by Ann Beattie
“Uh huh,” she said.
A breeze was blowing through the window at the foot of the bed. She walked to the window and looked out. Stretching to look as far as she could, she saw beside the inn the croquet field that they had walked through coming down the hill to the apartment. No one was there. He came over to where she stood by the window. She sat on the foot of the bed and continued to look out. He was making a move, finally, and she knew it. He must have known she was striking a pose. “Do you ever play croquet?” she said.
In the movies he would have seized her on that line.
“We could do that later,” he said. He came a step closer.
“This isn’t some joke, right?”
“No,” she said.
“Nobody knows where you are.”
“No,” she said. “I told you: I didn’t see any point in saying anything.”
“That the way you generally feel about stuff like this?”
She nodded.
“Yeah,” he said, coming close enough that he touched her. “I guess it figures that you wouldn’t have gotten where you are by being a dummy.”
18
ANDREW STEINBORN, ghostwriter of Puts and Calls for Fun and Profit, author of Mazie, the Mouse Who Came to Stay, and I Will Always Love You, the unauthorized biography of Dolly Parton, was in reality a novelist. He had completed his first, after his nonfiction achievements, while a student at Iowa; it concerned a talented, misunderstood man who never completed novels. It was taken to be comic by his professor, and after being stunned in the conference, Steinborn decided to go along with this notion. “Evelyn Waugh couldn’t have done these scenes better,” the professor said. “You’ve created a character who has no humanity, no humor, no saving graces—but I warn you, the reviewers are going to pounce because you’ve been so uncompromising.” The novel—the first Steinborn had finished, although he had worked on four others before he went to Iowa—was never published and never reviewed, though after a year of getting up at six to write for two hours before jogging and going to work, he had recently completed a novel called Buzz, which was about people at a fashionable resort in Southampton, as seen from the perspective of a mosquito.
Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, he was also waiting for the call from his agent to tell him the book was sold, so that he could use this good news to persuade Lillian Worth, the woman he loved, to marry him. She was a nurse who had quit her job at Mass. General and moved to Iowa to live with him his last six months there. Creativity was just in the air: she had written about a dozen poems. It was Andrew’s idea that she might put together a book of verse for the terminally ill and dying—a realistic yet inspirational, no-holds-barred book influenced by her reading of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her personal experience of watching people die. She thought of them as people who had died, not, as all her colleagues did, as patients who had passed. “Passed” seemed a silly euphemism; it carried with it, for Lillian, connotations of life being a long exam, and then at the end the payoff was death.
Lillian had moved back to Massachusetts a month before Andrew left Iowa. She was almost out of money, and the money he was inheriting wouldn’t materialize for two or three months. She had found out that she could get her job back at Mass. General, and as long as Andrew was now willing to move back to the East Coast, she thought that it made sense to leave early. Things had gone well in Iowa City—good but not great—and she thought he was being crazy when he talked about her departure as her “leaving him.” She was going back to find an apartment during the summer, before everyone got back into town in late August to start school; her friend had a lead on a railroad flat on a street behind Porter Square. She hoped that the apartment was as good as her friend made it seem. She was sure that if she and Andrew could live in a sunny, spacious apartment, many of the problems they had would disappear; it had been close quarters in the converted garage they lived in on a farmer’s property just outside the city.
Lillian had had no intention of seeing anyone else when she got back to Boston. When she told Andrew that, it was certainly the truth. He took her to the airport and they said goodbye. He liked public passion, and she was learning to tolerate it. He attracted a lot of attention even when they weren’t touching, because he dressed in amusing suits with boxy jackets and wide legged pants. In the winter he wore a fedora.
“Don’t leave me,” he said, clutching her to him at the airport.
“Shit, man, be cool,” a man who was stacking peanuts in a vending machine said.
Andrew loved it that the man had entered into their conversation. That was real life: just try to put that in a novel and have people believe it.
He kissed her passionately. “Never leave me,” he said.
“No. All right,” she said, putting her hands on his shoulders and trying to push him back. She was getting flustered. “I’ll call you tonight.”
“You’re the most beautiful girl in the world,” he said, kissing her across the forehead.
“Shee-it,” the vending-machine man said, slamming the door shut.
Andrew loved that.
Finally she got on the plane. About an hour into the flight, the man sitting across the aisle from her struck up a conversation. When he referred to Andrew, he called him “your husband.” She didn’t correct him. He didn’t seem to be flirting, but she was prepared. She had never found anyone on a plane attractive and wondered who all those stewardesses found to marry. It said something about planes that she never desired anyone when she was a passenger, but the thought had crossed her mind quite a few times in the hospital.
The man said his father was picking him up at the airport. He all but insisted that since where she was going was right on their route, she must come with them. His father: what could be the harm? As they waited for the luggage, he looked around for his father. “Maybe he parked out front,” he said. Their bags finally came out, and she followed him to the door. He didn’t seem to know what to do when he didn’t see his father’s car. “I’ll call him,” he said, “but you go ahead. Sorry it didn’t work out.” By this time she felt some loyalty to him. Where was his father? She stood by his bags while he went inside and phoned. He came back shaking his head. “He forgot. He just plain forgot,” he said.
The man’s name was Evan. He asked if she would like to share a cab. They waited in line for a cab. It was hot, and the heat was visible, waving up from the asphalt. They finally got a cab. Her back stuck to the seat the minute she leaned against it. They talked about Andrew’s comic novel. Evan smiled politely but he didn’t really seem amused. Perhaps, like any joke, it was better in the telling—or reading—than in paraphrase. She didn’t tell stories well. Andrew was a great storyteller, and being with him, she realized that her speech was never very exciting, that she didn’t say witty things, that her stories lacked punch lines. Evan had seemed interested in talking to her on the plane—it was just when she began telling him about the book that he began to lose interest. When the cab pulled up in front of Lillian’s apartment building, he offered to carry her suitcase, but she told him that she could manage with no trouble. He gave her his card. “Call if you have time for coffee or a drink,” he said. She felt awkward suddenly, and wondered if he did too. Walking up the front steps, she thought of her friend Anita’s “Isn’t She Lovely” test. The categories were often changed to protect the innocent. Sometimes Anita would just hum the first bars of the Stevie Wonder song and Lillian would find herself making up categories and scoring everyone from the man in the car next to theirs to the elevator operator. Anita didn’t change the pronoun when the test applied to men. One of the first judgments made was that they fit the category. Evan got a 9 for looks, a 2 for economically feasible (he was a carpenter) and a 10 for chutzpa (he kissed her before she got out of the cab, then sat back, smiling, and let her carry the suitcase, as she said she would).
The truth was, she liked him. She thought about him, looked at his card quite a few times, and on Sunday she called. She told him, then,
that it wasn’t what he thought: the man at the airport hadn’t been her husband, although she was committed to him. He told her the situation wasn’t what she thought: he had been attracted to her, and so sure she wouldn’t share a cab with him that he had made up the story about his father. His father lived in Arizona. They agreed to see each other on Wednesday. The next morning she did the cowardly thing and wrote him a note saying that she had made a mistake to call him. Much to her surprise, he didn’t respond. More than a week later, when Andrew was due in Boston, she got drunk during the afternoon and called Evan. “What do you want me to do?” he said. “If that’s the way you want it, there’s nothing I can say.” She was embarrassed, and they hung up. But that only fascinated her more: there was never, ever, a time when Andrew didn’t have something to say. When they were having good conversations, he would run out of the room and come back with the recorder, to help him with dialogue later. He wanted them to be very close, so whenever they had a disagreement, he would later say out loud what he intuited that she felt. It was scary; he would become her—when he spoke from what he thought to be her mind, even his face took on her likeness. It made her hate every thought she had, rational or irrational. She did know that he loved her madly. She had said that they would live together. So she tried to forget about Evan and what he might do. Anita called Evan “cocky” for what he had done; she didn’t believe that his response had been sincere, and she told Lillian to stay posted.
Then Andrew drove to Boston. There was much celebration because they had gotten the apartment and could move into it in August. Meanwhile, he would stay with her. The first night he was there, he picked up the phone and whoever it was hung up. It happened again the next morning. The next time the phone rang, Lillian picked it up. It was a literary agent; Andrew had given her Lillian’s number so that she could call if she was willing to take him on. One of the deciding factors—in fact, she was so sure of Andrew that she had already made the commitment, although she did not tell him this—was that she felt he would be the perfect man to write the novelization of Passionate Intensity. She was proud of herself for sounding so enthusiastic on the phone when she reached Andrew, for pointing out that the novelization would be published around the same time his real novel came out. She said that she was surprised that he had never heard of Nicole Nelson (one of the agents she worked with had filled her in about who she was). The next day, she Federal Expressed to him cassettes of four shows and a photocopy of the People magazine interview with the cast, plus a bio sheet on everyone. Lillian called Anita, and they arranged to go to her boyfriend Howley’s house in Cambridge, while he and Anita were seeing a movie at Coolidge Corner, to watch the shows on Howley’s Betamax.
“It’s real,” Andrew said. “You know what I mean? It’s almost primitive. Like tom-toms beaten before the kill. It’s just prolonged, made dramatic. So much happens. I see why this has captured people’s attention.”
“I’ve never heard of anybody who watches it,” Lillian said.
“It’s like General Hospital.”
“I’ve heard of plenty of people who watch General Hospital. I’ve never heard anybody talk about this show.”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” Lillian said. “I think you should take the money and run.”
He looked at her. “It isn’t a question of that,” he said. “It’s a way to stimulate my own thinking.”
“About what? Abused children and promiscuous doctors? Don’t you think everybody thinks the same things about those clichés?”
“Lillian—there are many layers to everything. Subtleties.”
On the TV, Stephanie Sykes was locked in a bathroom, drinking from a flask. She was crying and disheveled, her eyes owllike with sadness. She heard a noise and raised the top of the toilet tank and dropped the flask in.
“Stephanie?” Gerald said. “Your mother has called from the hospital. She can’t take you to the rehearsal today, but when she gets home at midnight, she wants to go over your part with you. Stephanie—your real mother is going to be in the audience on Saturday. There is no way that … that Cora can stop it. Your real mother is in a prison hospital now, darling. And the patients who are well enough are going to come to the performance. Do you … what shall I say to Cora?”
The music came up, sudden and loud enough to explain, by itself, why Stephanie, at that moment, collapsed in the bathroom.
“You must know, darling,” Gerald said to the unconscious body on the other side of the door, “that Cora and I believe in you. We believe that you will go on to be a great dancer. Darling, you must know that … we are your real family.”
More music. Lillian looked at Andrew.
“Why doesn’t the person who writes the dialogue write the novel?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but you should never look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“This isn’t a gift horse—this is an albatross.”
Andrew looked shocked. Then his face lit up. “What a brilliant way of putting it,” he said. He put his arms around her and kissed her. “There’s no one like you,” he said. “When my agent sells Buzz and I get the money for this novelization, we’re going to have the most splendid wedding in the world.”
He put on the next cassette. Apparently, his agent had not sent four consecutive programs, but an assortment. In this one, some doctor was kissing Cora’s toes and nuzzling her ankle. They were in an office at the hospital, and suddenly a nurse walked in. That would never happen that way. In real hospitals, what was going on was always so shocking that everyone knew enough not to open doors. It simply wasn’t done, without knocking. Jane Austen’s characters would have been perfectly comfortable in Mass. General. Lillian said this.
“You mean so much to me,” Andrew said. “I worship that strange, wonderful mind. I missed you so much when we were apart. A writer’s life is so lonely, and to have found a soulmate …”
When Anita and Howley came home, they were still watching.
“Another goddamn plodding movie about some guy that’s obsessed,” Howley said. “He’s driving around, listening to crap on the radio, and thinking about this woman, and outside the car there are magnificent, snow-covered mountains, and he’s so out of it, he’s just whizzing by, going to meet this woman for two seconds just to have a look at her … I paid good money to see that?”
Howley stood in front of Lillian, blocking her view. “What the hell is this?” Howley said.
“Passionate Intensity,” Andrew said.
“What in the hell is happening in this world?” Howley said. “This thing looks like a soap opera.”
“It is a soap opera, Howley,” Anita said.
“It’s like General Hospital,” Andrew said.
“Yeah?” Howley said, kicking the footstool away from the chair and sitting on it. “Famous people do cameos?”
“Is this the show that had Elizabeth Taylor?” Anita said, sitting on the floor, next to Howley.
“I don’t know,” Andrew said.
“That was General Hospital. I don’t think she was on two of them,” Lillian said.
“Make us drinks, baby,” Howley said. “I’d do it just to seem liberated, but it breaks my heart to put as much ice in a glass as you like. You’d better make them.”
“None for me, thanks,” Andrew said. “It’s not true that all writers have a problem with alcohol.”
“I’ll have one,” Lillian said.
“Now how do you figure in this?” Howley said.
“I’m going to get inside their minds,” Andrew said. “I’m going to add dimension to what’s going on. I’ll be enlarging those characters, subtly telling the public what they are and what they aren’t.”
“I can tell you what they aren’t,” Howley said. “They’re not real. There’s not a guy on this show that would spit crossing the street.”
“Make drinks and don’t put ice in them; that’s fine with me,” Anita said, hugging his leg.
“That’s Stephanie
Sykes,” Andrew said, when Nicole came on the screen. “Look at that face. They picked her because she’s got depth.”
Howley turned from the screen and looked at Andrew. Lillian looked at Anita.
“Come on,” Anita said to Lillian. “Help me pour whiskey in glasses.”
Lillian got up. All the tumbling and talking on the screen was making her exhausted. She wanted to bolt down a whiskey or two before she had to get up and go home.
In the kitchen, Lillian and Anita heard the bloodhounds, wailing in the backyard. They let them in, and they tore into the living room. They ran to Howley, and he reached down and stroked their ears. The dogs joined the crowd, mesmerized by people crying on Passionate Intensity.
19
NICOLE answered the phone, so she was the first to get the news of Jane’s marriage. One week after Nicole flew East, Jane had married the twenty-four-year-old would-be tennis pro. Piggy Proctor had given her away. They were married in a friend’s backyard. She could not remember the names of the friends, because they were Piggy’s friends, not hers. In attendance were Piggy, Piggy’s wife, and Piggy’s mother, who was visiting for the week.
Nicole tried to sound cold, but she had to fight back tears. “Why wasn’t I there?” she said.
“It was sudden,” Jane said. “It was just something that we had to do, and it seemed silly to make a big production of it and have you fly back—”
“See how you like it when I do this to you,” Nicole said.
“I didn’t do it to you,” Jane said.
“Yeah. You were just feeling up and thought you’d marry that guy.”
“We’re all going to be happy together. Even Piggy loves him.”
“No way,” Nicole said. “Piggy gets it together when he has to get it together.”
“You know how much I love you,” Jane said. “Don’t sulk.”
“You’re my mother, not my director,” Nicole said.
