by Ann Beattie
“You’re not pregnant, are you?” she says, looking right at me.
“No,” I say. “What would make you think that?”
“Because I am,” she says. “That’s why I’ve been such a bitch.”
“What?”
“Well, just because you aren’t doesn’t mean other people can’t be,” she says.
“Janet! No!”
She pats my shoulder idly. Then she drops her hand in her lap as if it’s made of lead. “I found out in the ladies’ room of the Yarrow, on lunch break,” she says. “But I knew I was, even before I took the test. I just knew I was.”
“Have you told anybody?”
“This bus is making me nauseated,” she says.
“Is it really making you sick?” I say, rising to my feet—as if by rushing to her I can do anything about the way her stomach feels. I loom over her, unsteadily. I grab the metal bar and sink back into my seat.
“I told Damon,” she says. “Damon, wouldn’t you know, is delighted. He’s excited about having a second chance to do it right.”
“What’s wrong with Lyric?” I say.
She raises an eyebrow and lets it sink slowly. “I appreciate your devotion to the child,” she says, “but we’re not talking about a National Merit Scholar.”
“That’s not the only way to judge people,” I say. “She’s very bright.”
This time Janet looks at me without the raised eyebrow. First she looks into my eyes, then she drops her eyes when they well with tears. “Oh hell,” she says.
“You’re upset about this,” I say.
Janet nods her head yes. “Or as your friend might say: ‘All I wanted to do was hang and chill.’ ”
“Janet, really, she hasn’t had an easy time of it.”
“My God, if you’re so nuts about her, maybe you could join our little family unit and pal around with her, while I take care of Nell and the baby.”
What I know is that there is not going to be any such family unit. But the idea that my sister might be having a baby by a man who knocks women around…it’s too awful to contemplate.
“He’s delighted,” she says again. “And then the day after he finds out, who shows up but Selleck, saying that his daughter is the most wonderful thing in his life. Except for his teeny tiny little wife, of course. Who doesn’t dance anymore, as far as I know.”
“You don’t have to do this!” I say urgently.
“My mother was a Catholic,” she says. “You don’t know about Catholic guilt.”
“Janet! That can’t seriously be a deciding factor—”
Janet pulls her silver cross out from beneath her T-shirt.
“That’s…let’s not argue about jewelry, Janet. Please. Please. I mean—”
The bus turns the corner and opens its doors to two boys wearing Rollerblades. “In the back and sit down for the duration of the ride,” the driver says mechanically. The boys zoom to the back of the bus and start laughing. I look in the rearview mirror and see the bus driver’s look of disapproval. It takes me a minute to realize that he’s scrutinizing the whole bus, though: he’s heard what I’ve been saying, as well as hearing the boys’ silliness. I realize that he’s probably a Mormon. Which makes me think of spirit babies, which in turn makes me look upward. I see the ceiling of the bus.
At the Yarrow, we disembark. I get off first and reach back for Janet’s hand, as if she’s already hugely pregnant. She takes my hand without noticing my odd gentility. She also doesn’t drop it as we walk across the circular drive to the hotel. “Okay,” she says, taking a deep breath as we walk in the front door. “This is fine. I can deal with this.” She walks a slight bit faster. We’re going in the direction of the restaurant. Someone says hello and she says hello back. The restaurant is almost empty.
“I don’t suppose black coffee has been helping me to feel less nauseous,” she says, when we’re seated.
“You just got together with Damon,” I say. “Don’t you think—”
“Not only that, but I already have a three-year-old and a highly evolved Valley Girl stepchild, to say nothing of the fact that he’s got a cat I’m allergic to.”
“Are you going to let him keep the cat?” I say.
She studies my face. I don’t mind meeting her gaze at all. I’ve got to stand my ground. “No,” she says. “I’m going to suggest he get rid of the cat.”
She looks at the menu again. When the waitress comes to the table, Janet says, “No coffee for me. Iced tea, if you have it. And the granola with fruit.”
“I’ll have an English muffin and grapefruit juice,” I say. “Coffee with milk, please.”
Janet reaches across the table and takes my hand. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know anything.”
“That’s why we’re here,” I say. “I have to tell you something.”
“Right,” she says. “Excuse me for sidetracking you. What is it you wanted to tell me?”
“Janet, please don’t be business-like.”
“I’m not trying to be business-like. I’m trying to allow you to tell me whatever is so important.”
“You’re going to have trouble hearing this, because you don’t like Lyric.”
She starts to say something, then stops. “I’ve been exaggerating,” she says. “Lyric’s an easy person to make fun of. I’ve picked up her father’s reservations about her, and I realize that isn’t fair. If you say she’s intelligent, I’m sure she’s intelligent.”
The waitress brings the iced tea and juice. She goes to a station and gets a coffee mug and brings it to the table, with the coffeepot and two little plastic containers of milk that she takes out of her apron pocket. We thank her. She says, “You’re welcome,” and goes away.
“Do you know anything about the woman Damon was involved with before he met you?” I say.
She looks surprised. “A few things. Yes,” she says.
“Do you know anything about women—you know—before that?”
“That he’s quite a womanizer. Yes,” she says slowly.
“But about the women,” I say.
“Tell me what you’re getting at,” she says. “I’m not about to give a recitation of random facts about a bunch of women I’ve never met.”
“He’s been physically abusive,” I say.
She looks at me. To my surprise, she says: “Once.”
“Once?”
“That’s what I said. Once. I know about that. Yes. Is that what Lyric told you that you had to tell me?”
“Janet, I don’t believe it was just once.”
She shifts in her chair. “Well, that’s what he told me,” she said. “And it flipped him out so much that he was in counseling for a year.” She takes the lemon out of her iced tea. Instead of squeezing it, she looks at it, then puts it on the tablecloth. “I realize that once is once too often,” she says. “Toward the end, when he had that job he really hated in Ithaca, he was drinking too much. I’m not saying that’s an excuse. Just that he doesn’t touch alcohol now, as you know. He made a mistake. He told me about it.”
I persist: “Do you know about the detached retina?”
“God,” she says, “this is so painful. Yes I do. I wish you didn’t, because I honestly think he realized that his drinking had gotten out of hand, and I’m entirely certain he regrets it and that he’d never do a thing like that again.”
“Listen to yourself. That’s the way women who’ll let themselves be abused always defend the man.”
“He’s not ‘the man.’ He’s Damon. He’s never hurt me, and he told me about what happened with that other woman. Can we drop the subject now? Please?”
“He shoved Lyric’s mother around. The way Lyric described it was that her mother would just get drained of energy, and that he stayed as solid as a bag of sand.”
She looks at the floor. She looks back at me. “Why do you believe her?” she says. “There’s quite a bit of animosity between them. Maybe what looked to a little child—”
“Listen to yourself!” I say.
She stops talking. “That’s what she told you?” she says, finally.
“She’s told me more than that.”
Janet looks very pale. “She didn’t say he hit her, did she?”
“She said he didn’t. But come to think of it, I’m not sure I believe her. She might have found it possible to tell me about the others, but not about herself.”
“Isn’t that a little paranoid?”
“Maybe.”
“ ‘Maybe,’ ” Janet echoes. “So we have for breakfast a big, looming ‘maybe’ on the table.” The waitress is coming our way with a tray. “Why don’t we tackle it piece by piece,” Janet says. “You eat a bite of muffin, I’ll have a spoonful of cereal.”
“It wasn’t easy to say these things to you.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t,” she says.
“Please don’t sound business-like,” I say, as the waitress puts my plate in front of me.
“What is my alternative? To sound all screwed up and vulnerable? I’m rattled by what you said, okay? It worked. It’s made me very nervous. I’m going to have to think about this.”
“You’ve already got a three-year-old. You’ve only lived with him for a few months. You don’t know what it would be like to live with him for years and years. You’ve got to do your screenplay.”
“Are you serious?” she says.
“Sally Hemmings.”
“Thank you. I don’t need prompting to remember what my screenplay is about.” She takes another bite of cereal. “Nobody’s ever going to unravel the truth about that,” she says. “Jefferson either did, or he didn’t.”
—
On the last day of the conference, which comes, sure enough, a day earlier than the brochure seemed to indicate, Lyric, Nell, and I decide to buy tickets and ride on the Alpine Slide. I don’t know about Janet, but I’m ready to go home—even if all that means is that I’ll have to start packing boxes. From time to time, I’ve thought about Janet’s sarcastic suggestion that I move in with her, but what she doesn’t know is that Lyric isn’t going to be around any time at all, and the prospect of daily life with Nell…I adore her, but I don’t want to spend all my spare time with a three-year-old. What’s this living with other people when you’re an adult, anyway? Camping out for six days in Park City has been all I can manage. The second bouquet from Hale didn’t bring me around any, either; if anything, it reinforced my resolve to keep away from somebody who so little wanted to express enthusiasm for me that he twice sent flowers with a card that simply said, “Hello.”
“I don’t know why a pretty girl like you has any trouble finding a fellow,” Nikki says to me. She’s dunking little tubes in the hot tub, then dropping different chemicals in them with an eyedropper. What happens with each one, which is not discernible to my eye, seems to please her. “Maybe you don’t talk enough,” she says. “You have to put out some give to get some take.”
“You’re the second person this week who’s told me I’m not very talkative,” I say.
“If you were talkative, you’d say who the other person was!” Nikki says. She puts her testing kit on a shelf below the redwood floor and closes the little trapdoor. She wipes her hands on her legs. “Probably the teenager, because she can talk up a storm.”
“Lyric,” I say.
“Real name Linda,” Nikki says.
“It is?”
“Yeah, sure. We traded information a few mornings back. She adopted the name Lyric when she was in grade one to make herself special. I know what she feels like, thinking you’ve got to have the right name. I could not be in Park City, Utah, and always be Nguyen, you know?”
She goes to the control panel on a small redwood column and turns the dial. The water starts to bubble. “Aah,” she says, sitting down, swinging her feet into the water. “Just for a minute. You, too,” she says.
“I don’t like very hot water,” I say.
“Relaxing. Try it,” Nikki says. She slowly lowers her legs into the water. Then she pulls them up again. “She could be a real beautician,” Nikki says, holding one foot high in the air. “How come if Lyric painted my toenails, you don’t have painted toenails?” Nikki says.
“I didn’t want them painted.”
“You,” she says. “You’re more fun than you want to let on.”
“I doubt it,” I say.
“Hey, nobody else got two bouquets here this week,” she says, lowering her feet again. The water bubbles close to the hem of her white bermuda shorts.
I sit beside her, cross-legged. Then I change my mind, swing my legs around, and lower them into the water. For a second they sting, then they tingle.
“You know I’m fun, right?” Nikki says.
“What do you mean?”
“Girls know what other girls mean when they talk about fun,” she says. “Don’t tell me you don’t. I talked to Lyric about fun. She guessed something and I said it was right.”
A chill goes up my spine. I don’t know what I anticipate, but I’m sure it’s nothing good. I didn’t know Lyric had spent any time with Nikki, let alone that she’d painted her toenails.
“I have been a widow for twelve years. Something has to happen, right?”
“What do you mean?” I say again.
“You know. Fun in bed,” Nikki says.
I drop my mouth open. At first, I think she’s saying she went to bed with Lyric. She sees my mouth agape, and looks puzzled. She even says, “What’s wrong?”
“I’m not following what you’re saying,” I say.
“I swore her to secrecy, now I swear you,” Nikki says. “Just one afternoon. When he scheduled deep tissue massage. There wasn’t any. You understand?”
I don’t know if I’m relieved or dismayed. This was not a discussion I expected to be having when I took two Tylenols and went out on the deck to get some air.
“He loves your sister,” Nikki says. “It doesn’t mean anything but that two people had fun. You don’t tell her, though, because she doesn’t need to know. That would not please anyone.”
“You’re serious?” I say. “He slept with you?”
“Yeah,” she says, giving my shoulder a playful shove. “Lyric had a hunch, from the way he looked at me. She asked me, and I swore her to secrecy. I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t have admitted it, because it was her father, but she’s so grown-up,” Nikki says. “If women aren’t honest with other women, there will be no honesty, right?”
“What?” I say, dazed.
“Because the men are not going to be honest! No!” Nikki says.
“Oh, man,” I say. “Oh man. I don’t believe this.”
“You’re more surprised than she was!” Nikki says.
“This has been a tough week,” I say. “I’m getting tired of being surprised.”
“If people weren’t willing to be surprised, they’d still think the earth was flat. They wouldn’t have tested, right?”
I watch a golden wasp come near the surface of the water and lift off just before it’s lapped in. The wasp circles around to buzz behind me and reapproach the water. This time the water gets it, and I watch it wash toward the far end of the whirlpool, where the blue plastic cover is neatly rolled. “Desert rose,” Nikki says, lifting her foot to admire it. She looks at me. “If he wasn’t nice-looking, I wouldn’t have. You can tell when somebody is a nice man.”
“Because of the way they look?”
“No, not just looks. Deeper than looks. Some people look at you and let you see inside their soul.”
“And he was…” I falter. “He was a nice man?”
“Mmmm,” Nikki says.
What did I expect? Violence, during the half hour when he was ostensibly getting deep tissue massage? In my imagination, he has become so monstrous I’ve been assuming he couldn’t contain his terrible impulses.
“I like it rough,” Nikki whispers. Then she looks to the side, embarrassed.
“Oh no,” I s
ay. “Oh no, he didn’t do anything to you, did he?”
“When there is real passion, I like it rough,” she says again.
“What?” I say. “Nikki, please. What, exactly?”
“Hey, I found a way to get you to talk,” Nikki says. When she speaks, though, she sounds more nervous than triumphant.
“Nikki,” I say, putting my hand on her elbow. “Nikki, let me level with you. I’ve been worried that he might do something to my sister. Do you know from Lyric that he’s done violent things to women?”
“I was just talking about fun,” Nikki says. She looks at my hand clasping her elbow. I remove it. I put my hand on my thigh, spread my fingers, and look at the light circle of skin—much lighter than the rest, in spite of almost a week of tanning—where for years I wore the silver band Hale gave me.
“I don’t want to tell,” she says, her voice barely audible above the bubbling water. “Too personal.”
We sit in silence for a long time. Eventually, extraneously, Nikki says in a very quiet voice: “Don’t tell your sister.”
—
To my surprise, when I go downstairs—my headache worse than when I set out—Damon is sprawled on the orange sofa, clicking through channels with the remote.
“There she is!” Nell hollers, jumping off his lap. “Lyric went looking for you!” she squeals.
“Hey—where’ve you been?” Damon says to me. On the TV screen, there is a shot of Joan Collins, on the witness stand. “Why are they airing old news?” he says, clicking the remote.
“Where’s Janet?” I say.
“Mommy has a headache,” Nell says.
“Yeah, well, her sister does, too,” I say, sitting in a fake-zebra-hide chair.
“What’s up with you two? Janet said she was too sick to make it to the last session. You getting sympathetic pains?” Damon says.
“How are we going to find Lyric?” Nell says. “You stay here, and I’ll find her.”
“No, sweetie,” I say. “Just sit here another minute and she’ll come back.”
“She will come in one minute?”
“She definitely will, and if she doesn’t, curse me for a fool,” I say. I rub my hand over my face. My fingers smell slightly of chlorine.