Park City

by Ann Beattie

  “With the Entenmann’s?” Harry said.

  “He’s never been here before. He brought that to be funny,” Alice said. “I twisted his arm to come, and the Entenmann’s is his retaliation.”

  Harry looked at Alice. “I wish I’d heard from you this week. I was worried something had happened to you.”

  “Oh God,” Alice said again. “I couldn’t work. I tried to draw, and I was too nervous. I painted this whole room so it would look nice, and I borrowed the furniture. I thought if it looked nice, I could persuade you to maybe be with me in Key West, Ames, instead of my moving to New York. And then some part of me thought—I wanted to test and see if Harry was really my friend, if there was even any reason to stay, because what’s the point in staying if I don’t even have one really good friend, just Janey that I go to lawn sales with sometimes, and the Black Pig’s girlfriend.”

  “The Black Pig?” Ames said.

  “Black Pig worked construction with us,” Harry said.

  “It’s really quite colorful here, isn’t it?” Ames said. He turned to Alice. “But tell me, you didn’t paint the room just for me, did you?”

  “Why wouldn’t you think I was your friend?” Harry said, paying no attention to the fact that Ames was talking to Alice. “You were punishing me for not being friendly enough by refusing to answer any of my messages?”

  “Those spotlights weren’t in the ceiling until yesterday,” Alice sniffled.

  “Well—they’re really quite lovely,” Ames said. “I don’t know what to say. It would never have occurred to me that you would have painted or changed the house in any way and, you know, borrowed furniture.”

  “Who did you borrow this stuff from?” Harry said.

  “Cheryl and Dieter Hals,” Alice said.

  “Who are they?” Harry said.

  “Dieter is opening a restaurant down here. Louis Quatorze sold them two of my drawings, and they came over to see what I was working on, and one thing led to another because their furniture was going to have to be put in storage because the house wasn’t finished, and I asked if I could put it in the living room.”

  “Louis Quatorze?” Harry said.

  “You know who he is, don’t pretend you don’t. The interior decorator in Back Bay. Louis. Everybody calls him Louis Quatorze behind his back.”

  “No relation to the Black Pig, I trust?” Ames said.

  “I like you better,” Harry said to Ames.

  “Thank you. I knew I was losing ground,” Ames said.

  “I’m so embarrassed I could die,” Alice said.

  “She’s quite levelheaded. You should be flattered she brought in this trendy furniture for you,” Harry said.

  “I’m glad to hear that. I’ve always thought of Alice as very practical.”

  “Stop talking about me like I’m not here,” she said.

  “Shouldn’t you be in the kitchen cooking?” Harry said.

  “Who cares? Why can’t we have your cake and finish this champagne?” Ames said.

  “See! That’s what I love about Ames. He’s completely serious when he says that,” Alice said.

  “I’d marry a man with such sterling qualities,” Harry said.

  “You see! He likes me so well he thinks you should marry me,” Ames said.

  “Then I will.”

  “Really?” Harry said. But now he liked Ames, and he suddenly realized that of course she would—he should have known that. It remained a rhetorical question only because neither Ames nor Alice could answer it. She had jumped into Ames’s lap and was kissing him. This was the first “dinner”—the first nonpotluck, nonbarbecue—he had been to in so many years he couldn’t remember the last dinner he had attended, unless he included the dinner at the Methodist church that he and Nance got stoned and went off to: ham and beans and jars of mustard the size of umbrella stands. No such middle-class ritual ever figured into his life in Key West. He also probably wasn’t getting dinner.

  —

  Today’s scenario: Have one last, final, no matter what happens and no matter how desperately you desire it no more going back to the Cubano grocery con leche. Go home, shoot the shit with the poolman, see if Nance finished the Dutch detective novel she borrowed and whether she had a clue in hell about who did it. Then a bit of pacing, working up to the chores and choices of the day: a little daytime TV that could be turned off when the first person on Sally or Oprah or whoever it was hung her blow-dried head and cried. Señor Leonard Cohen, sí! Maybe a phone call to Goldman in Chicagoland, see how the computer programs he’s been writing are going. Continue work on Great American Novel about drifters in Key West; yes, it will have been written before, but ne’er so well expressed. Check in with Alice about projected arrival time at Key West International, call Ames at his office to let him know the Mapplethorpe sale seemed to have gone through, according to the oblique FedEx letter from the madman collector in Gallup, New Mexico. Then the late-afternoon funeral of the florist, interment preceded by marching band, as per deathbed request, plus small gathering after service to drink tequila sunrises “until the first person becomes genuinely morose.”

  Through the garden gate, high on caffeine, depressed about the Plague.

  Sage advice for poolman: Let the boy toy go to South Beach; he’ll see soon enough what he’s missing and come crawling—or tangoing—back.

  Horoscope: Success! Love! Fortune!

  Real horoscope: You’re always bouncing off the walls. What do you think you are? A ball?

  Telephone call to Nance (malevolent ex-husband dead; remarried to guy who tailed her to Buffalo): No idea who did it. A total surprise. Price of avocados ridiculous. O.J. murdered Nicole. Aromatherapy the best thing for tension headaches, foot reflexology the best thing for salt and/or sugar cravings. Husband, on business trip, has departed a day early to see Kitaj exhibit in New York. Amniocentesis reveals fetus is boy.

  Response to news of friend’s amniocentesis results, the sad death of the florist, a man in his midthirties, who never hurt a soul, + pool man’s problems with younger lover (sexual identity omitted) who wants to become a model, as phone is held up to senile mother’s ear at rest home in Flemington, New Jersey: “Walk on through the wind, and the same for the rain. Mama always loved you best, Harry.”

  —

  Harry has gotten to the part of his manuscript where he has to describe the evening his main character, a charismatically irresponsible yet somewhat romantic drifter named Wylie, agrees, as a favor, to attend a dinner in which the not conventionally beautiful but nevertheless quirkily beautiful love interest, a photographer instead of a painter—and boy, did that take a lot of research, finding out all the chemicals those people plunge their hands into regularly….Anyway: the quirkily beautiful photog suddenly comes apart, realizing she loves Wylie, not her suitor. The suitor has to be credible, both sympathetic but also possessing enough negative qualities that the reader will increasingly side with the woman, named Alicia, and Wylie. So he names the suitor Liam. Makes him a Brit. The guy is rather inhibited and arch and sometimes silly. All buttoned up, as those Brits can be. Older than our hero, but still viable. Still a hurdle to be jumped.

  Blah, blah, blah: dialogue with increasing subtext.

  Props: champagne; trendy leather furniture to establish how cosmopolitan is our Alice/Alicia.

  From there on, he can tell the truth, though every time he would write “drawing,” he simply writes “photograph.” The three of them have their bottle of champagne and then it turns out there is a second bottle, which the Brit opens, calling the woman “Darling.”

  They went/go from the living room into her studio—just another bedroom, really, but the wall had been knocked down so that two adjoining bedrooms were opened up to provide a large space in which she could work. And then she gave/gives a sort of tour, though Wylie’s eyes went/go to the end of the line of artwork almost immediately. At first Alicia had been working abstractly, taking photographs that couldn’t easily be deciphered, bec
ause they were close-ups of parts of Wylie’s body: his knuckles, say, quite blurry and enlarged, so that the sense of proportion further threw off the viewer, and it was difficult to puzzle out what you were seeing. But toward the end she began to move away from abstraction, and that is how he knew/knows she’s in love with him: much larger photographs, but expressive in a different way than the abstract ones; close-ups that show his expressions, so that you have no doubt this is him, not her; this is not a case of the artist projecting onto the subject.

  What Harry had actually seen, that night, was himself. The way Alice had hung the drawings evoked a sort of Humpty-Dumpty in reverse, so that first you saw the breakage, and then you moved into the present, which was highly detailed, and very realistic. No more indecipherable shapes falling down. For years she had seen him as a shape, turning, and then something had happened and she had begun to draw him as he was, drawn him full figure, in precise detail, and clearly with great feeling. After all that time of being interested in how he might come apart, she had started to be interested in the way he was put together.

  When he returned to the house to look at them more carefully, he saw that they were dated, as well as signed. The realistic drawings had begun soon after Ron left town. Ron disappeared; Harry suddenly became a person. Bizarrely, there had been that strange moment when she watched him understand this. When they had stood there with the wealthy, older man between them—Ames had been standing there between them—there the silly Brit had stood, understanding nothing.

  —

  Five days after the dinner, when curiosity got the better of him and he went back to the house, she was gone. He knew she would be. It was her day for lawn sales and flea markets. As he thought, the bathroom window was easily shoved open. He climbed in and listened for a second, just to make sure. Silence. Then he splashed water on his face and wiped his face and hands on a towel. That made him think of having dipped his fingers in the holy water before Nance’s wedding at St. Mary Star of the Sea—something he hadn’t done since he was ten or eleven, which was when he put his foot down and stopped attending church.

  Alice’s house had been as quiet as the inside of a church, and the quiet caused him to walk gently. He picked up a key on a table, thought what trouble he might be able to cause by taking it, held it in his hand for a few seconds, then put it back.

  In the rooms she used as her studio, the drawings were still pinned to the wall. He stood back to survey them again. He had quite a few conflicting thoughts. The most recent drawings were quite good, as he’d remembered. She knew him very well. His expressions. What lay behind the expressions also showed through. If he’d known that was what she was doing, would he have let her draw him? He would have been uncomfortable, probably. And she also probably guessed that, so she’d said nothing. Clever. She hadn’t misrepresented herself. It was his mistake if he thought the process was always the same. That the reality of whoever and whatever he was would forever be only in the service of some abstraction.

  He found a piece of paper on a pad by the telephone. On it, he wrote: I came back for a longer look. I think you have an amazing talent. You really captured me. Is this about art, though, or is this about something else? Don’t get me wrong. I know you’re marrying Ames. I never wanted a wife, a family, any of that stuff. I don’t now. But why not stick together? Think of us as two floaters on the surface of life. Think of me—as I think of you—as my friend. It was heartfelt, though he wasn’t sure, himself, exactly what he meant. But he was proud of himself for writing the note, and amused that he thought to tape it to the wall at the end of the series, the way a teacher might comment at the end of a student’s essay.

  Before he left, he went into the kitchen to see if she had something cold he could take with him—a Coke, a beer, whatever. He walked by the aquarium, still attuned for any sound, not so much worried that she’d come back and find him as that his presence might initially frighten her. He passed the aquarium the way he’d circumvent a room divider, but opening a can of ginger ale as he passed it a second time, he stopped. The aquarium was bubbling, but almost empty: a few neons; one black molly. What the fish swam over, which at first looked curiously like a diving bell, was, on closer inspection, her white hard hat, sunk in the middle of the tank. As he watched, the little fish darted over it. There was one clump of seaweed, frizzy and anemic, that had drifted into a corner. How very curious. Did it mean that she was done with being on construction sites for all time, and what the hell: Maybe the fish would like the hat? Had she done it in anger, the way a frustrated warrior might plunge his sword in soil? The three neons stayed together, swimming left and right. The water was slightly cloudy. The world inside the tank didn’t look too pleasant. Which was what made him think of a final possibility: the destruction of the reef. The hard hat as garbage, possibly—Alice’s version of a sunken tire—the coral ruined, the reef sparse and dying, the fish mostly gone. It might be that the aquarium stood there, brackish and bubbling, nearly empty of fish, as a sort of symbolic reminder.

  He tapped the glass, but it was only an idle gesture, nothing he thought would register with the fish. He trailed his fingertips down the glass, then went back to the kitchen, dumped the rest of the too-sweet ginger ale down the drain. He looked around and found scissors on the counter by the phone. Then he went to the sink and picked up the sponge, a slightly wet, blue, rectangular sponge, that had been leaning against the dish drainer. He folded it and began to carefully cut, seeing what would emerge even before he stopped snipping and unfolded it. And pop! There it was: two figures, joined at the hip, one with a left arm raised above its head, the other with its right arm raised. He considered his handiwork and shaved a little off one of the figure’s heads, giving the male figure short hair. Then he turned on the water and held the sponge under the faucet and watched it puff up. He had done quite a nice job. He took it to the aquarium and put it on the surface of the water. The black molly rose for it instantly, assuming it was food, but when the fish saw that it was not, it veered away and darted into the seaweed. He tapped his fingers on the glass gently, one more time, then turned and walked down the hallway, past three brass Chinese characters hung vertically on the wall, stopping when he came to her bedroom. There was a queen-size bed against the far wall: no headboard, no bedspread. At the foot of the bed was a quilt, a patchwork quilt, that looked old. Family heirloom or, more likely, a flea market find? He squatted and touched his cheek to the material, which felt slightly rough because of the way it was channel-stitched. On the bureau, there was a dresser set: comb, brush, mirror. He ran his hands through the brush and put the little wad of hair he pulled out in his pocket. Then he picked up the mirror, but quickly replaced it before he turned it over, having no desire to see himself close-up, at all. In a small glass bottle was an iris, long dead. Wood shutters were open on one window, closed on another. He looked out both windows—to the side yard, and, opening the shutters, to a cement birdbath in the backyard—then went back to the bathroom, stood on the lid of the toilet, and exited through the window. He dropped to the ground and stood up, his legs a little shaky from the impact. Behind him was Alice’s house, Alice’s museum, of sorts, to which he’d just added his own little contribution. Such a long time had elapsed between her doing the drawings of him and his seeing them. How long would it take her to discover the floating figures?

  —

  In this odd but pleasant arrangement that has come to be his life, on this day of March 1995, fired by con leche and impelled by his quest to get it all down, in writing, like McGuane and Sanchez before him, yes, yes, but ne’er so well expressed, to make a little poem…in his quest to define a time and a place for everyone who was somewhere else, he nevertheless takes time out to go to the florist’s funeral before meeting Alice’s plane at five-fifteen. He is a sort of servant, he supposes—but who among us cannot see himself as that, from time to time, if not with depressing regularity? On the days when he’s feeling particularly cynical, he thinks that wha
t he lacks is a good drug connection—he’s nostalgic for the old days, the old ways, but to be realistic, he couldn’t handle the drugs anymore, even if he had access. Most days, he’d admit—though he’s never asked—that what he lacks is a settled life and an affectionate companion, but look where everyone’s significant others seem to be disappearing these days—into the cemetery; into the coral limestone.

  After the funeral, some tourists on pink motor scooters stop to look at the spectacle passing by: a six-man brass band, led by a high-stepping bugle player, followed by other musicians and oddly dressed people clasping the florist’s favorites, birds-of-paradise, like big candles. The strutting marching band and its entourage include gays, straight people, blacks, whites, and a dog in a wagon, who has bells fastened on his collar and paws, and whose every attempt to steady himself results in his own contribution of a jingle.

  Alice found the note he left for her years ago—he is sure of it—but never once referred to that, or to the floating blue spongepeople, directly. He realized that it had registered, though, the minute Ames called and stumbled through the recitation of a rather bizarre “idea”: having Harry house-sit and “take care of things” while they were away, though of course as his wife’s muse and as his own friend, he must feel a member of the household, not some—some—

  “Floater,” Harry had filled in.

  And then, hearing the obvious put to him so simply, Ames had gone into almost as much of a dither as the black tuba player was in at this very moment, desperate to finish his short riff before the cortege turned into the cemetery, swearing that was not what he had meant at all, not what he intended to say.

  ZALLA

  Recently, I had reason to think about Thomas Kurbell—Little Thomas, as the family always called him. Little Thomas fooled the older members of the family for a while because he was so polite as a child—almost obsequious—and because his father, Thomas Sr., had been a genuinely nice man. Ours was an urban family, based in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and Little Thomas’s father’s death reinforced every bit of paranoia everyone had about life in the country. No matter that he actually died of complications of pneumonia, which he had contracted in the hospital as he was lying in traction, recovering from a broken leg, shattered ankle, and patched-together pelvis, suffered after falling from a hay wagon. Legend had it that he’d died instantly from the fall, and this was always invoked as a cautionary warning to any youngster in the family who took an interest in skiing or sailing or even hiking. For the sake of storytelling, Thomas Sr.’s death often dovetailed into the long-ago death of his cousin Pete, who had been struck by lightning when he got out to investigate a backup on the Brooklyn Bridge: wham! With Thomas still sliding out of the hay wagon, there was a sudden bolt of electricity, and Pete, moved to New York City, was struck dead, lit up for such a quick second it seemed somebody was just taking a picture with a flash. I suppose it’s true in many families that some things get to be lumped together for effect, and others to obscure some issue. I was thirty years old before I got the chronology of the two deaths correct. It’s just the way people in our family tell stories: it wasn’t done to mislead Little Thomas.