by Ann Beattie
15
THE night before Myra DeVane turned in her Country Daze piece, she got a phone call from Edward, in California. She was surprised: kissing and not calling seemed to be the operative mode these days—every bit as popular and a more pleasantly passive version than the tried-and-true kiss and tell. They had gone out to dinner on Sunday, and then she had gone to bed with him. They had gone back to his room after dinner, where wallpaper printed with Golden Eagles replaced the clichéd etchings. An etching would have been welcome; she felt as if they were making love in a gigantic bird’s nest and that she might be plucked away at any time. The eagles glowed in the dark, and seemed to swirl around the room as she and Edward moved on the bed.
When she heard that he was in California, she softened a little. He had probably had to leave town on short notice, as he had always said he might. She had had the phone unplugged most of the day before, when she was at home working. She was making excuses for him before he made them for himself.
What he had to say was even more interesting. He obviously assumed that she knew something she knew nothing about. Jail? Nicole? The car in the woods? She had no idea what he was talking about, and said as much. And then he leaped to his defense, not believing that she was serious. “Have you written me off?” he said. “Without even hearing my side of the story?”
She asked to hear his side of the story. She said again that she had no idea what he was talking about. No, it wasn’t in the paper. Yes, she was sure. No, the front page was all about the mass murders at McDonald’s. Then he turned the subject to police corruption. He had paid a bribe to keep his name out of the paper, taken a long shot. Was she telling him that it had worked?
Maybe she was wrong, but she hadn’t read anything about it in the paper. She had been in town that day, and nobody was talking about it. What exactly happened? she asked him. He began to describe two cops who sounded like something from a Marx Brothers movie. Two cops, one of whom he swore was stoned, who had nearly crashed into a car he had borrowed for the day. The crazy cop had insisted on arresting him, and in the cop car, he had made it plain that money would be just the thing to hush this up. He had talked about how much toys cost these days, saying that he bet his son would be very pleased to have as many Kermits as money would buy. Edward, terrified and trying to console Nicole, had to listen to a long talk about toilet training on the way to the police station. There wasn’t anything about … indecent exposure in the paper?
The closest thing to that was a news item about Miss America, whose nude pictures were in Penthouse and who might have her crown taken away.
He told her the story, conveniently changing some of the facts. He and Nicole (what an irony that he and a dishwasher were the only people who put themselves out for Nicole; how lonesome stars really were) had gone to the woods, where he was going to take more photographs of her. They had decided to go for a swim, and just as they were stripping down to their underwear (okay, in retrospect he realized that that was chancey, but why did people have to have such dirty minds?) a car had zoomed into the woods and veered off into the bushes … He could try to describe to her where to look; surely the mess would still be there. He stopped talking, amazed at how well he was doing so far.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
The cops had gotten hysterical. They were hysterical to begin with. What cop who thought he had a pervert in the car would drive him to a K Mart and go in with him and load a shopping cart full of stuffed frogs? The cop was a pervert. Edward thought he might be so crazy he was dangerous. He had his credit card with him, so what the hell: hush money for fifty frogs.
“This didn’t really happen,” she said.
“It did!” he said. “You’ve got to find out about this cop and get him off the force. It’s your civic duty. He’s a madman. Not capable of helping anybody.”
“Go on,” she said.
“It happens all the time,” he said. “Cops burglarizing houses, running drug emporiums …”
He said that he didn’t know what the cops had said to Lucy, but she had even refused to see him in jail, apparently. He had been given the word, when he finally got in touch with a lawyer who got bail posted and sprung him from jail, that under no circumstances should he go anywhere near Lucy or Nicole and that he should go back to California. He had his camera, and all the photographs, but the easel was still at Lucy’s house. The whole sketch pad, with the drawings of Nicole.
“What do you think I can do about it?” she said.
“Do you think there’s any way you could get it?”
“I’ve never been to her house,” Myra said. “Let me get this straight: you and Nicole were going swimming, and then you were going to take pictures. Wouldn’t her hair be a mess?”
Action shots. The toy manufacturer didn’t want studio portraits.
“Listen,” Myra said. “This is pretty crazy. I don’t really know what to say. But there’s no way I can help you.”
“She’s not there a lot of the time. She never locks the door.”
“You’re insane,” Myra said. “You think I’d go out to her house and steal something? Can you imagine keeping that out of the papers? The Robber Reporter?”
She should really do a piece on police corruption …
Not her territory.
This was important. Worth talking to the higher-ups at the paper about. He would take a lie detector test saying that he had been forced by a policeman to buy every Kermit frog at the K Mart.
She believed him. It was just one crazy story after another. Day after day.
Lucy was having an affair with Hildon. They went off together at least once a week, and always on Monday.
Not a chance in hell.
He’d helped her out. Introduced her to Lucy. Confided in her about Nicole and the dishwasher.
She met him at the party by chance. By chance he knew Lucy, and Lucy was at the party. He hadn’t had to stretch far to do her the favor. And she didn’t care about Lucy and Hildon or Nicole and the dishwasher. It wasn’t that kind of story. It was an article about Country Daze magazine.
That was the problem everywhere: only little stories got told. They were misleading. No one would know that the cops were madmen. No one was willing to listen to his side of the story, and he could explain everything.
Oh: did he want her to write what he’d just told her?
He thought that he could confide in her. He didn’t think of her as a cold-blooded reporter, but as … a friend.
Who would break into someone’s house.
It was unfair! He had done nothing wrong.
He was lucky he wasn’t still in jail.
That was true.
Well: it wasn’t the phone call she expected, but it was nice to hear from him, and she hoped he would have a good summer in California.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “The job photographing those elevators in New York came through. I’m going to be there in a couple of weeks. I don’t have any desire to walk back into Looney Tunes, but I’d like to see you again.”
That got a slight smile. He couldn’t see that, of course. She said she didn’t see how that would happen, but she was glad they had met. To have a good summer.
“I’m serious,” he said. “You could get a flight from Burlington to New York for twenty-seven dollars. I’m going to be in a room at the Plaza.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Think about it,” he said. “I’d like to see you again.” He gave her his phone number.
When she hung up, she got a Coke out of the refrigerator and sat on the kitchen counter to drink it. It was very cold, and so strong that it burned going down. She thought about hopping a plane and going to the Plaza. It was such a nice idea that it made her realize how unhappy she was in Vermont. The Country Daze piece was finished, and she had no other big assignment. She was owed a week’s vacation; she could go to the city and stay for a week.
She went out to the driveway, to take the piece i
n to work. She had not written anything about Hildon’s affair with Lucy Spenser. She had nothing in it about Nicole Nelson being Lucy’s niece, or about Nicole having a crush on a dishwasher at the inn. She did not intend to pursue the story Edward had told her about the police, or to include mention of the fact that the publisher’s grandfather was a jump rope baron. She did not think there was any purpose in creating scandals where there were none and worried that writers who did were going to beat her to the best magazines and newspapers. It probably was an odd notion for a journalist to have: that many things were what they seemed, or less than they seemed. Myra saw it as a condescending attitude toward your subjects that their sex lives had anything to do with their performance at work. It was easy to turn things into a comedy: the lonely hearts adviser whose own life was a shambles; her niece pining for a dishwasher, but involved with a man found naked in the woods; her boss cheating on his wife with her; Lucy’s former lover writing letters from afar that were half pleading and half accusatory. Any other reporter would have stooped to making Lucy a person living a ludicrous life, and it bothered Myra that Lucy did not even feel she owed her a face-to-face interview, let alone a debt of gratitude. Even Lucy’s dog, she remembered hearing, was on parole: one more dead sheep and the police said they were going to look the other way when the farmer shot him.
Taking the back road to the office, she stopped while a herd of cows crossed the road. In Boston it would be twenty-year-olds with stringy hair, backpacks and Shakti sandals. Here, it was cows. The day was overcast; another day that threatened rain. As she started to drive again, she rolled up her car window halfway and braked for a flock of birds that she did not think could possibly swoop above the car in time. She put on the radio and listened to an official from the Miss America pageant who insisted that they were justified in removing Miss America’s crown. Myra spent a few seconds imagining what the letter from Miss America to Cindi Coeur would read like, and what Cindi Coeur would write back. Myra had always known girls like Lucy; girls who were in the right place at the right time. It was too stuffy in the car with the window rolled up and too cold with it rolled down. She decided to leave it down. She felt as if she could drive this road with her eyes closed. She passed Honey House, a small old farmhouse painted yellow, with a beehive painted on the front door. She couldn’t see the hive now, because the door was open and a screen door had been put up. There were hand-lettered signs, pointing down the driveway to the garage, telling people where to go to buy honey. She had never bought any. Someone had told her that the farmer’s wife wore an apron with swarming bees embroidered on the front and earrings with clusters of bees dangling from them. Not far from the Honey House was a wide dirt driveway that led to half a dozen pastel-colored trailers. A small American flag that had been anchored, somehow, in a birdbath, flapped in the breeze. Myra pulled quickly to the right; while staring at the flag, she had drifted to the center of the road, and a truck was coming at her. She heard her tires in the gravel and held the wheel steady. To the left and right, now, were acres of land that had been plowed. A dog trotted along the side of the road. A woman in a plaid skirt, holding a little girl’s hand, walked behind the dog. What did these people do with their lives? What did they think? Depending on her own state of mind, Myra thought they were either desperate or utterly content. She was feeling low today, so it was a day when she was certain they had it all over her: that they cleaned the lint off of the washing machine filter with the same care she used editing her prose, and that both tasks were equally worthwhile. In fact, if she really wanted to feel sorry for herself, these people had appliances and she didn’t—no dishwasher, no washing machine, no dryer—not even a blender after she made the mistake of leaving an iced-tea spoon in hers and turning it on. An iron. Everybody had an iron. It was like having a spine. To cheer herself up, she reminded herself that while everybody had an iron, not everybody had an ironing board. Ironing boards were among the most improvised household articles since coffee tables made out of wood cartons, and cinder block bookcases. She had removed the top board from her bookcase and put it across her table/desk to iron on, when she first came to Vermont. She realized that it was pathetic to equate having an ironing board with being a real adult. That was probably why she often used the ironing board as a chair.
People’s little secrets. The things they would not even think of as being secrets, until someone, say, asked to borrow an ironing board.
She went over the high bump that led down a steep slope to the newspaper’s parking lot. It was Saturday and there were only two cars in the lot; out of habit, she pulled into her space, facing the Leglan River. Before the paper moved into the big brick building, it had been a medical facility; the doctors’ assigned parking place signs were still there. A friend on the paper who had gone to Disneyland had put a cavorting Minnie Mouse decal over hers. Previously she had been Dr. Trigowski. The water was muddy and almost flooded the banks. It had been a rainy summer. The dampness was still in the air, and the sky still looked like rain.
Nate Wells and Herb Walsh were in the newspaper office. Herb had pulled his chair up to Nate’s desk and was shaking his head, much amused by something, as Myra walked in. Nate held a hand up in greeting and picked up his cigarette from the ashtray (another non-ashtray ashtray: a brick with the center gouged out) and took a puff before continuing with what he was reading. There was a picture on Nate’s desk of his wife and child. His wife had left him and was remarried to Nate’s cousin. His child had gone on a camping trip in the Grand Canyon and never been heard from again. There were also two separate photographs of collies. Nate now lived with two collies. At Christmas he had sent out cards with a photograph of the two collies sitting and facing the camera, one with a red bow around its neck and the other with a green bow. Below the picture was printed Greetings from Our House to Yours.
“Read this, read this,” Herb said, taking the piece of paper out of Nate’s hand. “This woman made up her own press release. This sounds like a story for you, Myra.” Herb loved to be amused. He often brought the Enquirer in to work. He especially liked the test in a recent issue that people could take to find out if their co-workers were space aliens.
Under a line of exclamation points, Bulletin had been written in calligraphy. It was an announcement of the founding of a feminist commune, subtitled Deep Breathing Can Destroy the Enemy. As best Myra could make out, it was a holistic approach to man-hating. Since she found these things more depressing than Herb, she was just about to sigh and hand it back when she caught the list of members. The first name on the list was Maureen Hildon’s. Myra’s eye went back to the text. The leader, Davina Cole, had recently acquired the long-abandoned old post office building, and by September I, would be ensconced with ten other women who wished to save mankind from man. Mankind could best be saved by womankind, but the first step necessary was to recondition through relaxation. Self-awareness = satisfaction. Apparently, through talking to yourself, hyperventilating, and examining your breasts, the enemy could be subverted. Potential members were urged to send a full-length black-and-white photograph or, preferably, negative, and $30 to Davina Cole. Space may be limited, Ms. Cole warned, though psychic sisterhood is expansive. There was a drawing in the lower left-hand corner of a woman with fingertips that looked like talons on her breast (nipple mid-center, like a bull’s eye), and an arrow around the breast, moving counterclockwise. Women now embrace destiny not douche bag, it concluded.
Myra handed it back to Herb, frowning. It was beginning to seem downright lethargic not to tackle the true story of the Country Daze staff. Whatever it was.
Herb fell over in the chair, laughing.
“Uh-oh,” Nate said. “We’ve offended her feminist sensibilities.”
“This is the wife of the editor of Country Daze,” Myra said, pointing to the piece of paper that Herb was now weeping into, like a handkerchief.
“You’re kidding? His wife belongs to this thing?”
“What do you think I o
ught to do?” Myra said.
“Infiltrate,” Herb said. “Oh God, look at this thing.”
“Run a side-bar,” Nate said. “Spill the facts and get some shrink to comment.”
“How about Joan Rivers?” Herb said.
“I’m serious,” Myra said. “These people are a lot stranger than they seem.”
“The poor guy,” Nate said. “What can he do about his wife being a lunatic?”
Myra looked at him. He meant it; he felt sorry for Hildon. And if she told him that Hildon was having an affair with Lucy Spenser/Cindi Coeur, he would shrug and say that was nothing. Men really did stick together. That was true.
It suddenly occurred to her that she hesitated to analyze people’s messy lives because that would be hypocritical. When had she analyzed her own? Nothing much was happening in her own life right now. She was waiting for more: a bigger city, a more prestigious job, some romantic involvement. That old, familiar complex that seemed overwhelming—the last thing she’d want to admit to people. It was as though it was a personal failure, a sign of weakness, not strength, to have effectively kept the world at bay. Going to New York would be a way to try to change that.
Herb called her a sissy and said he was going to infiltrate.
She left her piece on the editor’s desk, with a note asking him to call her in the morning to let her know if she could take off at the end of the week.
