung up, being careful not to touch the phone with her nails. She was becoming less and less sure that if he came back from Madrid she would even want to see him. Might as well give up on him and do something else. Screw Mary Knapp’s father, who acted at lunch as though he wanted to screw her.
But she was starting to dislike men. She was starting to get very tired of all the hassles they caused, the way they just put themselves in front of you, and suddenly you had a barrier to run around. They were stronger; they did have a different kind of energy. Spangle didn’t have any money, and he’d managed a trip to Spain, while she was teaching five days a week in a hot classroom—teaching boys who thought everything was either funny or pointless. When they were vocal, it was always the boys. And the goddamn magician, that completely crazy, boring, stupid magician who hounded her. If the police weren’t men, she would call the police and try to get them to keep him away from her. She went to the window and looked out. A fat woman was walking a cat on a leash. A man was walking a few paces in front of her, smoking a cigar. She tried to figure out if they were together. A teenage boy in a light-blue leisure suit ran down the street, and the man with the cigar turned to look. Cynthia saw that what she had taken for a man was really a woman—a tall, heavy woman smoking a cigar. The woman with the cigar waited. The woman with the cat caught up with her. They walked down the street together. The magician was nowhere to be seen, but if she went out he would be there. He knew that she was sick of talk about magic, and a couple of nights ago he had switched the topic to health insurance: Everyone should demand national health insurance. He had asked her to have a donut and coffee with him, and she had refused. She had even told him to leave her alone, that she was going to tell her husband that he was bothering her. That didn’t stop him, because obviously her husband wasn’t there. She went into the kitchen and turned on the useless fan. The idea of Spangle as a husband amused her. Once, she had wanted that: Spangle, off stoned in Madrid, who probably thought that he was going to come back and worm his way into her heart again. On the shelf above the sink was a bottle of tequila with a worm in the bottom. She thought that it would be nice to pickle her students: to have rows of canning jars, with little shrunken students inside. She wondered if the magician could help her with that plan. Because he was out there. She was sure that he was out there. If she stepped out he would be there—it would be as simple as holding out a sugar cube to a horse, a pole to a sinking person. If she went out, the magician would come for her.
She drank some Kahlua and felt sorry for herself. She put an ice cube in the glass and drank some more, tilting the glass and knocking the ice cube against the side.
She curled up in a chair in the living room and wrote her sister a letter, an ugly letter that accused her of selling out for money. She asked her sister if she would like a newly tailored mouton coat. There was no danger in writing her sister such a letter, because unless a carrier pigeon came for it, there would be no way to get it to her. There would be no way, because the mailbox was on the street and so was the magician. If she really thought that it would be as simple as her going out and his snapping to her side like a piece of iron to a magnet, she would call the police and let it all happen. But she realized that if she called them, either they would come and the magician would see them and not approach her, or else, inexplicably, he would not be there. Then she, herself, would be perceived as yet another New Haven nut. She reread the letter. It was coherent and true, and if she had the nerve, she would mail it. She had to agree with Spangle’s mother that it was awful to see people throwing their lives away, and her sister was being very one-minded about dedicating herself to a rich, eccentric old man. Cynthia went into the kitchen and poured the last of the Kahlua into the glass. The first drink was all right, but the second and third were candy-sweet. She thought about calling Mary Knapp’s father and asking him to come over with a bottle of gin and a bottle of tonic. He would. She thought he would. She thought that Spangle had no right to have stayed with her so long—he had stayed with her, not the other way around—only to take off, stay away. He could be anywhere, doing anything. And she had to get calls about mouton coats. If she picked up the phone—which was ringing—and it was Tess Spangle again, she was just going to hang up.
It was someone named Bobby, whom she didn’t know, who said he was an old friend of Spangle’s from the Cambridge and Vermont days and wanted to know if Spangle wanted to come to a party at a waterfall in New Hampshire. She told him that Spangle was in Madrid. He told her that he was going to be going to Africa in September. After they had finished talking, he said: “I haven’t called the wrong number, have I? I really wanted to get in touch with Spangle. I haven’t seen him since 1972. Last week I called a wrong number—a restaurant, to make a reservation—and they took my name and number and everything, and I’d never reached the goddamn place. I went to the restaurant and we couldn’t eat dinner. My girlfriend was with me,” he said. “We’re going to Africa together.”
She hung up and sat in the chair. From the apartment next door, she could hear music. It was a group of people singing “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The people next door had come over once, the first week she stayed in the apartment, early in the morning, to see if she had any goat’s milk she could spare. “Oh man, I really didn’t think so, but the things you least expect can happen sometimes,” the man had said. The woman with him had just said, “Thank you anyway.” She never talked much, Cynthia found out—in fact, the first time she knocked on the door, wanting Cynthia to play Go with her, she had just smiled and held out the box. They apparently had a record of “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and were singing along with it. There seemed to be lots of people singing. There was a noise that sounded like a chair crashing. The record played on, but the people stopped singing. After quite a while, during which Cynthia thought black thoughts about Spangle and her students, someone started singing “Tammy.” The woman who san
g it had a clear, high voice that would have been very pleasurable to listen to, if she had been singing something other than “Tammy.”
Cynthia thought that she would like to have enough money to have a house in the country—Spangle had once had that—and to be able to sit in it and not hear a sound. There would be no phone in the house, and there would be no colorful locals, and if there were, they wouldn’t be magicians. They would be traditionally crazy, maybe—religious fanatics, conservatives. It would be nice if there was a garden, and a deer or two; and if the deer grazed in the garden, she would not shoot them. It would be nice to worry, every summer, about what to do with so much zucchini. Zucchini bread. Zucchini bisque. Zucchini biscuits. Zucchini soufflé. Zucchini balls. Zucchini-lentil casserole. Zucchini with zucchini sauce. How had she gotten bombed on three Kahluas?
It was unbelievable. Pendergast’s mother had come in, and why had she wanted her son to pass the course, in spite of his having failed every assignment? Because she did not think that she could cope with one more thing after her double mastectomy. She had said this wearing a thin cotton blouse that was as flat as a piece of paper against her chest. “All I want to do is play tennis and enjoy my summer and hope that I live,” Pendergast’s mother had said to her. The woman had smelled of alcohol. Scotch, probably. Drunk or not, the woman had no breasts. The thought of it made Cynthia jump out of the chair. She went to the window again, and looked out. The street was empty. Finally a little girl and her mother came by. She watched them until they were out of sight. Of course she couldn’t flunk Pendergast. She wondered if she could flunk Mary Knapp. She wondered if she would ever have a better job than the one she had this summer.
There was a fight going on in the hall. A woman was crying. She thought about putting the chain on and peeking out, but decided not to. The woman who was crying—no, a different woman, because the crying kept on—was saying: “You recorded me singing ‘Tammy,’ you son-of-a-bitch. You give me that goddamn cassette.” Another noise that sounded like a chair breaking. People running down the stairs. She went to the window and looked out. A girl about twenty, in a long, wraparound Indian cotton skirt, red running shoes, and a silver halter top was running to the left, and a man was chasing a woman, running to the right. The man caught the woman, picked her up and carried her back toward the building. They passed the building, though, and laughing, continued down the street. Why couldn’t the magician be interested in them? Another woman, with a sailor’s cap and white pants and a black shirt, came down the steps. She didn’t seem to be drunk. She turned around to wave, and Cynthia jerked her head back from the window. She peeked again, to see if the magician was out there. He was, but she couldn’t see him. He really did manage to come out of nowhere. She tried to imagine where he could be hiding that he would have a view of the street in front of the building, but she never saw him.
Pendergast’s mother had asked her if she played tennis.
Bobby called again, this time to give her a message for Spangle. The message was that he was saving an article for Spangle from the New York Times about umbrella bamboo, which flowers once every hundred years, then dies. All the world’s umbrella bamboo was about to flower and die. “It’s not as depressing as it sounds, if you read the article,” Bobby said. “When Spangle gets back, ask him to call me. Here’s my number. Have you got a pencil?”
She found enough Grand Marnier, left over from a soufflé they had made a long time ago, to have a shot-glassful. She drank it, thinking that it was probably possible to combine zucchini and Grand Marnier. The Desperation Cookbook, she would call it. At the end of every recipe it could say, “If desperate, substitute any ingredients.” My God—imagine not having your breasts. What awful things happened to women.
She went into the bedroom and undressed. She took her cotton nightgown from the foot of the bed and put it on, thinking that she would shower later. There was nothing in the apartment to eat, and undressing removed the temptation to go out and find food. There was a New York Times on the bedroom floor. She got into bed, put Spangle’s pillow behind her pillow, and stretched out. Flipping through the paper, she found some answers to a quiz she hadn’t seen:
2. Mr. Niehouse, an American businessman, was rescued and returned to the United States after having been held captive by leftist guerrillas in Venezuela since his kidnapping in February 1976.
3. The number of passenger cars has remained about the same.
She looked through the rest of the paper. Mayor Koch, she found out, had refused to control the pigeon problem by shooting them. His reason was: “When you go after a pigeon, all the people who love pigeons will hate you.” She read about police officer Ignatius Gentile, who jumped in front of a subway car in Brooklyn. She learned that Bloomingdale’s had quickly sold out of its Skylab Protective Helmet. She spent most of the time studying the crossword puzzle, wondering about 49 down: “—Across the Table,” 1934 song. Five letters. The Grand Marnier was gone. Spangle was in Madrid. Pendergast’s mother’s breasts were gone. Only the magician was sure to be out there, all revved up, full of tricks, eager to talk. If she thought he was dangerous, she would have been terrified, but she was more frightened of that crazy what’s-his-name in her class, with his motorcycle and his painted-on smile, than she was of the magician. Maybe she could agree to have coffee and donuts with him in exchange for his coming to her class and doing magic tricks. He could have the students jump through a burning hoop, and if they missed, what the hell.
The phone rang, and she almost didn’t answer it, but at the last minute, the eighth ring, she thought that it might be Spangle. She went to the phone. It was her sister. Cynthia told her that she had written her a letter, but that she didn’t have to worry—it wouldn’t get mailed. In the morning she would be sober, and in the morning, when she dared to go out, the temptation to send it would be gone.
“How nasty was it?” her sister said.
“I said you’d sold out for money and security.”
“That’s certainly true. What was the nasty part?”
Cynthia sighed. “I’m glad I didn’t bother to go mail it.”
“What did you mean before, when you said that in the morning you’d dare to go out?”
“Oh, I wasn’t really serious. There’s some creepy guy around here who’s from the West Coast—I guess that part is true, at least—and he’s got a crush on me. Guess what he is.”
“A midget?”
“No. A serious guess.”
“A Rolfer.”
“No. You’re getting close. Sort of close.”
“Don’t let a Rolfer touch you. It’s just sadism.”
“Come on, guess.”
“Where on the West Coast?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Not much help. Is he a shrink of any kind?”
“No.”
“Movies.”
“Nope. Not movies.”
“If he’s not a midget Rolfer who’s writing a screenplay, I can’t guess.”
“A magician. A pull-the-rabbit-out-of-the-hat type magician.”
“Jesus. I’d watch out for him.”
“I guess I wouldn’t talk about him so much if he didn’t sort of give me the creeps. I’ve only seen him three times actually, but he just appears. He’s odd. He talks like we’re old friends.”
“You’re right. Don’t go out. You can insult me on the phone. It’s Bill’s money, too. Fifteen cents for a stamp.”
“Is he richer and richer?” Cynthia said.
“God, yes. Of course. He wants to have a baby.”
“Don’t do it.”
“Honey, I wouldn’t. Things are just calming down with us. I overate strawberries, and you remember how fruit used to make me break out? I went to a dermatologist and told him I sprayed myself with cologne all over, and he said it was the cologne, of course, and that I had to stop using it. I made him put it in writing. At first Bill wanted me to try new scents, but I told him that the dermatologist had said no: nothing
on my skin but Castile soap. So for the first time in years I don’t smell like a florist’s. If he hints around about trying a new cologne, I just buy a pint of strawberries and eat them on the sly. But the baby thing—my God. He read that Leboyer book, which he got from some guy flying first-class with him from Atlanta to New York, and by the time he hit LaGuardia, he could hardly wait to get the limo home to tell me that he thought something of ours should be born to the Moonlight Sonata. God. The idiots you meet in first class.”
“You’re not going to marry him, are you?”
“Well, I might. I just wouldn’t have a baby. I know it’s corny, but I really do love the Moonlight Sonata, and once I’d gritted my teeth through it, it would be ruined forever.”
“What are you eating?” Cynthia said.
“A vegetable burrito. Leftovers from last night’s dinner. The same man who gave him the Leboyer book gave him a recipe for vegetable burritos, and he went out and bought all the ingredients and made them. God.” She stopped chewing. “But the reason I called is to say that we’re going to have a house on the Vineyard next month, and we want you to come see us. He has a rich friend who isn’t too old. Fortyish. He’d love to meet you. Spangle doesn’t deserve you. If he wanted to get home he could haul ass, you know.”
“I’m pretty disgusted with him. With his mother, too. She calls almost every damn night, and she means to be nice, but I just can’t stand to talk to her. She’s crazier than Spangle, in her way.”
“I never thought Spangle was particularly crazy. I just don’t think he has enough money. We’ll have a convertible on the Vineyard.”