by Ann Beattie
“No!” Lucy said. “I would not think it was funny if you planted willow trees to weep in your behalf in my yard!”
“Come in here, Lucy,” Hildon said. “You’re acting like a jackass.”
“That was my father,” Lucy said into the telephone. “He’s very outspoken. He gets away with everything because he’s six five. Daddy thought the bushes were beautiful, by the way. Let me put him on to thank you.”
Lucy came to the doorway and smiled at Hildon. Such a tease. Putting him on the spot. He decided to turn the tables on her. He walked past her and picked up the telephone. “Shtup my daughter and your ass’ll fly farther than Johnny Unitas’ football,” he said. He slammed the phone down.
Lucy looked shocked. Then she laughed. Lucy with the long swing of auburn hair, the long, matchstick legs and arms, the perfect white teeth. His heart really was racing; he had taken such a risk. He went into the living room and sank down into the sofa. She nestled against his side, laughing hard. “It makes me wish I did have an irrational father,” she said. “That macho shit really does have its appeal. That was pretty good, Hildy.”
“That kid’s no more than nineteen,” he said, suddenly feeling as stuffy as a real father. “You ought to hang out with people your own age.”
“I don’t hang out with him—I met him when I went to buy a rosebush.”
“The flirting was pretty heavy, Lucy. Pretending that you were debating between a rosebush and a box of petunias. Lucy the dizzy dame.” Hildon crossed his eyes and tapped his knuckles on his forehead.
“Hildon—are you serious? You’re serious. You really believe what you’re saying. What bothers you—that it worked?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Hildy—are you serious? I’m taking you seriously. Please smile.”
“We were having a nice time, and suddenly you just turned your attention on that silly kid and started coming on to him like I wasn’t there.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you? Since when are you so easily offended?”
“You’ve always been able to hurt me when you wanted to.”
“Hildon—you’re out of your mind. We’re having a serious discussion. Why are we doing that? Did something bad happen to you before you came over?”
“Tell the truth,” Hildon said. “Don’t be cute for a minute. All I want is for you to admit you were flirting. Yes, I’m overreacting. It’s your right to flirt. But you have to be serious for one second and admit that I’m right.”
“Is there some reason why you want to get into a fight with me?” Lucy said.
“I never won a fight with you in my life, so I’d be crazy to want that, wouldn’t I? You’re taking the easy way out by pretending that every disagreement is a fight, and therefore you don’t have to lower yourself to take part in it. Just say that you were flirting, and I’ll shut up about my personal code of ethics that says a thirty-five-year-old woman shouldn’t turn on a teenager.”
“He’s not a teenager.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“What is the subject, Hildon? That you want to make a big production out of some silly person’s crush on me?”
“You kid around with those people. You take them seriously and you’ve dismissed me.”
“We talk on the phone almost every day.”
“I edit the magazine you write for.”
“It has nothing to do with that. I could mail the pieces in.”
“Go ahead,” Hildon said. “Keep talking. Convince yourself, and then it’ll be all over.”
“Hildon,” she said, putting her hands on his shoulders. “Are you all right? Are you going to keep this up?”
“Are you?” he said. “All you have to do to stop me is admit that I was right and that you were flirting.”
“Hildon,” she said, closing her eyes, “Close your eyes and we’ll both be quiet for a minute, and when we open our eyes we’ll pretend this didn’t happen.”
“I don’t want you to pretend anymore,” he said.
Her mouth showed a flicker of annoyance; she squeezed her eyes shut. She did not open them. She had her hands on his shoulders. In a few seconds he kissed her hand. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter and did not react. He looked at the hand he had kissed. Thank God she had not married Les Whitehall. He closed his eyes and opened them again. Her eyes were squeezed shut. The lines in her forehead and fanning above her nose made him realize that someday Lucy would be old. He would be old. He would be old without ever having won a fight, but he would still have Lucy. He put his cheek on her hand and closed his eyes. He kept them closed for much longer than a minute. He felt her breath on his hair, and a slight breeze coming through the window. When he opened his eyes she was looking at him. Her face was almost expressionless—that look that had first lured him to her side when they were twenty years old. The look was a mask: because she was pretty and she had been looked at, appraised, so often, she wasn’t going to let anybody have anything easily besides their own false assumptions. She was so pretty that many people made the mistake of thinking she had to be dumb. Her immobile face reinforced that effect. It seemed almost intimate when she smiled, and a real turn-on when she laughed. She smiled at him. It was over. Another moment when he might have lost her had passed.
She got up and went into the kitchen. “Do you want a drink?” she said. He had shook her up a little. He was sorry he had done it. He looked at the rug and tried to compose his thoughts. She came to the kitchen doorway and looked at him. Now she did look upset. She walked back to the living room and sat beside him.
“Did you do that to scare me?” she said.
“I just went out of control,” he said.
She leaned back against the sofa and closed her eyes. It was very quiet; depending on how strong the breeze was, you heard different noises: scratchy or soft, the tinkling of wind chimes. He held her earrings between two fingers: a gold sliver of moon on which a little star had landed. He studied it, dangling from her ear, rubbed it the way he would rub a shell, doubting the cool smoothness of it.
“Go make us a drink,” she said. “I’m not as dishonest as you think I am. I was flirting. I did it just to do it. I was pretty surprised when he found out where I lived and put all those bushes in the backyard.”
They hadn’t done this routine for so many years that at first Hildon didn’t realize it had begun. It was what they had done long ago: belittled themselves so much that the other would be overwhelmed with positive feelings. That was the way they had so often ended up in bed. He was standing. She put her hands behind his knees and drew her forehead to his leg. He froze for a second, then stepped toward her. She kissed his leg.
Hildon started to laugh. He needed to choke back a terrible sadness that had started to overwhelm him. He sat on the couch now, leaning the tip of one shoulder against the back, and began to raise her shirt out of her jeans. He kissed her stomach. His nose tickled her, and she drew up her legs. “I didn’t think he was nineteen,” Hildon said. “I was just being a prick.”
4
THE pickup truck that passed Lucy as she was driving to the airport to get Nicole made her feel as if she were in a time warp: it was a red Ford, and the driver had his long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. As she passed, Lucy looked over and saw a thin, round-faced blond girl sitting in the passenger’s seat. Wedged between them was an Irish Setter. Where would all the Irish Setters of the world be today if there had been no hippies? Lucy saw the bumper in her rearview mirror and cut back into the lane. Her mother would have said, “Where can they be going?” Her mother was always mystified by the sight of people casually dressed, couples together at two in the afternoon. She was not really asking a question but saying that she did not approve of people who did not work. She was still dismayed that Jane had no career, and she didn’t take what Lucy did seriously. She could not take it seriously that Lucy was a teacher in the Arts in the Schools program because that was part time. She understood that Lucy got paid for t
he columns she wrote, but since they were a joke and very few people had made careers out of jokes, she didn’t take that seriously either. Lucy couldn’t argue with her there.
She listened to the radio. She was trying to get back to that. When Les left, she had stopped listening to music. He had played the radio all the time. When she had an image of Les, music accompanied it, like the beginning of a movie. The Eurythmics were on the radio. This summer’s Eurythmics record was not as good as “Sweet Dreams.” Lyrics didn’t remind her of Les—he had loved all A.M. music, so just the sound of the radio was painful. The specifics changed, but the format never did. It was one advertising jingle or another. Music playing softly, gradually getting louder as the DJ finished talking, the number to call to name a song and win a prize, the number-one song, the big hit of summer, fast talk about worthless products, where to get tickets to this concert or that concert, whatever shouldn’t be missed, and don’t be late. Men at Work. Culture Club. Michael Jackson then and now. Blast from the Past, Oldies but Goodies, two hot dogs for the price of one, and a cold front moving in from the North. Then came a Möbius strip of music. All over America, people were driving around hearing a song and remembering exactly where they were, who they loved, how they thought it would turn out. In traffic jams, women with babies and grocery bags were suddenly eighteen years old, in summer, on the beach, in the arms of somebody who hummed that song in their ear. They ironed to songs they had slow-danced to, shot through intersections on yellow lights the way they always had, keeping time with the Doors’ drumbeat. They might have to be reminded of many of the names of kids they had gone to school with, but once they heard the name, they could say with certainty which of them thought John was the best Beatle and which thought Paul was. They were as sure of the top ten, the summer they graduated from high school, as any minister of the Ten Commandments. It was how people kept in touch with their past. And above all, no matter how many other people had danced to it or made love to it or hung pictures of Jackson Browne or Bruce Springsteen or Van Halen in their bedroom, it was personal. Cyndi Lauper was singing “Time After Time” when Lucy turned off the radio. Bad enough that one song, or two songs, could break your heart—she had to make the mistake of falling in love with somebody who was an addict to all of it. It was like falling in love with someone and having it be your own special secret that the sun went down at night.
It was still difficult for Lucy to believe that she had spent more than ten years in New York. Every time she got in her car now, she remembered with amazement all the time she had spent on buses and in subways and being thrown around in cabs. She had had a car then, but it was impossible to drive in the city. She stored it in a carport in Hackensack, for $25 a month, with a woman who was a cousin of a woman Lucy had gone to school with. At the time, this had made perfect sense. On weekends—almost every weekend, when she got together with Les Whitehall—they drove to the Hudson Valley, or to see friends of hers in Connecticut. In retrospect it was amazing to realize that at least once a week she had been amazed that there was still a sky. She had gotten so used to the hard edges of things that she had come to think of the world as a gigantic coloring book, all outlines and shapes, so clearly delineated that there was little need to fill it in. One star. Two. A sky that looked like corridors, one turn after another determined by the tops of buildings jutting up as obstacles. The most needed crayon was gray.
Lucy had gone to New York because she thought that she would become a success. There was quite a difference between being successful, which she might have done anywhere, and being a success. Being a success meant being a personality, and New York was a big stage, always ready. The props distracted people, though, and Lucy was no exception. She began to work less; to worry more about getting enough sleep, which resulted in restless nights and dragged-out days; and as she lost ground, to fixate on what she had. By the time she doubted that she was going to be a success, it was also clear that the city had a way of keeping people. Life was so difficult that small triumphs began to look like success. Managing to keep your car so near the city seemed a real coup. The city always allowed people to fool themselves. There were statistics of people mugged or robbed or raped, but it still seemed that there was safety in numbers. There was something solid about New York that couldn’t be shaken. It was a wall, and the people were Humpty Dumpty; the New York Times, the mayor, even signs hurriedly printed and hung on trees warned them to be careful, so if they toppled, they could only blame themselves. The king’s horses and the king’s men couldn’t help them. The horses were for hire, trotting around Central Park with carriages full of tourists.
When she first moved to the city, the fairy-tale aspects of life there fascinated Lucy—things were so excessive, the veneer only intensified how primitive everything really was. It took awhile to realize that there was no proper ending to the fairy tale: things were simply out of control, and no one was in charge once the strobes were unplugged and the interview was over. It was people’s own fault if they didn’t get the joke. Mayor Koch was right there doing his best to amuse, on Saturday Night Live, if you wanted to tune in.
It could be scary if you let yourself focus on the chaos, so most people kept their sanity by focusing, instead, on things. Those who would still take a risk focused on people. When they did, of course they gave the people magical powers: everyone was exceptional and mysterious, romanticized out of proportion. Real people couldn’t save anyone if they were in trouble, but heroes and heroines could. Since it was the tendency of many women to exaggerate men’s importance and abilities anyway, men fared particularly well in New York.
Les Whitehall had led a charmed life: he was attractive, intelligent and amusing. People who didn’t know him well would be slow to spot the fear disguised as optimism. He was always well spoken, an extrovert. The older generation knew to watch out for men like Les Whitehall, but in New York someone who was that together easily impressed people. What Lucy’s grandmother knew to call “a smoothie” was now, at natural-food stores in the city, the name of a refreshing drink. In another town (might as well say another world) it might never have been apparent to anyone, including Les, that he wasn’t achieving as much as he might. When Lucy met him, he was writing a novel, taking a course in philosophy, playing racquetball and jogging two miles a day, in addition to his job as a college teacher. He commuted to teach classes outside the city four days a week. This made him a maverick to New Yorkers, and exotic to his students and colleagues. In a town where every waitress was an actress, every cab driver a philosopher, where the construction workers were doing field work for their Ph.D.’s in psychology, and the hospital orderly sang opera, you gradually came to assume that every Nathan’s hot dog was actually a dehydrated roast beef. It was taken for granted that people weren’t what they appeared to be, and no matter what they were, you hoped that actually they were more than they seemed. The city was overcrowded, after all; people who couldn’t swim had no excuse for setting out for the island to begin with. Nobody cared much about anyone’s past. The present simply didn’t exist, and the real interest was in the future. Ask any New Yorker where to get the Sunday Times on Saturday night.
Les Whitehall was from Carbondale, Illinois, and if he had stayed there, he would have gone into business (his father and uncle owned a hardware store), bought a cruisemobile, married and had children. He was saved by a scholarship. He went to Princeton, where he dated lanky, loquacious women. He learned early that it was better to be quiet than to speak and make a mistake. Much to his surprise, his silence was accepted as the appropriate response of a superior mind. Everyone at Princeton was assumed to be intelligent until proven otherwise. More than the people he grew up with, the people who crowded around him at college thought in terms of black and white. It seemed appropriate to Les that from then on, those were the colors in which his classmates, in their tuxedos and elegant dresses, would be dressed. He kept up with a few people from that crowd. Lucy could never feel close to any of them. She was no
longer sure why she had been so impressed with Les Whitehall. His optimism was part of it. And he had simply been so conspicuous in a town where almost no one stood out that she had been taken in. He was tall but not too tall, handsome but casual, one of those men who could change the filter on an air conditioner and your perception of what kind of a day you had had with equal dexterity. In time, she came to learn that optimism was not something he really felt, but a convenience for him—something he could use as a sort of weapon. When things worked out, he would say that he had predicted it all along, and if they went wrong, he would turn that against whoever had believed in him. Until she met Les, she never realized that fear, not strength, could make people resolute. He knew that he was handsome and forceful. He knew how he appeared to other people. He was so sure of this, and of their surprised and happy reaction to him, that he would play around—the confession of weakness that lightened his conscience also made others see him as forthcoming. Anyone smart enough to suspect that what he did was tinged with bravado would probably be won over to his side, anyway: interesting, this elaborate defense system in someone so urbane. The childishness made them warm to him.
Another couple introduced Lucy to Les Whitehall, and after dinner he had taken her for a drink. Les’s talk was full of significant pauses and deliberate omissions. He made people want to find out about him, but he chose carefully, selecting people who would have the good manners to question him graciously, backing off if the board creaked, tiptoeing forward when the bridge seemed stable. When they got tired (it was impossible to find out enough to think you had gotten to the other side) he would suddenly take on life. He wore them out in a difficult situation they never wanted to enter into, then gave them something—a fond look, a hand—so that when they least expected it, they were safe after all. He let them feel approved of, but in reality he did not approve of himself or of anyone else. Anyone who had less than he had wasn’t worth his time, and anyone who had more was a threat. That was Les: he perceived of everything in terms of competition. He was still racing with the football, but running more slowly than he had in Carbondale, the letters on the back of the jersey replaced, when necessary, with his heart on his sleeve. The new goal was to get women.
