by Ann Beattie
21
THE day was perfect. Everything caught the light: the leaves of the aspen trees flickered silver and green as they blew in the breeze, birds and butterflies seemed irradiated—even the pebbles in the big circular driveway of the Birches glowed like shells underwater, and simple weeds seemed beautiful.
Andrew Steinborn and Lillian Worth were officially engaged. Her engagement ring, a small diamond in an elaborate platinum setting that had once belonged to Andrew’s grandmother, seemed larger when it caught the light.
Andrew considered this a pre-honeymoon. They were going to be married the first of September, but since Passionate Intensity was due at the end of September, he wouldn’t be able to take a real honeymoon with Lillian for a while. The room at the Birches was free, and Boston was hot. He had been able to persuade Lillian to come with him. Actually, she had been glad to come, because she was starting to get cold feet about the wedding, and she thought the trip with Andrew would solidify their relationship. She had tossed around the idea of seeing Evan again, letting Andrew go to Vermont alone. She was ashamed of herself; he was a wonderful person, enthusiastic about his work and enthusiastic about her, on his way to a successful career. It seemed strange to think of being the wife of Andrew Steinborn the famous writer. He might like to think of himself as F. Scott Fitzgerald, but she certainly did not envision herself as Zelda, who was clearly a vain, neurotic woman. She would not pull Andrew down, but would support him. On the ride up, she had read him plot summaries of Passionate Intensity programs, and when that got to be too much of a chore, she read some poems from The Complete Poems of Robert Frost, which Andrew suggested might put them in the mood for Vermont. The poems weren’t what she expected: they seemed laconic and confusing—brain teasers, almost. Perhaps that was just because anything would pale in comparison with the plots of Passionate Intensity.
It would all be much easier to take if Andrew would just admit that the show was only a soap opera. Why did he insist that it was something more—that there were subtleties and hidden complexities in the characters, and that to the intelligent viewer the show was more than entertainment. If he had been a nurse as long as she had, he wouldn’t have such an interest in fathoming the thoughts of hysterics.
Lillian wasn’t sure what the purpose of these interviews was, either. She suspected that the actors just played their parts with no more thought about their characters’ inner workings than a keypunch operator whose job it was to use a machine. But that was why he was a writer and she was not. Her job was technical, really, but it was always easy for Andrew to imagine that someone imagined something. He thought of people as existing both within and beyond themselves. He wasn’t put off by people’s complexity. He actually enjoyed it. He thought that people, without realizing it, were always in the process of figuring out themselves and others: there was a constant molting going on, and only the foolish wouldn’t want to observe the feathers and bone exposed. It did make him, as her friend Anita said, a little too serious. Intense, Lillian thought: not serious. She wished she had been quick-witted enough at the time to say that.
They were registered at the Birches as Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Steinborn. There wasn’t a phone in the room, so while she showered and changed her clothes, he went down the hall to phone Nicole Nelson. Alone in the room, she touched the wallpaper (the eagles weren’t really raised; they just looked that way) and opened the closet door. When she was alone in a hotel, she never used the closet. She threw clothes over the chair or on the spare bed. She took two dresses out of her suitcase and put them on hangers. The Bermuda shorts wouldn’t wrinkle. Nothing else really had to be hung up. She closed the closet door and sat on the bed, looking out the window. There were large shade trees that almost blocked her view of the Green Mountains. As they checked in, the man behind the desk had mentioned that the inn, a quick drive and a pleasant walk away, served cocktails outside, and that the view of the mountains was particularly good in early evening, when shadows started to spread. She wondered what it would be like to live in a town like this. She looked in the desk and found one postcard and one envelope. There was also a pen: black plastic, with the end cut on the diagonal, to be used as a letter opener. It struck her that she hardly ever wrote or received letters anymore.
Andrew came back to the room. “No answer,” he said. He had tried to call before, from the road, to confirm the next day’s appointment. Lillian could tell that he was getting worried.
“You’ll get her eventually,” she said.
“I hope so,” he said. “I’m more interested in her than the other characters. She’s really the center, you know?”
Lillian was tired of thinking of Passionate Intensity. She stretched out on the bed. He went to the window and positioned himself so he could see around the trees as well as possible to the mountains. He was tired from the drive and thought that a drink might help him unwind. He realized that Lillian was stretched out behind him. They had been in motels together before, but no place as classy as this. He felt like a child playing grown-up. There was something a little intimidating about playing Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Steinborn on such an elaborate set. F. Scott Fitzgerald had felt what he was feeling now: that so much was expected when you were in a high-class, adult world. Maybe that was why he liked Zelda so much—because she cut through all that, she insisted on remaining the child. Or the enfant terrible. He wished that Lillian would get up, come over to him. For a writer, it was strange that his imagination failed him so often when he needed it. He just wished that there was some way to connect, and not to feel awkward about it. He turned and smiled at her.
Her eyes were closed. She looked small, centered on the nubbly white bedspread. He looked back out the window, then decided to make a little noise to get her attention. He pulled open the desk drawer. Nothing much inside. He pushed it closed. When he looked at her again, she was looking at him.
“You know,” she said, “hardly anybody writes letters anymore.”
“Easier to call,” he said.
“But if you have a letter you can reread it.”
He made a mental note: Send her letters. Love letters. It would be something private between them.
“How many letters have you actually reread?”
“I can’t think of the last time I got a real letter. I guess from my mother, when I was in nursing school. I was lonesome, and I always reread those.”
Her mother had emphysema. This was not a good topic of conversation.
“Want to leave the car here and walk to the inn the guy at the desk told us about?”
“Sure,” she said.
She was relieved. She had felt as if they were two adults, playing at conversation. She suddenly remembered the letter she had written Evan—the last letter she had written. She wished that instead of their speaking on the phone he had written back. She thought she would be better able to puzzle out what he had said if she could look at it. Who was she kidding? His tone of voice had told her he was sincere. Anything could be written in a letter. The voice gave it away. What had he said: “There’s nothing I can do about that.” He was right, of course; here she was at the Birches with Andrew, in Vermont, and there was nothing he could do.
There was something she could do.
She was shocked at her thought. She had almost put him out of her mind, and for no reason, on the ride, she had started thinking about him again. It was because she had trouble extending her seat belt. She had had a similar problem on the plane, trying to clamp her seat belt shut. There had been a piece of cardboard in it; she had pulled it out, knowing the man across the aisle was watching, thinking that she was some dumb woman, too inexperienced to know how to close a seat belt. And that thing he had said to her about his father, who didn’t even live in Boston. She had really thought that was very inventive. And it was equally unusual for him to have then told her the truth. She could see his face quite distinctly. She just had, when she was resting on the bed with her eyes closed.
Some people
were playing croquet on the lawn that stretched beside the parking lot. One ball cracked against another, and a teenage girl jumped up and down, clapping. The man who was playing with her gave her a look of exaggerated dismay. When Lillian looked over her shoulder, expecting to see the man going down the slight slope to try to hit his ball back up to the playing area, she did a double take: he was standing with his arms around the girl. They were kissing, his mallet thrown in the grass.
They passed a little row of shops as they walked past the green: Aubuchon Hardware, a hobby shop, a laundromat, a pizza restaurant. The laundromat had window boxes on the side, planted with petunias and marigolds. A few cars drove by. The breeze felt good. She had gotten hot in the car, and sitting for that long made her stiff; she felt like a gingerbread man, baked and then put out to cool. There was a large white church on their right, with a tall spire. Two people sat on the lawn, talking. It seemed like a very nice town: small, quiet, pretty. She didn’t think she agreed with Andrew, although he was much smarter than she was, that anything that seemed simple was really a deception. She thought that maybe you did become a different person, depending on where you lived.
They walked down the hill, and as they did, the breeze came up stronger. They walked up the flagstone steps to the front door, and Andrew held the door open for her. There was a deep-green rug in the lobby, patterned to look like it had been stenciled. The walls were white, with punched tin lights hanging every six feet or so. There was a sign, with an arrow pointing left, in front of the high front desk: Cocktails on Patio. The man behind the desk smiled as they walked by. She was sure that they looked like a married couple. When she was in college she always read wedding announcements in the paper, to figure out whether the bride or groom was getting the better deal. She looked at people’s left hands to see if there was a ring. She couldn’t think of the last time she had looked at the page of wedding announcements. Or of the last time she had been to a wedding.
The girl who seated them was all smiles. The deck was crowded. She gave them a table in the last patch of sun, asking if this was all right.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Evan. She thought that discussing him with Andrew might exorcise him. She ordered a rum and tonic. Andrew ordered scotch and water. She looked at the engagement ring. He saw her looking, and smiled. She smiled back. Church bells started ringing just at that instant. The timing was either so appropriate or inappropriate that she continued to smile. Andrew put his hand over hers.
A man, woman, and little girl sat a couple of tables away. The man had two large dots of calamine lotion on his forehead. He and the woman were drinking a bottle of wine. The little girl was swishing her fingers in the ice bucket.
“Thirty dollars a ticket?” the man said. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. You can never sit close enough to see the performers, anyway. It’s better to watch it on television.”
“It’s not on television,” the little girl said.
“It’ll be on television eventually,” he said.
“I’m going to call the baby-sitter and let her know we’re going to be awhile longer,” the woman said. As she pushed her chair back, Lillian looked at her left hand, then looked back at her own table as the cocktail waitress put the drinks down. The little white napkins blew in the breeze.
“If I have half the money for a Walkman, you’ll buy it for me the next time we go to Burlington, right?” the little girl said.
“I don’t like the idea of them,” the man said.
“But you’re wrong,” she said. “You can hear through them. You can hear everything everybody’s saying.”
“But you don’t pay attention to it,” he said.
“You don’t always pay attention.”
“But I don’t have something clamped over my ears,” he said. He put his hands over his ears. She looked at him awhile, then tried to tug them away. She couldn’t budge his arms.
“That’s not what it’s like,” she said, pulling. “Come on—that’s not fair.”
The man started to hum and tap his foot, looking off in the distance. The little girl, half amused and half angry, continued to pull his arms.
Lillian tried to think what it must be like to be a parent. She hoped that Andrew’s agent’s plan for having the two books come out simultaneously would launch him on a lucrative literary career, and that she wouldn’t have to go back to work once their first child was born.
She thought about Evan kissing her, in the cab. She reached for her drink and drank half of it.
“Did I ever tell you about the time F. Scott Fitzgerald was riding up Fifth Avenue, and it was such a sunny, perfect day—he was on his way to the Plaza—that he burst into tears because he thought he would never be that happy again?” Andrew said.
“Yes,” she said.
“You know,” Andrew said, “I think that eventually we should move to New York, when I start to be well known. I think that’s the place to be.”
“I sort of like small towns,” she said.
“I don’t want to be anonymous,” he said.
“A lot of famous writers live in small towns.”
“Well, if you’re really famous, you can do that. I think that first you have to go to New York, then move away.” He took a sip of his drink. “Nothing’s going on in small towns,” he said. “Nobody’s thinking anything new.”
“What about Main Street? Peyton Place? Our Town?”
“It’s better when things are on the surface,” he said. “I like it better when all that excitement is out there, in the air.”
She nodded. She tried to think of what kind of excitement she and Andrew would experience. He was holding her hand and kissing her fingertips. He raised his eyebrows. She made an effort to smile, and took her hand away. She looked at the engagement ring on her finger.
The waitress came to their table, smiling instead of asking if they wanted another drink.
“I don’t believe so,” Andrew said.
“I think I’ll have another,” Lillian said.
“Well, all right,” Andrew said. “Make it two.”
The waitress walked away, her skirt blowing in the breeze. The breeze lifted Lillian’s hair. She said, “I’m not sure we should get married.”
His face went blank. He jerked his head and snorted a little laugh. He looked at her for a couple of seconds. “You’re kidding,” he said.
“We didn’t get along very well in Iowa.”
“We got along in Iowa,” he said.
She looked at him. Her hair blew over her face, and she didn’t push it away.
“We were living in a tiny little house, and I was working night and day,” he said.
“I know, but that might have been romantic. We just fought all the time.”
“We didn’t fight all the time.”
“We fought a lot.”
He put his fingertips on the napkin—lightly, as if it were a Ouija board. He raised his hands, then clasped them and looked at her. She had seen lawyers do that on television, when they were puzzled.
“I think we look at life so differently,” she said.
“At this moment we certainly are looking at it differently,” he said. “I love you. Do you love me?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t think that’s all we should think about. I don’t know how I’m going to fit into your life. I think that maybe you aren’t always realistic.”
“By realistic do you mean conservative? Backward thinking? Safe?”
“But you might let yourself in for a lot of disappointment if you really have this image of us as Scott and Zelda, living it up in New York. I mean, I read that book you gave me. They were both outlaws from their own lives.”
“They didn’t fit into the slot they’d been assigned, if that’s what you mean.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean, they were actors. And they were so ambitious. You can’t think we’re anything like them.”
“He was very romantic, and he was a risk taker,” And
rew said. “Don’t you see me that way?”
She didn’t. But she wasn’t Zelda, and it seemed cruel to say that she thought there was a difference between being a romantic and being a dreamer. What F. Scott Fitzgerald had done was risky, and it was partly just his good luck that it worked out as well as it did for as long as it did.
“He was an alcoholic and he died young,” she said.
“You’re the one who ordered the second drink,” he said. “I didn’t say I thought I was a duplicate. I only said that we have a lot in common. I look on him as an inspiration.”
“But that’s the way things were years ago. It doesn’t mean so much anymore to have gone to Princeton. People don’t want to go to places like the Plaza now.”
“Walk into the Palm Court any afternoon at five o’clock, and you’ll find it packed with people,” he said. “Fashionable people.”
“Maybe we should talk about this later,” she said.
“You’re treating me the way Zelda treated him. He and I are both genuine romantics—that’s what’s so sad. That neither of you realize that we don’t have to be led around by the nose.”
“He’s dead,” Lillian said. “You talk like he’s a friend of yours.”
“I quite realize that he’s dead,” Andrew said.
The waitress brought their drinks. “I’m sorry it took so long,” she said.
She and Andrew reached for their drinks in unison, the way people on a lurching subway car reach for the strap.
“I can’t understand why you’re bringing this up,” he said.
“I think Zelda was shallow,” Lillian said. “She cared about appearances, and money and success. I don’t like to be compared to her.”
