by Ann Beattie
He had not rinsed the washcloth well enough. The razor wasn’t put carefully on the back of the sink, but dropped on the small table among her make-up. He was a bad guest. The guest who brings flowers, then gets drunk and chews off the heads. When he left, and didn’t come back for two weeks, he had been such a coward that he had sent tulips. Then guilt caught up, and he began the weekend visits. Then his son shot his daughter. In between, there was life with his mother and Brandt, life with Nina, working with Nick, dealing with Metcalf. And then his son had shot his daughter.
Leaving Mary’s room, he went to the phone booth. He was about to call Nick, when he realized that he couldn’t remember what he wanted to talk to him about. He was standing there, dime in hand, trying to think, when Mrs. Patterson came toward him, carrying his raincoat.
“Thanks,” he said. “I knew I’d forgotten something.”
When she turned to go back to Mary’s room, he continued to stand by the phone, holding the raincoat. The weather. People called other people and talked about the weather. He would call Nick and talk about the weather, the thunder outside the hospital, and it would come to him why he had tried to reach him before.
Nick answered.
“It’s raining like hell here,” he said. He waited. He tried to think. He thought: I would have walked out into the rain and never remembered bringing my raincoat. Maybe I would have remembered. Gone back. He had tested himself a lot of times, and as little as he thought he could stand it, he was always able to walk into Mary’s room. Over and over.
“Do people die from guilt?” he said to Nick.
“No,” Nick said. “They die from being interrupted when they’re screwing, because some nut calls to talk about the weather. Call me back in half an hour.”
From his car in the parking lot, he looked back at the hospital. The thunder had stopped, and it was raining lightly. He counted fourteen windows up, and looked across to the window he thought might be Mary’s. It was just a dark square, high up.
Metcalf had heard about what happened somehow, and he had come into his office and sat down without saying anything, picked up the Nantucket picture from the desktop and studied it.
“What can I say?” Metcalf had said. “The truth is, everything shocks me. I couldn’t believe what happened between my wife and Jenny last summer. This summer, I can’t believe what’s happened to you. A man in the elevator this morning that I didn’t even know told me a joke about an eggman delivering eggs to a convent that shocked the hell out of me. What if I had been a Catholic? There are still Catholics, aren’t there?”
“What was the joke?” he said.
“Never mind what the joke was. It was filthy. You wouldn’t laugh at it. You probably need a laugh, though. I was going to come in and tell you some other joke, but I don’t have a joke in my head today.” He put the picture back in place. “I came in to offer to do anything, if there’s anything I can do. How’s your daughter?”
“She’s going to be all right.”
“Good.” Metcalf pushed himself up straight in the chair. “Anything I can do?”
“No. Thank you, though.”
“What could I do, huh? I could do something, but it wouldn’t have much to do with your daughter or her being—” Metcalf bent over, pulled up his pants leg, tugged his black sock higher. “Her being shot,” he said. He pulled down his pants leg. “I’m giving you a raise,” he said.
“You are? What kind of a raise?”
“Whatever raise you want,” Metcalf said, and got up and went out. “Be reasonable about it,” Metcalf called back, going down the hallway. He said something else that John didn’t catch.
Nina had made that crack about his not supporting her, about having to go to work because she didn’t have somebody to take care of her. What would she think, now, about the way he had taken care of Louise and his family? Did she still think that he would be a good father?
Louise had parked her car far down in the lot, and didn’t see him. He watched as Louise and Tiffy walked through the lot and across the one-lane road that separated the parking lot from the hospital. Tiffy was always with her, never even an arm’s-length away. They walked at the same pace, step for step. He watched their backs disappear through the tall glass doors, into the lobby of the hospital.
Driving away, he wondered what he would do with it if he were granted just one wish. He thought that the wish should be a selfish one, not a wish to change things for other people, but a wish for self-salvation, a wish that dared whatever force governed wishes to come through: that his family all disappear in a puff of smoke, and that he could start over again with Nina. That was two wishes, not one. Either the disappearance, or the starting over with Nina. As he drove, though, it came to him that he was now thinking about wish number three. What had numbers one and number two been? One and two and then a million more: for enough money not to have to work, for a perfect kiss, for rain to change to sun, sun to change to rain, a bee sting to stop itching, a photograph not to show the lines on his forehead, a ball to fly into his glove, to tag the runner in time, to find pesto in a New York restaurant in the winter, for his headache to go away, for the shell of the robin’s egg never to break. He had used up his wishes. So if it happened, it would just have to happen. There was no way he could wish for it
He wished for it. And that the car radio wouldn’t be full of static so he could hear music instead of his thoughts. And that the police not catch him for speeding. That he miss the frog hopping across the road. He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the frog, still hopping. Mary was alive. He was alive. The doctor was wrong: It wasn’t John Joel he identified with, but Mary. He was the victim, not the one who pulled the trigger. He certainly did not think that he had charge of his own life. As the doctor would have put it, he had the sense of reacting instead of acting.
“Would you like to go out for a drink and forget all this bullshit?” he had asked the woman doctor.
“If I thought this was bullshit,” the doctor said, “I wouldn’t be doing it. The question that interests me is why you kept going, if you felt you had no control.”
“Cruise control,” he said.
“Do you have cruise control on your car?” she said, writing.
“No,” he said. “And no pillars at the end of my driveway, either.”
“What is the connection?” she said.
“No connection. A non sequitur.”
“No it wasn’t,” she said. “Let me in on the joke.”
“The joke is that my lover overestimates how rich I am. I told her I had pillars at the end of my driveway, and she believed me.”
She said, writing, “You have a lover?”
Twenty-Two
THIS IS HOW she found out that Spangle was back in the States: Bobby, in New York, had given his friend Victor the rough draft of chapters one and two of the novel he was writing; and Victor, who thought his apartment might burn and knowing that Bobby never made photocopies, had walked to the photocopying shop on Third Avenue around the corner from his apartment. There he found an old acquaintance, a woman he had dated years ago, manning the counter. From Marielle Dekker, Victor had found out that Jonathan Spangle was in town. She had just run into him at Kenny’s Castaways. She said that she had been surprised to find out that he had a brother, because she had thought she remembered a discussion in the far-distant past, when he had attributed his selfishness to being an only child. But there the brother had sat, drinking beer. Victor told Bobby that he had run into Marielle Dekker, and that she had just run into Jonathan and Peter Spangle at Kenny’s Castaways. Bobby had said that he had just tried to look up Spangle, and had been told he was in Madrid: What was he doing at Kenny’s Castaways? Secretly he was delighted. He found Cynthia very attractive, and fair was fair—if Spangle was back, and not interested, he was interested. Bobby had made Victor call Marielle Dekker to ask if there had been a woman with Peter Spangle. No. Peter Spangle had been there alone. Well—fair was fair: If he was bac
k from Madrid and not interested, the road to Cynthia was clear.
After his appointments in New York, and a couple of nights at Victor’s apartment (a big Buddha in the corner, wearing a rubber Nixon mask, very realistic), he started back to New Haven.
Cynthia was still freaked out by the shooting, and she wondered what was the correct thing to do. What kind of a note do you write to the father of a student who has been shot? Say that she was sorry—just that, perhaps. Thank him for lunch. Mention subtly that Mary would pass the course. Hope that she would recover from her injuries so she would be able to read the first chapters of a lot of novels. A gift, perhaps: pages torn out of the Great Books. Quote Elvis Costello? “ ‘Accidents will happen …’ ”
She was thinking about it, pen in hand, when the phone rang. It was Bobby, who had been gone for more than two weeks, calling as if he had just left, from a phone on the highway, asking her not to eat. He was on his way to New Haven, and if she’d wait for him, and they could go out to dinner. She agreed. There was a pause. Then he said, “Have I got news for you.”
“What is it?” she said.
“First of all,” he said, “I would like to talk to you at dinner about the possibility of your coming to live with me.”
“What’s the joke?”
“No joke. The joke’s on you, apparently. Victor saw Marielle, and Marielle just saw Spangle and Jonathan having a night on the town. New York town.”
“What?” she said. “Who’s Muriel?”
“She’s an actress. Works at a Xerox place on Third Avenue, around the corner from Victor’s apartment.”
“Who’s Victor?” she said.
She was stalling. Had he just asked her to come live with him? After spending one night on her floor? She tried to remember what color eyes Bobby had. Instead, she got a picture of Spangle. Could it really be true that Spangle was back, but he hadn’t come back to her? Not even a call, a letter?
“Victor runs the lights in a place that does sex shows. He flashes blue lights on people butt-fucking. He was studying to be a bartender, but now he’s on welfare. They don’t know about the part-time work at the sex show. He paid to have the two chapters of my book Xeroxed, and he’s hardly got money to eat. That’s Victor.”
“So Victor knows Muriel and Muriel knows Spangle?”
Stalling.
“Marielle,” he said. “Cynthia, I can’t get you out of my head. I had no intention of saying all of this on the phone.”
She couldn’t think of what to say.
“I bought a dozen bagels,” he said. “Assorted. We can just eat bagels if you want.”
“I think I’d rather have a meal.”
“I don’t have any money, though. Except for gas to get back to New Hampshire. I gave Victor what I had. He’s sold half of his record collection.”
“I have money,” she said.
“The disadvantage of teaching is that you don’t get paid in the summer,” he said.
“You do if you teach summer school.”
“I couldn’t,” he said. “It’s the only way I keep my sanity, getting out of there.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I have money.”
“I’ve upset you.”
“You’ve surprised me. I wonder if somebody made a mistake? Is that woman sure that it was Spangle with Jonathan?”
“There’s no mistake,” he said. “Oh—I’m so upset. I’m so upset because Victor doesn’t realize what he’s doing, selling off his records. I would have gotten money together for him, he wouldn’t have had to do it. He’ll never be able to find those records again. He told me that one night he was working the lights and he kept thinking there was something familiar about one of the men on the stage, and finally he stopped the strobes and flooded the stage with bright-yellow light, and he saw it was his father’s accountant. His father’s accountant was belly-down with a Chinaman in a motorcycle helmet, butt fucking him. Jesus. Victor has got to get out of there. I think I can find him a job tending bar in New Hampshire. I know a girl who knows the owner of a restaurant.”
“I don’t even know Victor,” she said.
“You’ll like Victor. He doesn’t have any interest in what he’s doing. He just fell into doing it, answering an ad in the SoHo News. He thought they were looking for somebody to drive an ice-cream truck.”
She laughed. The first laugh all day.
“I know it,” he said. “Poor Victor. Victor had such an amazing record collection, and he just put them in boxes and carried the boxes out to the street and started selling them. I can’t believe it. He has to move to New Hampshire.”
The operator broke in: “It is now three minutes. Signal when through.”
Bobby seemed not to have heard. “He thought the ad was worded so vaguely because it was a job driving an ice-cream truck, and he thought it would be fun to drive an ice-cream truck. He didn’t mind. He tried to find the ad to show me, but he’d thrown it away. I wrote a poem about it. He’s very upset. I have to get Victor out of New York.” She heard trucks roaring by. “He had ‘Please Crawl Out Your Window,’ ” he said. “He had these records of Sherpas playing wind whistles. At least he got some money for ‘Please Crawl Out Your Window.’ He’s very upset because there was an item in Rolling Stone about the new Dylan record being religious. That upsets Victor very much. Oh—it’s not that, it’s the place he’s working. You won’t believe what an injustice has been done, when you meet Victor.”
“I don’t want to meet Victor,” she said.
“I’ve told you the story all wrong. I did everything that I intended not to do. I spilled the beans about Spangle and I told you that I wanted you to live with me and I didn’t give you a balanced picture of Victor. Believe me, you’d like Victor.”
“Why don’t you hang up, and we can talk about this when I see you?”
More traffic, Bobby shouting something into the phone about bagels.
“That’s nice,” she said, guessing at what he was saying. “But if you want me to live with you, you can hardly object that I’m taking you to dinner.”
“Will you?” Bobby said.
“Live with you? Of course not. I’m going back to Yale in the fall.”
“We can commute,” Bobby said. “The Mazda is totally reliable. In the snow we can take the train. This is the wrong time to ask you. It must have been terrible, going into the classroom and thinking of what to say to them about that girl that got shot.”
“They seemed more human,” she said.
“People talk about people having hearts on their sleeves. I think that people always have their emotions outside of them—pieces of their soul in a sneeze, even. They have eyes like a deer that’s been shot. Nobody can cover up. You should have known Victor before, and then see Victor now. And he’s a genius. He can point to the one wrong word in a thousand. It’s like perfect pitch, but he has it with words.”
“Why don’t you come back to New Haven, if you’re coming,” she said.
“Because I can’t hang up this way. I have to know that you’ll let me have another chance. That if I can calm down, you’ll let me try to talk to you about all this again.”
“I really don’t want to hear any more about Victor,” she said.
“What have I done?” Bobby said. “I’ve distorted everything. You think Victor is just another crazy. If you knew him, you’d see that he’s absolutely innocent, that he falls into these things because of some honest misunderstanding. He would enjoy driving an ice-cream truck. That’s really the truth. If something really bad hadn’t happened to his head, he never would have boxed up his records and gone out to sell them. He told me he was having nightmares of flying saucers, and he figured out that it was the records—his lost records. Do you think you could meet Victor and forget what I’ve told you and just see if you like him or not?”
“Bobby,” she said.
A truck went by. A blur of noise. Bobby shouting over the truck, all of it indistinguishable.