by Ann Beattie
The big surprise, once we were inside Steven’s loft, was that Charlie had rushed to the airport, hoping to make it back to Boston before his wife gave birth. He called her at the end of the service, and the outgoing message on their answering machine said, “Charlie, come home. I’ve gone into labor. It’s twelve-thirty and I’m leaving for the hospital.”
“Gracious!” Violet said. “I suppose that was the sensible thing to do, but I can still remember when a woman never referred to her condition. Women stayed inside the last months of their pregnancy. They certainly wouldn’t have broadcast the news to the world.”
“We all need a drink,” Steven said, steering us toward the front of the loft. “A friend from work’s tending bar. Tell him what you want, and have something to eat. He’s brought beautiful things to eat.” He pointed toward his friend, and the few people who had preceded us, so strongly backlit they’d become shadows.
“Even I need a drink,” Violet said, as I helped her out of her coat.
“How are you, sweetheart?” Steven said to me, kissing the side of my head.
Damian, Steven’s assistant, was sitting on a stool, leaning on the drawing table, propped on one elbow. Though he had on a suit at the service, he had changed into jeans and a pullover. “Because there’s a reception here now following a memorial service,” Damian said, in his thick English accent. “What do you think: we should let you test the security system and maybe at the same time we could turn on the radio and hope for a test of the emergency broadcasting system? Maybe run the Kentucky Derby through while we’re at it?”
“They’re very officious,” Steven said apologetically, as if we were on the receiving end of Damian’s sarcasm. “It’s about my new security system” he said. “They want to test it right this minute. It’s no time to do it, is the point.”
“The point is,” Damian echoed, “this is not the time.”
“So officious,” Steven hissed to the ceiling.
“Love, can you understand what I’m telling you? We don’t want to activate the cross-beams because people are standing all over the place. Grieving people. We’re here mourning the dead,” Damian enunciated slowly.
This is when it occurred to me that we were not. We were shaking off our coats, anticipating socializing with one another in a more private setting out of the church, relieved that the service was over: annoyance at life’s absurdities began creeping in; hunger was gnawing.
“Security system?” Violet was saying to no one in particular, as I put my arm around her shoulder and moved her toward the far end of the loft. “I hope he hasn’t been robbed,” she said. “I guess it’s just a precaution.” Then: “I couldn’t live like this.”
“How are you?” Steven’s friend from work said warmly, reaching across the table to shake Violet’s hand, then mine. “We met briefly last Christmas,” he said to Violet. “I was going out as you were coming in.”
“Oh, yes. You had your dog, on a leash.”
“Didn’t seem proper to bring him today,” the man said. “I usually take him everywhere. They started a day-care center where we work, you know, and now I drop the dog at day care. He loves children. They said that if one more person wanted to bring a dog, I’d have to leave mine at home. But do you know what? Nobody wants to. I’m just lucky. The dog and I got lucky.”
“A dog in day care,” Violet said. She didn’t seem surprised. Perhaps it might have surprised her if she hadn’t already had her quotient of surprises hearing about the way Charlie found out his wife had gone into labor and learning that a security company wanted to conduct a test which would catch all of us in a kleig light of sound. Somewhere down below, a car alarm was set off, whirring a repetitive, mechanical shriek, as though the woman on the phone had exacted revenge, haunting us with the possibility that obnoxious sounds might yet move closer. As Violet requested a Bloody Mary, I looked past Steven’s friend who was bartending, seeing the sky darkening with rain clouds, the wall of sand-colored buildings facing our building from across the street. In the high shine on Steven’s floors I could see shadows of the clouds reflected, and for a minute it reminded me of Parker’s Pond, the blurrily indistinct shapes cast by one’s legs and feet and skates. When I looked up, Steven’s friend was holding out two glasses: one, a wineglass; one, a glass filled with ice, silently offering me two possibilities. “White wine, thanks,” I said, but my interest was in the stack of cubes in the other glass. Like the world in miniature, they reminded me of the surface of the pond, the pond into which Violet had been promised she would not slip, one of the many places I followed her believing that if she was safe from harm, of course I was safe. Now, through the years, things had changed: it had begun to work the other way, so that Violet followed me: uptown, downtown, a silent accomplice in the mysterious ritual of how to get a cab that would take off in the right direction.
When Sylvie came in, she was wet from the rain. With her hair plastered to her head she looked like a woebegone little girl, though the mist on her face had enlivened her cheeks, at least . . . she was so pale in the church. She blew us a kiss and— shoes slipped off—hurried into the bathroom, probably to towel dry her hair, to reapply lipstick. What could it be like, to lose someone you had such a close relationship with for forty years? What would it be like to go to that person’s memorial service and hear people praise the person’s unfailingly unique virtues, allude to intimacies, offer gentle jokes the deceased would presumably smile to hear? So many private thoughts in public places. What would Sylvie’s private thoughts have been? Why didn’t he marry her? Or was the answer clear, and only outsiders didn’t intuit it?
I looked around the room. The people were family friends— or they were Steven’s friends, like the man tending bar, like Damian—people who barely knew Howell. Though many of Howell’s friends had been at the memorial service, as I looked around the room I saw that only two people who seemed to be Howell’s personal friends had come to Steven’s loft. And those two, a man about Howell’s age, wearing a too closely fitted dark suit he looked uncomfortable in, and a younger man with badly dyed blond hair and nervously hunched shoulders, who either did not have, or who was deliberately not wearing, the sort of clothes everyone else had on—even those two, I realized, were gay. There had been such an assortment of people in the church—people he’d worked with; people from organizations he’d given his time to; neighbors—that until the core group assembled, the obvious never occurred to me. As much as this gathering was for Sylvie—for her children, her niece, her sister’s one-time best friend . . . as much as it was Steven’s gesture toward his mother, it was also his gesture toward the two men, who seemed hardly to know one another, yet who stood close together, silently, awkwardly, the younger man finally helping the older man off with his jacket and adding it to a pile of coats on the chair by the entranceway, exchanging a few pleasantries with Damian, the older man so contrite it was almost possible to read his mind, to understand that what he really wanted was to bolt. Then the younger man went back to his side and gestured toward the table set up by the front window. I had been staring at them—I hadn’t meant to, but when my thoughts locked, my eyes must have, also—so of course as they came nearer they pretended not to notice me, or my stare. The older man walked right past me, but as the younger man passed he turned, then walked back to where I stood, his shoulders hunched, as if he were trying to fold into himself. “Ladies,” he said, ducking his head and raising it again. It was the first time in what seemed like hours that I realized Violet was at my side, that she was all but clinging to me, her glass empty, her expression slightly worried as she looked in the direction of the still-closed bathroom door.
“You don’t know who I am,” the man said as he approached, “but Howell often spoke of you. My name is Justin DeKalb. The surprising thing is, I would have recognized you anywhere, because I used to skate at Parker’s Pond. Howell described you both to me many times, but the minute I walked in, I realized I actually knew you. Not exactly that
I know you, but I used to be there when you were. At Parker’s Pond.” As he said this, he clasped Violet’s hand, smiling at her and then— more tenuously, it pained me to see—at me. How long had I been staring at this man? How long had I been rooted to the spot, oblivious of Violet, of Sylvie’s long disappearance, of the man’s discomfort? With the floor gleaming around us, I had the giddy feeling we were, all three of us, back there—back at the big pond Mr. Parker had dredged one winter on his front fifty acres that had seemed to all of us the most miraculous thing, the most wonderful gift. The memory made me spontaneously reach out to take Justin DeKalb’s hand, the way so many of us had locked fingers on those winter nights, at times to tease someone who was skating too slowly into action, or to coax someone into being our partner, or simply for the fun of making contact, seeing if fingers could communicate an idea: figure eights, or a race, or a conga line.
“I can’t believe it,” Violet was saying. “That crowd of people, and you remember the two of us? Well, I guess that says something, but I don’t know that I want to know what.” She smiled, her eyes glittering.
“I liked the way you skated together,” he said. “You were beautiful skaters.”
“I never was,” Violet said, though she did not protest too strongly. “I was scared to death,” Violet said, still gaily, but lowering her voice. “Scared silly, and you’ll laugh, but I always paid a psychic before I got out on the ice to tell me if I was going to make it. One time she advised against it, and I didn’t go. I pretended to be sick. Here’s something I never confessed until now: I pretended to have a terrible stomachache—you may even remember,” she said to me, “because you were so disappointed. I knew you’d be angry at me if I told you we couldn’t go because the person you called ‘Madame Money’ said the ice might crack.” She turned to Justin DeKalb. “Then I felt terrible, because it was always a way to get her out of herself, because she was so hopelessly sad her mother had died, and none of us who loved her knew what to do. Skating always did the trick, but that time I just lost my courage. Now I look back and wish we’d never missed one night at Parker’s Pond.”
This heartfelt confession so surprised me that I just stood there. As Violet was talking, Justin DeKalb had let go of my hand, and I looked at it, as if perplexed by the emptiness of my own hand. Because as she talked—up until almost the end of her confession—I had been on Parker’s Pond. I had felt that freedom again, the exhilarating, numbing cold, and the sensation had cleared something in my head. Without Violet—without the approval of anyone else—I could, and should, simply proceed with my life.
“Yes,” Justin DeKalb said, nodding. “It was a tragedy that your mother died so young. My condolences.”
“And mine, of course, about the death of Howell,” I said.
“Oh, we have got to get more cheerful,” Violet said. “At the very least, I need another drink to bolster myself.”
“You were scared?” I said suddenly. “Every time?”
