The Doctor's House

by Ann Beattie

  “Go right ahead,” I said. “As long as you’re not going to shoot me at the end of this rant.”

  She narrowed her eyes. She said: “I might have my problems. I might have a not-so-great marriage. I might have a mother going around trying to pass herself off as cheerful, when she cries herself to sleep. But I’ll tell you one thing:I got over being the cheerleader. And in the guise of being Mr. Nice Guy, you’re nothing but an exploiter. You know what? I’m not going to give you the letter Patty sent you in care of me. I visited Patty just a couple of days ago, it so happens. You know what I did? I brought the letter here, because I was going to give it to you, but when I saw you coming down the sidewalk, I ripped it up and put it in the trash outside. Just like high school again, isn’t it? The girls, all abuzz about you.”

  I could hardly believe how angry she was. It was an anger that preceded even seeing me, though. I was sure of it. As I started to get up to walk away, she moved faster. She snatched up her coat and stalked out of the restaurant. I sat back down.

  As she pushed open the restaurant door, she must havebeen crying. The blonde stared after her. When the door closed, the blonde did not—she quite deliberately did not—look back in my direction. Across the table from her, a man with a stubble of beard dropped her hat onto his beer bottle and swirled it around. She reached out and took his hand.

  I sat there until the waitress came to the table. Then I ordered a hamburger and a Coke. I found what had just happened so astonishing that I considered calling Nina immediately to tell her what she’d missed. If I’d had a tape recorder, I could have played the tape for Serena’s old shrink, who thought my responses were often curiously passive, and asked his considered opinion about what, exactly, I might have said or done. That evening on the radio, I had heard a report about air rage, like road rage in the sky. Alice seemed to have restaurant rage. I sat sideways, leaning my back against the wall, and made myself as comfortable as I could in the booth with its sharp, cracked leather seats.

  Not looking again at the blonde in the booth seemed the most important thing. It was still possible she might stand—at the very least, lock eyes with me again—when I got up to go, but until I did I resolved not to look in her direction.

  I did not think about Patty until—no eyes having followed me out of the restaurant—I saw the trash receptacle Alice had referred to. Then sadness overwhelmed me, as if something really unlikely and inappropriate was in there—as if the destroyed note was cremains, rather than ripped paper. I never thought of dipping in my hand.

  From my apartment, I called Hound. Kate said that he was working late. I called his office, but got no answer. Ispoke to Kate a second time and asked her to tell him to call me when he got home.

  “You sound like hell,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  I said that nothing was wrong. I was just tired.

  “Girl problems,” she said, making an educated guess.

  Yes—though it was not something I could talk to Kate about. It was understood that we would never again talk about ourselves. Our pillow talk had come to an end.

  My mother lost a child between my birth and the birth of my sister. She said it made my father sad, because it seemed for a while that she could not have another child, and my father—according to her—very much wanted a daughter. I was incapable, then as now, of imagining my father caring about a family. I would watch my father for signs that he cared. I hung around him more, after my mother told me that, and asked questions I thought were harmless and cute, like how many years he thought it would be before I, too, shaved. No matter the topic, or the time I approached him, he was never in the mood for talking. He clearly cared more about the newspaper, and the look of satisfaction on his face as he smoked his pipe was not an expression I ever saw, those few times he bothered to say good night to my sister or me.

  At odd hours of the day, my mother did what might be thought of as motherly things. She did the wash and ironed—often in the middle of the night, the ironing board set up in her bedroom, where a small pink plastic TV sat on top of her bureau. She sometimes even baked bread, though we never enjoyed it as much as we might have if our fatherhad allowed butter in the house. Jams or jellies weren’t allowed, either. They were special treats, included in tiny jars in our Christmas stockings. I’m sure my sister now loves teatime because it’s an excuse to eat things with jelly. When I think of my childhood, I realize that I focus on the things we had to do without. We were to be quiet at all times. We were to pick up after ourselves. We were to prepare our own breakfasts, if our mother did not appear. As an adult, I throw my clothes all over the apartment because it’s a way of rejecting my training. I also eat jelly on many things, including ice cream. These observations—first made by Caitlin, later noticed by Serena—I was able to explain and even to laugh about, though both women continued to be more annoyed than amused. They had their own eccentricities, but somehow theirs were nobler because they couldn’t be traced back to their childhoods.

  My mother was a childish person. Not that she had the gayness or the sometimes pleasing self-centeredness of a child. Instead, she had the self-absorption of an alcoholic and the moroseness of someone who has decided that nothing she can do is viable. At night she was more childish than she was during the day. She would giggle, showing me old photographs of herself as a girl. She would flit from topic to topic. But this gives the mistaken impression that she was animated. She wasn’t. She was fidgety, but she moved slowly—to compensate for the disorientating effects of the alcohol, I assume—and dipped into her bureau drawer for a photo album, or went to her night table drawer for a pack of letters like an old person making a great effort to retrieve things. She couldn’t sleep and she knew all her stories herself, so in inviting me in, whatshe was doing was reinvigorating her nighttime playthings by presenting them to someone new.

  She had a letter my father had written her when she was in the hospital, after miscarrying his supposedly longed-for daughter. Since his handwriting was almost indecipherable, she had to help me. Finally, after I had read it three or four times—she always wanted me to read it aloud—I knew it well enough to pretend to read it perfectly. The parts my mother liked best were my father’s assertion that the child she had already provided him with had made him so happy that any other happiness would be mere excess, and that she, herself, was the love of his life. It was so puzzling to me that I asked if he had once been very different. It was the wrong thing to ask. Whatever did I mean? she wanted to know. A doctor’s life was one in which the patients came first, but there was never a night he did not come into her bedroom and pray with her for the health and happiness of the family.

  Oh, really? Was that the prayer that went: “This is notthis”? The prayer that ended with his smashing his fist through a windowpane?

  There was a picture over my mother’s bureau of a small boy seen from behind, wearing pajamas and kneeling in prayer, as a collie sat beside him, facing the bed. Both the boy and the dog had halos over their heads. As she talked, my eyes went to the picture, but I quickly looked away. Ultimately, though, that was a clue to my mother. That she conflated things, imagining one thing to be another. In her imagination, a little boy or—for all I knew—the dog in the picture became her husband, kneeling. It was funny, on some level—extremely funny—but at the time I had no desire tolaugh. It explained why she thought certain things she’d seen in magazines were things my sister had done, like the time she rummaged through my sister’s room, intent upon finding the ice skates my sister had worn to the rink, demanding as she looked—futilely—to know where my sister had found the money for such an expensive purchase.

  I thought the issue ofLifemagazine about the Olympics in the bathroom was what my mother remembered, but no: she remembered seeing my sister leaving the house with her white skates slung over her shoulder. In looking so often at the photo albums, and at other memorabilia, she fooled herself into thinking that she and my father were still having a life, taking vacations
, eating in restaurants. Did our mother ever say anything nice to him about us those times we’d done something well, the way she reported on us immediately if we did something wrong? They rarely spoke to each other, rarely were in the same room at the same time, but since my mother watched soap operas in the afternoon, perhaps she thought they had an exciting, though turbulent relationship. Maybe she woke up in the morning thinking herself the betrayed mistress pregnant with the lawyer’s child, and that her husband was not a doctor, but a kleptomaniac lawyer. Maybe our family was always about to be joined by bastard brothers and prostitute half sisters, and maybe a mad arsonist was planning to burn down our house. Who could imagine what her reality consisted of? I hoped that it consisted of more than self-congratulatory nostalgia based on one note her husband had written her—which, truth be told, he may not have written. Would a person really write such a note on sheets ripped off a prescription pad? She involved me becauseshe needed a witness, though the longer I listened, the more silent I became: no help at all.

  No, I was help: with my silence, I soothed her.

  My sister and I, as teenagers, were not the timid children we had been. We conspired with each other, putting aside our differences in order to fool our mother, to do whatever we wanted behind her back. Most of the things we did were no worse than sharing cigarettes or looking at forbidden magazines. The magazines were right there, at the bottom of a box of plumbing supplies under the bathroom sink. It was my father’s stash; he had shown them to me not long before he took me to see one of his patients masturbating.

  Nina was as interested as I was in the airbrushed centerfolds ofPlayboy.We laughed at everything—even the jokes that made puns we didn’t understand. It was because of our giggling that we got caught. My mother found us, by doing the unthinkable: opening the door of the bathroom, without knocking. Once inside, she didn’t know what to do, and decided—as she could be relied on to decide things you would never expect—that our looking at what she called pornography meant that it was time for her to explain why the photographs were so misleading. Not only reprehensible, and degrading to women, but misleading. Which led her to the medicine cabinet, from which tumbled pills and jars of Vaseline, and things that had no part in what she intended to talk to us about, such as a flashlight and a toothbrush still in the package. Her discussion with us about the evils of pornography—“lecture” is a better word, since my sister sat as silently as I did—was bizarre. My mother stood over us, holding the things that had fallen into her hand, all of whichshe believed pertained to the reality behind the magazine’s centerfold. The Vaseline, she informed us, was a lubricant because sex was not always comfortable. The pills were for menstrual cramps: although women seemed to have been created as sex objects, actually God had punished them—not the men who had sex with them—with discomfort. She ran out of steam as she looked at the toothbrush. She held the narrow box aloft, but words failed her.

  “Are you rehearsing for your career as a nurse?” Nina said, dripping sarcasm.

  The look on my mother’s face was one of astonishment.

  “No, I’m aconcerned parent, unlike your father, whose years of education don’t seem to have lifted his mind from the gutter,” she said. She picked up thePlayboyand threw it in the wastebasket. “How dare you speak to me that way,” she said.

  Nina was unpredictable: she could be taciturn, then scream; she disdained our mother, then decided to mock her to her face.

  Which really wasn’t that different from what Mac decided, years later. An old girlfriend? Meet her for a farewell gambling episode and drink, but don’t invite Nina along. A quandary about whether to drop out of medical school? Work it out privately. “You know,” Mac once said to me, “your sister’s always braced for some disaster. Well, she’s going to have to adjust her expectations, because she’s not going to hear the bad news from me.”

  Wrong, Mac. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

  I went around, jiggling the piece of paper with Patty Arthur’s number on it as if it were pocket change. Alice had been right; it had not been difficult to find out where she was. But why call? Why, this many years later, when she had thrown me over for a college professor and I hadn’t cared, because I’d been dating a Swedish girl who didn’t consider an evening complete without sex? I’d probably persevered because I wanted to prove to Alice that I hadn’t been affected by what she’d said—I suppose it seemed like a way of getting even with her, in absentia—and also because I couldn’t get Josie out of my mind. I thought Patty might be the antidote. I thought about calling Josie and telling her that her friend Alice had a chip on her shoulder a mile high and giving her my version of our unpleasant meeting, but somehow, I expected she’d call me when she heard. I thought so for weeks, and then I realized that either Alice had said nothing, or that Josie didn’t want to get involved. I thought about her on the street in Vermont. About extending my hand, her kiss. She had warned me emphatically, while providing no evidence, that I should stay away from Patty. Since she misread Alice’s feelings for me, though, wasn’t there every chance she’d misunderstood Patty’s?

  I returned to the restaurant twice, hoping to see the blonde woman again. Neither time did I find her.

  At work, my client list was expanding. I was commended for a program I’d completed that had been sent to an engineering company in Buffalo. Around that time, I began dating a woman named Shaundra Hodges, who had a teenage daughter in boarding school. Shaundra had a parrot who said, “Nice legs” and several obscenities her ex-husband had taughtit. There was a framed photograph of the snub-nosed daughter, with the parrot sitting on her shoulder. There was also a snapshot, leaning against the photograph, of her ex-husband: a private detective named Mickey Brenner. The parrot did not appear in that snapshot. A gun did. A gun that was actually a cigarette lighter. Mickey Brenner’s head was dipped toward the flame, so that only a bit of a profile, lips dangling a cigarette, could be seen. I didn’t think I knew her well enough to ask why she had it there, leaning up against the picture of their daughter. “Mickey, my ex,” was her only comment as I stood looking at it. Shaundra worked for an insurance company in Somerville and lived only a few blocks from her office. She thought Somerville was as beautiful as a wildlife refuge, compared to the Bronx, where she had first worked when she moved to New York after splitting with Mickey.

  His name stays in my mind, because we never had sex without Mickey being present. Not actually present, but invoked with expletives that would have made the parrot blanch. I told my sister about it—about how Shaundra would become more and more furious at her ex-husband the closer she came to orgasm, cursing him, calling him terrible things.

  My sister was horrified. She thought I should have no more to do with the woman, and refused to meet her. She was usually curious enough to meet the women I went out with, but she wanted nothing to do with foulmouthed Shaundra. Nina was aghast that I thought so little of myself that I didn’t care if there was a third presence in the room when we had sex. She thought that I picked the wrong women because I knew things wouldn’t work out, and that I picked excessive people because I could focus on their shortcomings and neverblame myself when the relationship ended. Still, some part of her liked to hear my stories: they convinced her that dating was a minefield of weirdnesses impossible to maneuver without risking harm. It made her feel superior to me, in a way she shouldn’t have, just because she’d put herself on a hill high above the battle. From where she was, she would have seen nothing if I hadn’t brought back stories. I had been doing that since we were adolescents: showing her magazines, involving her in my discoveries.

  When she told Mac about our father’s unexpected appearance in a friend’s basement, it was the first time I heard the story from her perspective. The way she saw it, she had been the center of attention, taking photographs of girls scantily dressed that she and I had a vague notion of selling to some magazine. I was only the offstage presence, directing the action from behind a closed door. This was not exactly the
case, because the girls ran constantly to the door, like penitents to the window of the confessional, to get advice about what to do. It was easier for them to approach someone not part of the scene—easier, and also mysterious and exciting. My sister was both in the scene and apart from it, the eye behind the camera. The girls were lesbians. Lucy Roderick had told me so. She had asked me to watch her make out with her cousin Dianne, who had had an abortion when she was fifteen, vowing never to be with a man again. Now that might be the fulfillment of a conventional male fantasy, but then I was a teenager, and such a thing seemed both titillating and terrifying. It was Lucy who had told me—having learned it from her mother—that our mother did, indeed, have a boyfriend: a man she went shopping and to matinees with. Iwas surprised to hear this, in part because it was impossible to imagine my mother at a matinee.

  Not wanting to be a pawn for Lucy Roderick, I set down my own conditions: that I not be the only person watching; that my sister also be present. After all, Lucy insisted that they weren’t embarrassed to be lesbians. The plan was to take pictures to sell to a magazine, the four of us splitting the profits. I brought enough grass to make everybody happy. I’d started buying it from a friend’s brother. It made my nighttime visits to my mother’s room easier, when I had to look at the same things, reread the same notes, react to the same stories I’d heard before. Grass gave me a nice, bemused distance from all that, and since her eyes were redder than mine, since she was more out of it than I was, she never noticed.