by Ann Beattie
“This one—” he says, warming to the subject. “The oars are chopsticks, roughed up and stained with dirty motor oil. The waves are a mixture of whipped cream and shaving foam. I turn on the fan over there—” He gestures across the shining floor.
She puts the photographs on the workbench and carefully flips back to his hand, manipulated to express pain. She has no idea what to say. He is correct in saying that the only human form—the anachronistic close-up—is in this one photograph. There is not even a picture of the boat in its entirety.
“Is it part of the game not to tell people you’re putting them on? Do you present these as documents of a real voyage?”
“What forger would make money if it couldn’t be spent?” he says.
“Renny, this is incredible,” she says.
“A lot of work goes into it,” he says. She is not sure if he makes the comment to temper her praise, or if he says it to refute her.
Pru and I took Amtrak to Philadelphia to see Janine. She and Janine didn’t phone or write letters, though every now and then one would buy a funny item that reminded her of something they’d seen or done in the old days and mail it to the other without comment, Pru had told me.
Pru altered the pattern by sending Janine a note saying we wanted to take her to lunch.
We met at a restaurant near the store where Janine repaired electronic equipment. She wore a blue dress and had a tightly belted, small waist she was proud of, but her hourglass figure spread into wide hips and thick legs. It was highly doubtful that she’d ever been a ballbuster, though perhaps attractiveness was not a prerequisite. Her girlfriend was there with her. Brynn was also heavy, though her weight was more evenly distributed. Her arms had the definition of someone who worked out seriously. She made little eye contact and spoke in meaningless pleasantries. If she sensed Janine had something to say, she stopped midsentence.
The subject did not turn to Nelson until the coffee was brought. I had spaced out a little, listening to the upbeat Muzak version of “Imagine,” when I heard Pru saying that when she and I met, I’d provided what she called “an interesting addendum” to the time they’d spent with Nelson: he’d told me and my cousin increasingly bizarre tales, she explained, assigning them degrading roles in his invented sex life.
“Who’s Nelson?” Brynn said.
“This guy we knew at NYU a million years ago,” Janine said dismissively. “Hey: we figured out he was a jerk and put him behind us, right? But”—she turned to me—“Nelson got in touch with you?”
“This was years ago. When she was a child,” Pru said.
“In Minneapolis,” I said. “I was living with my uncle. Nelson came to make a movie about our family—my cousin and my uncle and me. Actually, that sounds strange now that I say it. Why would he pick us, when he knew so many other people in town?”
“Go figure,” Brynn said.
“I guess we were a little unconventional. Being raised by an uncle.” As I spoke, I was flooded with affection for Roy. I remembered the privilege of being in the garage with him, late at night, on a winter night: the space heaters roaring, the clusters of dried berries and ferns, the summer flowers he’d hung upside down to dry from the ceiling beams. A cook’s kitchen of delicacies, had they been edible.
“You know what’s perfectly clear to me now?” Pru said. “Nelson just didn’t like women. And back then, I guess that seemed like a challenge. Remember your old Pontiac, Janine? We were always driving him around, telling him his ideas were so cool. So he repaid us by using us as fodder for his fantasies.”
“All you can do is move on.” Brynn shrugged.
“I had sex with him exactly once,” Pru said. “Midway through a film he was making of me.”
“What can you do, hon?” Brynn said. “You move on.”
“I guess what I was saying was that I felt manipulated,” Pru said. “What’s a worse word—manipulated or humiliated? He was pretty much responsible for my flunking out of school. I’ve never gotten things back on track with my mother. You move on, but people’s shit hurts you.”
“Exploitation,” I said, echoing what Renny had said in Savannah. “Like rape,” I said. “Telling those things to my cousin and me, making us the audience for his mean-spirited fantasies.”
Pru looked at me. “Are you crazy?” she said. “E-mailing a bunch of crap wasn’t the same thing as somebody forcing himself on you. You could have turned off the machine. You weren’t helpless.”
It was obvious what she’d said. I had the terrible feeling that she had heard it herself, too. It was even obvious to Brynn, who could not manage one more banal word.
Janine put her hand on Pru’s arm. “It was a long time ago,” she said. “You’re okay.”
“Then if I’m so okay, why don’t you ever get in touch with me? How come my only friend is somebody my sister, who lives in another country, sent around to meet me? I never went back to school. I’m never going to get a decent job. I just have to pretend it’s great to carry plates, and every now and then I get to make a brilliant suggestion, like ‘Why don’t we have a magazine rack?’ ” Her voice broke on magazine.
The Muzak continued, but whatever song it was was unrecognizable, it had been so denatured. Janine raised a finger, as if she could read my mind and wanted to tell me the song’s title, but of course she was summoning the waiter for the bill.
That night, back in the city, worried about Pru, I spent the night on her couch. The things you discovered when you went on a fact-finding expedition, oblivious to your own self-absorption. Your past; your pain. What I’d found out about was Pru. Who had been right to take me to task when I’d made a self-serving analogy, presenting myself as more helpless than I’d been.
All those years missing Gladys—all those years of missing us—and not long after Roy decided to take another chance, not long after he came back from the pound with a beagle mix, he died. He threw a stick, the dog tore off after it and returned to Roy, who’d fallen to the grass. The neighbor saw it all.
Except for people from the neighborhood, and a few people from the company he’d retired from, except for Roy’s dentist’s assistant, whose bottom lip quivered when she offered her condolences, and Elizabeth Brown, the former boarder, who flew in from Phoenix, everyone at the funeral was male. Nelson’s mother rushed over at the reception afterward to introduce herself. “My Nelson had the best time of his life getting to know the people in your household,” she said. “Roy, and you, and your cousin. Oh, Roy was one in a million. When Nelson wanted to make a film about real people, regular people, I knew just where to send him. I said, ‘Nelson, why wouldn’t you make a film about people in New York City?’ and he said, ‘They don’t make eye contact in New York City. The way that city works is that everybody steers clear of everybody else.’ Well: it sounds funny, but I think maybe he was right. I’ve had a wonderful life in Minneapolis, supported by warm, helpful people, and I’m not so sure decent people do behave that way elsewhere. Such good friends. Such helpful people.”
Someone had put one of Roy’s wreaths on a stand beside the food table. Where a portrait might have sat, there was a large wreath decorated with Roy’s trademark dried berries and silver-sprayed acorns. Even though I wouldn’t look at her, Mrs. Crawford wouldn’t let me go. “Do you know what I thought, when I heard you were coming?” she said. “I thought, you’ve got to show her that picture.” She opened her handbag and removed an over-exposed picture from an envelope. I might have given the photograph only a cursory glance if not for the presence of Gladys in the foreground, costumed in a nurse’s cape, head hung in shame.
“My Nelson!” she said. “He certainly did like that Polar Bear Club. And look here: that’s your uncle.” Indeed it was. A sailor’s hat was tipped on Roy’s head, and he wore the same striped bathing trunks as the others, with the logo of a polar bear’s head at the hem. His hand was draped around the shoulder of the almost faceless young man next to him. Next came Nelson, no sillier than the others i
n his long scarf…no: two scarves, intertwined. It was a black-and-white photograph, but I remembered the colors as being red and pink, and that there had been a time in my life when I’d thought that one of the brashest and most wonderful things I’d ever seen. I also remembered the story of the melting snowman, which we’d been told had been attired in a scarf…. Nelson had e-mailed Renny that he and I should play the strip-poker snowman game, and we had both been scandalized. The final figure in the picture, of course, standing a little apart from the others, was Renny.
She rattled on: “You were your uncle’s favorite. If a man has a fondness for a lady, no one else can come close. My husband, God rest his soul, he passed a year ago, he said to me, ‘Nelson’s my boy, but you’re number one in my life.’ Parents aren’t supposed to say things like that, but it’s true, you know.”
The way the woman was compulsively talking suddenly infuriated me. Did she have any idea what she was saying—did this woman have any idea of anything?
It wasn’t just that I’d been excluded, but that I hadn’t had a clue. How many times had Renny gone swimming with the Polar Bear Club? He’d never mentioned it, ever.
“So—did Nelson ever get a movie made?” I heard myself asking, with a real edge in my voice.
“Oh, yes. He did a film that was shown at Sundance about migratory workers. It was a big success. It upsets me that people don’t keep in touch with their friends. Why did you say your cousin wasn’t at the funeral?”
“Hello!” I called to the dentist’s assistant, whom I’d met before the service began. She was uncomfortable being there, awkward. She looked startled that, having only met me briefly, I was now calling out to her as if she were my dearest friend. “Excuse us,” I muttered, drifting away. The girl looked at me, wide-eyed: we were rudely turning our backs on an old lady.
“This photograph is for you!” Mrs. Crawford called. “Nelson would have been here today, but he’s with a film crew in Nepal.”
“Nepal,” the girl said, letting the word itself transport her.
“You’ll never get there, or anywhere else, if we don’t get away from that woman,” I said, steering her toward a table where there was a punch bowl and food.
“Oh, I’m really sorry…this is the first funeral I’ve ever been to. Dr. Richardson asked me to come because he was out of town. I don’t really know what I should do.”
“Avoid old windbags,” I said.
A man ladling punch extended a glass, pretending he hadn’t heard me.
“If I’d stayed another second, I’d have told her my opinion of her son the filmmaker,” I huffed.
The girl looked at me. She had no idea what the story was, but she picked up on the undercurrent. She said gently, “You’re okay.”
It took me whizzing back to Philadelphia. To Janine’s hand on Pru’s arm. To Pru, crying on the train. I went back in time to the night I’d spent on her couch, and how useless I’d felt, how guilty that what I really wanted was to drift off to sleep…really: What could I do for Pru, after the fact? Then, that summer, the café was sold, and after that she got involved with the soon-to-be-famous sculptor, then discovered he was still secretly seeing his ex-wife. She got a job, but quit after the first day, returning to her apartment and her CDs that had provided the café’s background music; all she would do was lie in bed listening to the sad ones. She knew this was upsetting me, but she wasn’t about to snap out of it because I wanted her to. After a couple of weeks I stopped going there and phoned instead, but things were never the same, and after a while I realized that things had worked out to her satisfaction. If I disappeared, she wouldn’t have to deal with what I knew about her, and she wouldn’t have to feel embarrassed in my presence.
“Are you feeling better?” the girl asked. She held a cup of punch. She took a sip. “I know what that’s like, feeling like you’re cornered,” she said. “Sometimes patients talk and talk and they don’t want to let you go. They tell you all this stuff because they’re really nervous, sitting in the chair.”
She was nice. I could imagine the report she’d make to the dentist about Roy’s niece, who was jumping out of her skin, desperate to get away from some old lady.
Or maybe it wasn’t all that bad for her. She might have felt proud that she’d done what was expected of her, she might go home, kick off her shoes, not think much of anything about where she’d been, how the people—not just me: the people—had been. Gay men. That was who constituted most of the people.
That night in the attic, in Savannah, Renny realized he’d caught me by surprise, but he wouldn’t embarrass me further by letting on. He was adept: the same Renny who’d clicked on e-mails and left, leaving me to consider them in private.
He’d done the same gentlemanly thing in detaching himself from his own life. If it was too late and too unlikely to be one kind of explorer, he’d set off on a different kind of voyage—one that he’d record, then (how true) say that he wasn’t ready for a show. His wife thought that he was photographing dried flowers. She’d mentioned to me that she’d gone upstairs and seen dried flowers from the garden on the worktable. Implied in her statement had been a question that went unanswered, though I came to find out why they were there. As Renny explained to me that night, certain parts were useful for the ship: leaves as miniature hulls; a white anemone petal the perfect sail; aperture stopped down, filter fogged with hair spray.
He’d taken a fantastic trip—no more or less than travelers do every day—but then, no different from many people who have been hurt, he ironized it. “Real” pictures of “real” trips (Nelson: the air-drawn quotation marks around the word typical)…other photographers who’d done something similar had their work in museums: Harvard had faked exploration art in its collection, he’d told me. Before we went downstairs, he’d said, “Do you know who Captain Lawrence E. G. Oates was? Okay—he’s hardly a household name. He was a captain who went on an expedition to the South Pole, and he got frostbite, and he knew he was going to die, and that he’d be a burden to everyone because he wouldn’t die quickly. So he took his leave from the party with what came to be a famous line. At least, a famous line if you’d ever heard the story of Captain Lawrence E. G. Oates. He said, ‘I’m just going out now, and I may be some time.’ ”
A writer’s interest would be in Oates’s thoughts as the snow hit his face. A good writer could make up anything. You’d assume it would involve fear; or Oates might feel a heavy resignation, in contrast to the filmy snow. Something unexpected might happen—something that would shake him from his own resolve and make him laugh on his way to his speeded-up death. Things—whole lives; details—could get clarified, or complicated, which in this case (for once) would amount to the same thing, since there would be the same amount of time to sort things out.
The wind must have been the reality. A paradoxical wind, real and metaphoric (whether Oates wanted it to be or not), that froze his face into a self-indulgent smile, or into a more predictable frown. As long as the writer made it credible, the reader would feel the cold. The wind was in the hands of the writer. It could be the unexpected seepage of air through a skylight into an attic. The swirl of air made by a dog’s tail as she thumped down for sleep. It might also be a totally benign breeze from the pages of a storybook read by a solicitous uncle that would blow the children safely on their way.
“My mother’s picking me up. Would you like to stand outside with me?” the girl said.
Did I do the right thing to shake my head and let her go?
That Last
Odd Day in L.A.
KELLER went back and forth about going into Cambridge to see Lynn, his daughter, for Thanksgiving. If he went in November, he’d miss his niece and nephew, who made the trip back East only in December, for Christmas. They probably could have got away from their jobs and returned for both holidays, but they never did. The family had gathered for Thanksgiving at his daughter’s ever since she moved into her own apartment, which was going on six years now; Chri
stmas dinner was at Keller’s sister’s house, in Arlington. His daughter’s apartment was near Porter Square. She had once lived there with Ray Ceruto, before she decided she was too good for a car mechanic. A nice man, a hard worker, a gentleman—so naturally she chose instead to live in serial monogamy with men Keller found it almost impossible to get along with. Oh, but they had white-collar jobs and white-collar aspirations: with her current boyfriend, she had recently flown to England for all of three days in order to see the white cliffs of Dover. If there had been bluebirds, they had gone unmentioned.
Years ago, Keller’s wife, Sue Anne, had moved back to Roanoke, Virginia, where she now rented a “mother-in-law apartment” from a woman she had gone to school with back in the days when she and Keller were courting. Sue Anne joked that she herself had become a sort of ideal mother-in-law, gardening and taking care of the pets when her friends went away. She was happy to have returned to gardening. During the almost twenty years that she and Keller had been together, their little house in the Boston suburbs, shaded by trees, had allowed for the growth of almost nothing but springtime bulbs, and even those had to be planted in raised beds because the soil was of such poor quality. Eventually, the squirrels discovered the beds. Sue Anne’s breakdown had had to do with the squirrels.
So: call his daughter, or do the more important thing and call his neighbor and travel agent, Sigrid, at Pleasure Travel, to apologize for their recent, rather uneventful dinner at the local Chinese restaurant, which had been interrupted by a thunderstorm grand enough to announce the presence of Charlton Heston, which had reminded Keller that he’d left his windows open. He probably should not have refused to have the food packed to go. But when he’d thought of having her to his house to eat the dinner—his house was a complete mess—or of going to her house and having to deal with her son’s sour disdain, it had seemed easier just to bolt down his food.
