by Ann Beattie
Andrew was talking to me. “Listen—” He lowered his voice. “I’ll call back in ten minutes, okay?”
“No, it’s not. Andrew, this is important. She—” I knew I had to say something, or he would hang up. I heard my voice, shakily saying, “She had a baby.”
“What’s so surprising about—ooooh, I get it. You think it’s mine. You think I’m Mick Jagger. She was pregnant when I slept with her, Sherlock.”
The phone toppled from the table and I knelt on the rug, still holding the receiver to my ear. A glass filled with pens had toppled with it. Pickup sticks, I thought: pens facing every which way. The rule of pickup sticks was that when you picked them up, no stick could move any other.
“You slept with her,” I repeated.
“I did. As part of my compulsion.”
“I have very bad news,” I said. “I had lunch with Mrs. M today. Alice’s mother.”
“You had lunch with Alice Manzetti’smother? You’re putting me on!”
“Andrew, please,” I said. Then I could not think what I wanted him to please do. “She told me she was HIV positive,” I said.
“Alice Manzetti’s mother?”
“No. Patty Arthur. Jesus, Andrew. Patty. And she disappeared.”
There was a long pause. “That can’t be true,” he said.
“Why can’t it?”
“Because she . . . there’s some mix-up. Look: she’s sort of a pothead. She wasn’t—”
“Andrew, she wrote her husband a note. She abandoned the baby.”
“There’s some mix-up,” he said. “I know Patty.”
“What if youdon’tknow Patty?” I said. “Call Josie, Andrew. She’s the one who told Alice.”
“Let me close the door,” he said. I could envision him walking the length of his office. He was still alive. Walking. Even if he had slept with her, that didn’t mean he’d caught the virus. It was the first reassuring thought I’d had.
“Can you call Josie?” he said, when he came back. He sounded perturbed, as if he was only indulging me, until he spoke again, and I heard his voice crack. “Will you do that? Let’s try to sort this out, okay?”
“Why don’tyoucall Josie? You slept with her. Call her yourself.”
“For your information, we didn’t have sex. I haven’t touched her since high school. It was a harmless get-together, but she’s married to such a tyrant she had to see me behind his back.”
When he spoke again, his voice was more serious. “All I know is that Josie lives somewhere in Connecticut,” he said.
“She lives in Fairfield. Her married name is Epping. E-p-pi-n-g. Your memory was so good that you even told me whatpetsshe has, Andrew.”
“Why are you yelling at me? She told me she had twin girls and twin kittens. What of it?”
“You weren’t there?”
“No. I saw her in Brattleboro, when she’d gone to visit her aunt.”
“You got together with her in Vermont? You’ll do anything, you’ll go anywhere to screw these girls. They’re all desperate, and they’ll all get involved with you. And it might have gotten you in very, very bad trouble.”
“Nina—get a grip,” he said.
He seemed almost superrational, considering the news. What was he trying to prove? That I was the prudish, hysterical female? That he was the wise older brother? What did he think—that assuming those roles, you could bully death?
“IknowPatty Arthur,” he said. “She isn’t a deceptive person.”
By the time I got the letter from Eugenia Manzetti, Andrew had spoken to Josie and had been proven right: it was not Patty who had tested positive, but her husband. Everything else, though, was true: she had left the baby with a sitter and never returned; she had written a note to her husband, saying that it was over between them. Six days later she had been found dead in a New York City hotel room. Apparently she had not been married to the man she called her husband. At the autopsy, multiple drugs were present in Patty Arthur’s body, but there was no sign of HIV.I am sorry I relayed vicious gossip about a person who obviously had enough problems, Mrs. M wrote.I suppose there is always a tendency to wantto place blame in these situations, and I am inclined to say that the man she lived with should have noticed if she was depressed and needed help, but he certainly had problems of his own, so for all I know he did what he could, she wrote.She is not a person whose mind can be fathomed, if she left her own child in that situation. I hope in the future to write to you about something other than tragedy, but because I realize bad news does not always travel fast—and that bad news can be wrong in its specifics—I needed to write to give this sad topic closure.
Bad news can be wrong in its specifics; that was almost as good asYou fill in. Awake at night, my insomniac memories were almost always about how much Patty had wanted to go to Morocco. If there was a heaven—which I didn’t believe—she might be there, drinking strong Moroccan coffee, lazing in bed, propped against an enormous collection of pillows, waiting for her life to begin. As she had been that day, though none of us would have made an analogy between those odd surroundings and heaven. The pound cake—the ordinary, yet exceptional cake she lied about and then confessed to having baked herself—that had been heavenly, though of course it had nothing to do with heaven.
I was so sorry that I told you so abruptly about Patty’s disappearance,Eugenia Manzetti wrote, at the end of her note.The death of another is always a lesson to all of us that we should value this world while we can, for life’s but a fleeting shadow, as Shakespeare wrote. I am moved to say that you have capacities you have not yet experienced, and if you will forgive unwanted advice from an old woman, petty quarrels, such as you are having with your brother,will only sidetrack you from the most important matter of all: that of recognizing, and expressing, love.
It was quite the note. But when it became flowery, it reminded me of the many sympathy notes I had received after Mac’s death. I read it through once and put it aside. It was not until several evenings later that I picked it up again, to show it to Mary Catherine, and that same night to Kate, when she stopped by to apologize for intruding in my life with what she called her “quandaries,” bringing a bottle of wine I knew she wished I would invite her in to drink.
So we did that: Kate and I had a glass of wine, and she filled me in on Henry’s move back to the house, her son’s joy, her own confusion. “She writes eloquently,” Kate said, handing it back to me. “She must think very highly of you to write such a message.” By now, she had settled herself in my house comfortably, curling onto the sofa. If I wanted a new friend, Kate seemed willing to be that.
“It’s not going to work, I can already tell,” she said, by complete non sequitur. Except that nothing is a non sequitur to the teller, if that is the thing they’ve come to say.
Why refute her? If that was what she thought, she knew more about her relationship with her husband than I did. I said: “At least you tried.”
“You don’t seem surprised. I suppose you saw it more clearly than I did.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen, Kate,” I said. “I’m just accepting what you say.”
She looked around the room. “When something like this happens, does it—I shouldn’t ask, but when someone close to you dies, it must bring up all the emotion about yourhusband’sdeath, doesn’t it? I know that when my uncle died, it made me think about my mother’s death all over again.”
“Death dominoes,” I said. Most times, she was right—all too many things took me back, consequential and inconsequential—but this time I had been so overwhelmed with worry about my brother that I had never really dwelt on Patty Arthur’s actual death. Instead of thinking of her as a grown woman, in the present, I had frozen her in time as a yearning adolescent, masquerading as a grown-up. I hadn’t been so intelligent, as Eugenia had suggested. I was only shy and withdrawn, so I made books my friends as a way to hide my nervousness, while Patty had been both a pretender and the real thing. She aspired to something
—even if that thing, that state, was a young girl’s fantasy.
I thought about the whole issue of Andrew’s looking people-up. A big part of it was sex—he wasn’t going to make me think otherwise—but he could have had sex with anyone.Didhave sex with many women he hadn’t gone to high school with. It seemed more likely—it was an idea Serena had first planted in my mind—that in trying to reconnect, he’d been trying to work his way back to something. Bodies held history. You didn’t exactly have a relationship with someone you’d known in your youth and rediscover the past; but in the script, so to speak—in words that might be spoken—or in deeper feelings that might register inadvertently, in spite of what was said, I thought it was possible that having sex with them was an attempt to arrive again at that point where your desire was so obvious, you didn’t need to articulate anything. Our childhood remained puzzling, but also preoccupying. What to make of those years? Though wesurvived them, it would have been likely we’d become alcoholics ourselves. Violent people. I continued to think about it long after Kate had hugged me and left. There were so many unknowns; there had been so many mysterious incidents between our mismatched, loudly and silently warring parents that we’d never know why they stayed together.
It seemed clear that our father and mother did not love each other, but had they had anything else, in place of love? Their lives couldn’t have been only the crises or the standoffs Andrew and I remembered. Their marriage had seemed not so much like a battle as the day of defeat after the battle was lost. We had kept out of their way—not that our father was often present—but we had developed the habit of coming in the back door instead of the front, of not even flushing the toilet, so as not to draw attention to where we were. My mother called us piggies, but we had our own, private reasons for the things we did. What had we learned, growing up in the house of Dr. X? Craftiness. Deception. To pretend that things that were happening were not happening. How to make an end run around them: Andrew practicing signing their names on our report cards; neither of us passing on information about events at school. She would have come drunk, and he would have put his patients first and not come at all—a situation that was inevitable with doctors, though I had heard too many rumors about the mothers he fooled around with to believe that he was ministering to anyone but himself. Patty Arthur had not been the only girl who’d been taunted in her youth because of things that had happened to a parent. Why was it that the girls were taunted, but never the boys? Because it was assumed that boys were separate, that girls were bound totheir parents in a way boys were not. If anyone confronted Andrew about our father’s womanizing it was always another boy, and the questions or revelations were delivered with barely disguised admiration. And our mother? Boys did not talk about other boys’ mothers. Ever. Neither did girls—except that I knew they gossiped behind my back, and worse yet, that some of them pitied me.
At home, we were meek when we were not lucky enough to be absent. So our father must have been all the more surprised the time he came upon Andrew and me in Lucy Roderick’s rec room. I had been waiting to see, when Andrew began looking up high school girls, whether he’d go so far as to look up Lucy Roderick. As in a bad comedy, all of us—Andrew, me, Lucy, and Lucy’s visiting cousin, Dianne—had assembled at the Roderick house to do something furtively. Like our mother, Mrs. Roderick drank. She drank bourbon in Coca-Cola, sipping from a straw as she vacuumed, taking a Coke bottle with her as she drove around.
We’d known she would be away on a long errand the day we assembled. I was to be the photographer. Andrew had taught me how to use a camera. He had heard about a magazine that paid for sexy pictures, and he wanted us to cash in. It was so crude—so unlike Andrew. I never believed for a minute that he really wanted to do it for the money, but since I didn’t know why it was so important to him, I guess I went along hoping I’d find out. We never discussed the intimacies between him and Patty Arthur. So since we did not do that, why did he want to subject me to such a parody of what I assumed was his real love for her? All I knew was that, somehow, it was a test. It was pointless; he knew he had my loyalty.I’ve never understood pushing to the limit people who love you. In that, I suppose he was his father’s child.
Lucy was the first to take off her clothes. She had big breasts, but her cousin’s were even larger. Andrew had ripped pages from one of our father’s hidden copies ofPlayboyso the girls could imitate the poses. He also provided the marijuana, so the girls could loosen up. Dianne said that she had once smoked hash. She twirled her shirt over her head, then tossed it on the floor. Things were beginning: eventually we would have a roll of film of Lucy and Dianne stripped down to their panties, cavorting.
I had not easily been convinced to go along with the plan. Quite frankly, being in the presence of girls posturing through re-creations of porn shots seemed embarrassing. I knew that Andrew and Patty Arthur had had some argument, and I asked him if that was why he wanted to do it. I talked around the subject and did not even use her name, but he knew what I meant and simply tossed the question aside as if it did not deserve an answer. It also made me nervous that he was smoking more grass, and doing it more daringly. I’d had a few tokes before, and knew how strangely it could make a person behave. But he really wanted me in on the action; he wanted me there as much as he had not wanted me in on his relationship with Patty Arthur. He all but told me that my being there would be the factor that would really make things happen. If Lucy and Dianne saw that I wasn’t shocked, they would eventually give up their reluctance.
Lucy went along because her cousin always had a more exciting life than she did; it pleased her to think that this time, she could turn the tables. Dianne—whom Andrew andI had met once before, sneaking out of an adults-only movie with her hoody boyfriend—had a reputation for being a girl who liked to do things just for kicks. Andrew had a friend whose older brother had agreed to develop the film.
I helped Andrew convince the girls that the pictures would make them famous. It was all a big joke, really. They didn’t believe it any more than we did, but Dianne had a crush on Andrew, so she was eager to be persuaded. Lucy had already promised Andrew in school that if I was there, she would go through with it. She obviously never thought I’d really join him. I had let Lucy down, in supporting my brother. Once there, she was so amazed, and Dianne was so excited to see that someone else was in on it, that I wasn’t about to lose face by flinching.
We ran upstairs to watch Mrs. Roderick’s old Buick pull away. On the way back downstairs, Lucy detoured to show us that her father also had a secret stash of dirty magazines. They mostly featured people in the military, without any pants. Dianne insisted on taking one of the magazines downstairs, though Lucy kept trying to grab it away from her. Dianne was the most nervous. All of us, including Lucy, lied to Dianne, saying that we had taken pictures like the ones we were going to take before. We were so united in what we said, and we said it so straight-faced, that I began to believe it, myself.
Andrew put himself in charge of the music. They huddled and smoked grass—I didn’t, because I wanted the pictures to turn out—and as everybody got sillier, Andrew changed the music, switching between songs that were fast and slow before the music really had time to register. He reminded meof our mother, drinking after dinner, fiddling with the radio dial until I thought it would come off in her hand.
I did not smoke grass because I already felt peculiar enough. It was strange, to be a girl her brother considered one of the guys. I felt that what he was doing should be part of his private life, but at the same time, I was flattered he wanted me there.
The record Andrew put on sounded dated; the music was slow and too romantic—it might even have been a record the Rodericks danced to, since Lucy said her mother and father sometimes danced late at night in their rec room. The grass had made everyone giggly. The girls cracked themselves up by pouting like the men in Mr. Roderick’s magazines. We all knew nobody would buy the pictures. We were doing it as an excuse to act up, and to expre
ss forbidden desires through sexual pantomime. We were doing it because things had progressed to a certain point, and no one wanted to back down. Eventually the magazine had nothing to do with the poses Dianne and Lucy struck. They became rather inventive, as each tried to top the other. I took a reading with the light meter, the way Andrew had taught me, and backed up, trying to find the best vantage point from which to photograph. They wouldn’t listen to me and hold still, so I began taking pictures while they were in motion. I took most of the roll of film and then, the way all of a sudden a wind comes up that lifts the hat off your head and leaves your hand patting the air, a chill descended over the room as we heard a key inserted into a lock, and our father walked in through a door leading from the patio to the basement.
He stood there with the key in his hand, as surprised tosee us as we were to see him. I was on a footstool, aiming down at Lucy and Dianne, who had stopped cavorting a few minutes before to line their eyes with a black pencil and to put red lipstick on their lips. Their faces were not what I looked at, though. Each had the nipple of one breast touching a lava light that sat on a candlestand Andrew had pulled into the middle of the room. The candle sat forgotten, in the corner. The lava light sent up mesmerizing gobs of green oil.
He had the key, of course, because he’d been carrying on with Lucy’s mother, but at that moment, I thought that he’d followed us—and I continued to assume that as he stood in front of me, so surprised that his mouth dropped open. I had never before really seen him rattled. Furious, but not rattled. I tried to think how he’d known where we’d gone. When he finally recovered himself enough to close his mouth, he turned instantly toward his son. “Andrew?” he said. We all chimed in. We were so frightened, we couldn’t let Andrew be our spokesman. We felt we had to explain, immediately. Our desperate attempts all came out in a rush: the money someone was offering for photographs; immediate, tearful apologies; the girls grabbing each other and scrambling away, as if there was anywhere to go. You would have thought our father was Charlie Manson, there was so much pandemonium. Within seconds, he was cursing Andrew, and the words were so vicious, so ugly, that I was more frightened than I’d ever been in my life. The only advantage I had was that I was not stoned. Andrew was, and as astonished as he’d been, he also found our father’s astonishment funny. It was the smirk of the prisoner going to the gallows. Which was not a bad analogy, because in a way, he was about to bekilled. When Andrew did not answer his questions, our father became even more enraged. He chased Andrew through the house—for once, he was so filled with adrenaline that he actually caught him—and dragged him back to the basement where only I remained, sitting on a sofa, bugeyed with fear. Andrew came into the room propelled by my father’s kick, flailing until my father pounced and pinned his arms behind his back. “Where are they?” our father said to me. “Get those girls.” My legs were shaking so badly I couldn’t stand. “Get them,” he repeated, this time shouting into Andrew’s face, before once more kicking him from behind. Andrew fell and lay sprawled on the floor. He slowly curled into a very tight ball.
