Park City

by Ann Beattie

  —

  After three more lessons she could drive the car. The last two times, which were later in the afternoon than her first lesson, they stopped at the drugstore to get the old lady’s paper, to save him from having to make the same trip back on foot. When he came out of the drugstore with the paper, after the final lesson, she asked him if he’d like to have a beer to celebrate.

  “Sure,” he said.

  They walked down the street to a bar that was filled with college students. She wondered if Larry ever came to this bar. He had never said that he did.

  She and Michael talked. She asked why he wasn’t in high school. He told her that he had quit. He was living with his brother, and his brother was teaching him carpentry, which he had been interested in all along. On his napkin he drew a picture of the cabinets and bookshelves he and his brother had spent the last week constructing and installing in the house of two wealthy old sisters. He drummed the side of his thumb against the edge of the table in time with the music. They each drank beer, from heavy glass mugs.

  “Mrs. Larsen said your husband was in school,” the boy said. “What’s he studying?”

  She looked up, surprised. Michael had never mentioned her husband to her before. “Chemistry,” she said.

  “I liked chemistry pretty well,” he said. “Some of it.”

  “My husband doesn’t know you’ve been giving me lessons. I’m just going to tell him that I can drive the stick shift, and surprise him.”

  “Yeah?” the boy said. “What will he think about that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll like it.”

  “Why?” the boy said.

  His question made her remember that he was sixteen. What she had said would never have provoked another question from an adult. The adult would have nodded or said, “I know.”

  She shrugged. The boy took a long drink of beer. “I thought it was funny that he didn’t teach you himself, when Mrs. Larsen told me you were married,” he said.

  They had discussed her. She wondered why Mrs. Larsen wouldn’t have told her that, because the night she ate dinner with her she had talked to Mrs. Larsen about what an extraordinarily patient teacher Michael was. Had Mrs. Larsen told him that Natalie talked about him?

  On the way back to the car she remembered the photographs and went back to the drugstore and picked up the prints. As she took money out of her wallet she remembered that today was the day she would have to pay him. She looked around at him, at the front of the store, where he was flipping through magazines. He was tall and he was wearing a very old black jacket. One end of his long thick maroon scarf was hanging down his back.

  “What did you take pictures of?” he said when they were back in the car.

  “Furniture. My husband wanted pictures of our furniture, in case it was stolen.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “They say if you have proof that you had valuable things, the insurance company won’t hassle you about reimbursing you.”

  “You have a lot of valuable stuff?” he said.

  “My husband thinks so,” she said.

  A block from the driveway she said, “What do I owe you?”

  “Four dollars,” he said.

  “That’s nowhere near enough,” she said and looked over at him. He had opened the envelope with the pictures in it while she was driving. He was staring at the picture of her legs. “What’s this?” he said.

  She turned into the driveway and shut off the engine. She looked at the picture. She could not think what to tell him it was. Her hands and heart felt heavy.

  “Wow,” the boy said. He laughed. “Never mind. Sorry. I’m not looking at any more of them.”

  He put the pack of pictures back in the envelope and dropped it on the seat between them.

  She tried to think what to say, of some way she could turn the pictures into a joke. She wanted to get out of the car and run. She wanted to stay, not to give him the money, so he would sit there with her. She reached into her purse and took out her wallet and removed four one-dollar bills.

  “How many years have you been married?” he asked.

  “One,” she said. She held the money out to him. He said “Thank you” and leaned across the seat and put his right arm over her shoulder and kissed her. She felt his scarf bunched up against their cheeks. She was amazed at how warm his lips were in the cold car.

  He moved his head away and said, “I didn’t think you’d mind if I did that.” She shook her head no. He unlocked the door and got out.

  “I could drive you to your brother’s apartment,” she said. Her voice sounded hollow. She was extremely embarrassed, but she couldn’t let him go.

  He got back in the car. “You could drive me and come in for a drink,” he said. “My brother’s working.”

  —

  When she got back to the car two hours later she saw a white parking ticket clamped under the windshield wiper, flapping in the wind. When she opened the car door and sank into the seat, she saw that he had left the money, neatly folded, on the floor mat on his side of the car. She did not pick up the money. In a while she started the car. She stalled it twice on the way home. When she had pulled into the driveway she looked at the money for a long time, then left it lying there. She left the car unlocked, hoping the money would be stolen. If it disappeared, she could tell herself that she had paid him. Otherwise she would not know how to deal with the situation.

  When she got into the apartment, the phone rang. “I’m at the gym to play basketball,” Larry said. “Be home in an hour.”

  “I was at the drugstore,” she said. “See you then.”

  She examined the pictures. She sat on the sofa and laid them out, the twelve of them, in three rows on the cushion next to her. The picture of the piano was between the picture of her feet and the picture of herself that she had shot by aiming into the mirror. She picked up the four pictures of their furniture and put them on the table. She picked up the others and examined them closely. She began to understand why she had taken them. She had photographed parts of her body, fragments of it, to study the pieces. She had probably done it because she thought so much about Andy’s body and the piece that was gone—the leg, below the knee, on his left side. She had had two bourbon-and-waters at the boy’s apartment, and drinking always depressed her. She felt very depressed looking at the pictures, so she put them down and went into the bedroom. She undressed. She looked at her body—whole, not a bad figure—in the mirror. It was an automatic reaction with her to close the curtains when she was naked, so she turned quickly and went to the window and did that. She went back to the mirror; the room was darker now and her body looked better. She ran her hands down her sides, wondering if the feel of her skin was anything like the way the sculpture would feel. She was sure that the sculpture would be smoother—her hands would move more quickly down the slopes of it than she wanted—that it would be cool, and that somehow she could feel the grayness of it. Those things seemed preferable to her hands lingering on her body, the imperfection of her skin, the overheated apartment. If she were the piece of sculpture and if she could feel, she would like her sense of isolation.

  This was in 1972, in Philadelphia.

  THE LAWN PARTY

  I said to Lorna last night, “Do you want me to tell you a story?” “No,” she said. Lorna is my daughter. She is ten and a great disbeliever. But she was willing to hang around my room and talk. “Regular dry cleaning won’t take that out,” Lorna said when she saw the smudges on my suede jacket. “Really,” she said. “You have to take it somewhere special.” In her skepticism, Lorna assumes that everyone else is also skeptical.

  According to the Currier & Ives calendar hanging on the back of the bedroom door, and according to my watch, and according to my memory, which would be keen without either of them, Lorna and I have been at my parents’ house for three days. Today is the annual croquet game that all our relatives here in Connecticut gather for (even some from my wi
fe’s side). It’s the Fourth of July, and damn hot. I have the fan going. I’m sitting in a comfortable chair (moved upstairs, on my demand, by my father and the maid), next to the window in my old bedroom. There is already a cluster of my relatives on the lawn. Most of them are wearing little American flags pinned somewhere on their shirts or blouses or hanging from their ears. A patriotic group. Beer (forgive them: Heineken) and wine (Almadén Chablis) drinkers. My father loves this day better than his own birthday. He leans on his mallet and gives instructions to my sister Eva on the placement of the posts. Down there, he can see the American flags clearly. But if he is already too loaded to stick the posts in the ground, he probably isn’t noticing the jewelry.

  Lorna has come into my room twice in the last hour—once to ask me when I am coming down to join what she calls “the party,” another time to say that I am making everybody feel rotten by not joining them. A statement to be dismissed with a wave of the hand, but I have none. No right arm, either. I have a left hand and a left arm, but I have stopped valuing them. It’s the right one I want. In the hospital, I rejected suggestions of a plastic arm or a claw. “Well, then, what do you envision?” the doctor said. “Air,” I told him. This needed amplification. “Air where my arm used to be,” I said. He gave a little “ah, so” bow of the head and left the room.

  I intend to sit here at the window all day, watching the croquet game. I will drink the Heineken Lorna has brought me, taking small sips because I am unable to wipe my mouth after good foamy sips. My left hand is there to wipe with, but who wants to set down his beer bottle to wipe his mouth?

  Lorna’s mother has left me. I think of her now as Lorna’s mother because she has made it clear that she no longer wants to be my wife. She has moved to another apartment with Lorna. She, herself, seems to be no happier for having left me and visits me frequently. Mention is no longer made of the fact that I am her husband and she is my wife. Recently Mary (her name) took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. She broke in on me on my second day here in the room, explaining that she would not be here for the croquet game, but with the news that she had visited New York yesterday and had taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. “And how was the city?” I asked. “Wonderful,” she assured me. She went to the Carnegie Delicatessen and had cheesecake. When she does not visit, she writes. She has a second sense about when I have left my apartment for my parents’ house. In her letters she usually tells me something about Lorna, although no mention is made of the fact that Lorna is my child. In fact, she once slyly suggested in a bitter moment that Lorna was not—but she backed down about that one.

  Lorna is a great favorite with my parents, and my parents are rich. This, Mary always said jokingly, was why she married me. Actually, it was my charm. She thought I was terrific. If I had not fallen in love with her sister, everything would still be fine between us. I did it fairly; I fell in love with her sister before the wedding. I asked to have the wedding delayed. Mary got drunk and cried. Why was I doing this? How could I do it? She would leave me, but she wouldn’t delay the wedding. I asked her to leave. She got drunk and cried and would not. We were married on schedule. She had nothing more to do with her sister. I, on the other hand—strange how many things one cannot say anymore—saw her whenever possible. Patricia—that was her name—went with me on business trips, met me for lunches and dinners, and was driving my car when it went off the highway.

  When I came to, Mary was standing beside my hospital bed, her face distorted, looking down at me. “My sister killed herself and tried to take you with her,” she said.

  I waited for her to throw herself on me in pity.

  “You deserved this,” she said, and walked out of the room.

  I was being fed intravenously in my left arm. I looked to see if my right arm was hooked up to anything. It hurt to move my head. My right arm was free—how free I didn’t know at the time. I swear I saw it, but it had been amputated when I was unconscious. The doctor spoke to me at length about this later, insisting that there was no possibility that my arm was there when my wife was in the room and gone subsequently—gone when she left. No, indeed. It was amputated at once, in surgery, and when I saw my wife I was recovering from surgery. I tried to get at it another way, leaving Mary out of it. Wasn’t I conscious before Mary was there? Didn’t I see the arm? No, I was unconscious and didn’t see anything. No, indeed. The physical therapist, the psychiatrist, and the chaplain the doctor had brought with him nodded their heads in fast agreement. But soon I would have an artificial arm. I said that I did not want one. It was then that we had the discussion about air.

  Last Wednesday was my birthday. I was unpleasant to all. Mrs. Bates, the cook, baked me chocolate-chip cookies with walnuts (my favorite), but I didn’t eat any until she went home. My mother gave me a red velour shirt, which I hinted was unsatisfactory. “What’s wrong with it?” she said. I said, “It’s got one too many arms.” My former student Banks visited me in the evening, not knowing that it was my birthday. He is a shy, thin, hirsute individual of twenty—a painter, a true artiste. I liked him so well that I had given him the phone number at my parents’ house. He brought with him his most recent work, a canvas of a nude woman, for my inspection. While we were all gathered around the birthday cake, Banks answered my question about who she was by saying that she was a professional model. Later, strolling in the backyard, he told me that he had picked her up at a bus stop, after convincing her that she did not want to spend her life waiting for buses, and brought her to his apartment, where he fixed a steak dinner. The woman spent two days there, and when she left, Banks gave her forty dollars, although she did not want any money. She thought the painting he did of her was ugly, and wanted to be reassured that she wasn’t really that heavy around the hips. Banks told her that it was not a representational painting; he said it was an impressionist painting. She gave him her phone number. He called; there was no such number. He could not understand it. He went back to the bus stop, and eventually he found her again. She told him to get away or she’d call the police.

  Ah, Banks. Ah, youth—to be twenty again, instead of thirty-two. In class, Banks used to listen to music on his cassette player through earphones. He would eat candy bars while he nailed frames together. Banks was always chewing food or mouthing songs. Sometimes he would forget and actually sing in class—an eerie wail, harmonizing with something none of the rest of us heard. The students who did not resent Banks’s talent resented his chewing or singing or his success with women. Banks had great success with Lorna. He told her she looked like Bianca Jagger and she was thrilled. “Why don’t you get some platform shoes like hers?” he said, and her eyes shriveled with pleasure. He told her a couple of interesting facts about Copernicus; she told him about the habits of gypsy moths. When he left, he kissed her hand. It did my heart good to see her so happy. I never delight her at all, as Mary keeps telling me.

  —

  They have written me from the college where I work, saying that they hope all is well and that I will be back teaching in the fall. It is not going to be easy to teach painting, with my right arm gone. Still, one remembers Matisse in his last years. Where there’s a will, et cetera. My department head has sent flowers twice (mixed and tulips), and the dean himself has written a message on a get-well card. There is a bunny on the card, looking at a rainbow. Banks is the only one who really tempts me to go back to work. The others, Banks tells me, are “full of it.”

  Now I have a visitor. Danielle, John’s wife, has come up to see me. John is my brother. She brings an opened beer and sets it on the windowsill without comment. Danielle is wearing a white dress with small porpoises on it, smiling as they leap. Across that chest, no wonder.

  “Are you feeling blue today or just being rotten?” she asks.

  The beginnings of many of Danielle’s sentences often put me in mind of trashy, romantic songs. Surely someone has written a song called “Are You Feeling Blue?”

  “Both,” I say. I usually give Danielle
straight answers. She tries to be nice. She has been nice to my brother for five years. He keeps promising to take her back to France, but he never does.

  She sits on the rug, next to my chair. “Their rotten lawn parties,” she says. Danielle is French, but her English is very good.

  “Pull up a chair and watch the festivities,” I say.

  “I have to go back,” she says, pouting. “They want you to come back with me.”

  Champagne glasses clinking, white tablecloth, single carnation, key of A: “They Want You Back with Me.”

  “Who sent you?” I ask.

  “John. But I think Lorna would like it if you were there.”

  “Lorna doesn’t like me anymore. Mary’s turned her against me.”

  “Ten is a difficult age,” Danielle says.

  “I thought the teens were difficult.”

  “How would I know? I don’t have children.”

  She has a drink of beer, and then puts the bottle in my hand instead of back on the windowsill.

  “You have beautiful round feet,” I say.

  She tucks them under her. “I’m embarrassed,” she says.

  “Our talk is full of the commonplace today,” I say, sighing.

  “You’re insulting me,” she says. “That’s why John wouldn’t come up. He says he gets tired of your insults.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be insulting. You’ve got beautiful feet. Raise one up here and I’ll kiss it.”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” Danielle says.

  “Really,” I say.

  Danielle moves her leg, unstraps a sandal and raises her right foot. I take it in my hand and bend over to kiss it across the toes.

  “Stop it,” she says, laughing. “Someone will come in.”

  “They won’t,” I say. “John isn’t the only one tired of my insults.”