Park City

by Ann Beattie

  Sol has put up some pictures he framed—old advertisements he found in a box in the attic (after Charles repaired the attic stairs). I study the pictures now, in the firelight. The Butter Lady—a healthy coquette with pearly skin and a mildewed bottom lip—extends a hand offering a package of butter. On the wall across from her, a man with oil-slick black hair holds a shoe that is the same color as his hair.

  “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Eastertime, too,” Dylan sings.

  Margaret says to Beth, “Do you want to come take a bath with me?”

  Beth is shy. The first night we were here, she covered her eyes when Sol walked naked from the bathroom to the bedroom.

  “I don’t have to take a bath while I’m here, do I?” she says to me.

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Why do I have to take a bath?”

  But she decides to go with Margaret, and runs after her and grabs on to her wool sash. Margaret blows on the incense stick she has just lit, and fans it in the air, and Beth, enchanted, follows her out of the room. She already feels at ease in the house, and she likes us all and wanders off with anyone gladly, even though she’s usually shy. Yesterday, Sol showed her how to punch down the bread before putting it on the baking sheet to rise once more. He let her smear butter over the loaves with her fingers and then sprinkle cornmeal on the top.

  Sol teaches at the state university. He is a poet, and he has been hired to teach a course in the modern novel. “Oh, well,” he is saying now. “If I weren’t a queer and I’d gone into the army, I guess they would have made me a cook. That’s usually what they do, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Charles says. “I’m queer, too.” This seems to be an old routine.

  Noel is admiring the picture frames. “This is such a beautiful place,” he says. “I’d love to live here for good.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Sol says. “With a lot of fairies?”

  Sol is reading a student’s paper. “This student says, ‘Humbert is just like a million other Americans,’ ” he says.

  “Humbert?” Noel says.

  “You know—that guy who ran against Nixon.”

  “Come on,” Noel says. “I know it’s from some novel.”

  “Lolita,” Lark says, all on the intake. She passes the joint to me.

  “Why don’t you quit that job?” Lark says. “You hate it.”

  “I can’t be unemployed,” Sol says. “I’m a faggot and a poet. I’ve already got two strikes against me.” He puffs twice on the roach, lets it slip out of the clip to the hearth. “And a drug abuser,” he says. “I’m as good as done for.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, dear,” Charles says, putting his hand gently on Sol’s shoulder. Sol jumps. Charles and Noel laugh.

  It is time for dinner—moussaka, and bread, and wine that Noel brought.

  “What’s moussaka?” Beth asks. Her skin shines, and her hair has dried in small narrow ridges where Margaret combed it.

  “Made with mice,” Sol says.

  Beth looks at Noel. Lately, she checks things out with him. He shakes his head no. Actually, she is not a dumb child; she probably looked at Noel because she knows it makes him happy.

  Beth has her own room—the smallest bedroom, with a fur rug on the floor and a quilt to sleep under. As I talk to Lark after dinner, I hear Noel reading to Beth: “The Trout Fishing Diary of Alonso Hagen.” Soon Beth is giggling.

  I sit in Noel’s lap, looking out the window at the fields, white and flat, and the mountains—a blur that I know is mountains. The radiator under the window makes the glass foggy. Noel leans forward to wipe it with a handkerchief. We are in winter now. We were going to leave Vermont after a week—then two, now three. Noel’s hair is getting long. Beth has missed a month of school. What will the Board of Education do to me? “What do you think they’re going to do?” Noel says. “Come after us with guns?”

  Noel has just finished confiding in me another horrendous or mortifying thing he would never, never tell anyone and that I must swear not to repeat. The story is about something that happened when he was eighteen. There was a friend of his mother’s whom he threatened to strangle if she didn’t let him sleep with her. She let him. As soon as it was over, he was terrified that she would tell someone, and he threatened to strangle her if she did. But he realized that as soon as he left she could talk, and that he could be arrested, and he got so upset that he broke down and ran back to the bed where they had been, pulled the covers over his head, and shook and cried. Later, the woman told his mother that Noel seemed to be studying too hard at Princeton—perhaps he needed some time off. A second story was about how he tried to kill himself when his wife left him. The truth was that he couldn’t give David his scarf back because it was stretched from being knotted so many times. But he had been too chicken to hang himself and he had swallowed a bottle of drugstore sleeping pills instead. Then he got frightened and went outside and hailed a cab. Another couple, huddled together in the wind, told him that they had claimed the cab first. The same couple was in the waiting room of the hospital when he came to.

  “The poor guy put his card next to my hand on the stretcher,” Noel says, shaking his head so hard that his beard scrapes my cheek. “He was a plumber. Eliot Raye. And his wife, Flora.”

  —

  A warm afternoon. “Noel!” Beth cries, running across the soggy lawn toward him, her hand extended like a fisherman’s with his catch. But there’s nothing in her hand—only a little spot of blood on the palm. Eventually he gets the story out of her: she fell. He will bandage it. He is squatting, his arm folding her close like some giant bird. A heron? An eagle? Will he take my child and fly away? They walk toward the house, his hand pressing Beth’s head against his leg.

  —

  We are back in the city. Beth is asleep in the room that was once Noel’s study. I am curled up in Noel’s lap. He has just asked to hear the story of Michael again.

  “Why do you want to hear that?” I ask.

  Noel is fascinated by Michael, who pushed his furniture into the hall and threw his small possessions out the window into the backyard and then put up four large, connecting tents in his apartment. There was a hot plate in there, cans of Franco-American spaghetti, bottles of good wine, a flashlight for when it got dark….

  Noel urges me to remember more details. What else was in the tent?

  A rug, but that just happened to be on the floor. For some reason, he didn’t throw the rug out the window. And there was a sleeping bag….

  What else?

  Comic books. I don’t remember which ones. A lemon-meringue pie. I remember how disgusting that was after two days, with the sugar oozing out of the meringue. A bottle of Seconal. There was a drinking glass, a container of warm juice…I don’t remember.

  We used to make love in the tent. I’d go over to see him, open the front door, and crawl in. That summer he collapsed the tents, threw them in his car, and left for Maine.

  “Go on,” Noel says.

  I shrug. I’ve told this story twice before, and this is always my stopping place.

  “That’s it,” I say to Noel.

  He continues to wait expectantly, just as he did the two other times he heard the story.

  —

  One evening, we get a phone call from Lark. There is a house near them for sale—only thirty thousand dollars. What Noel can’t fix, Charles and Sol can help with. There are ten acres of land, a waterfall. Noel is wild to move there. But what are we going to do for money, I ask him. He says we’ll worry about that in a year or so, when we run out. But we haven’t even seen the place, I point out. But this is a fabulous find, he says. We’ll go see it this weekend. Noel has Beth so excited that she wants to start school in Vermont on Monday, not come back to the city at all. We will just go to the house right this minute and live there forever.

  But does he know how to do the wiring? Is he sure it can be wired?

  “Don’t you have a
ny faith in me?” he says. “David always thought I was a chump, didn’t he?”

  “I’m only asking whether you can do such complicated things.”

  My lack of faith in Noel has made him unhappy. He leaves the room without answering. He probably remembers—and knows that I remember—the night he asked David if he could see what was wrong with the socket of his floor lamp. David came back to our apartment laughing. “The plug had come out of the outlet,” he said.

  —

  In early April, David comes to visit us in Vermont for the weekend with his girlfriend, Patty. She wears blue jeans, and has kohl around her eyes. She is twenty years old. Her clogs echo loudly on the bare floorboards. She seems to feel awkward here. David seems not to feel awkward, although he looked surprised when Beth called him David. She led him through the woods, running ahead of Noel and me, to show him the waterfall. When she got too far ahead, I called her back, afraid, for some reason, that she might die. If I lost sight of her, she might die. I suppose I had always thought that if David and I spent time together again it would be over the hospital bed of our dying daughter—something like that.

  Patty has trouble walking in the woods; the clogs flop off her feet in the brush. I tried to give her a pair of my sneakers, but she wears size 8½ and I am a 7. Another thing to make her feel awkward.

  David breathes in dramatically. “Quite a change from the high-rise we used to live in,” he says to Noel.

  Calculated to make us feel rotten?

  “You used to live in a high-rise?” Patty asks.

  He must have just met her. She pays careful attention to everything he says, watches with interest when he snaps off a twig and breaks it in little pieces. She is having trouble keeping up. David finally notices her difficulty in keeping up with us, and takes her hand. They’re city people; they don’t even have hiking boots.

  “It seems as if that was in another life,” David says. He snaps off a small branch and flicks one end of it against his thumb.

  “There’s somebody who says that every time we sleep we die; we come back another person, to another life,” Patty says.

  “Kafka as realist,” Noel says.

  Noel has been reading all winter. He has read Brautigan, a lot of Borges, and has gone from Dante to García Márquez to Hilma Wolitzer to Kafka. Sometimes I ask him why he is going about it this way. He had me make him a list—this writer before that one, which poems are early, which late, which famous. Well, it doesn’t matter. Noel is happy in Vermont. Being in Vermont means that he can do what he wants to do. Freedom, you know. Why should I make fun of it? He loves his books, loves roaming around in the woods outside the house, and he buys more birdseed than all the birds in the North could eat. He took a Polaroid picture of our salt lick for the deer when he put it in, and admired both the salt lick (“They’ve been here!”) and his picture. Inside the house there are Polaroids of the woods, the waterfall, some rabbits—he tacks them up with pride, the way Beth hangs up the pictures she draws in school. “You know,” Noel said to me one night, “when Gatsby is talking to Nick Carraway and he says, ‘In any case, it was just personal’—what does that mean?”

  “When did you read Gatsby?” I asked.

  “Last night, in the bathtub.”

  As we turn to walk back, Noel points out the astonishing number of squirrels in the trees around us. By David’s expression, he thinks Noel is pathetic.

  I look at Noel. He is taller than David but more stooped; thinner than David, but his slouch disguises it. Noel has big hands and feet and a sharp nose. His scarf is gray, with frayed edges. David’s is bright red, just bought. Poor Noel. When David called to say he and Patty were coming for a visit, Noel never thought of saying no. And he asked me how he could compete with David. He thought David was coming to his house to win me away. After he reads more literature he’ll realize that is too easy. There will have to be complexities. The complexities will protect him forever. Hours after David’s call, he said (to himself, really—not to me) that David was bringing a woman with him. Surely that meant he wouldn’t try anything.

  Charles and Margaret come over just as we are finishing dinner, bringing a mattress we are borrowing for David and Patty to sleep on. They are both stoned, and are dragging the mattress on the ground, which is white with a late snow. They are too stoned to hoist it.

  “Eventide,” Charles says. A circular black barrette holds his hair out of his face. Margaret lost her hat to Lark some time ago and never got around to borrowing another one. Her hair is dusted with snow. “We have to go,” Charles says, weighing her hair in his hands, “before the snow woman melts.”

  —

  Sitting at the kitchen table late that night, I turn to David. “How are you doing?” I whisper.

  “A lot of things haven’t been going the way I figured,” he whispers.

  I nod. We are drinking white wine and eating cheddar-cheese soup. The soup is scalding. Clouds of steam rise from the bowl, and I keep my face away from it, worrying that the steam will make my eyes water, and that David will misinterpret.

  “Not really things. People,” David whispers, bobbing an ice cube up and down in his wineglass with his index finger.

  “What people?”

  “It’s better not to talk about it. They’re not really people you know.”

  That hurts, and he knew it would hurt. But climbing the stairs to go to bed I realize that, in spite of that, it’s a very reasonable approach.

  Tonight, as I do most nights, I sleep with long johns under my nightgown. I roll over on top of Noel for more warmth and lie there, as he has said, like a dead man, like a man in the Wild West, gunned down in the dirt. Noel jokes about this. “Pow, pow,” he whispers sleepily as I lower myself on him. “Poor critter’s deader ’n a doornail.” I lie there warming myself. What does he want with me?

  “What do you want for your birthday?” I ask.

  He recites a little list of things he wants. He whispers: a bookcase, an aquarium, a blender to make milk shakes in.

  “That sounds like what a ten-year-old would want,” I say.

  He is quiet too long; I have hurt his feelings.

  “Not the bookcase,” he says finally.

  I am falling asleep. It’s not fair to fall asleep on top of him. He doesn’t have the heart to wake me and has to lie there with me sprawled on top of him until I fall off. Move, I tell myself, but I don’t.

  “Do you remember this afternoon, when Patty and I sat on the rock to wait for you and David and Beth?”

  I remember. We were on top of the hill, Beth pulling David by his hand, David not very interested in what she was going to show him, Beth ignoring his lack of interest and pulling him along. I ran to catch up, because she was pulling him so hard, and I caught Beth’s free arm and hung on, so that we formed a chain.

  “I knew I’d seen that before,” Noel says. “I just realized where—when the actor wakes up after the storm and sees Death leading those people winding across the hilltop in The Seventh Seal.”

  —

  Six years ago. Seven. David and I were in the Village, in the winter, looking in a bookstore window. Tires began to squeal, and we turned around and were staring straight at a car, a ratty old blue car that had lifted a woman from the street into the air. The fall took much too long; she fell the way snow drifts—the big flakes that float down, no hurry at all. By the time she hit, though, David had pushed my face against his coat, and while everyone was screaming—it seemed as if a whole chorus had suddenly assembled to scream—he had his arms around my shoulders, pressing me so close that I could hardly breathe and saying, “If anything happened to you…If anything happened to you…”

  —

  When they leave, it is a clear, cold day. I give Patty a paper bag with half a bottle of wine, two sandwiches, and some peanuts to eat on the way back. The wine is probably not a good idea; David had three glasses of vodka and orange juice for breakfast. He began telling jokes to Noel—dogs in bars outsmart
ing their owners, constipated whores, talking fleas. David does not like Noel; Noel does not know what to make of David.

  Now David rolls down the car window. Last-minute news. He tells me that his sister has been staying in his apartment. She aborted herself and has been very sick. “Abortions are legal,” David says. “Why did she do that?” I ask how long ago it happened. A month ago, he says. His hands drum on the steering wheel. Last week, Beth got a box of wooden whistles carved in the shape of peasants from David’s sister. Noel opened the kitchen window and blew softly to some birds on the feeder. They all flew away.

  Patty leans across David. “There are so many animals here, even in the winter,” she says. “Don’t they hibernate anymore?”

  She is making nervous, polite conversation. She wants to leave. Noel walks away from me to Patty’s side of the car, and tells her about the deer who come right up to the house. Beth is sitting on Noel’s shoulders. Not wanting to talk to David, I wave at her stupidly. She waves back.

  David looks at me out the window. I must look as stiff as one of those wooden whistles, all carved out of one piece, in my old blue ski jacket and blue wool hat pulled down to my eyes and my baggy jeans.

  “Ciao,” David says. “Thanks.”

  “Yes,” Patty says. “It was nice of you to do this.” She holds up the bag.

  It’s a steep driveway, and rocky. David backs down cautiously—the way someone pulls a zipper after it’s been caught. We wave, they disappear. That was easy.

  WOLF DREAMS

  When Cynthia was seventeen she married Ewell W. G. Peterson. The initials stood for “William Gordon”; his family called him William, her parents called him W.G. (letting him know that they thought his initials were pretentious), and Cynthia called him Pete, which is what his army buddies called him. Now she had been divorced from Ewell W. G. Peterson for nine years, and what he had been called was a neutral thing to remember about him. She didn’t hate him. Except for his name, she hardly remembered him. At Christmas, he sent her a card signed “Pete,” but only for a few years after the divorce, and then they stopped. Her second husband, whom she married when she was twenty-eight, was named Lincoln Divine. They were divorced when she was twenty-nine and a half. No Christmas cards. Now she was going to marry Charlie Pinehurst. Her family hated Charlie—or perhaps just the idea of a third marriage—but what she hated was the way Charlie’s name got mixed up in her head with Pete’s and Lincoln’s. Ewell W. G. Peterson, Lincoln Divine, Charlie Pinehurst, she kept thinking, as if she needed to memorize them. In high school her English teacher had made her memorize poems that made no sense. There was no way you could remember what came next in those poems. She got Ds all through high school, and she didn’t like the job she got after she graduated, so she was happy to marry Pete when he asked her, even if it did mean leaving her friends and her family to live on an army base. She liked it there. Her parents had told her she would never be satisfied with anything; they were surprised when it turned out that she had no complaints about living on the base. She got to know all the wives, and they had a diet club, and she lost twenty pounds, so that she got down to what she weighed when she started high school. She also worked at the local radio station, recording stories and poems—she never knew why they were recorded—and found that she didn’t mind literature if she could just read it and not have to think about it. Pete hung around with the men when he had time off; they never really saw much of each other. He accused her of losing weight so she could attract “a khaki lover.” “One’s not enough for you?” he asked. But when he was around, he didn’t want to love her; he’d work out with the barbells in the spare bedroom. Cynthia liked having two bedrooms. She liked the whole house. It was a frame row house with shutters missing downstairs, but it was larger than her parents’ house inside. When they moved in, all the army wives said the same thing—that the bedroom wouldn’t be spare for long. But it stayed empty, except for the barbells and some kind of trapeze that Pete hung from the ceiling. It was nice living on the base, though. Sometimes she missed it.