by Ann Beattie
“It was all pretty crazy,” he says. “There was so much passion, so fast. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I don’t think I let on to her how much I cared. She saw that I cared, but she…she didn’t know my heart kept stopping, you know? We drove out here one day and had a picnic in the car—it would have been your nightmare picnic, it was so cold—and a dog came wandering up to the car. Big dog. Right over there.”
I look out my window, almost expecting that the dog may still be there.
“There were three freezing picnics. This dog turned up at the last one. She liked the dog—it looked like a mutt, with maybe a lot of golden retriever mixed in. I thought it was inviting trouble for us to open the car door, because it didn’t look like a particularly friendly dog. But she was right and I was wrong. Her name is Robin, by the way. The minute she opened the door, the dog wagged its tail. We took a walk with it.” He juts his chin forward. “Up that path there,” he says. “We threw rocks for it. A sure crowd pleaser with your average lost-in-the-woods American dog, right? I started kidding around, calling the dog Spot. When we were back at the car, Robin patted its head and closed the car door, and it backed off, looking very sad. Like we were really ruining its day, to leave. As I was pulling out, she rolled down the window and said, ‘Goodbye, Rover,’ and I swear its face came alive. I think his name really was Rover.”
“What did you do?” I say.
“You mean about the dog, or about the two of us?”
I shake my head. I don’t know which I mean.
“I backed out, and the dog let us go. It just stood there. I got to look at it in the rearview mirror until the road dipped and it was out of sight. Robin didn’t look back.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Get ice,” he says, starting the ignition. “But that isn’t what you meant, either, is it?”
He backs up, and as we swing around toward our own tire tracks I turn my head again, but there is no dog there, watching us in the moonlight.
—
Back at the house, as Howard goes in front of me up the flagstone pathway, I walk slower than I usually do in the cold, trying to give myself time to puzzle out what he makes me think of just then. It comes to me at the moment when my attention is diverted by a patch of ice I’m terrified of slipping on. He reminds me of that courthouse figure—I don’t know what it’s called—the statue of a blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice. Bag of ice in the left hand, bag of ice in the right—but there’s no blindfold. The door is suddenly opened, and what Howard and I see before us is Koenig, his customary bandanna tied around his head, smiling welcome, and behind him, in the glare of the already begun party, the woman with red hair holding Todd, who clutches his green dinosaur in one hand and rubs his sleepy, crying face with the other. Todd makes a lunge—not really toward his father but toward wider spaces—and I’m conscious, all at once, of the cigarette smoke swirling and of the heat of the house, there in the entranceway, that turn the bitter-cold outdoor air silver as it comes flooding in. Messiah—Sophie’s choice of perfect music for the occasion—isn’t playing; someone has put on Judy Garland, and we walk in just as she is singing, “That’s where you’ll find me.” The words hang in the air like smoke.
“Hello, hello, hello, hello,” Becky calls, dangling one kneesocked leg over the balcony as Deirdre covers her face and hides behind her. “To both of you, just because you’re here, from me to you: a million—a trillion—hellos.”
WHAT WAS MINE
THE WORKING GIRL
This is a story about Jeanette, who is a working girl. She sometimes thinks of herself as a traveler, a seductress, a secret gourmet. She takes a one-week vacation in the summer to see her sister in Michigan, buys lace-edged silk underpants from a mail-order catalog, and has improvised a way, in America, to make crème fraîche, which is useful on so many occasions.
Is this another story in which the author knows the main character all too well?
Let’s suppose, for a moment, that the storyteller is actually mystified by Jeanette, and only seems to stand in judgment because words come easily. Let’s imagine that in real life there is, or once was, a person named Jeanette, and that from a conversation the storyteller had with her, it could be surmised that Jeanette has a notion of freedom, though the guilty quiver of the mouth when she says “Lake Michigan” is something of a giveaway about how she really feels. If the storyteller is a woman, Jeanette might readily confide that she is a seductress, but if the author is a man, Jeanette will probably keep quiet on that count. Crème fraîche is crème fraîche, and not worth thinking about. But back to the original supposition: Let’s say that the storyteller is a woman, and that Jeanette discusses the pros and cons of the working life, calling a spade a spade, and greenbacks greenbacks, and if Jeanette is herself a good storyteller, Lake Michigan sounds exciting, and if she isn’t, it doesn’t. Let’s say that Jeanette talks about the romance in her life, and that the storyteller finds it credible. Even interesting. That there are details: Jeanette’s lover makes a photocopy of his hand and drops the piece of paper in her in-box; Jeanette makes a copy of her hand and has her trusted friend Charlie hang it in the men’s room, where it is allowed to stay until Jeanette’s lover sees it, because it means nothing to anyone else. If the storyteller is lucky, they will exchange presents small enough to be put in a breast pocket or the pocket of a skirt. Also a mini-French-English/English-French dictionary (France is the place they hope to visit); a finger puppet; an ad that is published in the personals column, announcing, by his initials, whom he loves (her), laminated in plastic and made useful as well as romantic by its conversion into a key ring. Let’s hope, for the sake of a good story, they are wriggling together in the elevator, sneaking kisses as the bubbles rise in the watercooler, and she is tying his shoelaces together at night, to delay his departure in the morning.
Where is the wife?
In North Dakota or Memphis or Paris, let’s say. Let’s say she’s out of the picture even if she isn’t out of the picture.
No no no. Too expedient. The wife has to be there: a presence, even if she’s gone off somewhere. There has to be a wife, and she has to be either determined and brave, vile and addicted, or so ordinary that with a mere sentence of description, the reader instantly knows that she is a prototypical wife.
There is a wife. She is a pretty, dark-haired girl who married young, and who won a trip to Paris and is therefore out of town.
Nonsense. Paris?
She won a beauty contest.
But she can’t be beautiful. She has to be ordinary.
It suddenly becomes apparent that she is extraordinary. She’s quite beautiful, and she’s in Paris, and although there’s no reason to bring this up, the people who sponsored the contest do not know that she’s married.
If this is what the wife is like, she’ll be more interesting than the subject of the story.
Not if the working girl is believable, and the wife’s exit has been made credible.
But we know how that story will end.
How will it end?
It will end badly—which means predictably—because either the beautiful wife will triumph, and then it will be just another such story, or the wife will turn out to be not so interesting after all, and by default the working girl will triumph.
When is the last time you heard of a working girl triumphing?
They do it every day. They are executives, not “working girls.”
No, not those. This is about a real working girl. One who gets very little money or vacation time, who periodically rewards herself for life’s injustices by buying cream and charging underwear she’ll spend a year paying off.
All right, then. What is the story?
Are you sure you want to hear it? Apparently you are already quite shaken, to have found out that the wife, initially ordinary, is in fact extraordinary, and has competed in a beauty pageant and won a trip to Paris.
But this was to be a story about the worki
ng girl. What’s the scoop with her?
This is just the way the people in the office think: the boss wants to know what’s going on in his secretary’s mind, the secretary wonders if the mail boy is gay, the mail boy is cruising the elevator operator, and every day the working girl walks into this tense, strange situation. She does it because she needs the money, and also because it’s the way things are. It isn’t going to be much different wherever she works.
Details. Make the place seem real.
In the winter, when the light disappears early, the office has a very strange aura. The ficus trees cast shadows on the desks. The water in the watercooler looks golden—more like wine than water.
How many people are there?
There are four people typing in the main room, and there are three executives, who share an executive secretary. She sits to the left of the main room.
Which one is the working girl in love with?
Andrew Darby, the most recently hired executive. He has prematurely gray hair, missed two days of work when his dog didn’t pull through surgery, and was never drafted because of a deteriorating disk which causes him much pain, though it is difficult to predict when the pain will come on. Once it seemed to coincide with the rising of a bubble in the watercooler. The pain shot up his spine as though mimicking the motion of the bubble.
And he’s married?
We just finished discussing his wife.
He’s really married, right?
There are no tricks here. He’s been married for six years.
Is there more information about his wife?
No. You can find out what the working girl thinks of her, but as far as judging for yourself, you can’t, because she is in Paris. What good would it do to overhear a phone conversation between the wife and Andrew? None of us generalizes from phone conversations. Other than that, there’s only a postcard. It’s a close-up of a column, and she says on the back that she loves and misses him. That if love could be embodied in columns, her love for him would be Corinthian.
That’s quite something. What is his reaction to that?
He receives the postcard the same day his ad appears in the personals column. He has it in his pocket when he goes to laminate the ad, punch a hole in the plastic, insert a chain, and make a key ring of it.
Doesn’t he go through a bad moment?
A bit of one, but basically he is quite pleased with himself. He and Jeanette are going to lunch together. Over lunch, he gives her the key ring. She is slightly scandalized, amused, and touched. They eat sandwiches. He can’t sit in a booth because of his back. They sit at a table.
Ten years later, where is Andrew Darby?
Dead. He dies of complications following surgery. A blood clot that went to his brain.
Why does he have to die?
This is just reporting, now. In point of fact, he dies.
Is Jeanette still in touch with him when he dies?
She’s his wife. Married men do leave their wives. Andrew Darby didn’t have that rough a go of it. After a while, he and his former wife developed a fairly cordial relationship. She spoke to him on the phone the day he checked into the hospital.
What happened then?
At what point?
When he died.
He saw someone beckoning to him. But that isn’t what you mean. What happened is that Jeanette was in a cab on her way to the hospital, and when she got there, one of the nurses was waiting by the elevator. The nurse knew that Jeanette was on her way, because she came at the same time every day. Also, Andrew Darby had been on that same floor, a year or so before, for surgery that was successful. That nurse took care of him then, also. It isn’t true that the nurse you have one year will be gone the next.
This isn’t a story about the working girl anymore.
It is, because she went right on working. She worked during the marriage and for quite a few years after he died. Toward the end, she wasn’t working because she needed the money. She wanted the money, but that’s different from needing the money.
What kind of a life did they have together?
He realized that he had something of a problem with alcohol and gave it up. She kept her figure. They went to Bermuda and meant to return, but never did. Every year she reordered perfume from a catalog she had taken from the hotel room in Bermuda. She tried to find another scent that she liked, but always ended up reordering the one she was so pleased with. They didn’t have children. He didn’t have children with his first wife either, so that by the end it was fairly certain that the doctor had been right, and that the problem was with Andrew, although he never would agree to be tested. He had two dogs in his life, and one cat. Jeanette’s Christmas present to him, the year he died, was a Rolex. He gave her a certificate that entitled her to twenty free tanning sessions and a monthly massage.
What was it like when she was a working girl?
Before she met him, or afterward?
Before and afterward.
Before, she often felt gloomy, although she entertained more in those days, and she enjoyed that. Her charge-card bills were always at the limit, and if she had been asked, even at the time, she would have admitted that a sort of overcompensation was taking place. She read more before she met him, but after she met him he read the same books, and it was nice to have someone to discuss them with. She was convinced that she had once broken someone’s heart: a man she dated for a couple of years, who inherited his parents’ estate when they died. He wanted to marry Jeanette and take care of her. His idea was to commute into New York from the big estate in Connecticut. She felt that she didn’t know how to move comfortably into someone else’s life. Though she tried to explain carefully, he was bitter and always maintained that she didn’t marry him because she didn’t like the furniture.
Afterward?
You’ve already heard some things about afterward. Andrew had a phobia about tollbooths, so when they were driving on the highway, he’d pull onto the shoulder when he saw the sign for a tollbooth, and she’d drive through it. On the Jersey Turnpike, of course, she just kept the wheel. They knew only one couple that they liked equally well—they liked the man as well as they liked the woman, that is. They tended to like the same couples.
What was it like, again, in the office?
The plants and the watercooler.
Besides that.
That’s really going back in time. It would seem like a digression at this point.
But what about understanding the life of the working girl?
She turned a corner, and it was fall. With a gigantic intake of breath, her feet lifted off the ground.
Explain.
Nothing miraculous happened, but still things did happen, and life changed. She lost touch with some friends, became quite involved in reading the classics. In Bermuda, swimming, she looked up and saw a boat and remembered very distinctly, and much to her surprise, that the man she had been involved with before Andrew had inherited a collection of ships in bottles from his great-great-grandfather. And that day, as she came out of the water, she cut her foot on something. Whatever it was was as sharp as glass, if it was not glass. And that seemed to sum up something. She was quite shaken. She and Andrew sat in the sand, and the boat passed by, and Andrew thought that it was the pain alone that had upset her.
In the office, when the light dimmed early in the day. In the winter. Before they were together. She must have looked at the shadows on her desk and felt like a person lost in the forest.
If she thought that, she never said it.
Did she confide in Charlie?
To some extent. She and Charlie palled around together before she became involved with Andrew. Afterward, too, a little. She was always consulted when he needed to buy a new tie.
Did Charlie go to the wedding?
There was no wedding. It was a civil ceremony.
Where did they go on their honeymoon?
Paris. He always wanted to see Paris.
But his wife went to P
aris.
That was just coincidence, and besides, she wasn’t there at the same time. By then she was his ex-wife. Jeanette never knew that his wife had been to Paris.
What things did he not know?
That she once lost two hundred dollars in a cab. That she did a self-examination of her breasts twice a day. She hid her dislike of the dog, which they had gotten at his insistence, from the pound. The dog was a chewer.
When an image of Andrew came to mind, what was it?
Andrew at forty, when she first met him. She felt sorry that he had a mole on his cheekbone, but later came to love it. Sometimes, after his death, the mole would fill the whole world of her dream. At least that is what she thought it was—a gray mass like a mountain, seen from the distance, then closer and closer until it became amorphous and she was awake, gripping the sheet. It was a nightmare, obviously, not a dream. Though she called it a dream.
Who is Berry McKenn?
A woman he had a brief flirtation with. Nothing of importance.
Why do storytellers start to tell one story and then tell another?
Life is a speeding train. Storytellers get derailed too.
What did Andrew see when he conjured up Jeanette?
Her green eyes. That startled look, as if the eyes had a life of their own, and were surprised to be bracketing so long a nose.
What else is there to say about their life together?
There is something of an anecdote about the watercooler. It disappeared once, and it was noticeably absent, as if someone had removed a geyser. The surprise on people’s faces when they stared at the empty corner of the corridor was really quite astonishing. Jeanette went to meet Andrew there the day the repairman took it away. They made it a point, several times a day, to meet there as if by accident. One of the other girls who worked there—thinking Charlie was her friend, which he certainly was not: he was Jeanette’s friend—had seen the watercooler being removed, and she whispered slyly to Charlie that it would be amusing when Jeanette strolled away from her desk, and Andrew left his office moments later with great purpose in his step and holding his blue pottery mug, because they would be standing in an empty corridor, with their prop gone and their cover blown.