by Ann Beattie
“And how did you get out of there? How did you get out of the basement? What happened with the girls?”
“Nobody ever said anything,” I said. “Can you believe that? As he might have said himself: Thedoctorgot off scotfree.”
“Dianne saw me one time and spit on me,” Nina said.“She walked up and spit in my face.”
It was the first I’d ever heard of it.
“But he just drove you home, Andrew? Didn’t your mother notice your injuries?” Mac persisted.
It was strange that she sometimes examined my fingernails, but paid little or no attention to any injuries. “She didn’t notice,” I said. “As for how we got out of there, he pointed and we ran. Right to his car, and I had to sit up front and get a driving lesson. All the way home, he gave me instructions about how to drive a car. I’m not kidding. He took it as an occasion to explain how to steer, and signal, and brake, like we’d been out for a driving lesson, and nothing else had happened.”
He was not the only person who confounded me.
Serena once wrote me a nasty note on the bottom of a sympathy card—a Hallmark card, with a cross and lilies on the front. She sent it to me after the abortion, though she was living with me. It came in the mail. She watched me open it.
The checkout girl’s good-bye note—the checkout girl with whom I’d had the one-night stand—was written on topofThe New York Timesthat I had delivered to my door. Leaving early in the morning, so quietly that I didn’t hear her, she had written: “Read all about it! Amber the One-Night Stand Leaves the Mercurial Andrew!”
A smiling Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson postcard—he in tall Texas hat; she in sunflower yellow suit—had been mailed to me months after I broke up with Sue McCamber. “I’m givingyouthe bird!” she had written.
Mac could not believe how confrontational people had been with me. It was as if my father’s evil curse remained after his death, Mac had said. Mac was one of the few men I ever admired. If he’d lived, I have the feeling he might eventually have stopped registering sympathetic surprise and come to understand my experiences better than I did. Serena, like Mac, could never get enough information about my childhood, but unlike Mac, she acted as if childhood was a colorful piñata, and once smashed, treasures of useful information would pour out.
Patty Arthur had gone out of my life like a shooting star when she was eighteen: on to that vast cosmos of men represented by her college professor. Though I hadn’t liked being thrown over, I’d been surprised to realize how relieved I suddenly felt, as if a whole murky, secret part of my past was departing with her. Seeing her again would mean I was risking bringing it back: a scientist, lifting the vial of smallpox.
I was nothing like a scientist. I was a self-involved poseur invoking scientists, as if by analogy I could pretend to some sort of risky yet humanitarian concern.
So what should it have been like—my long-awaited, inevitable reunion with Patty? The conclusion of a fairy tale? The surprise visit in a good movie, the inevitable visit in a bad one? All the years I lived in Cambridge, Patty had been as near as Provincetown.
She drove in from the Cape in her truck. She’d even told me on the phone that she came in every couple of months. Her voice sounded the same: no-nonsense, yet enticing. She told me that her husband bartended and took people out on whale watches. He was a bass player who only had anything resembling steady work as a musician in the summer. Patty’s youngest brother lived with them. He was, as she put it, pursuing spiritual awareness. The husband’s brother also lived there: a former model, too old to get jobs, thrown out by his stockbroker lover, down on his luck, working part-time waiting tables at the restaurant where Patty’s husband tended bar. The brothers and Patty and her husband had a ramshackle house they could have sold for a lot of money, but things had become so expensive on the Cape they couldn’t have split up and bought anything else. The down payment had come from Patty’s brother, who had been a third grade history teacher before he stopped working and began his study of Buddhism.
All this came out before we got together. It was almost as if she’d decided to filibuster, since she didn’t want to hear what I had to say. I half thought she might cancel: the day she was to see me was overcast. Rain was predicted. She was nervous about visiting, I could tell. About the time she said she’d get to my apartment, I looked out the window for her truck. I saw a bag lady hurrying along, pushing a shopping cart piled high with junk.
Half an hour later than she said she’d be, Patty knocked on the door. I opened it. She didn’t seem to have done anything special to dress for the occasion. She wore a denim skirt and a dark blue turtleneck flecked with lint. If she’d brought a raincoat, she had left it in the car. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was thin: her nose was more aquiline, her lips narrower. There were lines in her forehead. As a girl, she’d had bangs. Without them, her high forehead made her look slightly cadaverous. Her hair was streaked with gray.
This was Patty Arthur? I embraced her as an excuse not to look at her any longer. It was simply too painful.
“I’m glad you wanted to see me, Andy,” she said, as if she knew I had doubts. I had never before been called Andy, by her or by anyone else. “But it’s pointless—you know? Everything’s different. I mean, thank God everything’s different, but it is.”
She sat in a chair and looked around the room. She made no comment.
“You were a big part of my life,” I said.
“Pizzawas a big part of our life back then. Remember how important pizza was?”
She could still make me smile. “Let me get you something,” I said. “Coffee? Coke? Beer?”
“Morocco!” she said suddenly. “Remember all that bullshit about how I was going to live in Morocco? We were going to run away together, remember? So I’m in P’town, and you’re in la-di-da Cambridge. It doesn’t seem like either of us got very far.”
I didn’t think I’d had plans to go to Morocco, but maybe I had. I had once planned to be a doctor. A musician. A painter. She’d wanted to be an architect.
“Tell me what made you track me down,” she said.
“Curiosity about what happened to an old friend,” I said.
“I don’t quite believe that,” she said. “At least back then, you were never exactly Mr. Sociability. We were such a good fit because we were both scared to death.” She slipped off her shoes. “I wouldn’t have guessed you’d look up friends from the past, because it didn’t seem like you had a lot of curiosity. It seemed like you were careful not to ask questions, because you didn’t want to know the answers.”
“I was pretty curious. You don’t think so?”
“Sex, you mean? I lured you into that.”
“I didn’t mind,” I said.
“So what’s the deal?” she said, sinking back into a chair. “Are you debriefing the girls now? Alice was so excited she found out how to get in touch with you, and then she said you were so full of yourself she didn’t even give you my note. I haven’t noticed, so far, that you seem particularly full of yourself. It is a little odd, though, that you’re such a good host, now that the roles are reversed: Andrew offering Patty coffee.” She took a deep breath and exhaled. “I don’t want coffee,” she said.
“What was in the note?” I asked. I was sitting across from her.
“Stuff about my fucked-up life. What else?” She shrugged. “I don’t know what I hoped: that you’d call, or that you’d read it and not call.”
“I called without reading it,” I said.
“Yeah. I know. So now you get Snow White, on her day off from the dwarfs. Really: I live with Sleepy and Grumpy and Comet and Blitzen, or whatever the fuck they’re called. Itwould be funny, except it’s not funny.” She slipped into her shoes again. “I should go if I’m in this black a mood. Really, I should,” she said. “You catch me on a bad day. Month. Year.” She gave the first faint smile she’d given since she came in. “You had drinks with Josie at a bar, I hear,” she said. She added: “Jo
sie-the-writer.”
“She didn’t mention anything about writing.”
I got up and took her jacket from the coatrack. “Let’s go get some coffee,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, standing up slowly and slipping into the jacket. “She’s going to write everything about everybody. She didn’t tell you that? Even the score, or whatever she thinks she’s doing. Lady Lazarus, doing another encore even though Sylvia Plath is dead.”
“We could go to a bar,” I said. “Would that be better?”
“It’snoon,” she said.
“I believe I can find a bar that will serve drinks at noon.”
“You’re funny,” she said. “Why did you call me?”
“I called Hank Montgomery, too. He’s joining us at the coffee place. It was going to be a surprise.”
“Heis?”
“No,” I said. “Just thought I’d see how you’d react.” I reached back and took her hand as we walked down the steps, sidestepping a little puddle from a dropped cup of Starbucks coffee. Her hand was small, and fit perfectly inside mine. It gave me a jolt, the sensation was so familiar.
“You’re still handsome,” she said. “It would never have worked. I could never have kept your interest. If I hadn’t fucked you, you wouldn’t have been interested then, either.”
“Don’t dismiss your baking abilities. You did pretty well as Betty Crocker.”
“You remember the cake?” She smiled again. “Yeah, well, I would never have been enough for you.”
“I didn’t notice you trying, running off with your professor.”
“We didn’t run off,” she said. “He taught there.”
A boy passed by, walking a whippet. He carried a red shovel and a plastic bag. He was wearing wraparound sunglasses and listening to music through headphones, jutting his chin in and out, silently mouthing the words. The Nikes on his feet were wider than the dog’s body.
“That’s where I parked,” she said, pointing to a parking garage as we turned the corner. “Expensive habit, Cambridge.”
I squeezed her hand. “You never thought about calling me?” I said. Now that we were walking, I felt better. I hadn’t realized until I began to relax how guarded I’d been when she first walked in.
“Sure I did. I just thought I’d wait until I was at a better place in my life.”
“I’m glad you came,” I said, moving closer. “Is there anything I can do?”
“My mother helps out,” she said. “She’s pretty bummed, herself, since she actually believed it was just a few quick steps from not puking up my food to livingla vida locain Morocco. My poor mother: I wrecked her life. Being an unwed mother made her into a scaredy-cat good girl for the rest of her life.” She pointed with her free hand. “I go to that place and get liquid minerals for my brother. He enjoys remedies from the natural food store when he’s not buyingdrugs from a guy in Medford. Colloidal trace minerals, I believe they’re called.”
“Do you take drugs with him?” I asked, though I didn’t want to know.
“I smoke a little pot,” she said. “What did you think—I was a junkie?”
I steered her through a shortcut. Beneath the jacket she was thin. I could remember her small breasts. The way she’d once squirted whipped cream on them, placing candied cherries atop the cream. That seemed very, very sweet now—in all senses. Harmless and sweet, though maybe just a little over the top.
“My brother’s his own MTV show on speed,” she said. “He entertains us, since we can’t afford cable.”
“Patty,” I said, “you still have that wonderfully unique way of expressing yourself.”
“Yeah, you’re handsome and I’m funny,” she said. “How come we’re not a sitcom?”
I held open the door of an old-fashioned coffee shop where the coffee of the day was Maxwell House, and where you could sit in a wooden booth.
“Be right back,” she said, heading toward the rest room before we were even seated. “Order me some apple juice, please,” she called back. “My stomach couldn’t take coffee.”
I watched her walk downstairs, still surprised at the gray in her hair. I thought of her split-level house. Of her bedroom. Her bed. Of the cone of piercingly sweet incense she liked to burn. I wondered, now, whether her parents knew—they must have known—and just didn’t say anything. They might have been ahead of their time. That, or cowards.
I ordered apple juice and coffee. “How’s your sister?” the waitress said. “I haven’t seen her in a while.”
“She’s fine,” I said. It was probably the first question I’d answered so far that day. I had trouble getting comfortable as I waited. After what seemed like a long time, I got up and went downstairs, guessing that she might be crying. There was one rest room, with two plaques side by side, of a German shepherd in a tuxedo and a poodle in a ballet outfit. The door was open. I walked back upstairs, mystified. “Left through the kitchen,” a young man struggling with a big container of dirty dishes said, as he passed me. “Yeah,” he said, acknowledging my surprise. “Every so often they march right through the kitchen, like the front door they came in through doesn’t exist anymore.”
I dropped a five-dollar bill on the table and ran out, nearly toppling the juice. I suddenly remembered sitting in another coffee place, with Sue McCamber. “I don’t want to be here with you,” she had suddenly said. Which was one more sentence than I’d heard from Patty.
It was bright enough outside to make me squint. All signs of the storm had passed. Patty had told me where she’d parked her truck. I hurried across the street, trying to guess whether I had any chance of catching her. Josie, Alice, Patty—they were all in worlds of their own. Josie with her mixed signals. Alice, who’d acted like some weekend hunter, ready to shoot the first thing she encountered and call it a day. But this was nuts, what Patty had done. She must have realized I’d be angry. She couldn’t have assumed I’d just figure that was that, and drink my coffee.
I could have used some caffeine on my way to the garage.When I got there, out of breath, I asked the man in the booth if any trucks had gone out recently. “You mean like a real pickup truck?” he said.
She roared up then, as if on cue. I stared, knowing—just knowing—she’d drive through the bar the second she saw me. I saw the splintered wood; the shock on the attendant’s face. I heard the alarm go off. I felt my heart racing. But she didn’t do it. She held money out the window, pretending to look straight through me. I ran around in front of the truck, pulled open the door on the passenger side, and jumped in. I was panting, and as angry as I’d been in a long while. She took the money the cashier had handed back and stuffed it in her jacket pocket. She still would not look at me. Her jacket was red plaid. Her hair cascaded over her shoulders. There was a worn spot in the elbow of the jacket. A glove protruded from one pocket.
“As bad as I look, as out of control as I feel, you want to do it that much?” she said.
I hadn’t considered sex. Even thinking briefly of her breasts had not really been thinking of sex. I had not been waiting for her in the coffee shop, thinking we’d go back to my apartment and undress. But the minute she said it, yes. Yes: I did want to have sex that much.
“So,” she said, shrugging. “Your place or mine?”
“My place might have the advantage of not having three other men present, including your husband.”
“Right,” she said.
The car behind us waiting to exit honked. Patty stepped on the gas, barely stopping in time to let a boy on a skateboard shoot past.
“You’re going to have to tell me how to get there,” she said. “All these goddamn one-way streets.”
“Go right,” I said. “Right,” I said once more. I had her park on a block where we’d get a ticket, but they wouldn’t tow the car. She backed into a space between a Lexus and a battered Subaru. Since she seemed to be parking with her eyes closed, I was amazed she didn’t hit either car. I watched as she took the keys out of the ignition and dropped
them in her pocket. The jacket elbow was torn, rather than worn. It might even have been a recent tear. I locked my door, then went around and locked hers. “You can’t leave your truck unlocked around here,” I said.
I grabbed her hand and we walked in silence to the building. Everything about it suddenly looked wrong. Someone had put a frying pan with burnt meat in it outside one of the doors, I saw, as we took the stairs. The guy who lived across the hall from me had yet to bring in hisBoston Globe. Things were definitely going in slower motion now—for Patty, as well as for me. I could feel the calm between us, as if we’d walked back through a storm, after all, and now we were safe. My heart had almost stopped racing. “Nice,” she said, tiredly, as the key opened the door. She acted as if she had not been in the apartment before. I took her jacket and hung it up.
“Are you still offering coffee?” she said.
“I don’t suppose you feel like explaining what just happened?” I said.
“What’s to explain?” she asked. “Here we are. All roads lead to Rome. If not Morocco.”
A tear rolled down her cheek. I handed her my handkerchief. “I don’t fucking believe it. A guy who carries a handkerchief,”she said. “It’s probably French roast coffee, too.” She dabbed her eyes and handed the handkerchief back, as if returning it would stop her tears.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m making coffee. Which isn’t French roast.”
“Jamaican blue mountain,” she said sourly. “Fucking decaf Sumatra.”
She curled up silently in the chair. I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and took out the bag of coffee. I noticed that my hand was shaking.
Back in the living room, she had slid from the chair to the rug. She was lying there with her hands crossed over her chest like a mummy, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Jesus,” I said. “Patty. What is it?”
“I’m a mess,” she said. “I don’t know why you called me.” She rolled onto her side.
In the apartment below, a Dionne Warwick revival had begun. Better that than the Beach Boys festival the neighbor had entertained me with previously. Eyes squeezed shut, Patty undid the side zipper on her skirt, raised her hips, and bumped awkwardly out of her clothing. Underneath was a short white half slip, which she shrugged down around her hips and tossed off. Then she amazed me by reaching one-handed for her purse and unzipping a pouch from which she withdrew a prophylactic. All at once I remembered her former stockpile, kept in an arabesque box: her rather large collection, which she said her mother had provided her with, so that what happened to her would not happen to Patty. I took the packet without saying anything. In my entire life, no woman had ever done what Patty did.
