by Ann Beattie
A man running down the sidewalk with a small dog in his arms and a big black umbrella over him calls, “Your lights are on!”
It is almost a year later—Christmas—and we are visiting Noel’s crazy sister, Juliette. After going with Noel for so long, I am considered one of the family. Juliette phones before every occasion, saying, “You’re one of the family. Of course you don’t need an invitation.” I should appreciate it, but she’s always drunk when she calls, and usually she starts to cry and says she wishes Christmas and Thanksgiving didn’t exist. Jeanette, his other sister, is very nice, but she lives in Colorado. Juliette lives in New Jersey. Here we are in Bayonne, New Jersey, coming in through the front door—Noel holding Beth, me carrying a pumpkin pie. I tried to sniff the pie aroma on the way from Noel’s apartment to his sister’s house, but it had no smell. Or else I’m getting another cold. I sucked chewable vitamin C tablets in the car, and now I smell of oranges. Noel’s mother is in the living room, crocheting. Better, at least, than David’s mother, who was always discoursing about Andrew Wyeth. I remember with satisfaction that the last time I saw her I said, “It’s a simple fact that Edward Hopper was better.”
Juliette: long, whitish-blond hair tucked in back of her pink ears, spike-heel shoes that she orders from Frederick’s of Hollywood, dresses that show her cleavage. Noel and I are silently wondering if her husband will be here. At Thanksgiving he showed up just as we were starting dinner, with a black-haired woman who wore a dress with a plunging neckline. Juliette’s breasts faced the black-haired woman’s breasts across the table (tablecloth crocheted by Noel’s mother). Noel doesn’t like me to criticize Juliette. He thinks positively. His other sister is a musician. She has a husband and a weimaraner and two rare birds that live in a birdcage built by her husband. They have a lot of money and they ski. They have adopted a Korean boy. Once, they showed us a film of the Korean boy learning to ski. Wham, wham, wham—every few seconds he was groveling in the snow again.
Juliette is such a liberal that she gives us not only the same bedroom but a bedroom with only a single bed in it. Beth sleeps on the couch.
Wedged beside Noel that night, I say, “This is ridiculous.”
“She means to be nice,” he says. “Where else would we sleep?”
“She could let us have her double bed and she could sleep in here. After all, he’s not coming back, Noel.”
“Shh.”
“Wouldn’t that have been better?”
“What do you care?” Noel says. “You’re nuts about me, right?”
He slides up against me and hugs my back.
“I don’t know how people talk any more,” he says. “I don’t know any of the current lingo. What expression do people use for ‘nuts about’?”
“I don’t know.”
“I just did it again! I said ‘lingo.’ ”
“So what? Who do you want to sound like?”
“The way I talk sounds dated—like an old person.”
“Why are you always worried about being old?”
He snuggles closer. “You didn’t answer before when I said you were nuts about me. That doesn’t mean that you don’t like me, does it?”
“No.”
“You’re big on the one-word answers.”
“I’m big on going to sleep.”
“ ‘Big on.’ See? There must be some expression to replace that now.”
I sit in the car, waiting for Beth to come out of the building where the ballet school is. She has been taking lessons, but they haven’t helped. She still slouches forward and sticks out her neck when she walks. Noel suggests that this might be analyzed psychologically; she sticks her neck out, you see, not only literally but … Noel thinks that Beth is waiting to get it. Beth feels guilty because her mother and father have just been divorced. She thinks that she played some part in it and therefore she deserves to get it. It is worth fifty dollars a month for ballet lessons to disprove Noel’s theory. If it will only work.
I spend the day in the park, thinking over Noel’s suggestion that I move in with him. We would have more money … We are together so much anyway … Or he could move in with me, if those big windows in my place are really so important. I always meet reasonable men.
“But I don’t love you,” I said to Noel. “Don’t you want to live with somebody who loves you?”
“Nobody has ever loved me and nobody ever will,” Noel said. “What have I got to lose?”
I am in the park to think about what I have to lose. Nothing. So why don’t I leave the park, call him at work, say that I have decided it is a very sensible plan?
A chubby little boy wanders by, wearing a short jacket and pants that are slipping down. He is holding a yellow boat. He looks so damned pleased with everything that I think about accosting him and asking, “Should I move in with Noel? Why am I reluctant to do it?” The young have such wisdom—some of the best and worst thinkers have thought so: Wordsworth, the followers of the Guru Maharaj Ji … “Do the meditations, or I will beat you with a stick,” the Guru tells his followers. Tell me the answer, kid, or I will take away your boat.
I sink down onto a bench. Next, Noel will ask me to marry him. He is trying to trap me. Worse, he is not trying to trap me but only wants me to move in so we can save money. He doesn’t care about me. Since no one has ever loved him, he can’t love anybody. Is that even true?
I find a phone booth and stand in front of it, waiting for a woman with a shopping bag to get out. She mouths something I don’t understand. She has lips like a fish; they are painted bright orange. I do not have any lipstick on. I have on a raincoat, pulled over my nightgown, and sandals and Noel’s socks.
“Noel,” I say on the phone when I reach him, “were you serious when you said that no one ever loved you?”
“Jesus, it was embarrassing enough just to admit it,” he says. “Do you have to question me about it?”
“I have to know.”
“Well, I’ve told you about every woman I ever slept with. Which one do you suspect might have loved me?”
I have ruined his day. I hang up, rest my head against the phone. “Me,” I mumble. “I do.” I reach in the raincoat pocket. A Kleenex, two pennies, and a pink rubber spider put there by Beth to scare me. No more dimes. I push open the door. A young woman is standing there waiting for me. “Do you have a few moments?” she says.
“Why?”
“Do you have a moment? What do you think of this?” she says. It is a small stick with the texture of salami. In her other hand she holds a clipboard and a pen.
“I don’t have time,” I say, and walk away. I stop and turn. “What is that, anyway?” I ask.
“Do you have a moment?” she asks.
“No. I just wanted to know what that thing was.”
“A dog treat.”
She is coming after me, clipboard outstretched.
“I don’t have time,” I say, and quickly walk away.
Something hits my back. “Take the time to stick it up your ass,” she says.
I run for a block before I stop and lean on the park wall to rest. If Noel had been there, she wouldn’t have done it. My protector. If I had a dime, I could call back and say, “Oh, Noel, I’ll live with you always if you’ll stay with me so people won’t throw dog treats at me.”
I finger the plastic spider. Maybe Beth put it there to cheer me up. Once, she put a picture of a young, beautiful girl in a bikini on my bedroom wall. I misunderstood, seeing the woman as all that I was not. Beth just thought it was a pretty picture. She didn’t understand why I was so upset.
“Mommy’s just upset because when you put things on the wall with Scotch Tape, the Scotch Tape leaves a mark when you remove it,” Noel told her.
Noel is wonderful. I reach in my pocket, hoping a dime will suddenly appear.
Noel and I go to visit his friends Charles and Sol, in Vermont. Noel has taken time off from work; it is a vacation to celebrate our decision to live together. Now, on the third
evening there, we are all crowded around the hearth—Noel and Beth and I, Charles and Sol and the women they live with, Lark and Margaret. We are smoking and listening to Sol’s stereo. The hearth is a big one. It was laid by Sol, made out of slate he took from the side of a hill and bricks he found dumped by the side of the road. There is a mantel that was made by Charles from a section of an old carousel he picked up when a local amusement park closed down; a gargoyle’s head protrudes from one side. Car keys have been draped over the beast’s eyebrows. On top of the mantel there is an L. L. Bean catalogue, Margaret’s hat, roaches and a roach clip, a can of peaches, and an incense burner that holds a small cone in a puddle of lavender ashes.
Noel used to work with Charles in the city. Charles quit when he heard about a big house in Vermont that needed to be fixed up. He was told that he could live in it for a hundred dollars a month, except in January and February, when skiers rented it. The skiers turned out to be nice people who didn’t want to see anyone displaced. They suggested that the four stay on in the house, and they did, sleeping in a side room that Charles and Sol fixed up. Just now, the rest of the house is empty; it has been raining a lot, ruining the skiing.
Sol has put up some pictures he framed—old advertisements he found in a box in the attic (after Charles repaired the attic stairs). I study the pictures now, in the firelight. The Butter Lady—a healthy coquette with pearly skin and a mildewed bottom lip—extends a hand offering a package of butter. On the wall across from her, a man with oil-slick black hair holds a shoe that is the same color as his hair.
“When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Eastertime, too,” Dylan sings.
Margaret says to Beth, “Do you want to come take a bath with me?”
Beth is shy. The first night we were here, she covered her eyes when Sol walked naked from the bathroom to the bedroom.
“I don’t have to take a bath while I’m here, do I?” she says to me.
“Where did you get that idea?”
“Why do I have to take a bath?”
But she decides to go with Margaret, and runs after her and grabs on to her wool sash. Margaret blows on the incense stick she has just lit, and fans it in the air, and Beth, enchanted, follows her out of the room. She already feels at ease in the house, and she likes us all and wanders off with anyone gladly, even though she’s usually shy. Yesterday, Sol showed her how to punch down the bread before putting it on the baking sheet to rise once more. He let her smear butter over the loaves with her fingers and then sprinkle cornmeal on the top.
Sol teaches at the state university. He is a poet, and he has been hired to teach a course in the modern novel. “Oh, well,” he is saying now. “If I weren’t a queer and I’d gone into the Army, I guess they would have made me a cook. That’s usually what they do, isn’t it?”
“Don’t ask me,” Charles says. “I’m queer, too.” This seems to be an old routine.
Noel is admiring the picture frames. “This is such a beautiful place,” he says. “I’d love to live here for good.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Sol says. “With a lot of fairies?”
Sol is reading a student’s paper. “This student says, ‘Humbert is just like a million other Americans,’” he says.
“Humbert?” Noel says.
“You know—that guy who ran against Nixon.”
“Come on,” Noel says. “I know it’s from some novel.”
“Lolita,” Lark says, all on the intake. She passes the joint to me.
“Why don’t you quit that job?” Lark says. “You hate it.”
“I can’t be unemployed,” Sol says. “I’m a faggot and a poet. I’ve already got two strikes against me.” He puffs twice on the roach, lets it slip out of the clip to the hearth. “And a drug abuser,” he says. “I’m as good as done for.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, dear,” Charles says, putting his hand gently on Sol’s shoulder. Sol jumps. Charles and Noel laugh.
It is time for dinner—moussaka, and bread, and wine that Noel brought.
“What’s moussaka?” Beth asks. Her skin shines, and her hair has dried in small narrow ridges where Margaret combed it.
“Made with mice,” Sol says.
Beth looks at Noel. Lately, she checks things out with him. He shakes his head no. Actually, she is not a dumb child; she probably looked at Noel because she knows it makes him happy.
Beth has her own room—the smallest bedroom, with a fur rug on the floor and a quilt to sleep under. As I talk to Lark after dinner, I hear Noel reading to Beth: “The Trout Fishing Diary of Alonso Hagen.” Soon Beth is giggling.
I sit in Noel’s lap, looking out the window at the fields, white and flat, and the mountains—a blur that I know is mountains. The radiator under the window makes the glass foggy. Noel leans forward to wipe it with a handkerchief. We are in winter now. We were going to leave Vermont after a week—then two, now three. Noel’s hair is getting long. Beth has missed a month of school. What will the Board of Education do to me? “What do you think they’re going to do?” Noel says. “Come after us with guns?”
Noel has just finished confiding in me another horrendous or mortifying thing he would never, never tell anyone and that I must swear not to repeat. The story is about something that happened when he was eighteen. There was a friend of his mother’s whom he threatened to strangle if she didn’t let him sleep with her. She let him. As soon as it was over, he was terrified that she would tell someone, and he threatened to strangle her if she did. But he realized that as soon as he left she could talk, and that he could be arrested, and he got so upset that he broke down and ran back to the bed where they had been, pulled the covers over his head, and shook and cried. Later, the woman told his mother that Noel seemed to be studying too hard at Princeton—perhaps he needed some time off. A second story was about how he tried to kill himself when his wife left him. The truth was that he couldn’t give David his scarf back because it was stretched from being knotted so many times. But he had been too chicken to hang himself and he had swallowed a bottle of drugstore sleeping pills instead. Then he got frightened and went outside and hailed a cab. Another couple, huddled together in the wind, told him that they had claimed the cab first. The same couple was in the waiting room of the hospital when he came to.
“The poor guy put his card next to my hand on the stretcher,” Noel says, shaking his head so hard that his beard scrapes my cheek. “He was a plumber. Eliot Raye. And his wife, Flora.”
A warm afternoon. “Noel!” Beth cries, running across the soggy lawn toward him, her hand extended like a fisherman with his catch. But there’s nothing in her hand—only a little spot of blood on the palm. Eventually he gets the story out of her: she fell. He will bandage it. He is squatting, his arm folding her close like some giant bird. A heron? An eagle? Will he take my child and fly away? They walk toward the house, his hand pressing Beth’s head against his leg.
We are back in the city. Beth is asleep in the room that was once Noel’s study. I am curled up in Noel’s lap. He has just asked to hear the story of Michael again.
“Why do you want to hear that?” I ask.
Noel is fascinated by Michael, who pushed his furniture into the hall and threw his small possessions out the window into the back yard and then put up four large, connecting tents in his apartment. There was a hot plate in there, cans of Franco-American spaghetti, bottles of good wine, a flashlight for when it got dark …
Noel urges me to remember more details. What else was in the tent?
A rug, but that just happened to be on the floor. For some reason, he didn’t throw the rug out the window. And there was a sleeping bag …
What else?
Comic books. I don’t remember which ones. A lemon meringue pie. I remember how disgusting that was after two days, with the sugar oozing out of the meringue. A bottle of Seconal. There was a drinking glass, a container of warm juice … I don’t remember.
We used to make love in the tent.
I’d go over to see him, open the front door, and crawl in. That summer he collapsed the tents, threw them in his car, and left for Maine.
“Go on,” Noel says.
I shrug. I’ve told this story twice before, and this is always my stopping place.
“That’s it,” I say to Noel.
He continues to wait expectantly, just as he did the two other times he heard the story.
One evening, we get a phone call from Lark. There is a house near them for sale—only thirty thousand dollars. What Noel can’t fix, Charles and Sol can help with. There are ten acres of land, a waterfall. Noel is wild to move there. But what are we going to do for money, I ask him. He says we’ll worry about that in a year or so, when we run out. But we haven’t even seen the place, I point out. But this is a fabulous find, he says. We’ll go see it this weekend. Noel has Beth so excited that she wants to start school in Vermont on Monday, not come back to the city at all. We will just go to the house right this minute and live there forever.
But does he know how to do the wiring? Is he sure it can be wired?
“Don’t you have any faith in me?” he says. “David always thought I was a chump, didn’t he?”
“I’m only asking whether you can do such complicated things.”
My lack of faith in Noel has made him unhappy. He leaves the room without answering. He probably remembers—and knows that I remember—the night he asked David if he could see what was wrong with the socket of his floor lamp. David came back to our apartment laughing. “The plug had come out of the outlet,” he said.
In early April, David comes to visit us in Vermont for the weekend with his girlfriend, Patty. She wears blue jeans, and has kohl around her eyes. She is twenty years old. Her clogs echo loudly on the bare floorboards. She seems to feel awkward here. David seems not to feel awkward, although he looked surprised when Beth called him David. She led him through the woods, running ahead of Noel and me, to show him the waterfall. When she got too far ahead, I called her back, afraid, for some reason, that she might die. If I lost sight of her, she might die. I suppose I had always thought that if David and I spent time together again it would be over the hospital bed of our dying daughter—something like that.
