Park City

by Ann Beattie

  Wynn and I have come from New York. Every year we borrow his mother’s car and drive from Hoboken to Virginia. We used to take the trip to spend the week of Nicholas’s birthday with him. Now we come to see Spence, who lives alone in the house. He is making jam early, so we can take jars back with us. He stays in the kitchen because he is depressed and does not really want to talk to us. He scolds the cat, curses when something goes wrong.

  Wynn is in love. The girl he loves is twenty, or twenty-one. Twenty-two. When he told me (top down on the car, talking into the wind), I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying. There were enough facts to daze me; she had a name, she was one of his students, she had canceled her trip to Rome this summer. The day he told me about her, he brought it up twice; first in the car, later in Spence’s kitchen. “That was not my mother calling the other night to say she got the car tuned,” Wynn said, smashing his glass on the kitchen counter. I lifted his hand off the large shard of glass, touching his fingers as gently as I’d touch a cactus. When I steadied myself on the counter, a chip of glass nicked my thumb. The pain shot through my body and pulsed in my ribs. Wynn examined my hands; I examined his. A dust of fine glass coated our hands, gently touching, late at night, as we looked out the window at the moon shining on Spence’s lemon tree with its one lemon, too heavy to be growing on the slender branch. A jar of Lip ton iced tea was next to the tub the lemon tree grew out of—a joke, put there by Wynn, to encourage it to bear more fruit.

  —

  Wynn is standing in the field across from the house, pacing, head down, the bored little boy grown up.

  “When wasn’t he foolish?” Spence says, walking through the living room. “What kind of sense does it make to turn against him now for being a fool?”

  “He calls it midlife crisis, Spence, and he’s going to be thirty-two in September.”

  “I know when his birthday is. You hint like this every year. Last year at the end of August you dropped it into conversation that the two of you were doing something or other to celebrate his birthday.”

  “We went to one of those places where a machine shoots baseballs at you. His birthday present was ten dollars’ worth of balls pitched at him. I gave him a Red Sox cap. He lost it the same day.”

  “How did he lose it?”

  “We came out of a restaurant and a Doberman was tied by its leash to a stop sign, barking like mad—a very menacing dog. He tossed the cap, and it landed on the dog’s head. It was funny until he wanted to get it back, and he couldn’t go near it.”

  “He’s one in a million. He deserves to have his birthday remembered. Call me later in the month and remind me.” Spence goes to the foot of the stairs. “Pammy,” he calls.

  “Come up and kill something for me,” she says. The bed creaks. “Come kill a wasp on the bedpost. I hate to kill them. I hate the way they crunch.”

  He walks back to the living room and gets a newspaper and rolls it into a tight tube, slaps it against the palm of his hand.

  Wynn, in the field, is swinging a broken branch, batting hickory nuts and squinting into the sun.

  —

  Nicholas lived for almost a year, brain damaged, before he died. Even before the accident, he liked the way things felt. He always watched shadows. He was the man looking to the side in Cartier-Bresson’s photograph, instead of putting his eye to the wall. He’d find pennies on the sidewalk when the rest of us walked down city streets obliviously, spot the chipped finger on a mannequin flawlessly dressed, sidestep the one piece of glass among shells scattered on the shoreline. It would really have taken something powerful to do him in. So that’s what happened: a drunk in a van, speeding, head-on, Nicholas out for a midnight ride without his helmet. Earlier in the day he’d assembled a crazy nest of treasures in the helmet, when he was babysitting the neighbors’ four-year-old daughter. Spence showed it to us—holding it forward as carefully as you’d hold a bomb, looking away the way you’d avoid looking at dead fish floating in a once-nice aquarium, the way you’d look at an ugly scar, once the bandages had been removed, and want to lay the gauze back over it. While he was in the hospital, his fish tank overheated and all the black mollies died. The doctor unwound some of the bandages and the long brown curls had been shaved away, and there was a red scar down the side of his head that seemed as out of place as a line dividing a highway out West, a highway that nobody traveled anyway. It could have happened to any of us. We’d all ridden on the Harley, bodies pressed into his back, hair whipped across our faces. How were we going to feel ourselves again, without Nicholas? In the hospital, it was clear that the thin intravenous tube was not dripping life back into him—that was as far-fetched as the idea that the too-thin branch of the lemon tree could grow one more piece of fruit. In the helmet had been dried chrysanthemums, half of a robin’s blue eggshell, a cat’s-eye marble, yellow twine, a sprig of grapes, a piece of a broken ruler. I remember Wynn actually jumping back when he saw what was inside. I stared at the strangeness such ordinary things had taken on. Wynn had been against his teaching me to ride his bike, but he had. He taught me to trust myself and not to settle for seeing things the same way. The lobster claw on a necklace he made me was funny and beautiful. I never felt the same way about lobsters or jewelry after that. “Psychologists have figured out that infants start to laugh when they’ve learned to be skeptical of danger,” Nicholas had said. Laughing on the back of his motorcycle. When he lowered the necklace over my head, rearranging it, fingers on my throat.

  —

  It is Nicholas’s birthday, and so far no one has mentioned it. Spence has made all the jam he can make from the fruit and berries and has gone to the store and returned with bags of flour to make bread. He brought the Daily Progress to Pammy, and she is reading it, on the side porch where there is no screening, drying her hair and stiffening when bees fly away from the rose-of-Sharon bushes. Her new sandals are at the side of the chair. She has red toenails. She rubs the small pimples on her chin the way men finger their beards. I sit on the porch with her, catcher’s mitt on my lap, waiting for Wynn to get back from his walk so we can take turns pitching to each other.

  “Did he tell you I was a drug addict? Is that why you hardly speak to me?” Pammy says. She is squinting at her toes. “I’m older than I look,” she says. “He says I’m twenty-one, because I look so young. He doesn’t know when to let go of a joke, though. I don’t like to be introduced to people as some child prodigy.”

  “What were you addicted to?” I say.

  “Speed,” she says. “I had another life.” She has brought the bottle of polish with her, and begins brushing on a new layer of red, the fingers of her other hand stuck between her toes from underneath, separating them. “I don’t get the feeling you people had another life,” she says. “After all these years, I still feel funny when I’m around people who’ve never lived the way I have. It’s just snobbishness, I’m sure.”

  I cup the catcher’s mitt over my knee. A bee has landed on the mitt. This is the most Pammy has talked. Now she interests me; I always like people who have gone through radical changes. It’s snobbishness—it shows me that other people are confused, too.

  “That was the summer of ’sixty-seven,” she says. “I slept with a stockbroker for money. Sat through a lot of horror movies. That whole period’s a blur. What I remember about it is being underground all the time, going places on the subway. I only had one real friend in the city. I can’t remember where I was going.” Pammy looks at the newspaper beside her chair. “Charlottesville, Virginia,” she says. “My, my. Who would have thought twitchy little Pammy would end up here?”

  —

  Spence tosses the ball. I jump, mitt high above my head, and catch it. Spence throws again. Catch. Again. A hard pitch that lets me know the palm of my hand will be numb when I take off the catcher’s mitt. Spence winds up. Pitches. As I’m leaning to get the ball, another ball sails by on my right. Spence has hidden a ball in his pocket all this time. Like his brother, he’s a
lways trying to make me smile.

  “It’s too hot to play ball,” he says. “I can’t spend the whole day trying to distract you because Wynn stalked off into the woods today.”

  “Come on,” I say. “It was working.”

  “Why don’t we all go to Virginia Beach next year instead of standing around down here smoldering? This isn’t any tribute to my brother.

  How did this get started?”

  “We came to be with you because we thought it would be hard. You didn’t tell us about Pammy.”

  “Isn’t that something? What that tells you is that you matter, and Wynn matters, and Nicholas mattered, but I don’t even think to mention the person who’s supposedly my lover.”

  “She said she had been an addict.”

  “She probably tried to tell you she wasn’t twenty-one, too, didn’t she?”

  I sidestep a strawberry plant, notice one croquet post stuck in the field.

  “It was a lie?” I say.

  “No,” he says. “I never know when to let my jokes die.”

  —

  When Nicholas was alive, we’d celebrate his birthday with mint juleps and croquet games, stuffing ourselves with cake, going for midnight skinny-dips. Even if he were alive, I wonder if today would be anything like those birthdays of the past, or whether we’d have bogged down so hopelessly that even his childish enthusiasm would have had little effect. Wynn is sure that he’s having a crisis and that it’s not the real thing with his student because he also has a crush on Pammy. We are open about everything: he tells me about taking long walks and thinking about nothing but sex; Spence bakes the French bread too long, finds that he’s lightly tapping a rock, sits on the kitchen counter, puts his hands over his face, and cries. Pammy says that she does not feel close to any of us—that Virginia was just a place to come to cool out. She isn’t sure she wants to go on with medical school. I get depressed and think that if the birds could talk, they’d say that they didn’t enjoy flying. The mountains have disappeared in the summer haze.

  Late at night, alone on the porch, toasting Nicholas with a glass of wine, I remember that when I was younger, I assumed he’d be our guide: he saw us through acid trips, planned our vacations, he was always there to excite us and to give us advice. He started a game that went on for years. He had us close our eyes after we’d stared at something and made us envision it again. We had to describe it with our eyes closed. Wynn and Spence could talk about the things and make them more vivid than they were in life. They remembered well. When I closed my eyes, I squinted until the thing was lost to me. It kept going backward into darkness.

  Tonight, Nicholas’s birthday, it is dark and late and I have been trying to pay him some sort of tribute by seeing something and closing my eyes and imagining it. Besides realizing that two glasses of wine can make me drunk, I have had this revelation: that you can look at something, close your eyes and see it again, and still know nothing—like staring at the sky to figure out the distances between stars.

  The drunk in the van that hit Nicholas thought that he had hit a deer.

  Tonight, stars shine over the field with the intensity of flashlights. Every year, Spence calls the state police to report that on his property, people are jacklighting.

  WAITING

  “It’s beautiful,” the woman says. “How did you come by this?” She wiggles her finger in the mouse hole. It’s a genuine mouse hole: sometime in the eighteenth century a mouse gnawed its way into the cupboard, through the two inside shelves, and out the bottom.

  “We bought it from an antique dealer in Virginia,” I say.

  “Where in Virginia?”

  “Ruckersville. Outside of Charlottesville.”

  “That’s beautiful country,” she says. “I know where Ruckersville is. I had an uncle who lived in Keswick.”

  “Keswick was nice,” I say. “The farms.”

  “Oh,” she says. “The tax write-offs, you mean? Those mansions with the sheep grazing out front?”

  She is touching the wood, stroking lightly in case there might be a splinter. Even after so much time, everything might not have been worn down to smoothness. She lowers her eyes. “Would you take eight hundred?” she says.

  “I’d like to sell it for a thousand,” I say. “I paid thirteen hundred, ten years ago.”

  “It’s beautiful,” she says. “I suppose I should try to tell you it has some faults, but I’ve never seen one like it. Very nice. My husband wouldn’t like my spending more than six hundred to begin with, but I can see that it’s worth eight.” She is resting her index finger on the latch. “Could I bring my husband to see it tonight?”

  “All right.”

  “You’re moving?” she says.

  “Eventually,” I say.

  “That would be something to load around.” She shakes her head.

  “Are you going back South?”

  “I doubt it,” I say.

  “You probably think I’m kidding about coming back with my husband,” she says suddenly. She lowers her eyes again. “Are other people interested?”

  “There’s just been one other call. Somebody who wanted to come out Saturday.” I smile. “I guess I should pretend there’s great interest.”

  “I’ll take it,” the woman says. “For a thousand. You probably could sell it for more and I could probably resell it for more. I’ll tell my husband that.”

  She picks up her embroidered shoulder bag from the floor by the corner cabinet. She sits at the oak table by the octagonal window and rummages for her checkbook.

  “I was thinking, What if I left it home? But I didn’t.” She takes out a checkbook in a red plastic cover. “My uncle in Keswick was one of those gentleman farmers,” she says. “He lived until he was eighty-six, and enjoyed his life. He did everything in moderation, but the key was that he did everything.” She looks appraisingly at her signature. “Some movie actress just bought a farm across from the Cobham store,” she says. “A girl. I never saw her in the movies. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

  “Well, Art Garfunkel used to have a place out there,” I say.

  “Maybe she bought his place.” The woman pushes the check to the center of the table, tilts the vase full of phlox, and puts the corner of the check underneath. “Well,” she says. “Thank you. We’ll come with my brother’s truck to get it on the weekend. What about Saturday?”

  “That’s fine,” I say.

  “You’re going to have some move,” she says, looking around at the other furniture. “I haven’t moved in thirty years, and I wouldn’t want to.”

  The dog walks through the room.

  “What a well-mannered dog,” she says.

  “That’s Hugo. Hugo’s moved quite a few times in thirteen years. Virginia. D.C. Boston. Here.”

  “Poor old Hugo,” she says.

  Hugo, in the living room now, thumps down and sighs.

  “Thank you,” she says, putting out her hand. I reach out to shake it, but our hands don’t meet and she clasps her hand around my wrist. “Saturday afternoon. Maybe Saturday evening. Should I be specific?”

  “Anytime is all right.”

  “Can I turn around on your grass or no?”

  “Sure. Did you see the tire marks? I do it all the time.”

  “Well,” she says. “People who back into traffic. I don’t know. I honk at them all the time.”

  I go to the screen door and wave. She is driving a yellow Mercedes, an old one that’s been repainted, with a license that says RAVE-1. The car stalls. She restarts it and waves. I wave again.

  When she’s gone, I go out the back door and walk down the driveway. A single daisy is growing out of the foot-wide crack in the concrete. Somebody has thrown a beer can into the driveway. I pick it up and marvel at how light it is. I get the mail from the box across the street and look at it as cars pass by. One of the stream of cars honks a warning to me, although I am not moving, except for flipping through the mail. There is a CL&P bill, a couple of p
ieces of junk mail, a postcard from Henry in Los Angeles, and a letter from my husband in—he’s made it to California. Berkeley, California, mailed four days ago. Years ago, when I visited a friend in Berkeley we went to a little park and some people wandered in walking two dogs and a goat. An African pygmy goat. The woman said it was housebroken to urinate outside and as for the other she just picked up the pellets.

  I go inside and watch the moving red band on the digital clock in the kitchen. Behind the clock is an old coffee tin decorated with a picture of a woman and a man in a romantic embrace; his arms are nearly rusted away, her hair is chipped, but a perfectly painted wreath of coffee beans rises in an arc above them. Probably I should have advertised the coffee tin, too, but I like to hear the metal top creak when I lift it in the morning to take the jar of coffee out. But if not the coffee tin, I should probably have put the tin breadbox up for sale.

  John and I liked looking for antiques. He liked the ones almost beyond repair—the kind that you would have to buy twenty dollars’ worth of books to understand how to restore. When we used to go looking, antiques were much less expensive than they are now. We bought them at a time when we had the patience to sit all day on folding chairs under a canopy at an auction. We were organized; we would come and inspect the things the day before. Then we would get there early the next day and wait. Most of the auctioneers in that part of Virginia were very good. One, named Wicked Richard, used to lace his fingers together and crack his knuckles as he called the lots. His real name was Wisted. When he did classier auctions and there was a pamphlet, his name was listed as Wisted. At most of the regular auctions, though, he introduced himself as Wicked Richard.

  I cut a section of cheese and take some crackers out of a container. I put them on a plate and carry them into the dining room, feeling a little sad about parting with the big corner cupboard. Suddenly it seems older and bigger—a very large thing to be giving up.

  The phone rings. A woman wants to know the size of the refrigerator that I have advertised. I tell her.