by Ann Beattie
Yours truly,
Marigold Howe
How had he fallen in with such an accomplished, compassionate lady? From the time he was a child, he had selected friends she could see had bad character: secretive, sly little boys who got him into trouble when he wasn’t getting them into trouble. She remembered the game of Judge. This meant that Nicky dumped water out of a big old cement birdbath she’d only begun filling with water to keep him out of it, and sat in it to act as a judge in horrible trials the boys invented. His friend Tommy (the only murky child of the lovely Samuelsons) had sat in a lawn chair and argued in favor of sparing an allegedly stupid turtle’s life. At least, that was the way she’d heard it, when she came out and saw the turtle with a cinder block through its shell, the blood like cherry Jell-O on the grass.
When he was eight, Nicky killed a cat. He’d “lassoed” a friend’s gecko in its terrarium and said he had strangled it accidentally when he was trying to get the rope off. He took good aim with a slingshot. Boys will be boys, so many people had said to her. And—remember—he had kept a bird with a broken wing in a box and nursed it back to health. He and his friend had let it go on the Fourth of July, centering themselves, and the bird, in a ceremonial circle of spitting sparklers. Nicky’s father had been visiting that day, bringing with him his wife, Bernadine, and her terrier that wore a little red, white, and blue vest. Nancy had expected, all day, that the dog would end up dead, but it had not. It had only caused a certain amount of confusion by running away from everyone and hiding one place or another in the house, leaving little turds whose smell attracted her attention later that night, just about the time she realized the dog must have been responsible for uncovering many of her tulip bulbs outside the kitchen window, though she couldn’t be sure, since squirrels had dug them up in the past.
Meditation she thought of as a joke, though she realized that because it was an option for free time at work (newly instituted), she was biased against it. Other uses for free time (not to be confused with “break”) included doing the sun salutation in a small room that had once been a large storage closet. There was also tea brewing. The nurses’ stress was to be alleviated by tea brewing. She could give thanks that at least the dour cardiologist had not reappeared. The last slide show they had been required to watch had been on the subject of bedsores, and the number of repulsive close-ups—surely the cameraman had an obsession with the zoom lens—had given her a headache. Sitting there in the roar of the projector, she had felt like flotsam in space, sucked faster than the speed of light to disappear into some gaping—in this case festering—void.
When he was fourteen, Nicky and a friend had stolen the friend’s father’s car and crashed it into a tree less than a mile from the house, somehow managing to pin a neighbor’s cat between the front fender and a willow. It was the cat she’d heard about over and over—not from the owner, who accepted its death as a bizarre accident, but from the friend’s mother, who disagreed with her husband and felt the purpose of the ride had not been the driving, but driving with intent to kill. They had “stalked” the cat, the woman maintained. Vaguely, Nancy could remember reading textbooks, in nursing school, whose authors felt obliged to mention the merits of a vegetarian diet. This, before there was as much research and agreement among doctors as there was now. She could remember her own self-righteous Friday Fish Night (not for religious reasons: for the protein and low fat) and also her own Vegetarian Tuesdays: chopping broccoli and mixing it with polenta into little balls she cooked in canned spaghetti sauce. Her son grew up to eat Whoppers, and her husband—at least, the last she knew—ate “blackened” meat he cooked on a grill that cost more than they had paid for their first car. Edward and Bernadine had nervously made do with her hibachi, during the month they’d been in town years before, cooking skewers of beef and onions and handing the little sticks forward as if they were volatile tools of destruction.
At sixteen Nicky had not killed a fellow classmate, though he had fought with such energy that it had taken several courageous students and two teachers to pin Nicky to the floor. The other boy had no serious injuries: bruises, a cut knee. Nicky had broken his ankle—apparently after the fight had been broken up, kicking the tire of a parked car.
How much of it had been her fault? Had Nicky been more upset than it appeared that she and his father had divorced? He had never been a child who confided in anyone, even as a baby. If he awoke frightened in the night, there was no bad dream he could (or would) tell either of them about. From kindergarten, he had been attracted to troublemakers, though when he was home he had worked on various projects silently in his room and for a while had read so many books that she had to encourage him to go out and do something. In his teens, he had gone out with his easel and painted landscapes, though he never wanted her to look at them and he made her promise she would not discuss his interest in painting with his friends. Well: he had found things to do, and apparently those things had nothing to do with painting placid streams and towering trees. What he was most interested in now had to do with his inner landscape, which he was determined to turn dark and problematic with drugs. The Magical Mystery Tour had, like some powerful force of nature, itself, come and taken him away.
She got out a map and put on her reading glasses and looked for Leeds. Finding the dot on the map told her nothing. She went into her bedroom and sat on the bed, looking with satisfaction at the new bush planted in the lawn. It did not seem an omen of anything. It seemed only an improvement of her view. Its loveliness, though, also made her a little sad. Or its simplicity. Maybe its dainty branches blowing in the breeze saddened her. She remembered the boy saying that his sister had selected it for her bridal bouquet. She, herself, had carried white roses and baby’s breath. She and her husband had been married in a garden by a justice of the peace. She had been two months pregnant. In the third month, she miscarried and Edward Gregerson had stunned her by suggesting they get the marriage annulled. They should continue to live together, he said—but whether they should be married could be rethought. She had stopped loving him instantly. They had not annulled the marriage (though she wouldn’t have stopped him), and for a while they had gone on as if he’d never suggested it. He had clearly been waiting for her response, her agreement with his oh-so-logical plan, but she had not been able to say anything. She had gone into some sort of fugue state, in which she pretended to be able to do things she had done before, thereby doing them. She cooked. She had sex with her husband. She kept an appointment to take a typing test, got the results, and began a job as a secretary. After a month or so on the job, on the way home from work, she stopped and impulsively bought white roses and baby’s breath. “Pretty,” the young salesgirl had intoned, arranging and rearranging them. The roses had been very expensive. She had bought more than she carried in her bouquet. She had instructed the girl about how she wanted the stems cut and could still remember the girl’s disappointment that such long stems were being clipped so short. The florist’s paper had been patterned with pink polka dots. She remembered, because she had cried so hard, back in the car, that she had understood the Impressionists in a new way, as the dots blurred into a pink wash. She had looked at the prettiness of the bouquet and then she had begun to snap off the heads, one by one. When they were decapitated, she had broken up the baby’s breath as if it were parsley she were sprinkling on a casserole. She had reached over—the whole mess was on the floor, in front of the passenger seat—and ground some into the floor until skin peeled off the ball of her thumb. She had picked up some of the roses and taken them apart petal by petal, sprinkling them back on the pile, and then she had used the heel of her shoe to mash them further into the carpeting. Then she had driven home and left them there, where her husband had seen them in the morning when he went out to run an errand. So: he, too, could choose to be silent. He did not say anything, and the crushed flowers had been removed from the car when she sat in the seat next to him later in the day. She never slept with him again, though—as
she suspected—she was already pregnant.
For his part, George Wissone thought no more about her. That day he had surprised himself by coming close to lecturing her on the deficiencies of the CIA. But why should he care? You wouldn’t believe the fuckups. Sad sacks who needed extrication that the big-wigs left swinging in the breeze, people you wouldn’t want to get to know. Ask no questions, other than operational necessities. Try not to involve anybody, or let anybody know you’d been there. In, out, nobody gets hurt. Minimalist ops. No brands, no trophies, no Larry, no George. The Invisible Man.
He really did go on what might be thought of as medical missions, usually along with a doctor: off to the rescue of rich Americans who got themselves in trouble. He and O’Malley were just limo drivers, so to speak. O’Malley drove the car and he extricated Joe Blow. What do-gooder first thought of taking a bunch of kids on the same plane, he had no idea, but children began to be part of the haul. It started during the Carter administration. The kids were usually orphans, or kids whose adoptions had gotten fucked up for one reason or another, and there were nuns in the United States waiting to catch them when they arrived in the States. They would parcel them out to church-affiliated adoption agencies or into the arms of prospective parents. The 2002 trip to Sierra Leone had been textbook perfect. As well as some big-bucks American businessman who’d developed septicemia, they’d brought out four kids: three boys and a girl. The night before, O’Malley had gotten in a fight with a Harvard-educated Beng tribe leader on the subject of Michael Jackson’s fitness as a parent, and had broken his right hand throwing a wild punch, though he piloted the plane back one-handed and they sang doo-wop songs to the kids half the way to Logan. Hadn’t it been Logan that time? Rich O’Malley was Irish Catholic, married to his childhood sweetheart at age eighteen, unfortunately unable to conceive after a course of chemo for Hodgkin’s at nineteen. His wife worked in Bethesda, Maryland, as a first-grade teacher; he flew planes out of Reagan (“National Airport” to Democrats) on his humanitarian rescue missions—why not call them that? They saved people who needed saving, after all.
Lawrence Krebs, aka George Wissone, had been recruited right out of St. Christopher Summer Camp of Haller Isle, Maine. Last two years of high school skipped, free college, a passport that gave his age as two years older than he was; one hundred thousand dollars in an offshore bank account; a letter of thanks from the president of the United States that consisted mostly of an uppercase warning not to frame it and hang it in public view. That was it: they came after Eagle Scouts. They loved kids whose parents were tragically dead. Let others debate flying saucers and life on other planets; Larry got to parachute out of planes nobody realized had been dreamed up. If everybody was so dumb that they could be diverted into thoughts of life elsewhere, as opposed to how truly bizarre things were in the USA—well: that was the plan. He had met Reagan and George H. W., but Dubya wanted no personal contact. Which was fine with him. He sensed he wouldn’t like the guy. He had a bias against certain other ex-alcoholics. Reagan was not yet senile. George H. W. was a very focused man, out there steering his cigarette boat. Maybe after all this time he should hang the letter of long ago. Let Paula stop to read it on her way to his bathroom. Or put it on the refrigerator with one of those vegetable magnets people give other people when they’re in on the joke. His offshore bank account had grown substantial. Martha’s nosedive and Wal-Mart’s organizational problems? Another year or two, he’d be retired to a house in Mustique.
Still: this changing-identity stuff was slightly embarrassing, the where-do-I-live-today nonsense, a lifetime without being able to befriend much of anybody except a pilot who knew exactly what he did and who was also obsessed with God’s will (which apparently included both cancer and cancer treatments) and—to his own mystification—a pretty trust-fund Bard dropout who never asked qu-qu-questions, who preferred cosmetic surgery to jewelry, who, touchingly, liked his old tan terry-cloth robe better than her own Frette…at least he could claim he had something resembling human contact with two people.
The day after he’d moved to Charlottesville, new license wedged in a wallet (a present from Paula) made of the skin from some Gila monster du jour, 2/2 WBF condo rented in his assumed name and furnished by Ethan Allen before he arrived, he’d set out to find a place for lunch and to pick up some supplies for his home office. Some techie would come and hook up the computer, install the program, admire the desk chair. His was a life in which he was rarely questioned. He had no idea who the setup guys were, but they came in a black van, wherever he lived, and set to work immediately. His phone, though, had to be installed by non-telephone-company people, who came in an assortment of vehicles, including motorcycles (San Francisco) and a Volvo pulling a horse carrier (Atlanta). He didn’t question them, they didn’t bat an eye about him, or whatever they were hooking up. The first night in any place, he would call in—he had to do this at 11 p.m., a time he had chosen long ago as convenient—and when he said hello, he would immediately be hung up on. The phone would ring seconds later and the same voice he’d heard through the years would say, “Welcome to your new pad,” and call him by whatever name he would now be using.
His first day on Vinegar Hill, he had called in at 11 p.m., then looked through the phone book to see where he might buy office supplies. One of the chain places was in town; he decided to go there in the morning, then stop at Red Lobster for lunch, in that his life otherwise had little continuity. Recently, Paula had represented continuity, too, he supposed, though she’d dropped hints that she was thinking of a more settled life: Paula with her enhanced cheekbones and her collagen pout, the wine she drank deepening her cheeks to a rosy glow. She often called him “hon” because she couldn’t accept the name change. He loved it when it came out “h-h-hon.”
He called Rich O’Malley on his cell phone. They could only chat on an unsecured line, but he didn’t want more than that. Just to hear a familiar voice—though this time, O’Malley was only a couple of hours or so away. Rich picked up the conversation where they’d left off, telling him that SAD was a very real thing, and that even OfficeMax now sold lights he could sit under. Rich often confused himself with him. In a way, it was flattering. Rich, himself, stayed in the same location when he wasn’t flying and ate daily at a restaurant called O’Donnell’s. A worrier, Rich didn’t know what he was going to do when they closed the place. There was a diner he had his eye on, that was old-time authentic (Rich’s term of greatest approval), but of course that would be a step down from his favorite seafood restaurant. They hung up by saying “Spry jive,” which was a variation of “high five,” though the joke had become so convoluted over time that he couldn’t remember how it had started: they just both signed off that way.
He had decided, at the last minute, after putting a Puppies of America half-price calendar in his shopping basket, to toss in some other items he could not imagine using. These included a large package of pencils (pencils!), a little stand with a clip at the top to hold a picture (he decided to leave it as it was, with Britney Spears’s coarse face, smiling), a package of scissors with different-colored handles (who could possibly care?), and a sheet of bronze circles that contained the individual letters of the name George. He also threw in a large container of paper clips, already filled, with an annoying magnetized hole that both trapped the clips and made them difficult to get at, and a gallon of Poland Spring. Standing in line, he picked up a couple of things that were on a display rack near the cashier: a “theme book” with a spiral binding and a desk lamp with a clock in its base. Impulsively, he also picked up several panoramic picture frames that were shrink-wrapped together, and a pen covered in velvet. He almost put that back, ashamed of himself for squandering money, but the pen felt sensual, and Paula would like it. If he was buying paper clips, when he had not clipped together two pieces of paper in perhaps ten years, why not a pen? He slid his newly FedExed American Express Platinum card in the machine at the counter and—with an almost heartfelt laugh—ans
wered the cashier’s question by saying that no, he did not want to be added to the mailing list. When she asked his zip code, he hesitated, trying to remember.
In the last town he had bought a sound system: speakers everywhere in the faux Tudor 2/3 w/Jacuzzi. There had been perfect sound to listen to Lucinda Williams, and the setup had come with its own security system, so that if anyone tried to detach any of the speakers without hitting a code, he could…what? Spring out of bed and tackle the intruder? He had bought that in Columbus, Ohio. He never thought he would sink that low, after almost four years in Los Angeles, but he had. From there he’d gotten a semi-reprieve to Atlanta, for what turned out to be not even six months. Now they had a run on obscure Southern places, with their self-satisfied small-town urbanites and their eager little regional airports: Roanoke; Charlottesville. If this were a James Bond movie, he’d get to see who was cast in the role of the man who assigned him to those places. He had begun to think that they must be mad at him for some reason, though he’d had a run of ten consecutive successful missions, though before that…but who could blame him for having a guy die of AIDS in a hospital corridor, mid-rescue? Who even knew the guy had it? From Roanoke, he’d gotten a retired diplomat with an Ecstasy problem out of Haiti (though he’d had to shoot a medi-dart into the guy like he was a tiger), along with nine kids. From Atlanta, he’d gotten a counterespionage guy from North Korea, where he’d been roughed up big-time, whose prosthetic right arm the U.S. government had in the works before anybody even set eyes on him. The guy had screamed the whole way back in the plane, at one point going for the doctor’s throat, scaring the one little girl he’d snatched into years of guaranteed nightmares.
