by Ann Beattie
“Please. We won’t take much of your time,” the man said.
“When you realize how little I know, you’ll want to be on your way,” she answered.
Even in person, the woman whispered. “You could have introduced us,” she said.
“Nancy Gregerson,” Nancy said, coming closer to extend her hand. The man was already standing. He gave his wife his free hand, and shook Nancy’s hand firmly with the other. “Rich and Linda O’Malley,” he said.
She took out her key and opened the door. She said, with exaggerated patience, “Your friend and I met by chance. He hit my car when I was stopped at a light.” This fact still irritated her; she could feel herself clenching her jaw. “We met another time, and we started talking. I paid him”—she thought how strange it was that the subject had never come up between her and George, but didn’t want to falter. If she could make the story simple enough, they would go away. Her paying him was part of the story; the plane ticket had cost money, after all—“to go to London, because I thought—and you can bear me out on this—that he’d been involved in things like this before.”
“What do you mean?” Rich said. She had sensed from the moment she saw him—no different from the way she could sense the unpleasant contents of certain unopened letters—that their encounter wouldn’t be over as quickly as she’d hoped. She walked into the kitchen and put her package down. One of them closed the front door, as she knew would happen. They were all going to be polite, and understand one another, and then they would go away, no more enlightened than all the other people who wanted answers to things that had no answers. Oh, certainly: you could declare yourself an angel and make an assertion, but the audience would have to be desperate, or downright silly, to believe anything that was said.
She’d put the cookies on a plate. She brought with her a bottle of seltzer and some plastic cups. She felt under no obligation to be inordinately hospitable. In fact, she left the cups stacked: if he or his wife wanted a drink, they could disturb the pile. She did not address the man’s question, which he’d hollered while she was in the kitchen.
The woman sensed her distance and tried to bridge it. “We’ve been so close to George, all this time. We’re terrified to think that something might have happened to him, because it’s not like him to be out of contact.”
“I’ll say,” her husband said. He was going to be something of a problem, but she reminded herself that she was a nurse. She was used to worse problems.
“I miss my son,” Nancy said. “I’m so disappointed that the trip hasn’t resulted in anything yet. If it ever might. I’m as perplexed as you about why he hasn’t contacted me, or you. I don’t know what else to say.”
“Did you have an affair with him?” the woman asked.
She hadn’t counted on a question like that. She decided to indicate her disdain—people and their dumb assumptions about human behavior—by simply staring at the woman until she realized how ridiculous her question had been. It did not take the woman three seconds to drop her eyes.
“I hope you don’t think you can stay and question me indefinitely,” she said. She should not have spoken her worst fear; her voice went too high, and revealed her nervousness.
“Did you call the police?” the woman said.
“How much did you pay him?” Rich O’Malley asked. It was the first time she seriously considered that she might have a big problem on her hands. That the man might assume something crazy, such as that she had something to do with George’s disappearance. The police…she really hoped the police would not have to be involved.
“That isn’t a factor,” she said.
“He didn’t really need money,” Rich said. “He couldn’t have done this for the kind of money you’d pay him, I don’t think, so I guess what my wife was getting at was that he might have done it for love.”
“He hit my car at a red light,” she said. “I saw him two other times. At a coffee place where we ran into each other, and here, when I called him and he came to discuss the trip.”
“You told him what you wanted,” Rich said, “and he came over.”
“You can understand that we’re confused,” the woman said.
“Oh, and I’m not?”
“Rich, she’s made it clear she doesn’t know where he is,” Linda said.
“She gets him over to her house by telling him some kid he’s never met is missing, he comes, he goes to London, he takes her money, he never returns, she never calls the cops. Why do I think something doesn’t make sense?”
“What do you think this is? One of those party games where everyone gets to guess who killed the victim? Is that what you’re thinking—that I’m involved in something like that? Maybe he stopped at your house on the way to London, and you killed him for all the money I gave him, and you’re here to try to pin it on me because the cops already contacted you. You being his best friends and all. Do you see how dangerous paranoia can be, Mr. O’Malley? Now leave. Please.”
Linda had put her hand over her heart. She was biting her bottom lip. She said only her husband’s name, tentatively.
“Do you know Paula?” he said, frowning. “Did she not come here because you’d already met?”
She didn’t know who Paula was, but she’d decided the time had come to insist that they leave. It was her house, and she had done nothing wrong. But that thought only empowered her for a few seconds. Yet again, fallout from her son’s actions had ended up as rubble in her own life. If it took calling the police to get these people to leave, so be it. Some of the police might remember her: the distraught lady whose son was always causing problems. The woman whose husband had left her. The nurse who hadn’t realized her no-good son took drugs. What had she failed to understand this time?
Paula. Of course there was always a Paula. She had probably gotten involved with a man who wanted to get away from his wife. People disappeared more than was reported, changed their identity. There were books about those people; there was the witness protection program. With or without reason, secrecy was part of those people’s lives.
A plane flew over, angling darkness across the living room floor. Rich looked up, and she understood from the flash in his eye that it brought George to mind—though spry jive would have been nonsense words, had he said them aloud. Linda’s eyes went not to the ceiling, but to her husband. I know that habit, Nancy thought; when a marriage ends, the body retains its habits: that swivel of the head toward the other person, the assumption that someone is with you in the moment and will reply, wordlessly, to any unasked question. What she saw on a day-to-day basis had convinced her that nobody and nothing lasts forever. The big questions had been precluded, so if any of them returned now, they’d be safe: no longer would any responses be expected. She supposed that—had she been better at self-deception—she might experience the wind as the caress of an angel that had just passed over: a modern angel that, paradoxically, also embodied darkness. An angel that, like people on Earth, made a bold announcement of itself, then disappeared.
Find and Replace
TRUE story: my father died in a hospice on Christmas Day, while a clown dressed in big black boots and a beard was down the hall doing his clown-as-Santa act for the amusement of a man my father had befriended, who was dying of ALS. I wasn’t there; I was in Paris to report on how traveling art was being uncrated—a job I got through my cousin Jasper, who works for a New York City ad agency more enchanted with consultants than Julia Child is with chickens. For years, Jasper’s sending work my way has allowed me to keep going while I write the Great American I Won’t Say Its Name.
I’m superstitious. For example, I thought that even though my father was doing well, the minute I left the country he would die. Which he did.
On a globally warmed July day, I flew into Fort Myers and picked up a rental car and set off for my mother’s to observe (her terminology) the occasion of my father’s death, six months after the event. It was actually seven months later, but because I was in Toro
nto checking out sites for an HBO movie, and there was no way I could make it on June 25, my mother thought the most respectful thing to do would be to wait until the same day, one month later. I don’t ask my mother a lot of questions; when I can, I simply try to keep the peace by doing what she asks. As mothers go, she’s not demanding. Most requests are simple and have to do with her notions of propriety, which often center on the writing of notes. I have friends who are so worried about their parents that they see them every weekend, I have friends who phone home every day, friends who cut their parents’ lawn because no one can be found to do it. With my mother, it’s more a question of: Will I please send Mrs. Fawnes a condolence card because of her dog’s death, or, Will I be so kind as to call a florist near me in New York and ask for an arrangement to be delivered on the birthday of a friend of my mother’s, because ordering flowers when a person isn’t familiar with the florist can be a disastrous experience. I don’t buy flowers, even from Korean markets, but I asked around, and apparently the bouquet that arrived at the friend’s door was a great success.
My mother has a million friends. She keeps the greeting-card industry in business. She would probably send greetings on Groundhog Day, if the cards existed. Also, no one ever seems to disappear from her life (with the notable exception of my father). She still exchanges notes with a maid who cleaned her room at the Swift House Inn fifteen years ago—and my parents were only there for the weekend.
I know I should be grateful that she is such a friendly person. Many of my friends bemoan the fact that their parents get into altercations with everybody, or that they won’t socialize at all.
So: I flew from New York to Fort Myers, took the shuttle to the rental-car place, got in the car and was gratified that the air-conditioning started to blow the second I turned on the ignition, and leaned back, closed my eyes, and counted backward, in French, from thirty, in order to unwind before I began to drive. I then put on loud music, adjusted the bass, and set off, feeling around on the steering wheel to see if there was cruise control, because if I got one more ticket my insurance was going to be canceled. Or maybe I could get my mother to write a nice note pleading my case.
Anyway, all the preliminaries to my story are nothing but that: the almost inevitable five minutes of hard rain midway through the trip; the beautiful bridge; the damned trucks expelling herculean farts. I drove to Venice, singing along with Mick Jagger about beasts of burden. When I got to my mother’s street, which is, it seems, the only quarter-mile-long stretch of America watched directly by God, through the eyes of a Florida policeman in a radar-equipped car, I set the cruise control for twenty and coasted to her driveway.
Hot as it was, my mother was outside, sitting in a lawn chair flanked by pots of red geraniums. Seeing my mother always puts me into a state of confusion. Whenever I first see her, I become disoriented.
“Ann!” she said. “Oh, are you exhausted? Was the flight terrible?”
It’s the subtext that depresses me: the assumption that to arrive anywhere you have to pass through hell. In fact, you do. I had been on a USAir flight, seated in the last seat in the last row, and every time suitcases thudded into the baggage compartment my spine reverberated painfully. My traveling companions had been an obese woman with a squirming baby and her teenage son, whose ears she squeezed when he wouldn’t settle down, producing shrieks and enough flailing to topple my cup of apple juice. I just sat there silently, and I could feel that I was being too quiet and bringing everyone down.
My mother’s face was still quite pink. Shortly before my father’s death, after she had a little skin cancer removed from above her lip, she went to the dermatologist for microdermabrasion. She was wearing the requisite hat with a wide brim and Ari Onassis sunglasses. She had on her uniform: shorts covered with a flap, so that it looked as if she were wearing a skirt, and a T-shirt embellished with sequins. Today’s featured a lion with glittering black ears and, for all I knew, a correctly colored nose. Its eyes, which you might think would be sequins, were painted on. Blue.
“Love you,” I said, hugging her. I had learned not to answer her questions. “Were you sitting out here in the sun waiting for me?”
She had learned, as well, not to answer mine. “We can have lemonade,” she said. “Paul Newman. And that man’s marinara sauce—I never cook it myself anymore.”
The surprise came almost immediately, just after she pressed a pile of papers into my hands: thank-you notes from friends she wanted me to read; a letter she didn’t understand regarding a magazine subscription that was about to expire; an ad she’d gotten about a vacuum cleaner she wanted my advice about buying; two tickets to a Broadway play she’d bought ten years before that she and my father had never used (what was being asked of me?); and—most interesting, at the bottom of the pile—a letter from Drake Dreodadus, her neighbor, asking her to move in with him. “Go for the vacuum instead,” I said, trying to laugh it off.
“I’ve already made my response,” she said. “And you may be very surprised to know what I said.”
Drake Dreodadus had spoken at my father’s memorial service. Before that, I had met him only once, when he was going over my parents’ lawn with a metal detector. But no: as my mother reminded me, I’d had a conversation with him in the drugstore, one time when she and I stopped in to buy medicine for my father. He was a pharmacist.
“The only surprising thing would be if you’d responded in the affirmative,” I said.
“ ‘Responded in the affirmative!’ Listen to you.”
“Mom,” I said, “tell me this is not something you’d give a second of thought to.”
“Several days of thought,” she said. “I decided that it would be a good idea, because we’re very compatible.”
“Mom,” I said, “you’re joking, right?”
“You’ll like him when you get to know him,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “This is someone you hardly know—or am I being naive?”
“Oh, Ann, at my age you don’t necessarily want to know someone extremely well. You want to be compatible, but you can’t let yourself get all involved in the dramas that have already played out—all those accounts of everyone’s youth. You just want to be—you want to come to the point where you’re compatible.”
I was sitting in my father’s chair. The doilies on the armrests that slid around and drove him crazy were gone. I looked at the darker fabric, where they had been. Give me a sign, Dad, I was thinking, looking at the shiny fabric as if it were a crystal ball. I was clutching my glass, which was sweating. “Mom—you can’t be serious,” I said.
She winked.
“Mom—”
“I’m going to live in his house, which is on the street perpendicular to Palm Avenue. You know, one of the big houses they built at first, before the zoning people got after them and they put up these little cookie-cutter numbers.”
“You’re moving in with him?” I said, incredulous. “But you’ve got to keep this house. You are keeping it, aren’t you? If it doesn’t work out.”
“Your father thought he was a fine man,” she said. “They used to be in a Wednesday-night poker game, I guess you know. If your father had lived, Drake was going to teach him how to e-mail.”
“With a, with—you don’t have a computer,” I said stupidly.
“Oh, Ann, I wonder about you sometimes. As if your father and I couldn’t have driven to Circuit City, bought a computer—and he could have e-mailed you! He was excited about it.”
“Well, I don’t—” I seemed unable to finish any thought. I started again. “This could be a big mistake,” I said. “He only lives one block away. Is it really necessary to move in with him?”
“Was it necessary for you to live with Richard Klingham in Vermont?”
I had no idea what to say. I had been staring at her. I dropped my eyes a bit and saw the blue eyes of the lion. I dropped them to the floor. New rug. When had she bought a new rug? Before or after she made her plans?
“When did he ask you about this?” I said.
“About a week ago,” she said.
“He did this by mail? He just wrote you a note?”
“If we’d had a computer, he could have e-mailed!” she said.
“Mom, are you being entirely serious about this?” I said. “What, exactly—”
“What, exactly, what one single thing, what absolutely compelling reason did you have for living with Richard Klingham?”
“Why do you keep saying his last name?” I said.
“Most of the old ladies I know, their daughters would be delighted if their mothers remembered a boyfriend’s first name, let alone a last name,” she said. “Senile old biddies. Really. I get sick of them myself. I see why it drives the children crazy. But I don’t want to get off on that. I want to tell you that we’re going to live in his house for a while, but are thinking seriously of moving to Tucson. He’s very close to his son, who’s a builder there. They speak every single day on the phone, and they e-mail,” she said. She was never reproachful; I decided that she was just being emphatic.
Just a short time before, I had relaxed, counting trois, deux, un. Singing with Mick Jagger. Inching slowly toward my mother’s house.
“But this shouldn’t intrude on a day meant to respect the memory of your father,” she said, almost whispering. “I want you to know, though, and I really mean it: I feel that your father would be pleased that I’m compatible with Drake. I feel it deep in my heart.” She thumped the lion’s face. “He would give this his blessing, if he could,” she said.
