by Ann Beattie
Acclaim for
ANN BEATTIE’s
PARK CITY
“Extremely impressive, indeed virtuoso….It seems impossible not to…read the best of these stories with something like a sense of awe.”
—Chicago Tribune
“An ample, consistently entertaining collection…[that] will come to be seen as the finest of her books.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A book that should win the admiration of short-story writers and readers everywhere….Beattie’s ear…gives her stories their sharp life, muscle and surprise.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Beattie manages to combine literary minimalism with a precise eye on the nuances and difficulties of human relationships.”
—San Francisco Examiner
“As amusingly inventive as ever.”
—The New York Times
“Beattie at the very top of her game. Few writers have mastered gentle humor and exquisite dialogue the way Beattie has.”
—The Baltimore Sun
Books by ANN BEATTIE
Park City
My Life, Starring Dara Falcon
Another You
What Was Mine
Picturing Will
Where You’ll Find Me
Love Always
The Burning House
Falling in Place
Secrets and Surprises
Chilly Scenes of Winter
Distortions
ANN BEATTIE
PARK CITY
Ann Beattie has published six novels and five previous collections of stories, among them Chilly Scenes of Winter, Falling in Place, Love Always, Picturing Will, and Another You. She lives in Maine and Key West with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry.
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JULY 1999
Copyright © 1998 by Irony & Pity, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1998.
Vintage Books, Vintage Contemporaries, and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
“Second Question” and “Zalla” were first published in The New Yorker; “Going Home with Uccello” in GQ; and “Ed and Dave Visit the City” in The Southern Review.
Many of the stories in this collection were originally published in the following:
“Vermont,” “Wolf Dreams,” “Dwarf House,” and “Snakes’ Shoes” from Distortions by Ann Beattie (all originally published in The New Yorker), copyright © 1974, 1975, 1976 by Ann Beattie
“Secrets and Surprises,” “Weekend,” “A Vintage Thunderbird,” “Shifting,” “The Lawn Party,” and “Colorado” from Secrets and Surprises by Ann Beattie (all originally published in The New Yorker), copyright © 1978 by Irony & Pity, Inc.; “The Cinderella Waltz,” “Waiting,” “Desire,” “Greenwich Time,” and “The Burning House” (all originally published in The New Yorker), “Learning to Fall” (originally published in Ms.), and “Jacklighting” (originally published in Antaeus) from The Burning House by Ann Beattie, copyright © 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982 by Irony & Pity, Inc.; “The Working Girl,” “In Amalfi” (originally published in Fiction), “What Was Mine” (originally published in Esquire), “Windy Day at the Reservoir,” and “Imagine a Day at the End of Your Life” (originally published in Harper’s) from What Was Mine by Ann Beattie, copyright © 1991 by Irony & Pity, Inc. Reprinted courtesy of Random House, Inc.
“Janus,” “In the White Night,” “Heaven on a Summer Night,” “Summer People,” “Skeletons,” and “Where You’ll Find Me” from Where You’ll Find Me and Other Stories by Ann Beattie (all originally published in The New Yorker), copyright © 1986 by Irony and Pity, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Beattie, Ann.
Park City : new and selected stories / by Ann Beattie.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-679-45506-X
1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3552.EI77C66 1998
813’.54—dc21 97-49470
Vintage ISBN 978-0-679-78133-2
eBook ISBN 9781101971246
www.vintagebooks.com
v4.1
a
For my mother and father
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The stories here were written over approximately a twenty-five-year period. In selecting them, I noticed that quite a few of the stories have characters with the same name. I intended no linkage from story to story—though there are a few in-jokes, of course.
The first eight stories, in the section “Park City,” have never appeared in a book before. The others are from previously published collections:
Distortions (1976)
Secrets and Surprises (1979)
The Burning House (1982)
Where You’ll Find Me (1986)
What Was Mine (1991)
CONTENTS
Cover
Books by Ann Beattie
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
PARK CITY
Cosmos
Second Question
Going Home with Uccello
The Siamese Twins Go Snorkeling
Zalla
Ed and Dave Visit the City
The Four-Night Fight
Park City
DISTORTIONS
Vermont
Wolf Dreams
Dwarf House
Snakes’ Shoes
SECRETS AND SURPRISES
Secrets and Surprises
Weekend
A Vintage Thunderbird
Shifting
The Lawn Party
Colorado
THE BURNING HOUSE
Learning to Fall
The Cinderella Waltz
Jacklighting
Waiting
Desire
Greenwich Time
The Burning House
WHERE YOU’LL FIND ME
Janus
In the White Night
Heaven on a Summer Night
Summer People
Skeletons
Where You’ll Find Me
WHAT WAS MINE
The Working Girl
In Amalfi
What Was Mine
Windy Day at the Reservoir
Imagine a Day at the End of Your Life
PARK CITY
COSMOS
Jason is the first to run onto the patio. He takes the side steps and bangs on the French doors, and Carl and I follow grudgingly. We would have preferred the front walkway, but as we have done so many times, we sigh and follow Jason’s lead. And there stands Grand-Mam, delighted to see the person she calls “my favorite boy in all the world,” no matter which way—or with what war whoops—he has approached the house. In the cement flower urns, cosmos are still blooming in mid-November. Some of the leaves are still on the trees, too, and the Japanese maple is the deep rose-brown of dried blood.
Grand-Mam’s dining room is cluttered with things she has bought for us at her neighbor’s house sale: rattan chairs; a twin-bed frame; a fireplace screen and andirons; a rolled rug that I think I remember as being too wildly geometric. Jason runs the obstacle course into the kitchen, to get the freshly baked gingerbread squares he heard about on the phone. Estelle—Grand-Mam—calls hello to us over her shoulder. She is on the run, trying to catch Jason so she can tie his shoestring. Jason’s shoes don
’t just come untied; they seem to sprout octopus tentacles, because he prefers his shoelaces extra long. He is very particular about his clothes. He won’t wear anything bright. He won’t wear knit shirts, or knit anything. He will never wear a raincoat, regardless of how hard it is raining, so Carl sprays his jackets to weatherproof them. He wears a baseball cap turned backward, but forget keeping his ears warm: the brighter they are, the more Jason swears they’re—as he calls them—“room temperature.” He also insists he is room temperature when he has a fever. He had one two days ago, and I thought for sure we wouldn’t be making this trip, but just as the doctor’s nurse predicted: it zoomed up like a strongman’s mallet hitting the weight to ring the bell, then subsided with the first dose of Tylenol.
Grand-Mam is no one’s grandmother. She did raise Carl, though, after his parents died in the crash of a single-engine plane in Alaska. She was the next-door neighbor, and since there were only tenuous next of kin, she stepped in. By all accounts, she was happy to inherit a ten-year-old boy. This amazes me, since Jason is eight and I cringe to imagine the intensity of his desires and declarations when he is two years older. When I was eight, my parents had my sister, Marge, and overnight my own disposition changed; frantic for attention, I had Jasonesque energy, but instead of running everywhere, I went on talking jags. To this day, my mother is even wary of talking to me on the phone, in case I might start monologuing again, and prefers to write letters. I know they are disappointed that, for the second time, I am living with a man I haven’t married. It’s not that I’m opposed to marriage, but men now seem to want to observe the women they’re considering with the focus of scientists squinting at slides under a microscope. I was judged unworthy of one boyfriend because I didn’t carry a spare tire or a jack in my trunk. For a while, I almost wavered out of Carl’s affections because I drank what he called “girl’s drinks”: brandy Alexanders and mimosas. I had it out with Carl, pointing out his own deficiencies—for example, that he gripped his beer bottles as if they were grenades he intended to throw—which actually resulted in his grudging respect. According to Carl, he likes women who show gumption. I have lived happily with Carl since Jason was seven. If I decide to give Jason a brother or sister, Carl has said he will marry me. If not, he doesn’t see the point. Carl considers this pragmatic. All I can say is that pragmatism is not a quality Carl mentioned in the personals ad I responded to. I have taken to calling him “Fickle Fellow” instead of “Charismatic Carpenter.”
By the time I get to the kitchen, there are squares of gingerbread on four plates, and Jason is reaching, with gooey fingers, for another piece. As always, he has removed the napkin from the table, put it on his lap, then brushed it to the floor.
“I had to fire Nonette,” Estelle whispers to me. “The money was gone from the green vase.” She nods at the vase next to the stove, which holds yellow chrysanthemums. It looks very pretty—much more festive than the Ball jar I pour grease into that sits next to our stove.
“Carl, I hate to tell you this after all the work you did, but I’m afraid the squirrels are back in the attic,” Estelle says.
“Let me at ’em,” Jason says. “I can karate chop ’em.” He pushes his chair back so he can demonstrate a kick, seated. He turns so he is seated on one hip; several times, his left leg flies up, rising higher than you might expect. On the third kick, his foot brushes the edge of the table and everything shakes. “Earthquaaaake!” Jason screams. His whole body trembles, as if the shock waves are going to shake him to death. “I’m sorry!” he says, grabbing the edge as the table tips. There is a landslide of plates and glasses, silverware, stacked newspapers. Jason looks horrified. Across from him, Carl is white-faced, trying to stabilize the table.
“Oh, it was an accident,” Estelle says. Something else is toppled in the living room, but whatever it is falls with a simple, dull thump. The safety glass on the French doors stops them from shattering as Jason flings one open and runs from the house.
“Things happen in threes,” Estelle says. “First the maid steals my petty cash, then the squirrels burrow back in, and then poor Jason has an accident with this silly table.”
“What exactly is it that makes the table silly?” Carl says. Since the tornado has whirled through, Carl has decided to take out his hostility, inappropriately, on what remains standing. It’s not me, because I’m on all fours, carefully picking up what isn’t broken. Charismatic Carpenter, looking for long term commitment, likes canoeing, candlelight dinners, and cozy evenings by the fire. What a joke. Carl turns out to be a big Bruce Lee fan, which is what he watches on the VCR while too-wet wood smolders in the fireplace. Candlelight dinners, maybe, if his son hasn’t made creative use of the candle holders, and if I cook the dinner. And the canoeing—the canoe fell off the top carrier of his friend Alex’s car and what was left might as well have been driftwood. Alex: the same joker who wrote the touchy-feely ad Carl put in the Washingtonian: the bait I took, letting him reel me in with promises of glowing candles and gliding boats.
“You get back here, Jason,” Carl hollers, staring at the door. Leaves blow in. A strong wind sends bright pink cosmos with the leaves—the flowers Jason apparently uprooted on his way out the door.
“Oh, Carl—” Estelle says.
“Little bastard,” Carl says.
“Carl, you must not use that language around him,” Estelle says.
Carl expresses his frustration by mocking a frustrated person: for a few seconds he pantomimes a gorilla; then his face subsides into a bad actor’s tortured Hamlet. By the time he has walked into the living room, Estelle is smiling at his antics. He takes her in his arms and dances one perfect box step.
Unbeknownst to us, Jason has stolen the neighbor boy’s bike and is using it as an all-terrain vehicle in the woods behind the house. It will later cost Carl forty dollars—as much as it would cost to buy another similar piece of junk, according to Carl—to have the metal on the bent fender banged out and repainted.
“It’s such a delight to see you,” Estelle says, curtsying after her dance. “I hope you don’t think I’d ever mind anything Jason did, because he is my very favorite boy in all the world, you know.”
“That monster is what replaced me in your affections?” Carl says.
“Oh, Carl, no one is replaced.…”
Meanwhile, the looming tree; the wheels skidding on wet leaves; the crash; the young boy toppled, though he will walk away with only a bruise. He might even flash the trees the victory sign.
—
My students at Benjamin Franklin Junior High pay little attention to their lessons but suffer exquisitely whenever I make a mistake with my wardrobe (old-lady rubber boots, instead of cool lace-up hiking boots), or when I reveal myself to be ignorant of popular culture (no one cares about Jane’s Addiction anymore). They want to know why I do not wear a wedding ring (I have deliberately misled them into thinking that I’m married). I seem to be the only Canadian they are aware of ever having met. One of their mothers, writing me a note explaining her daughter’s absence, wanted to know two things: (1) Do you have a fax? My daughter often has inner ear infections accompanying colds, and it would be easier to explain her absence without having to write a note that she will probably lose on the way to school and (2) Did you ever meet Pierre Trudeau? My husband says he was a charming, well-educated man who stood by his wife as long as he could. My husband was picked out of a crowd to dance with Margaret Trudeau up the aisle of Books & Co., in New York City. If you want to know more, we will be at Parent-Teacher night.
But most of all—more than they pity me for not knowing to wear black-red Morticia lipstick instead of stupid pale pink, or for having my hair blunt cut, rather than layered in a retro Farrah Fawcett style that has recently been welcomed enthusiastically—most of all, they pity me for having chosen to spend my time in school. They feel that I could be making more money working for a corporation, as their fathers and some of their mothers do, or at the very least that I could be a cons
ultant, and therefore have more flexible time. I try to discuss my private life very little, but I am torn between wanting them to like me and my normal adult tendency to withhold unnecessary information from everyone except personal friends, unless I absolutely have to let a telephone salesperson know everything about me so I can order from a catalog. The problem is a little complicated: many of my students are Japanese. Nothing I tell them is really extraneous information, because they are all recent immigrants to the United States, and they don’t have a very good sense of how Americans live (although they do have a firm sense of how people should dress and style their hair). I exist for them—for the girls, anyway—somewhere in the limbo between parents and pranksters (American boys at thirteen can be terribly cruel), and as such, I am watched intently for signs that I might be listing one way or the other. Part of their ongoing quiz is a genuine desire to see that I have not shifted ground; another part is curiosity, yet it transcends curiosity, and perhaps should be respected as such.
I started at Benjamin Franklin as a substitute. I went there to replace the history teacher, when her appendix ruptured. She recovered from this, slowly, but was mugged in late September when she left her sickbed, against the doctor’s advice, to attend her son’s wedding in Detroit. Mrs. Truehall died, and a team of two psychologists was dispatched to Benjamin Franklin to explain that Mrs. Truehall would not be returning: the students would not be seeing her because race relations continued to be a problem in our country, and because drugs such as crack caused senseless violence. It wasn’t a very good talk. It was the sort of negative, cover-all-bases talk that was the obverse of the “have a nice day” mentality so rampant in the culture. I had only met Mrs. Truehall once. She clearly adored the students, and they adored her. I was shocked when the principal called me to say that she had died—that the news would be in the next day’s paper, but that I should prepare myself for what was sure to be a sad, demanding, and arduous day at Benjamin Franklin. The principal, Darren Luftquist, always explains himself by giving examples in groups of three: when he asked me to finish the term, and I accepted, he was pleased, grateful, and relieved. Not one more thing? I wanted to ask him: not just a teeny bit irritated that the students had unanimously said I was the best teacher they’d ever had, except for Mrs. Truehall, when his own wife taught social sciences at the school? But I said nothing, and from September until late October I continued to teach history, double-checking my interpretations of certain historical events during pillow talk with Carl, as well as consulting an invaluable yard-sale Toynbee. In November, another problem arose that sprang me from history class and deposited me into what was for me the much-better-known field (and ruts) of English: Howard von der Meiss, the Princeton Ph.D. who had sought the job in order to be close to his boyfriend, who ran the family lumber business (“I was nonjudgmental, open-minded, and supportive”), ran off with a stock boy and sent hate mail to the former lover and to the principal announcing that he had done so, though the letter did not arrive until several days of unexplained absences had passed. I was “rotated” (an apt word; Luftquist’s conversation could make a person’s head spin) into what had formerly been von der Meiss’s seventh-grade classroom. A replacement history teacher had been more quickly found than an English teacher, and Darren Luftquist’s wife had reminded her husband that my actual training was in English. She did this not to be truly helpful, but because she was a bitch. She knew that the ten Asian students—all of them girls, by coincidence—had had their own classes suspended, while they attended nonstop English classes, in order to better learn the language. They sat there like a Greek chorus—if you can imagine Japanese teenage girls as a Greek chorus—whispering, and eventually giggling (this was progress?), as the other students trudged through their days, going from classroom to classroom. To the Japanese students, the bell was only a minor annoyance, like hearing someone’s cell phone ring in a crowded theater. They shifted in their chairs and chatted as the halls filled with students, then emptied. They knew they had been nicknamed “the Tokyo Toads,” though not one of them was from Tokyo, and all ranged from attractive to beautiful. Still, the nickname had traumatized them, separated them from the other students, made them suspicious and self-critical and—when I pressed the point with them—resentful. They were astonished to find out how negative I felt about the boys who had been mean to them. In a private meeting with the girls after school, the braver ones named names, and I threw in a couple of others. I made them all brush their hair off their foreheads, even if they had bangs. I told them that they could do whatever they wanted when they left my classroom, but in the classroom I would expect to see any hair that was not tucked behind their ears held back by headbands and bobby pins, and that they were to sit with space between their chairs and not only look me in the eye, but any boy they felt like staring down. I taught them the word “decondition.” I told them that there was a little boy in my own family, and that I dreaded the time when he might go through an awful period in adolescence when he became cruel, and that I was doing everything possible to see that he always treated other people the way he would like to be treated. I discussed with them hormones, insecurity, the male tendency not to ask for directions, and the glass ceiling. Then I explained that men were now in a difficult position because they suddenly found themselves in a different world, which had different expectations. I discussed harmful stereotyping and quoted Oscar Wilde on the war between the sexes. I was a little out of control, but kept going because they were leaning forward, inclining their bodies at exactly the same angle, like the Rockettes—except that of course they were not kicking. I stopped when I found myself passing around my compact so they could look in the mirror and receive makeup hints. Subsequently, they sat taller, pinned back their bangs, wore early–Hillary Rodham Clinton headbands, and asked me privately for advice about everything from easing menstrual cramps to training their family pets.