by Ann Beattie
Hildon was quite up front about telling his friends that the magazine’s success was proof positive that the entire country was coked-out. Hundreds of readers wrote in every month—readers who had caught the slightest, trendiest in-jokes. Unsolicited manuscripts rolled in that were either works of such quality that Swift must have rolled over in his grave or suitable evidence of mass psychosis. Thousands of people had filled out a request form, in the last issue, to have the psychmobile come to their houses. This was one of Hildon’s new concepts; it was modeled on the idea of the bookmobile, but instead of books to check out, there was a staff of psychologists to evaluate people’s mental condition and see whether they should be checked in.
But Lucy’s column was the biggest success, and it had been from the first. She was, as Cindi Coeur, a Latter-Day Miss Lonelyhearts, and the picture that accompanied her column showed her with hair romantically disheveled, eyes wide (presumably with wisdom), and a smile that, coupled with hair and eyes, might have suggested après l’amour, tristesse. The beatific smile was actually après $125 a gram.
These days, Lucy did the column straight—if you could call making up the questions and writing the answers on pieces of pink stationery she had her mother send her from John Wanamaker in Philadelphia and using a fountain pen with lavender ink doing it straight. Lately, Lucy had been thinking that maybe it was time to stop. Just because Jagger was still popping up like a jack-in-the-box, did she really want to be Cindi Coeur at forty? Still, Lucy herself admitted to a morbid fascination with being facile.
Dear Cindi Coeur,
When my husband makes love to me he always has a lot of money under the pillow. I mean, before we get into bed he empties out his wallet, and in the middle of lovemaking, he plunges his hands into the money. His money is always all wrinkled. I think that clerks in stores will see the money and maybe know what is going on. What can I say to my husband to make him stop? Do you think that he likes money more than he likes me?
Sad in the Sack
Dear Sad,
Your husband is sexually excited by money. This is called a “fetish.” You have not given me enough information. First, I need to know the ages and educational backgrounds of some of the clerks in order to tell you whether they will know what your husband is up to. You do suggest that your husband has quite a bit of money if there is so much that he can plunge his hands into it. What denomination is this currency? If your husband has as much money as it seems, I want to suggest two things: (1) that you put up with whatever he does and (2) that you not consult your clergyman, as he will expect increased donations.
The phone rang in the kitchen and Lucy got up to answer it. It was her sister, Jane, calling from California. Jane’s calls were always a sidestep from whatever she was doing. She would call someone, clamp the phone between shoulder and ear, then become so involved in painting her nails or doing leg stretches that when the phone was answered, it caught her off-guard.
“Oh. Hello,” Jane said.
“Hi,” Lucy said.
“I set my alarm,” Jane said. “I wanted to be sure to catch you. It’s seven o’clock here.” She sounded offended, as if Lucy had arranged for it to be early morning on the West Coast.
“What’s up?” Lucy said.
What was usually up was something involving Jane’s daughter, Nicole.
“Nicole’s blue,” Jane said. “Piggy was trying to set up a spot for her on Saturday Night Live, and it fell through. Then you know that gorilla that she liked so much—the one they put in a sailor suit, that she stood next to on the deck of the QE2 for Vogue? He just died of pneumonia. I sent a contribution to the San Diego Zoo.”
For the last two years, Nicole Nelson had appeared on Passionate Intensity as Stephanie Sykes, an abused child from a broken family, a teenage alcoholic who was being rehabilitated by a woman internist and her husband, Gerald, a wimpy would-be novelist who felt misunderstood not only by his wife but by the world. The woman internist, who secretly subjected herself to experimental surgery to correct sterility, then found out that she could conceive. She faced the dilemma of whether to divorce her husband, who was at last working on his novel, to have a child with her true love, another doctor at the hospital, thereby disrupting the family routine she had established that had put young Stephanie on the road to recovery, or to settle for what she now realized was probably the correct thing: a childless marriage. This was also complicated by the fact that her husband’s sister, a volunteer worker at the hospital who had always envied her sister-in-law and who had had a brief affair with the same doctor, was now considering blackmail, wanting to force her sister-in-law into the dull routine of motherhood with the wrong man, so that she could make the handsome doctor who would be left behind fall in love with her again. The further complication was that when his wife’s wealthy benefactor died, the wimpy husband had buckled down long enough to put his wife through the last two years of medical school. The day of her graduation, he had had a mental breakdown and, when he was recovering, a brief affair with a woman who worked in the lab. Then he had at last gotten an advance for his book, Barren, a fictionalized account of his and his wife’s failure to have children. What no one but the doctor/lover knew was that Stephanie Sykes was pregnant and begging the doctor to abort her. What even the doctor did not realize was that his lover’s husband’s ex-lover, the woman who worked in the lab, had found out that Stephanie was pregnant. She was anti-abortion, and if the doctor performed the surgery, she was going to go to the wimpy novelist and let him know what a farce his happy family life was, in hopes of getting him herself.
“Nicole needs a vacation. I want to send her to you,” Jane said.
“She’d be bored to death,” Lucy said. “You know what happens here? In the late afternoon the cows walk into the field.”
“Boredom might be good for her,” Jane said. “Don’t people develop their imaginations if they’re bored?”
Why argue? Lucy thought. If Jane had made up her mind, the visit from Nicole was a fait accompli. Only seconds elapsed before Jane’s ideas materialized. Their mother likened Jane’s mind to a dollop of pancake batter dropped on a hot griddle.
“Both of you come, and we’ll go to Philadelphia and visit Mother,” Lucy said.
“I’m going to tell you something that you can never tell another soul,” Jane said. “I’ve gained eight pounds since you last saw me. I’m on a macrobiotic regime. I have to stay close to the seaweed store. I’ll come visit when I’ve finished ingesting half of the ocean.”
“Does Nicole want to come?” Lucy said.
“She loves you,” Jane said. “She had such a good time the last time she visited. She still talks about Heath Bar Crunch ice cream and Hildon’s motorcycle.”
“He sold it,” Lucy said.
He had sold his motorcycle because he wanted a pickup instead, but so far he hadn’t found one with the right ambience.
“Come on,” Jane said. “Martyr yourself.”
Lucy laughed. She spent no more time than other people thinking about being a do-gooder. Like the rest of the world, she was preoccupied and imperfect: she had had an abortion, crushed a few rabbits under tires as she rolled down country roads, turned the page of the magazine when her eye met the eyes of the orphan she could save if she made out a check and sent it before the winds of fate blew the urchin’s last grain of rice away.
Take Nicole for the summer? To Lucy, she was still a baby—the poor baby whose father had died before he ever saw her, two months after he and Jane married, off the southernmost point of the United States, in Key West, after drinking ten piña coladas with friends. After Nicole had been born, Jane had gotten engaged again, to an actor. They broke it off when Jane had a miscarriage, but before they did, he arranged for Nicole to meet his agent. Just after her first birthday, Nicole had done a toy ad, hugging a Baby Do-Right doll against her cheek, and the rest was history. From the first, she had not just been personable in front of the camera. Other children had rashes and
insect bites, but Nicole’s skin was unblemished; she always looked windswept rather than rumpled. She was the perfect California girl long before her mother took her there. Her bedtime lullaby, suitably enough, was harmonized by the Beach Boys, who also played at her kindergarten graduation. She tap danced on the Tonight show, sharing the limelight with Charles Bronson and a macaw. The first time Nicole visited her grandmother in Philadelphia, Grammy could not believe that the child had never learned a prayer. Instead of rattling off “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” when she was put to bed, Nicole waited patiently to be questioned. At night her mother always asked, “How do you feel about everything?” When Grammy took Nicole to see a Shirley Temple movie, Nicole’s whispered comment was, “What’s wrong with that girl?”
Lucy had not seen much of Nicole the last few years, so this phone call came as a surprise, but if she needed anything besides Jane’s request to persuade her, she had only to remember that Nicole was her only niece: beautiful, intelligent, talented, and famous—the gleam of her deceased daddy’s eye that now gleamed in Hollywood. She was also a fourteen-year-old girl who was difficult. But really—how could anyone know how much of Nicole’s difficult behavior was the result of fame and how much was just a given with any girl that age? It was perfectly possible, Lucy thought, that like a rabbit drawn into danger by the beam of a headlight, Nicole had been lured away from the relative normalcy of places like Vermont and stunned by exploding flashbulbs. Looking at stars—real stars in the sky—might be just what Nicole needed. As Lucy and Jane discussed Nicole’s visit, tiny birds began swooping through the air. Vermont really was paradise in a way—Les had been right about that. It was more beautiful than any invented backdrop, a sky against which Lassie could be painted, noble and romantic, with wind-fluffed fur. White pansies blew like handkerchiefs held in the air. An image came to Lucy’s mind of ladies waving goodbye to soldiers as the train pulled out. Just as quickly, she thought that this scene had already passed into myth; handkerchiefs were an anachronism, and the next war would blow the Earth away. Nobody was going anywhere by train. The inevitability she felt about this made her sad. Of course she wanted to spend time with her niece.
By the time she and Jane hung up, Lucy felt energized. As she waited for Hildon, she picked up her clipboard, uncapped the fountain pen, and invented the week’s column.
Dear Cindi Coeur,
My brother and I are in big trouble and we don’t know what to do. Our parents have grounded us because the cops found us acting suspiciously in a garage that’s under a restaurant complex where our parents often eat. What we were doing was playing “Deep Throat,” but neither of us thought we could tell anybody. The cops questioned us, and we said we were playing hide-and-seek. See, my brother stands behind a pillar, and I go around the garage until he makes a noise or I catch on where he is, and then I go over with a real serious look on my face and he whispers something to me. Then he closes his eyes and I go off and do the same thing. When we get bored, we make strange telephone calls from the pay phone in the garage, but nobody knows about that. My brother is sick of being grounded and thinks that we should just confess, but I think we should wait it out, or maybe there is another way. Do you have any advice?
Tina the Throat
Dear Tina,
Often I receive letters and worry that, in reading between the lines, I am understanding more than the people realize they are revealing. I would be avoiding the real issue if I did not tell you that Freud would be even more interested in the game you and your brother play than either the cops or your parents. You did not choose to play “Deep Throat” as opposed to Monopoly without a reason, and the reason is that it is a game highly charged with sexual undertones. I am not entirely sure that even the original players, Woodward and Bernstein, realized this. Stop for a moment and think of the pillars as penises, and you will begin to understand what I mean. But what a thing is and what we can make it appear to be is very important. Why not tell your parents about the game, but call it “Woodward and Bernstein” instead of saying that you were playing “Deep Throat?” You can suggest, by carrying a notebook when you speak to them, that you are interested in a career as a journalist.
3
As he pulled into the driveway, Hildon consulted his watch. It had been a Christmas present from Lucy: a watch that would tell him, even as he fell into the ocean, what time it was in Cairo. He sat for a few seconds before getting out of the car. Behind him a tractor rattled by on the dirt road, and he felt a tremor in his ribs as it passed. He was slightly hung-over from the party, and he needed a hit of Cindi Coeur to cheer him up. Some butterflies flickered up from the dust and beat their wings. He watched them fly away, to an area where rhododendron bushes had recently been planted.
Lucy was in the kitchen, sitting on the counter, having her daily lunch: a diet chocolate ice cream cone. What might be mistaken for sprinkles was actually a Diet Trim capsule she had broken into a bowl through which she rubbed the ice cream.
“Mon coeur,” Hildon said, kissing his fingertips and flicking them away from his lips.
The door had been open. He had told her a million times to lock it, just in case some lunatic came by, but of course she did not lock it, and today he had no intention of saying anything.
He opened the refrigerator. Perrier on the top shelf, bottles arranged neatly. He considered removing them and setting them up on the floor like bowling pins, which he could knock down with the pomegranate. There was mold inside the applesauce jar. There was chutney. A plate piled high with snow peas. As usual there was nothing to eat.
“What’s this?” Hildon said, thumbing a newspaper on the kitchen counter.
“Research,” Lucy said. “Jane called today. She’s sending Nicole for a visit.”
In preparation for this, Lucy had gone out an hour before to buy the tabloids so that she could read the Hollywood gossip. She had found a picture of Ed Harp and Nicole, both in indecent bikinis, at the beach. Nicole with Philippe (Jane had told her in a recent phone call that he was a Greek midget they were trying to pass off as a ten-year-old French boy). Nicole leaving Ma Maison, after dinner à deux with Gillie—another superstar who worked hard to make his affectations antic: he went everywhere, including Ma Maison, with his two Samoyeds. The color reproduction was bad in the photo: Nicole’s face, Day-Glo pink, seemed to be sliding off sideways into Gillie’s mottled pink and yellow jaw. It was rumored, in another paper, that Nicole had her eye on Brandt Buchanan. That picture showed Nicole riding on the shoulders of a boy who wore a shirt, the main purpose of which was to display unbuttoned buttons. Farrah was still with Ryan—no word on his son, whose teeth he had knocked out. There was a diet that guaranteed you would lose ten pounds a month, snacking on beans. Many women, all of them on TV shows that Lucy had never heard of, were said to be infanticipating. The boyfriends and husbands looked gay. Michael Jackson had added another llama to his menagerie. Alana’s life was livable without Rod. Another diet featured the eating of squash blossoms.
Lucy handed Hildon the week’s column.
Dear Cindi Coeur,
I understand that small children often exaggerate without thinking of it as a lie. My question is about my son, who has been complaining that his best friend has better lunches than he has. He says that instead of bringing tuna fish sandwiches to school, the boy has a whole tuna. I told him that this was not possible, because a real tuna fish would weigh hundreds of pounds. Nevertheless, my son refuses to eat tuna sandwiches anymore, and I feel that tuna sandwiches are better for him than the protein found in the only other sandwich he will eat—pork chop. I am also worried about his telling lies. He refuses to admit that he has made up the story about the tuna. I have questioned him in detail about how this would be possible, and he just continues the lie. He says the boy does not bring the sandwiches in a lunch box, but in a box the size of a bed. Should I discipline him, or just pack tuna sandwiches and insist that he face reality and eat them?
A Worried Mom
It seems to me that you have quite a few options. You could refuse to replace the tuna sandwiches with sandwiches made of pork chops, and substitute something such as quiche, which will get soggy and appeal to no child. You could also get a pig and put it in a cage, telling your son that this way he would have something to rival his friend’s tuna fish, and that it is his problem to get it to school. You might also consider the possibility that the other boy is being forced to eat sardine sandwiches and is trying to compensate for his own embarrassment by insisting that they are tuna fish. You may want to ask yourself what your son is missing at home that makes him have such a strong empathetic reaction with the other boy. You might also consider the possibility that one or both boys needs glasses.
The phone rang, and Lucy answered it. From her end of the conversation Hildon could tell that she was talking to the kid at the nursery—the kid he had met with her the week before who had now developed a crush on her and who had stolen what looked like quite a lot of rhododendron bushes and planted them in her backyard. Lucy always elicited strong reactions from people. They loved her or hated her—their intensity was the one constant. Hildon, of course, couldn’t understand people’s negative impressions; he and Lucy had been friends and lovers since their college days.
Hildon wandered into the living room, not wanting to hear any more of the conversation. He had never been insulted that Lucy hadn’t wanted to marry him until he met the person she did want to settle down with—Les Whitehall. Les had even more preppie refinement than Hildon, but no sense of humor about it. Hildon thought he bore as much resemblance to a real man as Play-Doh did to a rock. Instead of being a real shit kicker, he was an intellectual shit kicker: he gave lazy paraphrases of philosophers’ thoughts, pretended to think ironically of his own existence, and chose the easiest audience a coward could find—college kids.
