by Ann Beattie
Les was standing by the mantel, where the sketches of the Stephanie Sykes doll were propped up. St. Francis’ old collar was there. A glass vase—Waterford crystal, another hand-me-down from Rita—filled with black-eyed Susans. Lucy noticed that the stems were no longer in water.
“Lucy,” he said, “do you really hate me? There’s no point in my saying anything if all you feel toward me is hatred.”
“Did you think I’d be happy to see you?” Lucy said.
“You’re so unforgiving,” he said.
She could see the conversation that she was going to get bogged down in. She thought that even if what Les said was true, she was entitled to her feelings. She had not left him. She had not written Love Always, Lucy.
“We didn’t have a relationship,” he said. “I was a psychological study for you. You thought everything I did was duplicitous. That would drive anybody crazy. You couldn’t see that I was sincere.”
“You disappointed yourself, Les. That was your problem. Not that you disappointed me.”
“How did I disappoint myself?” he said. Before she could answer, he said, “Is it asking too much to try to find out whether we can have a reasonable discussion?”
“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think we could. You never put yourself anywhere—or stay anywhere—where you’re not on top. When you weren’t voted most popular teacher, you exiled yourself to Vermont. When I tried to deal with you as a real person instead of idolizing you, you left.”
“You’re the one who thinks of everything in terms of power plays. I was trying to have a saner life, living in the country. I realize that I’m too exacting a teacher to please all the students who want to float through. I know why that turned out the way it did. I just underestimated how sick you were and how tied to Hildon you’ve always been. I brought that on myself by moving here and putting you under the influence of the person you’ve always wanted to have overwhelm you. I thought that you loved me, and it wouldn’t happen. You never cared about me the way you cared about him.”
“Les—it wasn’t my feeling about Hildon that made us move to Vermont. You insisted that we move to Vermont.”
“How many things did you ever do that I insisted on?”
“See? You’re talking about things in terms of who has the most power again.”
“You can really be awful,” he said. “Are you being awful because I left you and you still care about me?”
He walked across the room and settled himself into the sofa, crossed his legs, and smiled. “Got a new BMW. Handles great,” he said. “New girl. New car. New apartment. Just your all-American guy, the one you’ve always loved.”
She reached for the nearest thing and threw it. He caught her sunglasses before they hit him in the face. He looked at them. Then he put them on, and jutted out his chin the way Lucy did when she was angry. “So you’ve got a new car, Les,” he said. “Big deal. At least you’re doing what’s so important to you by appearing to be prosperous. And the women are a notion pretty much like cars to you, aren’t they? Turn one in, get another one. When you do these things, aren’t you embarrassed? Or can you really pretend, pretend so well that you convince yourself?”
Next, she threw a glass bowl. It hit the wall in back of him, missing him by at least three feet. The pansy that had been floating in it fell onto the sofa. Water streaked the wall. She started to cry.
“Just because I don’t get off on pessimism the way you and Hildon do doesn’t mean I’m Pollyanna. My optimism reassured you plenty of times. When you had the flu that first winter and you thought you were going to die. I was the one who told you you could work things out with your mother. Talk about me being in exile in Vermont. You couldn’t be near her. You barely knew how to talk to her on the phone before you met me. I told you you could get the job teaching art at the school. It wasn’t the great Hildon who …”
Lucy had stopped listening. She was biting her bottom lip, looking past him to the doorway, where Nicole was standing.
“It’s something awful,” Nicole said.
Les looked over his shoulder. “Hey,” he said, shrugging. “Sorry I was yelling.”
Nicole looked at him, tears welling up in her eyes.
“People have got to care about each other to bother to yell, right?” he said.
“No,” Nicole said. “I never noticed that.” She walked toward Lucy. By the time she got to the chair, she was crying. “St. Francis ran down the road after a tractor,” she said. “I just had him off his lead for a minute, and he ran down the road and wouldn’t come back when I called him. You’ve got to drive me. Get the car, Lucy. Come on—we’ve got to get him.”
Lucy stood and looked around the room for the car keys. Nicole had put her hands over her mouth. It was what she had done when Lucy had to tell her that Piggy had called and that Jane was dead. She saw the keys on the corner of the mantel and ran out the door without saying anything to Les.
“What do you want to take crap from that guy for?” Nicole said through her tears as Lucy pushed the key into the ignition. She had left the windows down and the car was full of flies. They flew forward and sideways and Lucy and Nicole had to bat them away from their faces so they could see.
“You know, I’m in this with you now,” Nicole said, “and I don’t want you to sit around and take crap off some guy.”
“It’s complicated,” Lucy said. She was driving slowly, looking right and left for St. Francis. She hoped that Nicole would call for him, because she thought if she spoke, she would cry harder.
Nicole had already stopped crying. “St. Francis!” she called.
Only a little farther down the road, he heard her and shot up. He had been wriggling on his back, rolling in carrion. He gave a last mighty shake and ran toward the car.
To her surprise, Les was still at the house. He was sitting on the hood of his car, looking down the road, when they returned.
Nicole got out of the car and walked past him with St. Francis at her side without saying anything, like a princess and her consort cutting through a crowd. St. Francis stank and seemed a most ignoble escort. Nicole put him on his lead and began to talk to him earnestly.
“Who is she?” Les said.
“Jane’s daugher, Nicole,” Lucy said. “Jane is dead.”
He cocked his head. “What do you mean?” he said.
“She lives here now. Jane died. She married some jerk who put her on the back of his motorcycle and drove it off a cliff.”
“A car must have forced them off the road,” he said. His voice was very quiet. “Oh my God,” he said. “Jane’s dead?”
“I was in L.A. for the funeral when you were calling me.”
“She was on a motorcycle?” Les said.
Lucy nodded. Les was doing what she sometimes did herself. The incredulity was real, but the theory was silly: that if you could just repeat facts, stall for time, you might not have to hear the same ending to the story.
28
LUCY was in Hildon’s car, parked at a scenic overlook. A baby was sweeping the grass with a broom—a child about three years old, whose hands choked up on the handle as if he held a baseball bat. He tapped the broom against the ground, looked straight forward, then decided to sweep instead of bunt. All the while, the child was singing a song. The mother and father and an obese cocker spaniel were sitting on a tablecloth spread out near a willow tree.
Les Whitehall’s visit had made it possible for Lucy and Nicole to have the talk both had been avoiding. Maybe, Lucy thought, it was because Nicole had seen her vulnerability that she was willing to talk about her own. She wanted to star on Passionate Intensity. She would stay with Piggy Proctor and his wife, but she wanted Lucy to fly to L.A. and visit whenever she could. When the filming was over, Nicole would come back to Vermont.
So Les’s visit had been for the best, but of course he couldn’t have known that, and it wasn’t why he had come. He had come assuming that Lucy knew that Hildon was resigning as editor of Count
ry Daze. The day of Les’s visit, Hildon had been in New York talking to an agent about a book he might write. The agent was also Les Whitehall’s agent. Les had found out about Hildon’s plans by coincidence—and, actually, Lucy had too. Les had come to ask her if she would put in a good word for him with Matt Smith, the publisher, and if she would also ask Hildon not to let his bad feelings for him get in the way of his possibly getting the job.
“When did you intend to tell me?” Lucy said to Hildon.
Hildon had driven to her house, after getting her message, and had found Lucy going up the walk with a bag of groceries. She was resolute: whatever happened, she was going to proceed. None of them was going to hurt her so much that she stopped in her tracks. As though to strengthen her resolve, she had gone out and bought food. Now, the bag was wedged between them, unpacked. She had gotten into Hildon’s car still carrying the bag. That was like Hildon: to do things in his own way, in his own time, and then to expect that she’d stop the clock when he felt like talking. Lucy doubted whether he even felt like talking—whether he wasn’t discussing this purely because she had forced him to.
“I thought you’d make fun of me,” Hildon said. “You’re always talking about how the whole world wants to write. Look at what a fraud Les Whitehall was. I didn’t want you to think of me as another Les Whitehall.”
“You’re changing the subject,” Lucy said.
“I wasn’t going to quit unless my agent thought the proposal would work,” he said. “It all happened in a hurry. How could I know that my agent was also Les Whitehall’s agent, and that she was going to run off at the mouth?”
“That isn’t what I asked,” Lucy said.
Hildon was holding the wheel at the bottom, tightly, as if he were driving fast. Lucy had thrown her door open to let what breeze there was circulate through the car. His door was shut, as if they were in motion.
Lucy had had so many bad times in cars. Her father had played games with her—turned off the headlights, said “Whoa!,” as though a simple horse had galloped out of control, and accelerated through seconds of danger before he pulled the headlight switch back on. He had also teased her when she was a child by driving and closing the eye closest to her, squinting at the road through the other, saying, “Daddy’s gone blind! Daddy’s blind! Is the light ahead green or red?” She would describe everything nervously and thoroughly, begging him all the while to open his eyes, afraid to pull his arm or jump in her seat because it might cause him to veer off the road. It was not until years later, when she was telling the story to a school friend in front of him, that he closed his eye closest to where she and her friend sat and then turned his head, revealing the open eye that had been watching the road all along.
“I didn’t know how to tell you,” he said. “It wasn’t a sure thing, and you were going through so much in California. I wasn’t going to pack a suitcase and leave town before sunrise, you know.”
“I don’t know what I know,” Lucy said.
“Well,” Hildon said. “I wasn’t.”
The child was sweeping its father’s back. The mother was rubbing the dog’s stomach. From where Lucy sat, she couldn’t see the trickle of muddy river below. The farmhouse with the blue roof she had always loved was visible on the hillside, and people hardly larger than dots were moving around it—people and cows—more of those mysterious people who thought something and felt some way Lucy couldn’t fathom. People who lived in a house in the valley.
“I would have told you from the first if it had seemed real to me,” Hildon said.
She started to calm down. She was being a little irrational. Of course he wouldn’t have just disappeared without saying anything. He had every right to quit as editor of Country Daze and do something—as he had said on the ride to the overlook—“serious.” It was just a big change, another unexpected adjustment.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“I’m going to Boston for a while,” he said.
She turned and looked at him, startled.
“Lucy,” he said. “I need a change. I’m sick of the work I’ve been doing. I’m under a lot of pressure from Maureen’s lawyers. I can’t take any more phone calls from Matt Smith.”
“What do you mean you’re going to Boston?” she said.
“For a while,” he said. He chewed his bottom lip. She was still looking at him. “I’m going to move there for a while,” he said. She still stared. “Get out of the house,” he said, lamely.
It was such an off-the-wall explanation that it made her laugh. “Hildon,” she said, “if you ever decide you want to explain all this to me, come over or give me a call. I’ve got to get back to Nicole.”
“Don’t be self-righteous,” he said softly, and bit his lip.
“Hildon,” she said, “I don’t understand anything you’re saying today, including that last remark. Would you mind driving me home? I have things to do.”
He stared straight ahead. The child and the dog walked through his line of vision. He looked at the sun, which had just come out strong, shining on the blue roof that Lucy loved. “I’ve never been closer to anyone than I am to you,” he said, “yet I’m able to just leave.”
“I seem to be quite an inspiration to people in that way,” Lucy said. “Think of me as Tintern Abbey.”
“Don’t turn it against yourself,” he said. “I hate it when you do that.”
“Take me home,” she said. “I’m really upset.”
“I know you are,” he said. He touched the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it on. “You’re going to get mad at me for saying it,” he said, “but shit kickers don’t go through stuff like this. They don’t introspect.”
“I didn’t realize we were being introspective. I’d say that what I am is baffled.”
“Cindi Coeur?” Hildon said.
“I’m not Cindi Coeur.”
“I know,” he said. “So it was such a peculiar thing for us both to arrive at. That everything was such a joke.”
“You don’t think that most of the time and neither do I. We never have.”
“Hey, Lucy!” a man hollered.
There was one other car at the overlook. Andrew Steinborn and Lillian were there, still trying to decide what to do about their marriage plans. She wanted time to think. He wanted them to get a blood test and get married immediately. So far, the only compromise that had been agreed upon was that however the afternoon turned out, they would go out that night to a fancy restaurant, for an expensive dinner with wine. Andrew Steinborn leaned out of his window, waving madly.
“Who’s that?” Hildon said. “It’s a man who’s writing a book, actually.” Andrew continued to wave, shouting something Lucy couldn’t hear.
“Shit,” she said. “Just a second.”
She opened the door and began to walk across the gravel. Cars passed on the highway. Hildon could tell, watching her walk, that she was depressed. There was no spring in her step, no toss of the long hair. He opened his own door to go with her. The grocery bag tipped over and several potatoes rolled across the seat. In a hurry to catch up, he threw two back in the bag and leaned in to straighten it, saw another potato on the pavement and picked it up and put it in the pocket of his denim jacket. When he caught up with Lucy, she had already greeted the people in the car.
“We’re getting married,” Andrew said. “Isn’t it the perfect day to decide that? We knew it before, actually, but sitting here, looking out …”
“We’re thinking about it,” the woman sitting next to Andrew said, leaning across his lap. Lucy smiled and nodded. She introduced Hildon.
“A fellow writer,” Andrew said. “I am very, very glad to meet you. Lillian and I were reading your wonderful magazine out on the lawn at the inn the other evening. A very good, very unique piece of work.”
“Thank you,” Hildon said.
“He just quit,” Lucy said.
“You’re leaving?” Andrew said.
“He’s moving to Boston,” Lucy said. �
��He wants to get out of the house.”
Lillian straightened up and sat waiting for the conversation to end. A big, shiny convertible careened around the half-circle, radio blaring James Taylor and Carly Simon singing “Mockingbird.” Hildon put his arm around Lucy’s shoulder instinctively as the car made the turn. Kids, out having a joy ride.
“Good luck with your wedding,” Hildon said.
“I’m going to need it if my fiancée keeps these cold feet,” Andrew said nervously.
“You’ll get a sign,” Hildon said. “I’m a great believer in mystical revelations.”
“What do you mean?” Andrew said.
“A signal. A bolt of lightning will flash. Something will tell you.”
“Oh,” Andrew said. He looked uncomfortable. Hildon leaned forward. “Stay posted,” he said to Lillian. He raised a hand to say goodbye. Lucy smiled. As they turned away, Lucy could see Andrew stiffening. Hildon took his hand out of his pocket and dropped the car keys. As he bent to pick them up, he took out the potato and jammed it into Andrew’s tail pipe.
“What in the name of God are you doing?” Lucy whispered.
“Come on,” he said, his hand on her back, steering her toward his car. “There’s going to be a major explosion when that guy drives off.”
In the car, with Lucy laughing into her hands, he said, as he turned on his own ignition, “You don’t know that trick? You a goddamn stupid girl or something?”
As they pulled out, she looked happier. It had passed—for the moment, the tension between them eased up. He hadn’t had to bog down in all the details he didn’t have the desire, or the heart, to go into today.
