by Ann Beattie
—
She called in the morning to apologize. When she hung up on him the night before, she got straight for a minute—long enough to hail a cab—but she had a bad time in the cab again, and didn’t have the money to pay for the ride….To make a long story short, she was with Marielle.
“Why?” Robert asked.
Well, she was going to tell the cabdriver to take her to Robert’s place, but she was afraid he was mad. No—that wasn’t the truth. She knew he wouldn’t be mad, but she couldn’t face him. She wanted to talk to him, but she was in no shape.
She agreed to meet him for lunch. They hung up. He went into the bathroom to shave. A letter his father had written him, asking why he had dropped out of graduate school, was taped to the mirror, along with other articles of interest. There was one faded clipping, which belonged to Johnny and had been hung on the refrigerator at the house, about someone called the California Superman who had frozen to death in his Superman suit, in his refrigerator. All of Robert’s friends had bizarre stories displayed in their apartments. Cyril had a story about a family that had starved to death in their car at the side of the highway. Their last meal had been watermelon. The clipping was tacked to Cyril’s headboard. It made Robert feel old and disoriented when he realized that these awful newspaper articles had replaced those mindless Day-Glo pictures everybody used to have. Also, people in New Haven had begun to come up to him on the street—cops, surely; they had to be cops—swinging plastic bags full of grass in front of his nose, bringing handfuls of ups and downs out of their pockets. Also, the day before, he had got a box from his mother. She sent him a needlepoint doorstop, with a small white-and-gray Scottie dog on it, and a half wreath of roses underneath it. It really got him down.
He began to shave. His cat walked into the bathroom and rubbed against his bare ankle, making him jerk his leg away, and he cut his cheek. He put a piece of toilet paper against the cut, and sat on the side of the tub. He was angry at the cat and angry at himself for being depressed. After all, Dan was out of the picture now. Penelope had been found. He could go get her, the way he got groceries, the way he got a book from the library. It seemed too easy. Something was wrong.
He put on his jeans—he had no clean underwear; forget about that—and a shirt and his jacket, and walked to the restaurant. Penelope was in the first booth, with her coat still on. There was a bottle of beer on the table in front of her. She was smiling sheepishly, and seeing her, he smiled back. He sat next to her and put his arm around her shoulder, hugging her to him.
“Who’s the first girl you ever loved?” she said.
Leave it to her to ask something like that. He tried to feel her shoulder beneath her heavy coat, but couldn’t. He tried to remember loving anyone but her. “A girl in high school,” he said.
“I’ll bet she had a tragic end,” she said.
The waitress came and took their orders. When she went away, Penelope continued, “Isn’t that what usually happens? People’s first loves washing up on the beach in Mexico?”
“She didn’t finish high school with me. Her parents yanked her out and put her in private school. For all I know, she did go to Mexico and wash up on the beach.”
She covered her ears. “You’re mad at me,” she said.
“No,” he said, hugging her to him. “I wasn’t too happy last night, though. What did you want to talk to me about?”
“I wanted to know if I could live with you.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Really? You wouldn’t mind?”
“No,” he said.
While she was smiling at the startled look on his face, the waitress put a cheeseburger in front of him. She put an omelette in front of Penelope, and Penelope began to eat hungrily. He picked up his cheeseburger and bit into it. It was good. It was the first thing he had eaten in more than a day. Feeling sorry for himself, he took another bite.
“I just took a few drags of that stuff, and I felt like my mind was filling up with clouds,” she said.
“Forget about it,” he said. “You’re okay now.”
“I want to talk about something else, though.”
He nodded.
“I slept with Cyril,” she said.
“What?” he said. “When did you sleep with Cyril?”
“At the house,” she said. “And at his place.”
“Recently?” he said.
“A couple of days ago.”
“Well,” he said. “Why are you telling me?”
“Cyril told Dan,” she said.
That explained it.
“What do you expect me to say?” he said.
“I don’t know. I wanted to talk about it.”
He took another bite of his cheeseburger. He did not want her to talk about it.
“I don’t know why I should be all twisted around,” she said. “And I don’t even know why I’m telling you.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said.
“Are you jealous?”
“Yes.”
“Cyril said you had a crush on me,” she said.
“That makes it sound like I’m ten years old,” he said.
“I was thinking about going to Colorado,” she said.
“I don’t know what I expected,” he said, slamming his hand down on the table. “I didn’t expect that you’d be talking about screwing Cyril and going to Colorado.” He pushed his plate away, angry.
“I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Shouldn’t have told me what? What am I going to do about it? What do you expect me to say?”
“I thought you felt the way I feel,” she said. “I thought you felt stifled in New Haven.”
He looked at her. She had a way of sometimes saying perceptive things, but always when he was expecting something else.
“I have friends in Colorado,” she said. “Bea and Matthew. You met them when they stayed at the house once.”
“You want me to move out to Colorado because Bea and Matthew are there?”
“They have a big house they’re having trouble paying the mortgage on.”
“But I don’t have any money.”
“You have the money your father sent you so you could take courses at Yale. And you could get back into painting in Colorado. You’re not a picture framer—you’re a painter. Wouldn’t you like to quit your lousy job framing pictures and get out of New Haven?”
“Get out of New Haven?” he repeated, to see what it felt like. “I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t seem very reasonable.”
“I don’t feel right about things,” she said.
“About Cyril?”
“The last five years,” she said.
He excused himself and went to the bathroom. Scrawled above one of the mirrors was a message: TIME WILL SAY NOTHING BUT I TOLD YOU SO. A very literate town, New Haven. He looked at the bathroom window, stared at the ripply white glass. He thought about crawling out the window. He was not able to deal with her. He went back to the booth.
“Come on,” he said, dropping money on the table.
Outside, she began to cry. “I could have asked Cyril to go, but I didn’t,” she said.
He put his arm around her. “You’re bats,” he said.
He tried to get her to walk faster. By the time they got back to his apartment, she was smiling again, and talking about going skiing in the Rockies. He opened the door and saw a note lying on the floor, written by Dan. It was Penelope’s name, written over and over, and a lot of profanity. He showed it to her. Neither of them said anything. He put it back on the table, next to an old letter from his mother that begged him to go back to graduate school.
“I want to stop smoking,” she said, handing him her cigarette pack. She said it as if it were a revelation, as if everything, all day, had been carefully leading up to it.
—
It is a late afternoon in February, and Penelope is painting her toenails. She had meant what she said about moving in with him. She didn’t even go back
to Dan’s apartment for her clothes. She has been borrowing Robert’s shirts and sweaters, and wears his pajama bottoms under his long winter coat when she goes to the laundromat so she can wash her one pair of jeans. She has quit her job. She wants to give a farewell party before they go to Colorado.
She is sitting on the floor, and there are little balls of cotton stuck between her toes. The second toe on each foot is crooked. She wore the wrong shoes as a child. One night she turned the light on to show Robert her feet, and said that they embarrassed her. Why, then, is she painting her toenails?
“Penelope,” he says, “I have no interest in any damn party. I have very little interest in going to Colorado.”
Today he told his boss that he would be leaving next week. His boss laughed and said that he would send his brother around to beat him up. As usual, he could not really tell whether his boss was kidding. Before he goes to bed, he intends to stand a Coke bottle behind the front door.
“You said you wanted to see the mountains,” Penelope says.
“I know we’re going to Colorado,” he says. “I don’t want to get into another thing about that.”
He sits next to her and holds her hand. Her hands are thin. They feel about an eighth of an inch thick to him. He changes his grip and gets his fingers down toward the knuckles, where her hand feels more substantial.
“I know it’s going to be great in Colorado,” Penelope says. “This is the first time in years I’ve been sure something is going to work out. It’s the first time I’ve been sure that doing something was worth it.”
“But why Colorado?” he says.
“We can go skiing. Or we could just ride the lift all day, look down on all that beautiful snow.”
He does not want to pin her down or diminish her enthusiasm. What he wants to talk about is the two of them. When he asked if she was sure she loved him she said yes, but she never wants to talk about them. It’s very hard to talk to her at all. The night before, he asked some questions about her childhood. She told him that her father died when she was nine, and her mother married an Italian who beat her with the lawn-mower cord. Then she was angry at him for making her remember that, and he was sorry he had asked. He is still surprised that she has moved in with him, surprised that he has agreed to leave New Haven and move to Colorado with her, into the house of a couple he vaguely remembers—nice guy, strung-out wife.
“Did you get a letter from Matthew and Bea yet?” he says.
“Oh, yes, Bea called this morning when you were at work. She said she had to call right away to say yes, she was so excited.”
He remembers how excited Bea was the time she stayed with them in the country house. It seemed more like nervousness, really, not excitement. Bea said she had been studying ballet, and when Matthew told her to show them what she had learned, she danced through the house, smiling at first, then panting. She complained that she had no grace—that she was too old. Matthew tried to make her feel better by saying that she had only started to study ballet late, and she would have to build up energy. Bea became more frantic, saying that she had no energy, no poise, no future as a ballerina.
“But there’s something I ought to tell you,” Penelope says. “Bea and Matthew are breaking up.”
“What?” he says.
“What does it matter? It’s a huge state. We can find a place to stay. We’ve got enough money. Don’t always be worried about money.”
He was just about to say that they hardly had enough money to pay for motels on the way to Colorado.
“And when you start painting again—”
“Penelope, get serious,” he says. “Do you think that all you have to do is produce some paintings and you’ll get money for them?”
“You don’t have any faith in yourself,” she says.
It is the same line she gave him when he dropped out of graduate school, after she had dropped out herself. Somehow she was always the one who sounded reasonable.
“Why don’t we forget Colorado for a while?” he says.
“Okay,” she says. “We’ll just forget it.”
“Oh, we can go if you’re set on it,” he says quickly.
“Not if you’re only doing it to placate me.”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to stick around New Haven.”
“Then what are you complaining about?” she says.
“I wasn’t complaining. I was just disappointed.”
“Don’t be disappointed,” she says, smiling at him.
He puts his forehead against hers and closes his eyes. Sometimes it is very nice to be with her. Outside he can hear the traffic, the horns blowing. He does not look forward to the long drive west.
—
In Nebraska they get sidetracked and drive a long way on a narrow road, with holes so big that Robert has to swerve the car to avoid them. The heater is not working well, and the defroster is not working at all. He rubs the front window clear with the side of his arm. By early evening he is exhausted from driving. They stop for dinner at Gus and Andy’s Restaurant, and are served their fried-egg sandwiches by Andy, whose name is written in sequins above his shirt pocket. That night, in the motel, he feels too tired to go to sleep. The cat is scratching around in the bathroom. Penelope complains about the electricity in her hair, which she has just washed and is drying. He cannot watch television because her hair dryer makes the picture roll.
“I sort of wish we had stopped in Iowa to see Elaine,” she says. Elaine is her married sister.
She drags on a joint, passes it to him.
“You were the one who didn’t want to stop,” he says. She can’t hear him because of the hair dryer.
“We used to pretend that we were pregnant when we were little,” she says. “We pulled the pillows off and stuck them under our clothes. My mother was always yelling at us not to mess up the beds.”
She turns off the hair dryer. The picture comes back on. It is the news; the sportscaster is in the middle of a basketball report. On a large screen behind him, a basketball player is shown putting a basketball into a basket.
Before they left, Robert had gone over to Cyril’s apartment. Cyril seemed to know already that Penelope was living with him. He was very nice, but Robert had a hard time talking to him. Cyril said that a girl he knew was coming over to make dinner, and he asked him to stay. Robert said he had to get going.
“What are you going to do in Colorado?” Cyril asked.
“Get some kind of job, I guess,” he said.
Cyril nodded about ten times, the nods growing smaller.
“I don’t know,” he said to Cyril.
“Yeah,” Cyril said.
They sat. Finally Robert made himself go by telling himself that he didn’t want to see Cyril’s girl.
“Well,” Cyril said. “Take care.”
“What about you?” he asked Cyril. “What are you going to be up to?”
“Much of the same,” Cyril said.
They stood at Cyril’s door.
“Seems like we were all together at that house about a million years ago,” Cyril said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Maybe when the new people moved in they found dinosaur tracks,” Cyril said.
In the motel that night, in his dreams, Robert makes love to Penelope. When the sun comes through the drapes, he touches her shoulder and thinks about waking her. Instead, he gets out of bed and sits by the dresser and lights the stub of the joint. It’s gone in three tokes, and he gets back into bed, cold and drowsy. Going to sleep, he chuckles, or thinks he hears himself chuckling. Later, when she tries to rouse him, he can’t move, and it isn’t until afternoon that they get rolling. He feels tired but still up from the grass. The effect seems not to have worn off with sleep at all.
—
They are at Bea and Matthew’s house. It was cloudy and cold when they arrived, late in the afternoon, and the sides of the roads were heaped high with old snow. Robert got lost trying to find the house and finally had to stop i
n a gas station and telephone to ask for directions. “Take a right after the feed store at the crossroads,” Matthew told him. It doesn’t seem to Robert that they are really in Colorado. That evening Matthew insists that Robert sit in their one chair (a black canvas butterfly chair) because Robert must be tired from driving. Robert cannot get comfortable in the chair. There is a large photograph of Nureyev on the wall across from Robert, and there is a small table in the corner of the room. Matthew has explained that Bea got mad after one of their fights and sold the rest of the living-room furniture. Penelope sits on the floor at Robert’s side. They have run out of cigarettes, and Matthew and Bea have almost run out of liquor. Matthew is waiting for Bea to drive to town to buy more; Bea is waiting for Matthew to give in. They are living together, but they have filed for divorce. It is a friendly living-together, but they wait each other out, testing. Who will turn the record over? Who will buy the Scotch?
Their dog, Zero, lies on the floor listening to music and lapping apple juice. He pays no attention to the stereo speakers but loves headphones. He won’t have them put on his head, but when they are on the floor he creeps up on them and settles down there. Penelope points out that one old Marianne Faithfull record seems to make Zero particularly euphoric. Bea gives him apple juice for his constipation. She and Matthew dote on the dog. That is going to be a problem.
For dinner Bea fixes beef Stroganoff, and they all sit on the floor with their plates. Bea says that there is honey in the Stroganoff. She is ignoring Matthew, who stirs his fork in a circle through his food and puts his plate down every few minutes to drink Scotch. Earlier Bea told him to offer the bottle around, but they all said they didn’t want any. A tall black candle burns in the center of their circle; it is dark outside, and the candle is the only light. When they finish eating, there is only one shot of Scotch left in the bottle and Matthew is pretty drunk. He says to Bea, “I was going to move out the night before Christmas, in the middle of the night, so that when you heard Santa Claus, it would have been me instead, carrying away Zero instead of my bag of tricks.”