by Ann Beattie
“I was,” she said, “but it was a good kind of scared. I only feel bad that I let you down that one time. Sylvie was—” she looked toward the closed bathroom door “—considering the things that had happened in her life, of course she was traumatized, but she always took her responsibilities very seriously. She wouldn’t skate herself, you know, and she refused to let you go there without adult supervision. So I just got so I’d hold my breath and do it. After the first few minutes, it wasn’t so bad.” She smiled. “And look,” she said. “We survived.”
Sylvie left on the last shuttle for Boston. “Off to the birthing room!” Steven said to his mother. “Straight life is so hectic,” he sighed, hailing a cab. Sylvie embraced us: first me, then Steven, not caring that the cabdriver had started the meter when he stopped, or that he was looking impatiently out the window. As she got into the cab, I thought how much Sylvie looked like my mother. The rain had twirled her hair into soft curls. Like my mother, she was wearing a heavy coat of lipstick that glowed the unnatural pink-purple of phlox, though she wore no other makeup. In the cab she looked as small as Violet, like someone who could also use a little protection in the big city, though I knew she knew where she was going, and also that the news from Boston had been a sort of exciting ending to a difficult day. I was still not sure if she had lost a friend or a lover, though it began to seem strange even to me that I was still fixated on that. Maybe I had just wanted to live vicariously; maybe, like most other adolescents, I had wanted to think her totally in my control, while at the same time I had an urge for her to have escaped me, to have a secret life. And perhaps she had, though she probably did not silently contain the conventional secret I had suspected it would be.
“What was it Tiny Tim said?” Sylvie said, rolling down the window as the driver waited to move into traffic, “‘God bless us, each and every one?’”
“I think Tiny Tim sang it,” Steven said. “I think he sang it, and it was ‘Tiptoe through the tulips.’”
She sniffed, with a look of mock exasperation. As the cab pulled away, Steven stood at the curb, playing air music, strumming an imaginary ukelele close to his chest, looking as wild-eyed as he could. The rain had also made his hair curly, which helped. That, and his shirt hanging out of his pants, the dark circles under his eyes at the end of this long day. “To the gaaaaaarden wall,” he was singing in falsetto, as the cab pulled away.
“That’s ‘La Guardia,’” I said to him.
“Good one,” he said.
“You’re not going to believe this, but it wasn’t until tonight that I realized Howell was gay,” I said to Steven.
“What did you think?” he said.
I said, “I didn’t think anything.”
“But you know what was interesting?” he said, opening the inside door with a key, walking toward the elevator. “What was interesting was that he knew about me before I did. Remember that party when he got drunk and fell out of the tree? Don’t even bother to answer, because I know you remember. A perfectly ordinary accident, and it’s become family lore. Somebody got a little out of control, and nobody’s ever recovered from it. Think about it: divorces are never mentioned, my father took off and was never heard from again, but all Howell did was get a little tipsy and take a tumble, and for all eternity, everybody’s been fixated on his bizarre behavior. The infamous fall of Howell the clown. I’d bet money that even though nobody brought it up at the memorial service, it was on a lot of people’s minds. I look back now, and you know what? I’m still the only one who understands why it happened. That stuff about Romeo and Juliet. His playing Juliet to my Romeo. He knew then that I was gay, and I didn’t.”
“Steven—weren’t you six years old, or something?”
We got onto the elevator. He pushed five. “Seven, wasn’t I?” he said.
“He never—”
“Jesus,” he said. “Of course not.”
“What about Sylvie and Howell?” I blurted out.
“That’s an interesting question. My guess?” I nodded.
“My guess would be that when Dad took off and when your mother died, when Sylvie had to get that job she always hated, and when—don’t take this wrong—you came to live with us and for so long you were so goddamn inconsolable, by that time, Sylvie felt like she’d pretty much seen it all come and go. I think for most of his life, Howell couldn’t wait to see it go so he could get on with his life, but that somewhere in between his wish for things to change and her certainty about how life was going to be, they got attached to each other. That if there was no going forward, there wasn’t any going back, either.”
The elevator doors opened. What he’d said was very astute, but I wasn’t fully concentrating. What he was saying had just reminded me of something. It had reminded me of years ago, the first of the many times I’d left New York, when I’d been living with the man in Alphabet City. He said the only way out of New York was to make a run for it, because if you thought about it, you’d be like everybody else who was trapped; you’d weigh the pros and cons, and the bottom line would be that you’d never get out. It made me wonder, now, if it was easier to leave a lover, or to leave a city—though of course so many times the two are so interconnected you can’t be sure what you’re turning your back on. Or maybe you do find out, but not until you’re really out there, on the road. Then, if it feels like the road’s stretching toward something, you find out you’ve still got horizons, but if all you can see, in all that space, is a person, that person’s no mirage. He won’t recede. You just have to turn around and find him again.
I was thinking these thoughts not so much because of the man I ran away from when I was eighteen, but because at the moment, I was for all intents and purposes in limbo, the labyrinthine yet familiar limbo of New York. It wasn’t my home in Allentown, and it wasn’t whatever I’d go toward next. The day before Howell’s memorial service, my husband had said there was no use in pretending, no point in his going to a memorial service and sitting at my side as if we shared a life; we were going to separate, and it was only a question of time before one of us was gone.
As soon as Steven turned his key in the lock and opened the door, I glided past everyone, hurrying across the huge expanse of shiny floorboards to the windows, the big glass windows that fronted on lower Fifth Avenue, and stared outside with such concentration tears rose in my eyes. There were stars in the sky; I could see them where the rain clouds drifted apart, and though there were only a few, they still seemed as wonderful as they had seemed scattered everywhere, long ago, above Parker’s Pond. There were the stars and, far below, there was steam blanching the night, rising from below ground, where, on the subways, distances were being traversed, people were in transit. I saw through to that. I saw it as clearly as Violet had seen inside Sylvie’s mind earlier in the evening, and as clearly as I had seen into Howell’s gentleman friend’s mind when he stood in Steven’s apartment and hoped to disappear in a crowd that was not crowded enough, having no idea whether it would be more painful to be acknowledged or to go unnoticed. I suddenly felt as though I could see through anything, much the way Madame Money had claimed to Violet she could see the future. Like her, I knew at the very least how to make an educated guess. Keep pressing your luck and eventually your luck won’t hold: ice will crack, subway cars collide. At some point, accommodate fear, because otherwise fear will subsume you. But it was difficult to think cynically that minute. Across Steven’s loft, Violet was talking with Damian, a fresh drink in her hand, and the man with yellow, yellow hair was waiting on the fringes, eager to approach. At Howell’s memorial service, and at the reception afterwards, Violet was flirting, cocking her head in mock disbelief at whatever Damian was saying to shock her, and as strange a feeling as it was to have, I envied her. I envied her because in all probability she was playing a game she did not even know she was playing. The farther I moved away from the glass, the more clearly they were reflected. I knew them so well, I cared for them or sympathized with them. I appreciate
d their good intentions in difficult circumstances. Eventually I turned toward the windows, almost nose-to-the-glass, so I felt the outside coldness through the windows almost as an ache. Then I simply stood there to spy on the world that had nothing to do with them. As I looked down to the wide open spaces of the city—though it’s true those spaces existed primarily as corridors between buildings—I could have been Howell in the tree, intentionally myopic, a little dazed, wishing to be a little daring, but unlike Howell I had braced myself to stand firm, taking in everything that was not the life inside this room, this claustrophobic room that had become a repository for people’s good intentions, for their attempts at understanding, this loft above Fifth Avenue that most of them would never stand in again, which had suddenly become the place where they could understand what was not understandable, where they could have a drink, meet the people they’d always wanted to encounter, where they could forgive at the same time they were forgetting. Though I looked at Violet reflexively for my love to be beamed back, I knew I had already begun a journey outside her parameters. Nose and fingers to the glass—because who was watching, who cared?—there was all of New York. Outside there seemed, amid steam and stars, to be nothing but space.
See the Pyramids
THE STONE rabbit’s ears stand completely upright, a reminder to Cheri that for perfect posture, you should imagine someone pulling your head straight toward the sky, as if a piece of string is attached to the center of your head. And if you don’t care about perfect posture? Grab the string and loop it around your neck, then let him pull. The big marionette manipulator in the sky: God, who wants you to stand up straight. His celestial voice filtering through Anders’s barking baritone: I’ve told you and told you to stand up straight; you’re going to get curvature of the spine, be a stooped old woman before your time.
Cheri considers what a disappointment she sometimes is to Anders. She is pretty, but not regal; talented, but not with an unusual talent; nice, though given to sulking. The stone rabbit, which Anders has corrected her about—it is a cement rabbit, not stone—stands in the center of the back-porch picnic table, a deity waiting for its nightly offerings: small windup toys from the local drugstore positioned at its bunny feet; a bough of lilacs from the garden; a contemporary update provided by the addition of a woven friendship bracelet tied over the bunny brow as an improvised sweatband. They love to joke, Anders and LaValle; it’s something men of that generation seem to do, Cheri has noticed: have big plans and enjoy small jokes. The vintage Farrah Fawcett poster from someone’s garage sale has been laminated to become a dartboard for suction-cupped arrows; Anders has obtained drinking glasses at a flea market that are illustrated with Jughead and his friends Archie, Betty, and Veronica; there is a moose doormat that says WELCOME TO THE CAMP Though Cheri disdains retro for the sake of retro, some of the old jokes—including fashion—seem to make more sense than all these proliferating adolescent jokes.
They have rented this house on the Maine coast for July. The situation is that the owners, with ever increasing property taxes to pay on their waterfront property, now rent out their house for the last two months of summer and move back to their apartment on Beacon Hill. Cheri is occupying the house with Anders, LaValle, and Erin. She and Erin bankroll the place with money from modeling. Anders does the inventive, sporadically presented cooking. LaValle is a complete deadbeat who doesn’t even wash his own clothes, though he does have some interest in “motoring,” as he calls it: having them all pile into the car with a picnic Anders has packed and driving somewhere nice to eat it. Erin, Cheri’s best friend, loves LaValle, which is why he’s part of the picture: Erin’s “agent”; her “driver”; a willing “assistant to photographers” (which means that he has the smarts to point out where it’s sunny). Erin herself is a very capable person, but lazy. She’ll occasionally toss LaValle’s clothes (silk underwear; shorts; tacky tourist-shop tee-shirts; sweatpants) into the washer as a little kiss of domesticity; in exchange, he takes care of what he calls “the details.” This can include going to automatic teller machines for cash advances on Erin’s Visa card, renting movies to watch on the VCR, phoning around until he finds someone who will give Erin a cervical cap, sending orchid plants as special thank-yous to particularly nice photographers or stylists. Anders and LaValle generally keep a certain distance from one another, like two male dogs who know that once they make eye contact, it perpetuates the necessity of marking the territory. When Anders is on the porch, LaValle tends to be in the yard. Therefore, when Anders starts in on Cheri’s posture, there’s no one to rescue her.
Erin is having her afternoon nap, lying on the bedroom floor on top of a Styrofoam surfboard, with a wet sheet stretched over her and a fan going full blast. Cheri and Anders are alone on the porch. They’re both fading in the heat, slightly out of sorts, nagging each other a little, at loose ends until Erin wakes up and they can set out on an afternoon adventure. Short of a strong, cool breeze, only a movie animator could bring them to life, and the animator would probably opt first for the flamingo on the face of the clock; start the cement rabbit jumping; take the candles, in the shape of penguins and have them waddle fat-lady-in-a-girdle style across the tabletop. Farrah could step out of the poster and be there, with all her fabulous, fabulous hair and her pearly white teeth, to join in the fun. Scratch that, though: it’s the middle of a heatwave, and nothing is moving, the air is stultifying and still. Anders has been on Cheri’s case all day: the necessity of eating something, at least a spoonful of something, for breakfast; the advantage of speaking along with the French language tapes when the instructor tells you to; the lecture on bad posture and the evils implied therein. Jeez, Cheri thinks; after a certain point, even most parents aren’t so diligent about the necessity of their children’s self-improvement, are they? Don’t they run out of steam? Cheri didn’t stay around in California to see how family life would play itself out. She ran away from her father and stepmother when they had the second squaller in two years, hit the road directly after visiting Janey in the hospital (a courtesy call with Dad, who stayed until the end of visiting hours). Cheri had a nylon suitcase packed with her clothes hidden in the trunk of Dad’s Mercedes. Made it to Seattle, courtesy of a nice trucker, no hands-on-knee stuff, no probing questions about how young people today felt. By the next evening, she’d proceeded to the safe house she’d been to a couple of years before when she escaped from her mother’s place in Topanga, got a new ID from a vending machine set up in the bathroom: a rigged-up photo booth in case you wanted to have your ID picture look like you, instead of selecting from the photo box, then using the old Royal typewriter on the little desk that had been put up under the window to fill in whatever information was necessary (depending on what you took: driver’s license; student ID), a photocopy machine on the vanity next to the sink, sign on the dotted line, and presto, you had credentials which would look highly professional when you slipped the card in your wallet after using the three-step laminating machine that stood on top of the toilet tank. There were no towels and washcloths in the bathroom, and if anyone showered in there, Cheri would have been surprised. There was another bathroom downstairs for that; the upstairs bathroom was the manufacturing plant, the first step toward your journey out into the world as someone else, with a different . . . what would you say? A more advantageous social profile. The house belonged to some second-tier studio type in L.A.; it was rumored he’d given it to his teenage son who was blackmailing him. It was also said to have once served as a retreat for Robert Redford. Back when the heated pool got filled. In the days when not so many people crashed there. Anders’s brother maintained the house, and his lips were sealed about who actually employed him.
Cheri had met Anders the morning after her arrival, when she was on her way out to look for a waitressing job. He was helping his brother change a tire. It was love at first sight, though what Cheri had stopped to fall in love with was the car: a voluptuous red bullet car, shining in the rare Seattle sun. There sh
e stood: scrawny, too-tall little Dorothy Weston, having just dyed her hair auburn and plucked her eyebrows into skeptical high arches, wearing chandelier earrings she’d found in the “giveaway” box, her only makeup some Princess Di electric blue on the inside of her lower lashes, the perfect girl to ride in such a perfect car. “Cheri Sandler,” she said in response to Anders’s smile. And she had the papers to prove it.
For years, Cheri has felt that she’s gotten away with something. Judicious people might want to talk about good health or even good luck, but the something Cheri thinks she’s gotten away with has more in common with the red sports car. She thinks that because of her looks—her hair now back to blond, remuneratively photographed good looks—people are attracted to her as a sort of keen machine. Envious people can easily be discounted; people who look at a hot car and know they’re not the type—that’s unfortunate for them, but good for what’s being appraised. For a while, what she thought she was getting away with was Anders—his connections; his bright ideas; his vigilance about what she deserved, and what she could get. But then she realized that he needed her more than she needed him, so she started thinking that what she was getting away with was living without love. In other words, with Anders she could have the same things people in love had—companion-ship; attention; affection—more than that, though, she could have the appearance of being part of the status quo, so fewer people would hit on her, fewer people would ask her to explain herself, less speculation would go on generally—but he didn’t think she loved him, and she didn’t think he loved her, so if things fell apart, at least it might be less emotionally devastating. The downside of her relationship with Anders was that not being her lover, or in love with her, he had free range to take the positions lovers are not supposed to take toward one another: bullying father toward daughter; teacher to pupil.
