by Ann Beattie
He heard a car pulling into the driveway. Silently, he said: You are coming to see a dead man. You will find him upright and talkative. You will embrace him without hesitation. He will hug you in return. You will go on to do whatever you do with your lives, with a 50 percent chance of divorce. Thirty years from now, when you, too, are old, something sniffed for a second in the breeze will take you back to this moment of your arrival, and you will remember the feel of loose gravel underneath your sandals and the sight of your dead teacher in his doorway, and then the memory will not so much evaporate as flick some little particle into your eye, which will make you wince. That feeling, conventionally called pain, will take you elsewhere, your feet without feeling, your hair unstirred. That somewhere will be the exit ramp or the detour or the alternate route to the rest of your lives, which will also continue to be interrupted by divorce, appendicitis, mice in your basement, and random prosecution by the IRS because of your political beliefs.
Dana, damp-haired, was embracing him from behind. “Jackson!” he called. “And the beautiful Daphne!” He could feel Dana’s head peeking around from behind his sweaty striped shirt. He smiled as the couple approached, but he couldn’t snap out of it. He was dead. She was his devoted life-mate, refreshingly showered and ready for an evening of good discussions and laughter (she’d already made her potato salad with garden sage), yet he was not, as she thought, her personal Velcro, but rather an already unraveled spool of thread. He could feel his spine like a wooden spool, his body hastily reassembled to approximate an ordinary cylinder of thread.
“We’re Mr. and Mrs. Wilburn!” Jackson called. “We eloped!” Of course, he had no sense that he was stepping on every ant on the brick walkway, their feet crushing every sprouting blade of grass, wisteria blossoms sprinkled in their hair like the rice they’d foregone.
“Are you?” he heard Dana squeal.
He turned to look at her, his face too numb for his brain to name its expression. She looked at him quizzically. He’d forgotten that word. When would you ever use it, “quizzically”? He didn’t think, any longer, that he was dead—that had been speculative, a moment’s morbid game—but whatever she saw stilled her so that she seemed like a puppet dangling from lax strings as she was embraced by their visitors. Did they sense the discombobulation, her posture, his inability to make his eyes coordinate with his smile? Too many questions! The way to proceed was not to pose them, even silently. If they’d trained him in anything, they’d trained him in this. So what exactly had shattered that nugget of certainty inside him? The lobster’s banded claw had knocked against his knuckle, advantage Henry, and without even seeing it, because of course it was only a split-second’s feeling, the lobster was in the bag . . . but touch had become recognition, and the hard thing, the resolve, the sure thing, had crumbled like an oyster cracker, expected to remain crisp in spite of being floated in soup. In the soup, he thought wryly.
“We have to go on a tour of the house and find you the most wonderful wedding present,” Dana was saying. Beside him, Jackson was smiling tentatively. Anything would do if he could only form the words. “Old bean!” he said, and to his great relief Jackson laughed instantly, clapped him on the back, and that was enough to mobilize him, several paces behind the giggling women with their arms around each other’s waists. “You never know,” he heard himself saying to Jackson, who smiled broadly, thinking he’d gotten Henry’s drift, or that he’d missed the beginning of the sentence. The comment had come out with a tone of complete goodwill. He was very relieved to know that was so. He smiled at Jackson.
In the kitchen, Henry’s great-aunt’s silver ice bucket was thrust into Daphne’s arms. Oh, she would hold so many more precious things, but in this moment the heavy, dented ice bucket totally mesmerized her. They had only three chairs in their apartment in McLean! Protests, counterarguments, “You never know!” he heard himself exploding again, like some bizarre grenade configured to blow up twice. This time Jackson smiled with a little more reserve, but when their eyes met—thank God, that worked—Jackson’s eyes widened, and unless Henry was wrong, he almost, though not quite, clapped him on the back again, each realizing at the last second that two such moments would be too much.
* * *
The boiled lobster was lifted with big tongs from its salted water, put into deep soup bowls, their rims decorated with tiny crosshatching that looked disconcertingly like barbed wire. Lights that shone on the garden, dimly or well, depending on the day’s absorption of sunlight, bordered the porch. Medium tonight, but enough to illuminate the rubrum lilies and the almost-blackened purple flower cones of the butterfly bush. “Don’t let me,” Henry heard himself saying. As all heads turned toward him, he continued this already begun sentence: “Don’t let me fail to raise a glass, if these so-called flutes can be considered a proper glass, rather than a musical instrument best tapped by the beaks of songbirds. Anyway: I raise a toast to the happiness of our friends Jackson and Daphne, and wish them good luck. May they always be as happy as they are tonight. We share in your joy,” he said. It was such a classy toast, Dana looked at him with admiration. He coordinated his eyes with his smile and was so effective that she put her hand in his.
“Tell us how you do it. What’s the secret to a long and happy marriage, since pretty much no one has one anymore?” Daphne said.
“Oh, Daphne, you can just transform yourself into a tree if there’s ever a bad moment. Just disguise yourself and wait it out, isn’t that what Henry would say? Stand still and just be someone or something else, and then the earth will rotate on its axis and everything will come around and be all right again,” Dana said.
Daphne frowned. “No. I’m serious,” she said.
“Oh, I am, too,” Dana said, smoothing Daphne’s hair. “Forgive me for playing on your name, which is as beautiful as you are, and not only because of your looks. Just don’t be angry, wait things out; remember that stillness, like meditation, can give you those few moments to ride something out, during which time you’re sure to remember you really love the other person.”
“That’s amazing!” Daphne said.
“Are you guys being serious?” Jackson said. “You’re bound to disagree, but it’s kind of a waiting game or something?”
“What do you want to do, say something you’ll regret or don’t even half believe?”
“Oh. Okay. You mean it,” Jackson said. “Sorry. It just sounded so practical that—well, I’m only digging myself in deeper. Thank you for the good advice. I’ll try to remember it.”
“And try not to be solemn,” Henry added. “It’s always right there, because we’re serious people, but though we might seriously disagree from time to time, solemnity is the enemy of compromise.”
“Henry—are you serious?” Jackson said. He looked at Henry across the table, over the bowl mounded high with lobster carcasses, butter thickly gelled in everyone’s little individual dishes that surrounded the big aluminum bowl like devotional candles flickering around the pedestal of a saint. The hurricane globe allowed the candle to burn evenly. It was now half gone.
“I was imagining myself dead,” Henry said.
A rabbit. A rabbit dashed across the lawn.
“What did you say?” Daphne asked after a few moments had elapsed in silence.
“Purely speculative. If I could speak to my two dear young friends from beyond life itself, should I mind that my advice is conventional and think that because of that, because they’re so intelligent, both of them, they can’t hear it? No, in answer to my own question. Go ahead and tell them that disagreements aren’t the end of the world, and that sometimes the less said, the better.”
In his peripheral vision, Dana nodded. He was aware that Jackson’s knee touched Daphne’s beneath the table, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps not.
“We’re so happy for you,” Dana said in her usual calm, sincere voice. “Sudden marriages always come as a surprise, of course. But in this case, an excellent surprise.” She drained t
he last of her prosecco. “I hate to think what’s happened to their plane,” she said, looking at her watch. “We can always just leave the door unlocked.”
“I’ll wait up,” Jackson said. “I want to tell Benoit and Cara.”
“And I will wait with you. Which means that we’re hinting that the women clear the table,” Henry said.
“He’s hinting. But I happen to know there’s one more bottle of prosecco, and if you carry a couple of plates into the kitchen with me, we can open it,” Dana said to Daphne.
Henry looked at her approvingly. He was her second husband. What had happened to her first husband was terrible and never discussed. Of course, if the man hadn’t died, Henry would not be married to Dana. Had he ever mentioned any of that to Jackson? Probably not, since he rarely brought it up, even the fact that she’d been married before.
Dana, in her cropped pants and blue gauzy top, and Daphne, in her summer dress that looked like marbleized paper, walked barefoot into the kitchen. They did not return for the other plates. The candle flickered and went out.
“Are there matches?” Jackson finally said.
“Are you following in my footsteps?” Henry said. “The screens don’t have ears. Neither do the petunias. That’s why we summer in Maine.”
Jackson knitted his brow. He reached beyond the pepper grinder and picked up a book of matches, removed the hurricane globe, set it aside, struck a match, lit the candle, replaced the globe. “As you’ve said, one doesn’t say,” Jackson replied.
Henry nodded. His heart had just taken a complete, speeded-up roller-coaster ride. By saying so little, he’d taught Jackson very well. Good boy. So this was a celebratory night in other major ways as well. Jackson would live a long time until he, too, unexpectedly died, like any other soldier who always knew the risk, in theory, but who had to believe he’d be the exception. One day he’d also be driving down Route 1 with a bag on the floor, and he would start to die. By that time, there might be monorails instead of highways, they’d been around forever, but with the exploding population, they might be quickly built to transport people, carrying their groceries, carrying out their routines. Or people might have little rockets on their ankles, like spurs, that would move them through the universe, allow them to zoom into black holes (fatally attractive) and out again. Whatever was coming was coming. But the human brain, so far, hadn’t been co-opted. You couldn’t lie to it, though it could still lie to you. Things might very well change in the future, in the days before global warming fried the planet: Men might be kinder to other men; Mussolini might be resurrected to do his much discussed routine of making the trains arrive on time; but at this odd limbo moment, this bend-backward-and-shimmy-under-the-pole limbo moment, with porch lights glowing and solar spotlights allowing the stamens of flowers to puncture the night like so many silent tongues, he and Jackson were just two men—you know, any two men—passing time on the back porch.
THE DEBT
The plane landed in Fort Lauderdale, and Dick and Royce (Royal) were picked up by a pretty young woman wearing a tank top, shorts, and silver antlers and driven to Hertz. Royal’s brother, Brandt, arranged such things—or his secretary, Jacki, did (“Bag claim F. Laud surprise,” she’d texted). When things like the Lexus Reindeer unexpectedly appeared, the secretary knew it made Royal’s day. It took his friends—it took him—a short while to sort it out: Jacki’s kindness, perfectly paired with her taste for the absurd.
“Donna,” the reindeer said when Dick asked her name. Their bags, one each, were in the trunk. When she’d hopped out of the silver Lexus, they’d both been impressed with her extremely short shorts.
“Donner? Your name’s Donner, and you’ve got a friend named Blitzen?” Royal teased.
“Donner?” she said. “Like that guy that got everybody stuck out on the ice?”
He cocked his head and wondered whether she was kidding.
She fumbled a piece of paper out of her pocket and read: “ ‘My bro the traveler have a good rest / Enjoy those breezes, partake of life’s zest / When reindeer depart, you still have your bro / And his goodwill forever, I’m sure you know.’ ” She smiled and hopped back in the car.
“Thank you,” he said as seriously as he would have thanked a mourner at a funeral. “Thank you very much, Donna.”
It had not always been a pleasure for Royal to be Brandt’s brother. Brainy Brandt, a lush in his teens, now a teetotaler: jogged five miles minimum, daily, in Central Park before work. Lived in a penthouse rented from some Saudi’s daughter, and one wall of the bathroom was a waterfall. Brandt had changed when his high school sweetheart left him fifteen years before, after a year of marriage. His best friend was English—a former boyfriend of the late Princess Di. Brandt spent a couple of weeks every couple of months in London, playing polo and seeing plays, and said repeatedly that friendship was all that mattered; he’d never marry again. He and Royal talked on the phone every few weeks. In Royal’s opinion, Brandt became kinder every year—so much so that Royal wondered if he took notes during their calls, or whether he taped them and just gave the recording to his secretary, who understood she should do anything possible to facilitate . . . well, to call in the reindeer, if that was what she thought best.
Royal drove. Dick slid the passenger seat all the way back, tugged the brim of his cap toward his nose. On the radio, Elvis was dreaming of a blue Christmas. But Elvis wasn’t alive, and now, when the tourist ladies went weeping to Graceland, their faces were more immobile every year, their ages increasing along with the number of Botox injections. He wondered if Graceland were decorated, if there were a Christmas tree to enthrall the people touring the low-ceilinged rooms as they stared solemnly at the pool-table deity. What strange creatures their generation’s gods had turned out to be.
They stopped for a microbrew at Second Sunset, a bar that overlooked the channel, with a thatched roof and seagulls walking the rails like prissy prison guards. “We’re outta Gotham, man,” Dick said, locking thumbs with his buddy. By which, of course, he meant New York City. He was proud of himself for having found cheap flights to Florida that landed in Fort Lauderdale, adding a little time to the trip but allowing them to avoid the usual hectic, expensive Miami mess, and to save half the price of a ticket.
The bartender was bare-chested, wearing a leather vest. His head was shaved. He wore jeans with holes here and there, like stars that didn’t quite fit the celestial grid. A gold chain necklace dangling a shell. Gay or just a Florida dude? Hard to tell in the Keys. No earring. Maybe straight. Especially if the holes in his jeans hadn’t been frayed with a razor. A few seats down, on barstools, two women talked animatedly about the size of the rats outside some restaurant. Neither seemed at all squeamish; it was more like talk about “the one that got away.” The fatter woman kept flexing her foot, slapping her sandal against her heel. As Royal watched, trying not to appear to be looking, a muscular arm pushed something past his peripheral vision: a shot of tequila each, “on the house.” Did that mean they didn’t look like tourists, that the bartender thought they might come back? If so, did that make the bartender straight, a guy who bonded with his bros, or gay, thinking about how the night might go? Dick left a big tip.
“Good luck with the holidays!” the bartender called before he even saw the amount of the tip. “Good luck with the holidays”? No clue about his sexuality there.
About five-thirty, as the sky was lightening to pink and clouds were darkening to gray, Royal pulled into the breakdown lane and checked the MapQuest directions. “We’re a mile away,” he said to Dick, but Dick was sleeping. “You think the bartender was gay?” he asked, testing. No answer. “Would you sleep through the night if some cop didn’t pull up and hassle us, do you think, sitting there like a ventriloquist’s dummy playing I’m a Tourist in Florida?”
Dick’s lips parted stickily. He touched the rim of his cap. He said, “You’ve always got to give yourself the most important role, notice that? You’re Edgar Bergen, I’m Charlie
McCarthy. If you’re so smart, why don’t you know whether the guy was gay?”
They were headed for Kegan’s house, empty of Kegan’s longtime girlfriend, Sarah, though her daughter, Belle, who was either Kegan’s child or wasn’t, still lived there with him. She spent all her time on her Mac, writing and revising personal statements to apply to colleges, though college was three years away, if she could get a scholarship or some sort of financial aid. Sarah and her new boyfriend (an absolute jackass who signed his name “Second Papa” in the letters he and Sarah wrote Belle, Kegan had complained to Royal) sent money to the girl every month; how much, Kegan didn’t know, because Belle had informed him that this was “a personal question.” Belle, who’d inherited Kegan’s distrust of banks, had bought a safe he’d grudgingly bolted into the floor of her closet, joking that the termites would take it down in a matter of months no matter what he did.
“Say wha?” Dick said, leaning forward to lower the radio volume while simultaneously listening to Royal’s rather long paraphrase of the situation they’d be walking into. Dick’s lips were chapped from winter. His nostrils looked like wood that had been sanded down, the result of a recent cold. “She’s practicing writing personal statements? What the hell are personal statements?”
