by Ann Beattie
“This is all wrong,” I said, as he pulled me by the hand past Larry, who stood holding his barking poodle in the hallway. “I only had two Scotches,” I said. “I just realized when the wind blew that I smell like a flower garden.”
“You bet it’s all wrong,” he said, squeezing my hand so hard it almost broke. Then he shook off my hand and walked up the steps, went in and slammed the door behind him. I watched a hairline crack leap across all four panes of glass at the top of the door.
The other thing happened in happier times, when we were visiting my sister, Karin, on Twenty-third Street. It was the first time we had met Dan, the man she was engaged to, and we had brought a bottle of champagne. We drank her wine first, and ate her cheese and told stories and heard stories and smoked a joint, and sometime after midnight my husband went to the refrigerator and got out our wine—Spanish champagne, in a black bottle. He pointed the bottle away from him, and we all squinted, silently watching. At the same instant that the cork popped, as we were all saying “Hooray!” or “That does it!”—whatever we were saying—we heard glass raining down, and Paul suddenly crouched, and then we looked above him to see a hole in the skylight, and through the hole black sky.
I’ve just told these stories to my daughter, Eliza, who is six. She used to like stories to end with a moral, like fairy tales, but now she thinks that’s kid’s stuff. She still wants to know what stories mean, but now she wants me to tell her. The point of the two stories—well, I don’t know what the point is, I’m always telling her. That he broke the glass by mistake, and that the cork broke the glass by a miracle. The point is that broken glass is broken glass.
“That’s a joke ending,” she says. “It’s dumb.” She frowns.
I cop out, too tired to think, and then tell her another part of the story to distract her: Uncle Dan and Aunt Karin told the superintendent that the hole must have come from something that fell from above. He knew they were lying—nothing was above them—but what could he say? He asked them whether they thought perhaps meteorites shrank to the size of gumballs falling through New York’s polluted air. He hated not only his tenants but the whole city.
She watches me digress. She reaches for the cologne on her night table and lifts her long blond hair, and I spray her neck. She takes the bottle and sprays her wrists, rubs them together, holds out her wrists for me to smell. I make a silly face and pretend to be dazed by such a wonderful smell. I stroke her hair until she is silent, and tiptoe out, still moving as if I’m walking through broken glass.
Once a week, for a couple of hours, I read to a man named Norman, who is blind. In the year I’ve been doing it, he and I have sort of become friends. He usually greets me with something like “So what’s new with your life?” He sits behind his desk and I sit beside it, in a chair. This is the way a teacher and pupil should sit, and I’ve fallen into the pattern of letting him ask.
He gets up to open the window. It’s always too hot in his little office. His movements are exaggerated, like a bird’s: the quickly cocked head, the way he grips the edge of his desk when he’s bored. He grips the edge, releases his hold, grabs again, like a parrot shifting on its bar. Norman has never seen a bird. He has an eight-year-old daughter, who likes to describe things to him, although she is a prankster and sometimes deliberately lies, he has told me. He buys her things from the joke shop on the corner of the street where he works. He takes home little pills that will make drinks bubble over, buzzers to conceal in the palm of your hand, little black plastic flies to freeze in ice cubes, rubber eyeglass rims attached to a fat nose and a bushy mustache. “Daddy, now I’m wearing my big nose,” she says. “Daddy, I put a black fly in your ice cube, so spit it out if it sinks in your drink, all right?” My daughter and I have gone to two dinners at their house. My daughter thinks that his daughter is a little weird. The last time we visited, when the girls were playing and Norman was washing dishes, his wife showed me the hallway she had just wallpapered. It took her forever to decide on the wallpaper, she told me. We stood there, dwarfed by wallpaper imprinted with the trunks of shiny silver trees that her husband would never see.
What’s new with me? My divorce is final.
My husband remembers the circumstances of the photograph. I told him it was impossible—he was an infant. No, he was a child when the picture was taken, he said—he just looked small because he was slumped in the chair. He remembers it all distinctly. Rufus the dog was there, and his father, and he was looking slightly upward because that was where his mother was, holding the camera. I was amazed that I had made a mystery of something that had such a simple answer. It is a picture of a baby looking at its mother. For the millionth time he asks why must I make myself morose, why call in the middle of the night.
Eliza is asleep. I sit on the edge of her bed in the half-darkness, tempting fate, fidgeting with a paperweight with bursts of red color inside, tossing it in the air. One false move and she will wake up. One mistake and glass shatters. I like the smoothness of it, the heaviness as it slaps into my palm over and over.
Today when I went to Norman, he was sitting on his window ledge, with his arms crossed over his chest. He had been uptown at a meeting that morning, where a man had come up to him and said, “Be grateful for the cane. Everybody who doesn’t take hold of something has something take hold of them.” Norman tells me this, and we are both silent. Does he want me to tell him, the way Eliza wants me to summarize stories, what I think it means? Since Norman and I are adults, I answer my silent question with another question: What do you do with a shard of sorrow?
GREENWICH TIME
“I’m thinking about frogs,” Tom said to his secretary on the phone. “Tell them I’ll be in when I’ve come up with a serious approach to frogs.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter. I’m the idea man, you’re the message taker. Lucky you.”
“Lucky you,” his secretary said. “I’ve got to have two wisdom teeth pulled this afternoon.”
“That’s awful,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry enough to go with me?”
“I’ve got to think about frogs,” he said. “Tell Metcalf I’m taking the day off to think about them, if he asks.”
“The health plan here doesn’t cover dental work,” she said.
Tom worked at an ad agency on Madison Avenue. This week, he was trying to think of a way to market soap shaped like frogs—soap imported from France. He had other things on his mind. He hung up and turned to the man who was waiting behind him to use the phone.
“Did you hear that?” Tom said.
“Do what?” the man said.
“Christ,” Tom said. “Frog soap.”
He walked away and went out to sit across the street from his favorite pizza restaurant. He read his horoscope in the paper (neutral), looked out the window of the coffee shop, and waited for the restaurant to open. At eleven-forty-five he crossed the street and ordered a slice of Sicilian pizza, with everything. He must have had a funny look on his face when he talked to the man behind the counter, because the man laughed and said, “You sure? Everything? You even look surprised yourself.”
“I started out for work this morning and never made it there,” Tom said. “After I wolf down a pizza I’m going to ask my ex-wife if my son can come back to live with me.”
The man averted his eyes and pulled a tray out from under the counter. When Tom realized that he was making the man nervous, he sat down. When the pizza was ready, he went to the counter and got it, and ordered a large glass of milk. He caught the man behind the counter looking at him one more time—unfortunately, just as he gulped his milk too fast and it was running down his chin. He wiped his chin with a napkin, but even as he did so he was preoccupied, thinking about the rest of his day. He was heading for Amanda’s, in Greenwich, and, as usual, he felt a mixture of relief (she had married another man, but she had given him a key to the back door) and anxiety (Shelby, her
husband, was polite to him but obviously did not like to see him often).
When he left the restaurant, he meant to get his car out of the garage and drive there immediately, to tell her that he wanted Ben—that somehow, in the confusion of the situation, he had lost Ben, and now he wanted him back. Instead, he found himself wandering around New York, to calm himself so that he could make a rational appeal. After an hour or so, he realized that he was becoming as interested in the city as a tourist—in the tall buildings; the mannequins with their pelvises thrust forward, almost touching the glass of the store windows; books piled into pyramids in bookstores. He passed a pet store; its front window space was full of shredded newspaper and sawdust. As he looked in, a teenage girl reached over the gate that blocked in the window area and lowered two brown puppies, one in each hand, into the sawdust. For a second, her eye met his, and she thrust one dog toward him with a smile. For a second, the dog’s eye also met his. Neither looked at him again; the dog burrowed into a pile of paper, and the girl turned and went back to work. When he and the girl caught each other’s attention, a few seconds before, he had been reminded of the moment, earlier in the week, when a very attractive prostitute had approached him as he was walking past the Sheraton Centre. He had hesitated when she spoke to him, but only because her eyes were very bright—wide-set eyes, the eyebrows invisible under thick blond bangs. When he said no, she blinked and the brightness went away. He could not imagine how such a thing was physically possible; even a fish’s eye wouldn’t cloud over that quickly, in death. But the prostitute’s eyes had gone dim in the second it took him to say no.
He detoured now to go to the movies: Singin’ in the Rain. He left after Debbie Reynolds and Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor danced onto the sofa and tipped it over. Still smiling about that, he went to a bar. When the bar started to fill up, he checked his watch and was surprised to see that people were getting off work. Drunk enough now to wish for rain, because rain would be fun, he walked to his apartment and took a shower, and then headed for the garage. There was a movie house next to the garage, and before he realized what he was doing he was watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He was shocked by the dog with the human head, not for the obvious reason but because it reminded him of the brown puppy he had seen earlier. It seemed an omen—a nightmare vision of what a dog would become when it was not wanted.
Six o’ clock in the morning: Greenwich, Connecticut. The house is now Amanda’s, ever since her mother’s death. The ashes of Tom’s former mother-in-law are in a tin box on top of the mantel in the dining room. The box is sealed with wax. She has been dead for a year, and in that year Amanda has moved out of their apartment in New York, gotten a quickie divorce, remarried, and moved into the house in Greenwich. She has another life, and Tom feels that he should be careful in it. He puts the key she gave him into the lock and opens the door as gently as if he were disassembling a bomb. Her cat, Rocky, appears, and looks at him. Sometimes Rocky creeps around the house with him. Now, though, he jumps on the window seat as gently, as unnoticeably, as a feather blown across sand.
Tom looks around. She has painted the living-room walls white and the downstairs bathroom crimson. The beams in the dining room have been exposed; Tom met the carpenter once—a small, nervous Italian who must have wondered why people wanted to pare their houses down to the framework. In the front hall, Amanda has bung photographs of the wings of birds.
Driving out to Amanda’s, Tom smashed up his car. It was still drivable, but only because he found a tire iron in the trunk and used it to pry the bent metal of the left front fender away from the tire, so that the wheel could turn. The second he veered off the road (he must have dozed off for an instant), the thought came to him that Amanda would use the accident as a reason for not trusting him with Ben. While he worked with the tire iron, a man stopped his car and got out and gave him drunken advice. “Never buy a motorcycle,” he said. “They spin out of control. You go with them—you don’t have a chance.” Tom nodded. “Did you know Doug’s son?” the man asked. Tom said nothing. The man shook his head sadly and then went to the back of his car and opened the trunk. Tom watched him as he took flares out of his trunk and began to light them and place them in the road. The man came forward with several flares still in hand. He looked confused that he had so many. Then he lit the extras, one by one. and placed them in a semicircle around the front of the car, where Tom was working. Tom felt like some saint, in a shrine.
When the wheel was freed, he drove the car to Amanda’s, cursing himself for having skidded and slamming the car into somebody’s mailbox. When he got into the house, he snapped on the floodlight in the back yard, and then went into the kitchen to make some coffee before he looked at the damage again.
In the city, making a last stop before he finally got his car out of the garage, he had eaten eggs and bagels at an all-night deli. Now it seems to him that his teeth still ache from chewing. The hot coffee in his mouth feels good. The weak early sunlight, nearly out of reach of where he can move his chair and still be said to be sitting at the table, feels good where it strikes him on one shoulder. When his teeth don’t ache, he begins to notice that he feels nothing in his mouth; where the sun strikes him, he can feel the wool of his sweater warming him the way a sweater is supposed to, even without sun shining on it. The sweater was a Christmas present from his son. She, of course, picked it out and wrapped it: a box enclosed in shiny white paper, crayoned on by Ben. “B E N,” in big letters. Scribbles that looked like the wings of birds.
Amanda and Shelby and Ben are upstairs. Through the doorway he can see a digital clock on the mantel in the next room, on the other side from the box of ashes. At seven, the alarm will go off and Shelby will come downstairs, his gray hair, in the sharpening morning light, looking like one of those cheap abalone lights they sell at the seashore. He will stumble around, look down to make sure his fly is closed; he will drink coffee from one of Amanda’s mother’s bone-china cups, which he holds in the palms of his hands. His hands are so big that you have to look to see that he is cradling a cup, that he is not gulping coffee from his hands the way you would drink water from a stream.
Once, when Shelby was leaving at eight o’clock to drive into the city, Amanda looked up from the dining-room table where the three of them had been having breakfast—having a friendly, normal time, Tom had thought—and said to Shelby, “Please don’t leave me alone with him.” Shelby looked perplexed and embarrassed when she got up and followed him into the kitchen. “Who gave him the key, sweetheart?” Shelby whispered. Tom looked through the doorway. Shelby’s hand was low on her hip—partly a joking sexual gesture, partly a possessive one. “Don’t try to tell me there’s anything you’re afraid of,” Shelby said.
Ben sleeps and sleeps. He often sleeps until ten or eleven. Up there in his bed, sunlight washing over him.
Tom looks again at the box with the ashes in it on the mantel. If there is another life, what if something goes wrong and he is reincarnated as a camel and Ben as a cloud and there is just no way for the two of them to get together? He wants Ben. He wants him now.
The alarm is ringing, so loud it sounds like a million madmen beating tin. Shelby’s feet on the floor. The sunlight shining a rectangle of light through the middle of the room. Shelby will walk through that patch of light as though it were a rug rolled out down the aisle of a church. Six months ago, seven, Tom went to Amanda and Shelby’s wedding.
Shelby is naked, and startled to see him. He stumbles, grabs his brown robe from his shoulder and puts it on, asking Tom what he’s doing there and saying good morning at the same time. “Every goddam clock in the house is either two minutes slow or five minutes fast,” Shelby says. He hops around on the cold tile in the kitchen, putting water on to boil, pulling his robe tighter around him. “I thought this floor would warm up in summer,” Shelby says, sighing. He shifts his weight from one side to the other, the way a fighter warms up, chafing his big hands.
Amanda comes down.
She is wearing a pair of jeans, rolled at the ankles, black high-heeled sandals, a black silk blouse. She stumbles like Shelby. She does not look happy to see Tom. She looks, and doesn’t say anything.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Tom says. He sounds lame. An animal in a trap, trying to keep its eyes calm.
“I’m going into the city,” she says. “Claudia’s having a cyst removed. It’s all a mess. I have to meet her there, at nine. I don’t feel like talking now. Let’s talk tonight. Come back tonight. Or stay today.” Her hands through her auburn hair. She sits in a chair, accepts the coffee Shelby brings.
“More?” Shelby says to Tom. “You want something more?”
Amanda looks at Tom through the steam rising from her coffee cup. “I think that we are all dealing with this situation very well,” she says. “I’m not sorry I gave you the key. Shelby and I discussed it, and we both felt that you should have access to the house. But in the back of my mind I assumed that you would use the key—I had in mind more … emergency situations.”
“I didn’t sleep well last night,” Shelby says. “Now I would like it if I didn’t feel that there was going to be a scene to start things off this morning.”
Amanda sighs. She seems as perturbed with Shelby as she is with Tom. “And if I can say something without being jumped on,” she says to Shelby, “because, yes, you told me not to buy a Peugeot, and now the damned thing won’t run—as long as you’re here, Tom, it would be nice if you gave Inez a ride to the market.”
“We saw seven deer running through the woods yesterday,” Shelby says.
“Oh, cut it out, Shelby,” Amanda says.
“Your problems I’m trying to deal with, Amanda,” Shelby says. “A little less of the rough tongue, don’t you think?”
Inez has pinned a sprig of phlox in her hair, and she walks as though she feels pretty. The first time Tom saw Inez, she was working in her sister’s garden—actually, standing in the garden in bare feet, with a long cotton skirt sweeping the ground. She was holding a basket heaped high with iris and daisies. She was nineteen years old and had just arrived in the United States. That year, she lived with her sister and her sister’s husband, Metcalf—his friend Metcalf, the craziest man at the ad agency. Metcalf began to study photography, just to take pictures of Inez. Finally his wife got jealous and asked Inez to leave. She had trouble finding a job, and Amanda liked her and felt sorry for her, and she persuaded Tom to have her come live with them, after she had Ben. Inez came, bringing boxes of pictures of herself, one suitcase, and a pet gerbil that died her first night in the house. All the next day, Inez cried, and Amanda put her arms around her. Inez always seemed like a member of the family, from the first.
