by Ann Beattie
In preparation for their session, Maureen, as Davina had instructed, had tried to get a good night’s sleep and had had mineral water with orange juice for breakfast and eaten lightly. Davina had had a photograph of Maureen enlarged, cut out, and backed with cardboard. She leaned it against the wall as they talked. This black and white Maureen was almost life size. It was quite eerie, having it there in the living room: Maureen in her sarong, smiling.
“When you look at that, what do you see?” Davina said.
Maureen looked at it a long time. “I don’t know,” she said.
“You see an attractive woman smiling, don’t you?”
“Maybe I look silly.”
“Please don’t think of the statue as ‘I.’ Try to tell me only what you see.”
“I think I see a woman who isn’t especially attractive. Just an ordinary woman.”
“What is the part you think is most attractive?”
Maureen thought about it. The legs were nice; the calves thin and shapely. The hair was long, thick, and rather dramatic. She knew that her eyes were probably her best feature, but the blowup had almost obliterated detail, so that they were oval, muddy pools. “The hair,” she said.
“Good,” Davina said. “Concentrate on that for a few minutes.”
Maureen tried to concentrate on her hair, but her attention kept drifting. She was more worried about Hildon coming home while this was going on than she had been the time she went to bed with Matt Smith.
“Reach up and stroke your hair,” Davina said. “Say out loud: ‘I have lovely, luxurious hair.’ ”
“I have lovely, luxurious hair,” Maureen said, stroking her hands down the sides of her hair.
“Do you believe that?” Davina said.
“Well, of course, many people …”
“We aren’t interested in many people. We are interested in you. Do you believe that this is true of you?”
“Yes,” Maureen said.
“Society has taught us to turn aside compliments, which is wrong enough in itself, but which is very harmful if we take a simple fact to be a compliment. Now, tell me something else about your hair.”
“My hair is long.”
“Your hair, then, is the most impressive thing you notice about yourself; it is luxurious, lovely, and long. That’s very good, and easy to remember, because it alliterates.”
Davina opened a canvas bag she had brought with her. She took out a white towel, went over to the statue, and draped it over the hair.
“Find something else to admire,” she said.
Maureen smiled; with the sarong tied around her and the towel thrown over her hair, it looked like she had just come out of the shower.
“The legs,” Maureen said.
“What about them?”
“They’re shapely.”
“Fine. What else?”
“You mean what else are my legs?”
“Yes.”
“They’re not muscular.”
“Not what they aren’t, what they are.”
“They’re smooth.”
“Fine. Your legs are shapely and smooth. That’s going to be very easy to remember, also, because it alliterates. Are you a writer?”
“I’m nothing.”
“That’s why I’m here: to prove you wrong. Your identity is not what you do. It is the wholeness of you. Your essence, which we will get to later. But today we are already noticing that the statue has some attractive features. Let me cover your legs and see what else you can find for me.”
She reached in her bag and took out a piece of material and two thumbtacks. She tacked it over the legs.
“Nothing else in particular,” Maureen said.
“Nothing here?” Davina said, pointing to her arms.
“They’re just arms.”
“And here?” she said, pointing to Maureen’s breasts.
“I think they’re ordinary breasts.”
“Here?” Davina said, pointing to her ribs.
“Nothing really. I’m not fat, but you just want to hear what I am, not what I’m not.”
Davina stood there a minute, considering the statue. She took off the material and the towel. “All right, then. You are not conscious of your face or of your arms or of your chest or torso.” She reached in the bag and took out a clipboard, flipped through, and removed four pieces of paper. She handed them to Maureen. They were exercises for those parts of the body that, Davina said, would help make her more conscious of them. She was to exercise, as the little diagrams instructed her, and tell Davina the following week whether she did not feel a new awareness and more positive response to parts of her body. She was also to develop and improve the parts she admired; Davina thought that streaking her hair would be a good idea. She thought that mesh stockings would indeed accentuate Maureen’s shapely legs.
“Do you believe that you have rights?”
“What?” Maureen said.
“Do you believe that you have rights?”
“Yes, of course, but …”
“Maureen: are you certain that you think that of course you have rights?”
“Well, yes.”
“What are some of these rights?”
“I have the right to be happy.”
“Specific rights, please. Not general rights. I don’t want to hear you recite the Declaration of Independence. I want to hear what your specific rights are, in your life.”
“It is my right to tell people when they call and I am sleeping that they have awakened me and that they shouldn’t call so early.”
“Very good. Tell yourself that you will do this the next time someone interrupts your sleep.” Maureen nodded. “Out loud.”
“When I’m sleeping and somebody wakes me up, I’m going to tell them that they have disturbed me and that they should see what time it is before they call.”
“What other rights do you have?”
“It’s my right to tell my husband that I insist that he stop having an affair with Lucy Spenser.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Davina said. “No one can stop men from having affairs. This brings up a crucial point: it is impossible to have rights when you have no power. When you truly know the power you do have, you will spend less time worrying about the power you don’t have.”
Davina’s watch alarm buzzed.
“I know he’s sleeping with Lucy Spenser. Don’t you think it’s my right, even according to the Ten Commandments, which forbid adultery …”
“Maureen, please: it will do us no good if you continue to think in terms of the Declaration of Independence and of the Ten Commandments. Naturally, on the Fourth of July, or on Sunday when you are in church, they may come to mind, but you cannot let them determine your thinking. You must concentrate on what is truly the case or likely to be the case, and increase your power so that you can deal forcefully and effectively.”
Davina was taking a piece of plastic out of her purse, and a hanger. She slipped the hanger in a groove on the back of the statue, held the top of the hanger, and lifted it. Maureen dangled. She moved Maureen to the sofa and slipped the plastic over the statue, and tied the bottom with a twist-o-flex.
“I should tell you,” she said, as she walked toward the front door, “although this is probably premature, that if you continue to be troubled by your husband’s infidelity, it is your good luck that I have an ex-sister-in-law who practices witchcraft.”
9
“LIGHTS! Camera! Action!
“Who says that? Nobody says that. Let’s take it from the top. People do say that. It makes sense, too. Think about all the people who are tempted to take it from the bottom.
“That was a bad joke.
“Hello, sweetheart. For one trillion zillion dollars and all the love that will fit onto a microchip, can you tell me who’s talking to you?
“Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s irrelevant if you’re farsighted. You don’t have to see to know that it’s Piggy Proctor, talking to
you via TDK cassette. What you see as you hear my voice, no doubt, is a bird taking flight, and if there’s a plane, it’s a coincidence. You never looked up thinking you’d see Superman to begin with, did you? There you are, enjoying the beauty of nature in the country, and the real Superman is off making babies with his longtime love, Gay Exton.
“I can just hear you now: what do you want, Piggy?
“What’s to want, except your continued success. Never doubt me. As sure as they’ll never put fluorescent lighting in the Polo Lounge, Piggy Proctor lives for your continued success.
“Su casa, mi casa.
“I am calling today with very good news. Just as you were beginning to feel like a yacht without water, what should happen but that the heavens open, and rain pours down for however many days and however many nights, and suddenly there is a vast ocean on which to set sail; you are buoyed up, higher and higher, until suddenly it is September, and all around you a new ocean of possibility: you are aboard Noah’s Ark, and Piggy is with you. Where will the boat dock? On NBC. And where’s the beef? Not only have they decided to revive the series—not only have they decided to cough up under the influence of Piggy Proctor’s Heimlich Maneuvering, but they are going to a nightly half hour if they are pleased with the results of the pilot. Our new sponsor is a company in the Midwest that makes dehydrated oatmeal that puffs up when it hits milk. A bunch of neo-hippie capitalists sell the company and they decide to diversify, and what do they decide to gamble on but a girl whose fame they think will expand faster than oatmeal pellets.
“The Nicole Nelson doll is being produced at just the right time. And in addition, there’s going to be a novelization of the series, to the point where it left off. It’s going to be … why isn’t this on my VDT, where it ought to be? … going to be monologues by all the primary characters. The book is going to be called Barren, and under that title it says ‘Passionate Intensity,’ and below that on the dummy there’s you, on a television screen—a CU slightly in profile. Your hair is windswept and you look great.
“Now: the man who’s doing this novelization seems to be a very serious fellow. He wants to talk to everybody in the cast, so I’m sure you’ll be obliging. The guy’s got credentials that would sound good played on a kazoo. He’s written another novelization, I mean a novel, that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award, and he wrote a book on Vietnam—scratch that: he wrote something on Venus de Milo, an article or whatever it was—you tell me why my secretary can’t make simple, comprehensible entries on this disc. It looks like I’ve called up a fucking dream journal instead of a bio.
“I’m having the guy call you. I understand that he wants to come up, down, wherever the hell Vermont is, to interview you for a couple of days. Try to get back into the Passionate Intensity mind-set before he gets there. And get Lucy to send me receipts when she bills the corporation. I can’t go into Llewellyn’s office and talk up a hundred dollar dead animal. He thinks everything’s rechanneled money for drugs. I said, ‘You don’t know what life is like in the country. Nicole’s got a dog, it’s her necessary protection, it guards her and we deduct the Alpo bills from her taxes, right? You don’t think that sometimes maybe the dog makes a mistake and kills a sheep, or whatever?’ Here’s the good part: I said, ‘Would I pull the wool over your eyes?’ You tell Lucy that the next time the dog kills something, there’s got to be a receipt.”
A snippet of music played; Dionne Warwick’s voice singing, “Don’t tell me what it’s all about …”
The next sound was Piggy Proctor’s lips, smacking the receiver.
Lucy was sunbathing on a chaise in the side yard. Edward, who was expected soon, was still waiting to hear whether he was required in New York to photograph the elevator. He was still at the Birches, collecting $800 a day plus expenses. Nicole clicked off the cassette player. She had been smiling all the time she was listening, and now she smiled more. “God, am I glad,” she said. “I thought in September I was going to have to sit still for school a whole day.”
“Congratulations,” Lucy said.
“Imagine Stephanie Sykes as the heroine of a novel.”
“What makes you think she’ll be a heroine?” Lucy said.
“Because she’s a main character.”
“All main characters aren’t heroines, you know.”
“I just mean that she’ll look good. Like, Juliet died and everything, but she came off looking good.”
“Shakespeare might have had an edge on the person who’s going to write the novelization.”
“What do you mean?” Nicole said. “You don’t think Stephanie Sykes is going to get trashed, do you?”
“Think about the series,” Lucy said. “Nobody is really a hero or a heroine; they’re all confused and pulled in different directions. Almost no decision they make can be right.”
“Yeah, but Lucy—don’t you feel sorry for me that I was treated cruelly as a child and I got into drugs and drinking and everything?”
“Well, if anything, the woman who saved you—”
“She didn’t save me just to save me. She wanted to make it look like her marriage was normal and she and her husband were a family, and since she was a doctor and she knew about my child abuse and everything, it was heroic to take me in.”
“But you just explained it: she did it for good and bad reasons.”
“Luuuucy—nobody does anything except for good and bad reasons.”
“You don’t think that people are ever just good or just evil?”
“In fairy tales and stuff. I don’t know about real people.”
“Nicole, maybe we aren’t understanding each other—you aren’t saying that people, when they do some one thing, are doing it for a bad as well as a good reason, are you?”
“I guess it depends on how you define bad. Most bad stuff isn’t so bad that it matters.”
St. Francis was on his chain, resting his chin on a basketball that Edward had left at the house the day before. It was a clear, windy day, and the airplane that Piggy said might happen to be passing by was overhead now, a small plane that flew across the yard and field.
“You mean,” Lucy said, trying to sound casual, “that people are both good and bad, and sometimes they’re bad and sometimes they’re good.”
“Who doesn’t believe that?” Nicole said. “Like I said, there are probably some monsters and some angels.”
“And for the rest of it, do you … you think people are duplicitous, or what?”
“What’s ‘duplicitous’?”
“Deceitful.”
“No. People just do stuff. They look out for themselves, and if that means they step on other people’s toes, that’s just the way it goes. You’ve got to expect that.”
“Who do you know who’s like that?” Lucy said.
“What do you think about Piggy? You think he’s my guardian angel? That he’s just there to look out for me?”
“No, of course not. But what has Piggy ever done to you that wasn’t what it seemed?”
“He was going to take Jane and me to Chinois for my birthday, for example. He made a big thing about it. So we had to go that night instead of doing what I wanted to do. He had the publicist carry on about my birthday for a week. Then he wrote a note to Barbara Gerrald and sent her six dozen roses and said he couldn’t see her because he had to ‘babysit.’ She sent me the note when he started going out with Sylvie Marlowe.”
“But he might really have had a change of heart, but he didn’t want to hurt you, and of course he never thought Barbara would show it to you. Or he might have been embarrassed by how fond he was of you, and saying that he was babysitting just sort of passed it off. You know?”
“You don’t get it,” Nicole said. “Piggy’s business.”
Another airplane passed overhead and disappeared temporarily in a patch of clouds. It emerged slowly, and for a second it seemed to be pulling the cloud behind it. Nicole laughed. “I’ll tell you what Barbara Gerrald did that was ju
st great,” she said. “She told the carhop at Chow’s, when Piggy and his wife were in there, that the flowers were a birthday present and gave him ten bucks to put them on the dashboard. It’s not that original or anything, but when Piggy and his wife came out and saw the roses, he must have had a hard time explaining it.”
Lucy couldn’t think what to say. She felt in the position of standing up for morality, but she didn’t feel comfortable in the position of a conservative adult lecturing a child, either. She had to say something.
“Who’s Barbara Gerrald?” she said.
“She’s Penny Holden on Summer Nights.”
Lucy had learned not to persist. The more she questioned Nicole, the farther away she was led from any facts that would mean anything to her. People’s real names, their professional names, the movies and/or TV shows they appeared in meant nothing to Lucy, let alone who they were married to, having an affair with, or considering suicide because of. At first Nicole thought that Lucy was teasing her, when nothing she could say would define a person, but by now she had subsided into feeling a little sorry for Lucy because she was such an outsider. Nicole had liked Edward’s suggestion that they have marathon sessions in which Lucy would throw her arms around the droning TV and Nicole would teach her by immersing her in the experience like Helen Keller’s teacher.
Though Lucy knew that she was really talking to herself, she said, “I guess that when Piggy saw the roses he could have pretended they were there by mistake.”
“That’s figuring that the carhop didn’t know who Barbara Gerrald was,” Nicole said.
“You really think he knew?”
“I don’t want to get into it, but anybody but you would know who Barbara Gerrald is.”
“But it was a surprise—the guy wouldn’t stand around and talk about it, would he?”
“I don’t know how it turned out,” Nicole said. “The thing that might have saved him was that even if the carhop did say something, it probably didn’t make any sense because those guys are so speedy. What a lot of them do is drop acid before they have to start parking the cars. One night when I was out with Bobby Blueballs and his mother, the guy that brought the car had flipped out, and he thought he was in the belly of a whale. It was about a hundred degrees out, and he had the windows up and he was sweating like mad, waving his arms around trying to swim. He sideswiped a Mercedes coming up to the front door. The cops had to smash a window to get him out, and there was an ambulance and everything, and they had to give him a shot of Thorazine and peel him off the wheel.”
