The Doctor's House

by Ann Beattie

  I didn’t leave my house at all the next day, and the few times I could focus on my work, I was thankful to be involved in something that distracted me from the neighbors’ problems. I screened calls and did not pick up when I heard Angie’s friendly voice, wanting to know when I planned to come to New York. The only other call, all day, was from a David Scolkowski, whose name meant nothing to me, though by the time he’d finished leaving his message, I realized he must have been the man on the lawn.

  Things were not back to normal, because after something like that, things never entirely return to normal, but my problems had been put in perspective. I was glad Henry didn’t call, because the aftereffect of my talk with Kate had been my realization that I’d gotten too involved in their lives. It was still hard for me to believe that Andrew had done what he’d done, and that Henry had decided to find a way to make it acceptable. I sat in a chair, looking blankly toward the bedroom as if time had stopped, and Justin and I were still back there, in bed asleep. My thought was: What if I were still a young woman—what if I was Mary Catherine, with a husband and a little boy—and suddenly my life was threatened? A tiny corner of my brain had sometimes envied her, the same way Henry’s wife said she had been intimidated by me: Mary Catherine, out in her running clothes, dashing off with her long legs, or leaving her son at my house before she and her husband disappeared Chagall-like, in evening clothes, off to some benefit or ball. I wasn’t alone in trying on other people’s lives for size, but I had let the game depress me too many times, unwilling to admit that the lady in the fancy clothes could be suffering menstrual cramps, or at wit’s end becauseher dashing husband threw his underwear all over the floor, as Mary Catherine had confided in me Jack often did.

  I didn’t know what kind of life Mac and I would have had, because he’d died not long after we began. Of course, all I could do was imagine it. At our wedding reception, Bonnie Daley, a woman I’m no longer in touch with, had caught the bouquet. Andrew had flirted with her: he had tried to get the flowers. One of my strongest memories of my wedding was of my brother’s wide smile, and Bonnie Daley’s sparkling eyes. Had they gotten together? Knowing Andrew, they probably had. In those days, he didn’t tell me about women he went out with. When I was married to Mac, he talked only to Mac; I wouldn’t have known that, though, if Mac hadn’t said to me that he was flattered by my brother’s confidences. I had felt left out, then; through the years, it made me even sadder to be Mac’s permanent stand-in. My other memory of the wedding—a regret, more than memory—was about my wedding dress, which my mother said she would take to the dry cleaner to have cleaned and boxed. It was ruined when she decided, instead, to clean it herself, and scorched it with an iron.

  The night Mary Catherine returned from the hospital, when I was deep into self-pity because it had stirred up so many painful memories, I got a call from Jim Burnham, Angie’s ex-husband, who had pushed *69 and found out who hadn’t left a message. When I answered, he greeted me by name, so obviously Angie had also sent him my phone number, and told him to call me. He had a nice voice. An unfamiliar but nice voice, which was not something I often heard. Also, since he did not know Andrew, my brother would notbe a topic of conversation. That alone was a good enough reason to talk to him.

  We discussed his move to Boston, and then he invited me to a screening. He suggested that afterward we might go out to dinner. I liked that idea. Whatever happened would be a new experience, not fallout from an old experience, or information from my friend’s wife, filling me in on things I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. It was also unlikely that when I was with him, there would be any crisis in the middle of the . . . okay: I was going to call it that . . .date. I said yes. I agreed to see him two nights later. The screening was being held at the Brattle. He offered to pick me up, but I pretended that I would be busy until the last minute and said that I would meet him there. I did not get my hair done or buy new clothes or obsess about the evening to come. I did get a manicure. That was it. I wore black pants and a gray cashmere sweater. At first I had put on a black turtleneck, but that made it seem as if I was still in mourning for Mac. I took that off and got another sweater out of the closet. I felt awkward, unattractive, and greatly lacking in confidence.

  Jim was standing outside the theater, looking closely at the faces of people walking by as if he knew what I looked like. All that I’d told him, jokingly, was that I would be the woman wearing an autumn leaf. There were plenty of leaves underfoot, though my jacket sported only a small rhinestone songbird on a branch. Since he was the only person searching the crowd, our eyes connected quickly. I gave a tentative wave, and he rose up a little on his toes, returning the wave. Jim Burnham was not a large man, as I’d imagined from hearing his name. He was about my height, dressed elegantlyin a long black coat. He was probably sixty. A very attractive girl stood at his side. I tried not to look surprised. I tried to appear unthreatened by the presence of the girl, whom he introduced as his daughter. She, too, was meeting someone and going to the screening.

  Jim had a sincere smile, and the manners of an older generation. He cupped his hand under my elbow and began explaining his relationship to the filmmaker as we walked. Both had gone to RISD in the fifties, though Jim had dropped out and gone to Yale. Jim was preoccupied with the fact that he should have met me at my house; twice, he said that not picking me up just hadn’t seemed right to him.

  The first person to say hello to me inside the theater was Sue McCamber, sitting with a man who turned out to be her husband. I was happy to see her, though at first it had caused me a moment’s panic that Andrew might be there. “This is Nina, the sister of a man I used to date,” she said to her husband. “She was my son’s favorite baby-sitter of all time.” She smiled, exaggerating my beneficence. “He had such good times at your house,” she said. She had cut her hair and looked more businesslike; also, she was wearing a suit.Good, I thought.Good that you got away from Andrew.

  Jim and I moved away, toward the front, close to the screen, where there were still seats. A young woman in a sparkly minidress handed out photocopied pieces of paper, which turned out to be the filmmaker’s ideal review of the film, which he had written himself as a joke. There was much laughter as people caught on.

  “Is this a very Cambridge evening?” Jim said quietly, helping me off with my coat.

  “I’ve never been to a screening here,” I said. Actually, I had never been to a screening.

  “Who was that woman you said hello to, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “A woman my brother didn’t manage to ruin,” I said. It just slipped out.

  The lights were dimmed, then extinguished. The film began. The night before, I had been so anxious and afraid, and tonight, sitting next to this man, I was pleasantly excited. I looked at my hands. The nail polish shone in the dark, ever so slightly. I guessed that Jim would not take my hand, and he did not. When the movie ended, though, and we were applauding, the shoulder of his jacket touched mine, and there was a little jolt that took me back to adolescence.

  He had made reservations for dinner at Harvest. Harvest was not the sort of place you’d go alone for dinner, so I rarely went there. It seemed to glimmer with sound: muted conversations and the clink of glasses placed on shiny trays. It seemed surreal, in juxtaposition to the events of two nights before. I waited for him to order a scotch on the rocks. He ordered an Amstel. I planned to order a glass of wine. I ordered a Bloody Mary.

  Jim talked about his daughter, who was getting a degree in architecture. We talked about Boston architecture we liked: I. M. Pei; H. H. Richardson. He asked about my work and I told him I enjoyed the freedom of being freelance. It seemed a good way to bring up Angie’s name. I said that I was grateful she sent interesting jobs my way. “I can’t remember. Did you and she work together in New York?” he said. I told him that we were, as I put it, “phone pals.” Hesmiled. He said that he could see that working at home would have its advantages, but that every time he’d done it,
he’d gained weight. He quickly added that I had a lovely figure. Then his face clouded. I could see that he thought it was a mistake to have mentioned my body.

  We sipped our drinks immediately when they came. He did not—I was happy to see—offer a toast to anything.

  Before our dinner arrived, he told me about the man he called “the mad genius,” the twenty-six-year-old CEO of his ad agency, and I told him, sketchily, that two nights before had been pretty distressing at my house.

  We did not stumble and bumble. We had a good dinner, after which—barely arrived in Cambridge or not—he gave the waiter his business card and asked him to see if the chef could come to our table. When the chef came out of the kitchen, he broke into a big smile, as Jim jumped up to shake his hand.

  “How is—”

  “Fabulous,” I said, smiling at my almost empty plate.

  “I had the sea bass, which was spectacular,” Jim said.

  “Good choices,” the chef said. “But what is this that you didn’t let me know you were coming? I can at least send over an after-dinner drink.”

  The whole evening was so unusual, sopleasant, that I stopped thinking of “pleasant” as a dismissive word. Back home, I wondered if it had all happened. It was the sort of evening many people had much of the time, but it was not the sort of evening I ever had.

  Henry called to say that he’d found someone to sublet the condo in Arlington. He and Kate were going to give itanother try, but he was hedging his bets, holding on to his new place. I half hoped he’d want to make plans to get together, but he was only calling for corroboration that he was doing the right thing in moving back in with Kate.

  As I was exiting Widener a few days later, Jim’s daughter greeted me warmly as we crossed paths near the entrance. It took a second for me to remember who she was. Did I pick up a change in her expression that might mean she wanted to say something else, beyond our too polite banter, or was I imagining it, wanting to think there was more to tell me? My life in Andrew’s orbit had made me always poised to hear something important—at least, important to someone else. I thought that might be why I hung on Jim’s daughter’s words, though we had nothing much to say after exchanging our reactions to the film. I knew enough not to linger, so she wouldn’t report to her father that I’d acted strange.

  Mary Catherine often came over in the afternoon for tea. In September Justin had started preschool. She told me that sometimes she got frightened in the late afternoon, when the light began to fade. Jack had also mentioned that to me privately, so I had gotten into the habit of calling to ask her to drop by. In spite of the fact that we’d been neighbors for years, I knew her son better than I knew her. Having people in—having any routine—was something I resisted, but I couldn’t stand to think of her in her house feeling sad. I had mentioned the screening to her, and the dinner afterward.

  “Do you think I should invite him over? Take the initiative? Popcorn and a movie on the VCR—that sort of thing?” I said.

  “The world hasn’t changed as much as you might imagineduring your retreat,” she said, with no hesitation. “Wait until the guy calls you.”

  He did not call. Andrew appeared on my doorstep—my wet doorstep, muddied with leaves and shoe scrapings—about seven o’clock one night, almost two months after I’d last seen him. Nothing he could have said would have made me want to let him in—I’d rehearsed what I’d do if he arrived as he did, but face-to-face I could remember none of the lines I’d come up with.

  He didn’t say anything. He just stood there, looking older, needing a haircut. He had a black eye. He thought that when I took a step backward I was inviting him in.

  Chopin’s Nocturnes was on the tape deck, and I was baking myself a chicken dinner. I had just gotten off the phone, still needing more details for the interminable piece on alternate forms of travel that had been turned back by the senior editor at Angie’s magazine. Earlier, I had spoken to a woman who had ridden five hundred miles on a camel. These situations were so odd that they made the world seem discordant. Out my window were the leafless trees, the small, muddy yard—the scene of so much unhappiness—that separated my house from the neighbors’.

  Andrew looked around as if the place was unfamiliar. The chairs—perhaps that was what it was. Or had the house itself been tinged by the crisis next door? That could happen to places: a memory sometimes hovered, as if something that had transpired within had taken shape to haunt you the way a restless ghost would.

  Of course, under the microscope even dust has life.

  He went to the coatrack and hung up his coat. He was wearing a blue sweater and jeans. He had on cowboy boots, which struck me as ludicrous, like a tourist coming back from Mexico with Kahlúa and an enormous sombrero. So he’d been out west, playing cowboy. I went to the sofa and sat down, pulling the robe I’d thrown on the back of the sofa earlier over my legs. I hadn’t yet started a fire, and the house was drafty. I did not feel it necessary to avoid meeting his eyes. The tightness of my mouth must have told him I was perturbed.

  He sat in one of the chairs and looked over his shoulder in the direction of the kitchen, raised his eyebrows, and rubbed his stomach. Then he pointed his finger at his chest.

  I pantomimed a gracious gesture of receptivity to the idea: You show up after all this time and want a chicken dinner? Why not.

  He patted the skin beneath his eye. A nasty bruise.

  He dropped his hands in his lap, his mute show-and-tell session apparently concluded.

  I slid a bit lower on the sofa and closed my eyes, as he had. I did very much enjoy Chopin. I felt an almost numbing reluctance to say anything, because whatever I said would cast me in a role I didn’t want. To my surprise, though, now that he was in the room, I felt less rancor toward him than I would have thought.

  He said: “To begin with, I’m sorry.”

  I turned my head in his direction.

  “Come on,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”

  When he said nothing else, I gestured to my own eye.

  “She decked me,” he said.

  I had guessed that, but I hadn’t been sure.

  “I learned a lesson, if you’re willing to believe me. I was in way over my head. She stopped taking her medicine.”

  “Wasn’t that the problem with Miriam, too?” I said.

  He frowned. “I wasn’t dating Miriam,” he said. “What? You think I’m attracted to loonies? Is that your point?” He stood up. “Being judged by you isn’t one of my favorite things,” he said.

  “Forget being the invincible older brother,” I said. “We both grew up.”

  “Is that what you think? I’m upset by the way you’re acting, so I must want your approval, don’t you think, Nina?” He got up and grabbed a potholder and inspected the chicken, bending to look into the oven for a long time. “It’s okay,” he said. “Chicken’s okay, even if your brother isn’t.”

  “Andrew,” I said, offended that he thought all I cared about was sitting in judgment of him, “how about not telling me the story. How about the two of us having dinner and listening to this tape, and maybe you’d want to make a fire.”

  “Sure,” he said. Dejectedly. Then he asked: “Is that because you have no curiosity?”

  “I have no curiosity,” I said, trying it on for size. The truth was, I didn’t have much.

  “I should have listened to you,” he said. “One thing I realized coming back was that it was wrong of me to think that running away would be a harmless form of entertainment. She knows karate, it turns out. And when she goes off her meds, her favorite sport—along with real paranoia about men—is the first thing that comes to mind.”

  “Andrew,” I said, “that’s talking about it. I was suggesting—I was quite seriously suggesting—nottalking about it. I have a life. This place is not one big confessional. I was about to have dinner and quietly spend an evening listening to music. Do you getthat?”

  “Yeah. Sure. No. I understand,” he said.

/>   I got up and brushed past him, going into the kitchen to check the chicken myself. I was so angry, my hands were trembling. I opened the oven door carefully and pierced the breast with a fork. The juice was clear. I closed the oven and took out two plates and a carving platter. I pushed my papers to the far end of the table.

  “Can I help?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, walking away from the drawer I’d just pulled open. “You can set the table.” I went to the wine rack and took out a bottle of wine. I couldn’t bring myself to ask him what he’d like to drink, I so little wanted him as a dinner guest. I knew that I should calm down, but I was furious that he’d pulled an Andrew and then come back, expecting sympathy. I opened the refrigerator and set out a liter of water. Let him have water or wine—whichever he wanted. I put out two place mats and put two tumblers on them. He picked up the silverware he’d put directly on the table and put it down again on the place mats.

  “What’s going on with Hound and his wife?” he said.

  “He isn’t called Hound anymore. His shrink pointed out to him that that was something you’d call a dog.”

  He gave a snort. “How are the two of them doing?” he said.

  “Did you care this much about the state of their marriage before you screwed his wife?” I said.

  There was a long, silent pause. “He told you that?” he said.

  “She did.”

  “How did she happen to tell you that?”

  “By coming over to my house and telling me. That’s what women do if I’m not meeting them for coffee. They come to me, if I don’t go to them. They want you back, or they want you obliterated from their memory, or whatever it is they want. They just call me and talk to me, as if I have any control over you. As if I have any insight. I should stop talking to them entirely, except that they’d probably beat down my door, you leave them so miserably unhappy.”

  He maneuvered himself into the chair. “I’m going to have a very difficult time getting back into your good graces, I can tell,” he said. He rested his head in the palm of his right hand, elbow on the table. He said nothing, shoulders slumped. “I called that shrink Serena and I used to see,” he finally said. “I called him on the way back from the airport.”