by Ann Beattie
“Come into Mom’s room, and she’ll tell you about her boyfriend,” he said.
My sister drew back. Our father took a step forward.
“All this about her boyfriend’s dog,” he said, shaking his head sorrowfully. “Come on. Come tell Mom that you want to keep her boyfriend’s dog and we’ll see if she thinks you can.”
“No,” I said.
“No? You won’t? But you knocked on the door at two o’clock in the morning, it was so important to you. Unless you’re one of your mother’s boyfriends, too.”
I dropped my eyes. I could feel my sister’s terror. It was his tone of voice that upset her; she was too young to understand what he was implying.
“Maybe youcankeep the dog,” he said. “You can make a direct appeal to Mom and see if you can keep her boyfriend’s dog. In fact, maybe your sister would like to speak to Mom, since the dog is her best friend.”
“Leave her alone,” I said.
“You think that’s what I should do?” he said. “Would that be because her brother is more capable of raising her than her own father? Or her dutiful mother, who provides both her children with such happy moments, but who particularly dotes on her son? Leave her alone,” he said again, as if he could not comprehend the thought. He raised a finger, pretending to have just received inspiration. “All right, I’ll leave her alone,” he said. “Thenyoucome see Mom.”
I got up. Either the mattress springs creaked, or the dog whimpered. I wasn’t sure which. I crossed the room. Myfather stepped aside and waited for me to go through the doorway—looking at me and daring me to react. He followed behind me. I could hear my sister sobbing. This was definitely one of the worst nights of my life. On what seemed like an interminable walk down the hallway, I began to integrate my sister’s fear. Going toward my mother’s room, I wondered if Nina might have been right, after all: if she might be dead. If that might be what he was taking me to see.
He turned on the overhead light, which seemed unnaturally bright. It was one of his favorite things to do at night. He liked to follow the sudden brightness by a comment: “Just checking.” That night, he said nothing. My mother did not react to the light. She had rolled onto her side, the covers tangled beneath her. The sharp smell of vomit filled the room. She had thrown up on the rug at the side of the bed. She was not moving, but looking at her, I felt sure she wasn’t dead.
“Make your appeal,” my father said.
“What?”
“Ask her,” he said.
I thought that if I did what he wanted, eventually, sometime, sometime before I died, myself, this might be over. “Mom?” I said. “Can we keep the dog?”
Of course there was no response.
“Maybe you need to shake her,” he said.
I didn’t think I needed to shake her. But if I didn’t, this might never end. I put my hand on her arm and gripped it lightly. Her skin was clammy. I had no idea what time it was. There seemed to be some light coming up, out the window.“Mom,” I said again, with no prompting. “Can we keep the dog?”
Nothing. I waited for what he’d do next.
“I believe Mom has passed out from drinking too much,” he said. “That’s the thing about women: they like alcohol, but they can’t handle it. In part, it has to do with body weight. Women weighing less than men, and so forth.”
I said nothing.
“It’s disappointing, isn’t it?” he said. “But you can take advantage of women when they’re in this state. There is that.”
He was speaking as if we were old friends, having a casual conversation. I was sure that, like me, he could hear my sister crying.
“By ‘taking advantage’ I mean having sex, of course,” he said.
I knew what he’d meant. I said nothing.
“But since Mom doesn’t seem able to rouse herself, maybe if you wrote her a note about the dog and put it on her pillow. Or down there,” he said, gesturing toward the acrid vomit. “Maybe there, because she’ll be sure to find it, when she’s cleaning up. My suggestion would be to put it in writing, that you both very much want to keep the dog.”
I wished I had never seen the dog. It wasn’t the dog’s fault, but still.
I went to her desk, sat down, and wrote one sentence, certain that he had something more elaborate in mind, but with not much idea about what he might want me to write. I was surprised he didn’t ask to look at it. He just nodded and gestured, again, to the floor. He did it with extreme graciousness,like a well-tipped maître d’ showing a rich patron to a table. I bent and placed it a few inches away from the mess.
“Well, that’s about the best you can do in a circumstance like this, don’t you think?” he said.
I nodded.
“And now, being such a compassionate person, I’m sure you’ll want to go console your sister. But compassion can only go so far, don’t you think? The limits of compassion are so frustrating, but so real. You’ll have to be kind but firm. She’ll have to realize you can’t keep the dog, because Mom has no negotiating power. How can Mom negotiate, when she’s not even conscious?” He looked at his watch. “Look how late it’s gotten!” he said, looking from his wrist to the window. There was a slight pink brightening of the sky.
I did intend to console Nina, but once out of the room I found myself inexplicably angry at her. I was angry with all of them, and thought—as I did on a daily basis—of adulthood as an ideal condition, in which I could do what I wanted when I wanted. That night I did not knock on my sister’s door. Fortunately, she’d become silent, so there was no longer a clear reason to go to her. Years later she would say she had had “heart attacks” and passed out, she was sometimes so terrified. Her husband, who was a doctor, said they were anxiety attacks; he doubted that she had passed out, but thought, instead, that she had shut down her senses. That she had passed into a state something like hibernation. Fat lot of good that did her: at our house, every day was always the day we awoke in the cave and stumbled out, confused, into the light.
Part of the reason he acted the way he did, I think, was because he was secretly happy that I’d discovered him in our mother’s bedroom. His presence there became an occasion to assert that he had the upper hand in the relationship—yet if hehadhad sex with her when she’d passed out, could he have thought that was anything worth bragging about? What was the impulse, in my family, to say or do such ugly things? Wouldn’t any decent person keep quiet about their baser motives? If he felt powerful in that pathetic situation, I now realize how powerless he must have felt to begin with.
From the time I was six I fixed my sister’s and my breakfast. She told Mac about that the first time they dated. In fact, he joked that she talked so much about me, he suspected he didn’t have a chance. One of the things I’ve come to understand is that she doesn’t take me for granted, but Nina has hardened into someone who will not, or cannot, express gratitude. She didn’t even overtly delight in Mac; her fixity was something so extreme, though, that few people could have tolerated her devotion. He knew that, and knew, as well, that at some point it might become a problem. But he also told me that he’d never had a happy relationship with a woman until he met Nina.
He’d dated a woman before her, whose name couldn’t be mentioned in Nina’s presence. (I’d been taken by Mac to have drinks with her. It was a mystery to me why he still wanted to associate with her, except that Jan was extremely sexy.) She had taken money from his wallet and denied doing it, and worse than that, she had stashed drugs in the apartmentand sworn, when he found them, that they weren’t hers. She had thrown one of his textbooks out the window on a rainy night. She was spoiled, and petulant, and childish—the exact opposite of Nina who, if she felt any such impulses, kept them in check. But Mac had a very unrealistic idea about lovers who’d parted ways remaining friends. Not long after Mac moved in with Nina, he and Jan decided to have a last day of drinking beer and betting at the dog track, indulging in their vice one last time. It was a very un-Mac thing to do, and I wondered
if his confiding in me about their gambling was some kind of test of me, as well as a secret it pleased him to keep hidden from my sister. And I suppose the truth is that I blamed Jan for it, not Mac.
After their outing the three of us met up for drinks, and she acted pretty bizarrely: it was clear that she’d not only lost money that day, but that she was also losing Mac. Jan had insisted upon meeting the new woman he said he’d fallen in love with, and, because he couldn’t think how to say no, he’d told her Nina would join them for drinks, and instead, he had produced me. A meeting between Nina and any of Mac’s former girlfriends would never have worked, but he admitted to me later that Jan had been so adamant about it, he hadn’t known what to do. I wondered, when he first introduced me to her, whether he might have wanted us to become a threesome who met occasionally behind Nina’s back. Jan blew it, if that had been the case. Sensing that she was losing him, she’d come on to me right in front of him. She was trouble, and what that told me was that because he’d been involved with her, Mac had to have more problems than were apparent.
“Armchair shrink?” Serena would say. “Have everyone figured out but yourself?”
Serena could be so maddening; I would be the first to admit that I didn’t have myself figured out. That I don’t.Serena would want me to take that admission as an occasion to reimmerse myself in my childhood. Sometimes, with her in mind, I do. I see myself as a boy. I see myself doing something. I see Nina, like a shadow protruding into the light. But while I can easily envision her face, I never envision my own. Whatever is happening mystifies me because I don’t really feel part of the scene.
My sister and I had a routine of going to our father’s room, where every morning the door that had been so resolutely closed the night before stood open, and assessing the condition of the bed. We would look at the unmade—or the made—bed without comment. Then we would go to the kitchen sink and check to see if there were breakfast dishes. It was as if, over and over, we stalked an animal, understanding the directions it moved in by studying the pattern of the footprints, knowing what kind of animal it was because we recognized its droppings.
The worst problem I had with Serena was that she was obsessed with my childhood. When something really interested her, she wouldn’t let go. Her orientation toward the world was psychological. In spite of her deriding me for being too analytical, she believed anything any psychiatrist said, and she consulted them as often as possible. Still, as a form of addiction, Serena’s beliefs were hugely superior, in my mind, to liquor and drugs. I was even willing to go with her a few times, to see what she found so profound about theexperience. Of course, the psychiatrist’s orientation was also psychological, so being there with her was a little like being a twig in a brushfire.
That’s too histrionic: I was not wood devoured by flames. The experience was more like freezing than burning. Feeling the cold chill of recognition. Would that be an honest enough admission for Serena?
I’ve had trouble living with women. My wife Caitlin was beautiful, and in many cases she used her beauty as a buffer against the world. Beauty would draw things to her; not only people, but possibilities. But it was always as if the world was courting her, and she was empowered by saying no to those things people who weren’t beautiful wanted: no to this fascinating job; no to that friendship. In retrospect, I think she chose to marry me because I said no to her first. I even told her why, when I realized things were getting serious. That was back in the days when I thought I could tell a woman the truth, and not have it boomerang.
I told her that I still had not gotten over a girl I knew in high school. I wanted to get over her, but so far, in spite of distance and age and perspective, I had not. It was as if I’d slapped her. Her first question was whether the girl had been especially beautiful. The question forced me to conjure up an image, but to my surprise, no one image appeared, since I’d meant it more generally. I’d said girl, but I’d thought of it as girls. Rochelle Rogan, perhaps, with her pouting lips and arched eyebrows, or Josie, “the Dead Girl”—who, as fate would have it, remained very much alive. Patty Arthur? Of course Patty. I saw her breasts so vividly, it was as if I could touch them. But for years, I had forced Patty to the back ofmy mind. The Patty I remembered was casual and unadorned and wore no more makeup than my sister. She had beautiful eyes, yet she was not a girl you would call beautiful. I told Caitlin that she had not been particularly attractive. It was the wrong answer, because then Caitlin had a million questions to find out what it had been.
As I described what it was like the first time I walked into Patty Arthur’s bedroom, she got impatient and urged me to talk about the person, not the place. But the room hadbeenPatty Arthur. You couldn’t distinguish between them, the way people are so fond of saying that you cannot distinguish between love and architecture, viewing the Taj Mahal. The fact that Patty had been my first girlfriend was certainly significant, but the idea of the exotic, coupled with sex, made a powerful impression, so that one was always a letdown without the other. But when a person is no longer a teenager, what’s exotic? Faraway places? Incense (as Caitlin—as so many of my girlfriends—seem to think)? Private dancers?
What I yearned for, after Patty Arthur, was being taken by surprise, so that familiarity never became a foundation for anything with me, but the thing that precluded the possibility of a relationship’s deepening. When I confessed this to Caitlin—the last woman I ever did say it to—she thought I was talking about excitement in our sex life. She thought I meant that I wanted to see her in skimpy outfits, or to be seduced in secluded places. Which, being a man, I can’t say I minded—but I really wanted that rush that happens when something transforms you instantly: a variation of that strange moment when I exited the present, then was catapulted into someone else’s world, where I felt simultaneouslycomfortable and uncomfortable. The uncomfortable part was important, too. It made me trust the moment, because I knew I wasn’t idealizing. It sort of validates the metamorphosis, as if you’ve paid a price for it. This gets abstract, the more I try to put it into words. I wanted to do what quantum physicists do all the time: close a door on an empty box and open it on Schrödinger’s cat. I was one person when I walked into Patty Arthur’s room and another when I left.Transformations do not happen only in fairy tales.
A few tense days after our talk, Caitlin determined to surprise me. My life became a chaos of unexpected moments. They didn’t do much for me because it wasn’t newness I was looking for. They made her someone she was not, and they underscored for me how difficult, if not impossible, it was to become totally immersed in experiences that were someone else’s idea. After months of silly posturing, Caitlin came to the conclusion that youth would always be the missing factor. She was up against the impossible: meaning that only in youth could one truly be open to transformation. She had even been jealous of my sister because my sister had known me when I was young. Caitlin was irrational, and after my confession she became more so, bringing up Patty constantly, even going so far as to consult a Ouija board, to see how deep the bond still was between me and a person I had never seen as an adult.
When Caitlin redecorated the house, I didn’t know if it was her last desperate thought, or her final retaliation: the furniture gone, new furniture brought in—all done behind my back, so that when I walked through the front door I stood there, disoriented, convinced that I had somehowentered another person’s house. The memory of that awful moment makes my sister’s house doubly attractive to me: the way it stays the same through the years. Though I wish for her sake that she would make changes—bring in a comfortable footstool, even put some flowers in a vase. Instead, she’s chosen to keep everything as it was, as if the whole house is a roped-off crime scene.
Perhaps it is, though the crime happened elsewhere, in the darkness, on a highway.
Jan called me when Mac died. She remembered my name and found it in the phone book and called the same day his obituary was in the paper, hardly able to speak for crying. My first
thought was that she was so upset, she might call Nina next. Because of that, I decided I needed to see her one more time. I asked her to come to my apartment, even though her tears were so excessive that I just knew she wasn’t so much crying for Mac, as she was crying out to me. Mac’s death had provided her with a second chance to try to get together with her second choice.
At the time of Mac’s death, Hound’s boss, Gary, was crashing at my apartment for a couple of weeks, because Kate couldn’t stand the man. Gary’s wife had thrown him out, and he was a basket case. The two of us were basket cases: I knew I would never have another friend like Mac, and I was worried Nina might have to be hospitalized, she was so despondent.
I was in the shower when Jan arrived. Gary opened the door. I came out in my bathrobe, ready to lie to her and tell her how much she had meant to Mac, while also letting her know I wasn’t available, to find Gary and Jan deep in conversation. She was saying that when Mac died, she had lost hersoul mate; he was telling her that nothing he promised about changing his ways would make his wife take him back. I had only been in the shower for five minutes. How had they gotten into it so quickly? Jan’s mascara was streaked under her eyes like a clown’s. Gary jumped up and got her a tissue. I could tell that he was confused: what should his role be? He was obviously attracted to her, so he wanted to stay, but at the same time, he suspected he should go.
To my surprise, I began to feel competitive. I’d invited her over to tell her how important she had been in Mac’s life, but also to gently disabuse her of any notion that she and Mac might have gotten back together. Instead, before I had said much more than hello, she already seemed to be connecting with his replacement. I decided that she and I should have a one-night stand. “Will you excuse us?” I said to Gary, giving him his cue, and he said that oh, he had just been about to go out, so sorry. He got his jacket and left quickly, after shaking Jan’s hand and saying how nice it was to meet her. The door closed, and I smiled at her. I expected her to rush into my arms, to say something about the awful thing that had happened to Mac. Instead, she said: “Would you mind if I went with your friend? We were in the middle of a serious conversation when you more or less told him to beat it.” She got up and started toward the door before I could answer. I blocked her. I said that yes, I would mind. That she and I had something to discuss. She dropped her arms to her side. “Yes?” she said, patronizingly. She was looking at me coldly. She had called just a short time before, convulsed with misery, and now she was acting as if I were some petty annoyance. I no longer felt the slightest desire for her—not even out ofcompetitionwith Gary: freeloading, self-pitying Gary, who wasn’t even my friend, but Hound’s. She cocked her head. “What, exactly, are you stopping me for?” she said. It reminded me too much of Serena’s confrontations. It even reminded me of my long-ago fight with Nina, little Nina, and our pointless fight about her fantasy fairies. I stepped aside.
