Distortions

by Ann Beattie

  *

  I have a scotch-and-milk before bed. The fire is still roaring, so I bring my pillow to the hearth and stretch out on the bricks. My eyelids get very warm and damp—the way they always did when I cried all the time, which I don’t do any more. After all, this is the fifth night. As the doctors say, one must be adaptable. The dog tires of all the attention and chooses to sleep under the desk in the study. I have to call him twice—the second time firmly—before he comes back to settle in the living room. And when my eyes have been closed for five minutes he walks quietly away, back to the kneehole in the desk. At one time, Jon decided the desk was not big enough. He bought a door and two filing cabinets and made a new desk. The dog, a lover of small, cramped spaces, wandered unhappily from corner to corner, no longer able to settle anywhere. Jon brought the old desk back. A very kind man.

  *

  Like Columbus’ crew, I begin to panic. It has been so long since I’ve seen Jon. Without him to check on me, I could wander alone in the house and then disappear forever—just vanish while rounding a corner, or by slipping down, down into the bathwater or up into the draft the fire creates. Couldn’t that pull me with it—couldn’t I go, with the cold air, up the chimney, arms outstretched, with my cupped hands making a parasol? Or while sitting in Jon’s chair I might become smaller—become a speck, an ash. The dog would sniff and sniff, and then jump into the chair and settle down upon me and close his eyes.

  To calm myself, I make tea. Earl Grey, an imported tea. Imported means coming to; exported means going away. I feel in my bones (my shinbones) that Jon will not come home. But perhaps I am just cold, since the fire is not yet lit. I sip the Earl Grey tea—results will be conclusive.

  *

  He said he was going to his brother’s house for a week. He said that after caring for me he, also, had to recuperate. I have no hold on him. Even our marriage is common-law—if four years and four months make it common-law. He said he was going to his brother’s. But how do I know where he’s calling from? And why has he written no letters? In his absence, I talk to the dog. I pretend that I am Jon, that I am logical and reassuring. I tell the dog that Jon needed this rest and will soon be back. The dog grows anxious, sniffs Jon’s clothes closet, and hangs close to the security of the kneehole. It has been a long time.

  *

  Celebrated my birthday in solitude. Took the phone off the hook so I wouldn’t have to “put Jon on” when my parents called. Does the dog know that today is a special day? No day is special without beef bones, but I have forgotten to buy them to create a celebration. I go to the kneehole and stroke his neck in sorrow.

  It occurs to me that this is a story of a woman whose man went away. Billie Holiday could have done a lot with it.

  *

  I put on a blue dress and go out to a job interview. I order a half cord of wood; there will be money when the man delivers it on Saturday. I splurge on canned horsemeat for the dog. “You’ll never leave, will you?” I say as the dog eats, stabbing his mouth into the bowl of food. I think, giddily, that a dog is better than a hog. Hogs are only raised for slaughter; dogs are raised to love. Although I know this is true, I would be hesitant to voice this observation. The doctor (glasses sliding down nose, lower lip pressed to the upper) would say, “Might not some people love hogs?”

  I dream that Jon has come back, that we do an exotic dance in the living room. Is it, perhaps, the tango? As he leads he tilts me back, and suddenly I can’t feel the weight of his arms any more. My body is very heavy and my neck stretches farther and farther back until my body seems to stretch out of the room, passing painlessly through the floor into blackness.

  Once when the electricity went off, Jon went to the kitchen to get candles, and I crawled under the bed, loving the darkness and wanting to stay in it. The dog came and curled beside me, at the side of the bed. Jon came back quickly, his hand cupped in front of the white candle. “Maria?” he said. “Maria?” When he left the room again, I slid forward a little to peek and saw him walking down the hallway. He walked so quickly that the candle blew out. He stopped to relight it and called my name louder—so loudly that he frightened me. I stayed there, shivering, thinking him as terrible as the Gestapo, praying that the lights wouldn’t come on so he wouldn’t find me. Even hiding and not answering was better than that. I put my hands together and blew into them, because I wanted to scream. When the lights came back on and he found me, he pulled me out by my hands, and the scream my hands had blocked came out.

  *

  After the hot grape jelly is poured equally into a dozen glasses, the fun begins. Melted wax is dropped in to seal them. As the white wax drips, I think, If there were anything down in there but jelly it would be smothered. I had laid in no cheesecloth, so I pulled a pair of lacy white underpants over a big yellow bowl, poured the jelly mixture through that.

  In the morning Jon is back. He walks through the house to see if anything is amiss. Our clothes are still in the closets; all unnecessary lights have been turned off. He goes into the kitchen and then is annoyed because I have not gone grocery shopping. He has some toast with the grape jelly. He spoons more jelly from the glass to his mouth when the bread is gone.

  “Talk to me, Maria. Don’t shut me out,” he says, licking the jelly from his upper lip. He is like a child, but one who orders me to do and feel things.

  “Feel this arm,” he says. It is tight from his chopping wood at his brother’s camp.

  I met his brother once. Jon and his brother are twins, but very dissimilar. His brother is always tan—wide and short, with broad shoulders. Asleep, he looks like the logs that he chops. When Jon and I were first dating we went to his brother’s camp, and the three of us slept in a tent because the house was not yet built. Jon’s brother snored all night. “I hate it here,” I whispered to Jon, shivering against him. He tried to soothe me, but he wouldn’t make love to me there. “I hate your brother,” I said, in a normal tone of voice, because his brother was snoring so loudly he’d never hear me. Jon put his hand over my mouth. “Sh-h-h,” he said. “Please.” Naturally, Jon did not invite me on this trip to see him. I explain all this to the dog now, and he is hypnotized. He closes his eyes and listens to the drone of my voice. He appreciates my hand stroking in tempo with my sentences. Jon pushes the jelly away and stares at me. “Stop talking about something that happened years ago,” he says, and stalks out of the room.

  *

  The wood arrives. The firewood man has a limp; he’s missing a toe. I asked, and he told me. He’s a good woodman—the toe was lost canoeing. Jon helps him stack the logs in the shed. I peek in and see that there was already a lot more wood than I thought.

  Jon comes into the house when the man leaves. His face is heavy and ugly.

  “Why did you order more wood?” Jon says.

  “To keep warm. I have to keep warm.”

  *

  I fix a beef stew for dinner, but feed it to the dog. He is transfixed; the steam warns him it is too hot to eat, yet the smell is delicious. He laps tentatively at the rim of the bowl, like an epicure sucking in a single egg of caviar. Finally, he eats it all. And then there is the bone, which he carries quickly to his private place under the desk. Jon is furious; I have prepared something for the dog but not for us.

  “This has got to stop,” he whispers in my face, his hand tight around my wrist.

  *

  The dog and I climb to the top of the hill and watch the commuters going to work in their cars. I sit on a little canvas stool—the kind fishermen use—instead of the muddy ground. It is September—mud everywhere. The sun is setting. Wide white clouds hang in the air, seem to cluster over this very hilltop. And then Jon’s face is glowing in the clouds—not a vision, the real Jon. He is on the hilltop, clouds rolling over his head, saying to me that we have reached the end. Mutiny on the Santa Maria! But I only sit and wait, staring straight ahead. How curious that this is the end. He sits in the mud, calls the dog to him. Did he really just say that to m
e? I repeat it: “We have reached the end.”

  “I know,” he says.

  *

  The dog walks into the room. Jon is at the desk. The kneehole is occupied, so the dog curls in the corner. He did not always circle before lying down. Habits are acquired, however late. Like the furniture, the plants, the cats left to us by the dead, they take us in. We think we are taking them in, but they take us in, demand attention.

  I demand attention from Jon, at his desk at work, his legs now up in the lotus position on his chair to offer the dog his fine resting place.

  “Jon, Jon!” I say, and dance across the room. I posture and prance. What a good lawyer he will be; he shows polite interest

  “I’ll set us on fire,” I say.

  That is going too far. He shakes his head to deny what I have said. He leads me by my wrist to bed, pulls the covers up tightly. If I were a foot lower down in the bed I would smother if he kept his hands on those covers. Like grape jelly.

  “Will there be eggs and bacon, and grape jelly on toast, for breakfast?” I ask.

  There will be. He cooks for us now.

  *

  I am so surprised. When he brings the breakfast tray I find out that today is my birthday. There are snapdragons and roses. He kisses my hands, lowers the tray gently to my lap. The tea steams. The phone rings. I have been hired for the job. His hand covers the mouthpiece. Did I go for a job? He tells them there was a mistake, and hangs up and walks away, as if from something dirty. He walks out of the room and I am left with the hot tea. Tea is boiled so it can cool. Jon leaves so he can come back. Certain of this, I call and they both come—Jon and the dog—to settle down with me. We have come to the end, yet we are safe. I move to the center of the bed to make room for Jon; tea sloshes from the cup. His hand goes out to steady it. There’s no harm done—the saucer contains it. He smiles, approvingly, and as he sits down his hand slides across the sheet like a rudder through still waters.

  Hale Hardy

  and the Amazing

  Animal Woman

  Hale Hardy went to college because he couldn’t think of anything better to do, and he quit because he couldn’t see any reason to stay. He lasted one and a half years. He did not exactly quit; he was thrown out. When that happened he went to visit his sister Mary, who was living with another girl, Paula, who was being supported by some dude. Hale didn’t know the dude’s name, or why he was supporting her, or why his sister was living there. He just went.

  The sunsets he saw from the dining-room window knocked him out. It got so he’d pull a chair up to the window and wait for them, starting about one in the afternoon. He had a long wait, so he read. Sometime during the winter his former English teacher sent him Lolita in care of his parents, and they sent it on. That book put women in his mind. He thought it might be a good idea to pick up some woman and drive across the country with her—take some woman to the Grand Canyon. Eat ice cream with some woman, peering into the Grand Canyon. If they sold ice cream there. They probably did. They sold ice cream at the Alamo.

  He couldn’t keep one thought straight in his mind: first he’d be thinking about scoring some woman, then he’d be thinking about how good ice cream tasted, especially his favorite, French vanilla. Then he’d get up and eat—there was never ice cream in the place his sister was living, but there was a lot of other stuff—and then he’d sit down and wait for the sunset, trying to get through that long book, bogging down every few pages. He thought about writing his teacher. She couldn’t have been much older than he was. He always thought she liked him. She called everybody by their last name, but she called him Hale. She had big blue eyes. Nothing else about her was big. Would his skinny teacher be pleased to get a note from him? If he didn’t write, would he ever hear from her again? Yes; a postcard during the summer, from Seattle, Washington, saying that she was sailing around in a boat, which sure beat teaching. His mother forwarded that postcard with a comment: “If these are the people who are supposed to guide you, no wonder!!!” His mother put three exclamation points after everything; how much they were paying for heat, who was getting married, how many stray cats there were in New York City. Mary had nothing to do with their mother. Mary did not even refer to her by name; it was always “that wasted life.” He agreed that his mother’s life had been wasted, but he didn’t hate her for that the way Mary did. He just didn’t know what to do about it. He couldn’t understand why such a sensible woman would name him Hale Hardy, though. And that was his mother’s idea, not his father’s, because he had checked. Why didn’t she go through with the joke and give him N for a middle initial? What was she thinking of? His mother said that she had no way of knowing that Harold would get turned into Hale. That was partly Mary’s fault, because when she was little she had trouble pronouncing Harold; it came out “Hal,” got changed to Hale.

  He was not very hale and hearty, probably his body’s rebellion against such a nickname. He spent a lot of time reading Adelle Davis, trying to get together. Adelle never said what everybody was supposed to get together for, though. Let’s Stay Healthy for Our Trip to the Grand Canyon.

  There was a woman who came to clean whose name was Gloria Moratto. She was a woman in her thirties, hired by Paula’s husband (turned out he was letting Paula use the house willed to him by an uncle). He told Paula that Gloria was pitiful. He felt sorry for her. Paula said that when her husband didn’t know what to make of women he just gave in to them. Hale couldn’t understand why she needed the job. She always had so much money. Money was stuffed in her purse, which she carried unfastened, and money fell out of her big apron as she cleaned, and she stuffed it back in the pockets the way people stuff used tissues away, hoping no one will notice. But it was easy to see why Paula’s husband took pity on her: Gloria Moratto was indeed a sorrowful creature. Her large body was carried by small, narrow feet, and it rose up precariously, like a funnel. Her shoulders were very wide; on a man they would have been comforting. The most amazing thing about her was her head. It was big, accentuated by curly black hair bushing around it. Her eyes were big. Her mouth. But you could hardly see either because of the curly black hair. One time when Gloria came she had streaked her hair; the white and black was astonishing, like a skunk. He thought of her, then, as an animal, and watched with fascination as she did her work. He imagined that this huge, strangely shaped woman would be capable of building a beaver dam. She vacuumed, polished, scrubbed, dusted, carried away trash, put things in their proper places, washed dishes, did the laundry. This amazing animal woman came every Friday and worked all day.

  *

  Hale wanted very much to see the Grand Canyon. When he was a child he had begged ceaselessly to see the Alamo until his mother told his father that either Hale would go to the Alamo or she was leaving forever. His father went with him to Texas, bought him an Alamo comb and two ice-cream cones. They stayed overnight, ate breakfast in a restaurant that looked like the inside of a barn, then went home. He treasured his Alamo comb. They bought an Alamo pin for Mary, which Hale could tell she didn’t like. His father said that was to be expected; it was just nice to bring his sister a remembrance. Hale learned: you can give people things they don’t like, and that’s still nice. Hale was nuts about his comb. When his hair didn’t need to be combed he’d stick it in his cowlick and just leave it there. What happened to that comb? Were there Grand Canyon combs?

  Hale wanted to go to the Grand Canyon, but not alone. He would need someone to go along to verify that it was really happening, to take pictures of him standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon. His sister was not about to budge; it seemed that she loved Paula’s ex-husband, who made regular visits, ostensibly to check up on Gloria’s housekeeping. During his visits Paula left the house and so did Hale. Actually, he was kicked out. They didn’t want Paula’s ex-husband to know there was a man living there, so he and Paula would go into town and wait it out. One night Hale asked if she would like to go to the Grand Canyon. She had already seen it, when she was thirteen, and a
gain when she was sixteen. He asked if there were a lot of stands that sold tourist crap. Yes; all along the road. She sighed. The landscape was being ruined. He sighed. She did not want to go with him.

  That left Gloria, who was the only other person he knew in Connecticut. And what were the chances that the amazing animal woman, that woman of perseverance and strength, was going to pick up and go to the Grand Canyon with him? They were slim. Especially since she avoided talking to him. At least they were slim until he found out about her weakness. Her weakness was cats, and she loved to talk about how independent and smart and cute they were. She owned five cats. Hale found out about it from Paula, who found it out from Mary, who got the word from Paula’s ex-husband. Why any of them bothered to talk about it was something else. He went to the Humane Society and got another one for her, a cat that came with a blue collar that matched its blue eyes. “La la la,” Gloria sang, and the cat responded by turning his head to listen instead of jumping out of her arms. She gave it a dollar bill to play with, money wrinkled and twisted from being carried a long time in that deep apron pocket. The cat pounced on it, stuck his nose under it. Gloria had a new cat. His friendship with Gloria was beginning. From the living-room window a red-and-violet sunset flashed upon the sky.

  *

  Hale daydreams of Gloria, her paw-feet, her cat-eyes, only big, b-i-i-i-i-i-g. She is so competent; she will share the driving; her hand will be steady around the camera. Later, they would have lots of little kittens. It would be their house she took care of. No more exploitation of Gloria; let Paula and Mary keep house for themselves. On her birthday a little Siamese kitten; for Christmas an Angora. The pitter-patter of little paws. Cats, too: regal, willful, splendid cats. To broach the subject …