The State We're In

by Ann Beattie

  The day of the incident with the dog and the red-haired lady, Soars and I were out on the little chairs that sat inside the iron fence in front of the brownstone, where a large pink hibiscus set out by the guy in the garden apartment added a huge amount of atmosphere. Also, he’d put circular cushions on the chairs, which made them so much easier to sit on. He was a psychologist whose specialty was adolescents. They’d arrive and depart with deep scowls, throwing down cigarettes and crushing them, rarely making eye contact with us. The psychologist had told us that it was better not to greet the clients because there was hardly anything you could say to them that would be correct. We accepted this and ignored their acne eruptions and fanned away their cigarette smoke and basically looked right through them unless they seemed so desperate to be friendly that we said the word “Hello.” Once an ambulance came and got one of the clients from the basement who, we later found out (in spite of doctor-patient confidentiality) had been bleeding and had stuffed washcloths in his pants to come to his weekly appointment. The basement was called the “Garden Apartment.” When the wisteria was in bloom, the psychologist took back his little chairs and added them to others in the yard behind the house and had a real champagne party, to which we were always invited. If he ever sat in the chairs when they were out front, we never once saw it. Then again, we were in them a lot, and he was a pleasant, polite man, so maybe he didn’t have much of a chance.

  We were doing acting exercises. Soars read his lines and at some point it was my job to interject something distracting, or to go into a fake coughing spasm, or even to say something hostile, such as “You miserable faggot, you’re no Edward, let alone Lear!” The thought was, anything could happen during a performance and the actor had to squelch his real-life reaction and keep going, without faltering. There was only one script, since it cost money to Xerox, so we sat close together. I tried to act, myself, to the extent that I didn’t want him to be able to anticipate one of my sneezes or outbursts, which I’d learned he could sense because of my breathing slightly altering in advance of speaking, or by my moving in even the smallest way, or by the minuscule noise my lips made when parting. My job was to zing him without warning. One time I actually threw myself off the chair and writhed like someone having a seizure. I’d deliberately worn long sleeves and jeans, so the damage was minor, but a delivery person wheeling seltzer cases into the brownstone next door stopped and ran to my assistance, and it was more than a little embarrassing when we had to explain.

  I’m so sentimental. I can hardly believe there was such a time now. (I’m a doctor with a medical group in Portland, Maine; Soars is the divorced father of twins and an avid white-water rafter who leads trips for a tour company out west and writes articles about the outdoors and teaches at a community college.)

  Here’s an obvious thing that I never thought about until recently: Soars and I weren’t just well suited to living together, we were so simpatico we morphed into an old married couple, in speeded-up time. For years, we were playacting the daily life of so many marriages, with my sudden, sometimes insane eruptions of temper, our long-standing joke about moving each other’s tchotchkes, with his constantly repeated lines (though his, ideally, came from Shakespeare).

  While he was still in New York, he decided that except for his big crush on one guy, he wasn’t gay. He stopped dating men and began to hang out with me and my girlfriends, and then he began dating one of them, whose heart he broke, but that’s another story; even if he’s bi, time proved that he chose to marry women (he also had a second wife).

  Anyway, as Soars and I were rehearsing that day, the red-haired lady stood up and cursed our dog friend, screaming, “Lucifer the devil! Luuuuuuucifer!” rushing poor, scared Major Maybe, who’d just lifted a leg to pee against his favorite tree in the tree box and was humiliated when he had to drop it midstream. She stretched out her arms and meant to topple Mr. Leavell, who simply turned sideways and let the wild tornado pass (Major Maybe, a peaceful fellow, had flattened himself on the ground), and so it did, twirling crazily from her little bare feet up her thick legs, her own long, pee-stained skirt tangling in a way that tripped her, so that when she continued her trajectory between parked cars, into Twentieth Street, howling that once the devil appeared there could be no redemption, the fabric was coiled around her like cotton candy. Then she was flung forward as if someone really had not enjoyed their treat. The cab screeched to a halt and the driver jumped out and bent over her like a referee giving the count, his finger scolding: woman down . . . until up she sprang, toppling a seminarian who, along with Mr. Leavell (who was in his sixties), rushed to pull her off the taxi driver, whom she was attempting to squeeze to death. Major Maybe was so humiliated that his jaw went flaccid, his leash having been tossed over one of the pointy spikes of the iron gate that enclosed the little cement area outside his home. The leash was too short for him to lie down without strangling, so he had to sit and watch the spectacle. He’d had an invigorating walk, lifted his leg for a few pees, and experienced some excellent sniffs—now this: an explosion from a street person sent our way by Fidel Castro, who’d released people from the mental hospitals and put them on ships and sent them here to mingle with our own. On good days she sang hymns in Spanish in a beautiful, clear soprano. She felt the breeze blow through her hair. She ate her saltines and did nothing to anyone. On bad days . . . well.

  Where were the police? Where were the police? This was a time before cell phones. When the police arrived they handled the red-haired lady roughly, so much so that the seminarian took issue (it did no good). Her wrists were cuffed and her head was dunked into the police car like a basketball player sinking a one-handed shot. Easy. Nothing to it. Fast resumption of the game.

  Our rehearsals were suspended. Mr. Leavell picked up his dog’s leash and marched up the steps into his house. Soars and I went upstairs and broke out the bottle of Italian white and sat in our director’s chairs for a while—they were cheap, and the only furniture. Neither of us thought about stealing the flower to our side. Which was a rubrum lily that day, dropping its pollen onto the floor beneath the window, a giant’s yellow dandruff. Outside, the wisteria vine was thick and green, curlicues and pointing witches’ fingers of pale green shoots that would continue to quickly unfurl, but it was no longer in bloom. We took a walk. We discussed our futures. We wondered if we were going to fail, just simply fail: if I’d never know what I wanted to do in life (I worked part-time as a waitress and my mother sent a check every month that paid more than my half of the rent). We wondered if AIDS would sweep through the city, if the red-haired lady had enough sanity to be scared at the police station, how long Major Maybe would live. Soars reached for my hand. We never held hands because, of course, we weren’t a couple. We laced our fingers, and I was astonished at how bony his hand felt, and that his palms were sweaty. Then we went back and fucked. We did what so many people do on someone else’s wedding day, or after someone else’s funeral, though in this case it was only on the day some street person got carted off to the police station. We had a good time doing it, but the only thing that changed was that for some reason, afterward, neither of us continued to play the game of Steal the Flower. I soon stopped buying them. I used the money to buy other little luxuries, like mascara. He continued dating my friend.

  I met the man I married at a wedding I attended in Cape Neddick, Maine, in December (the bridesmaids carried white rabbit-fur muffs), though it took us eight years to get around to marrying. First I wasn’t sure about leaving New York City. Then I decided on medical school, but I wasn’t accepted anywhere in New York, so the decision about leaving was made for me. If you were in New York in the eighties, you wonder, now, where everybody went, and then you remind yourself that quite a few of them owned their property and dug in their heels, and eventually they—the people who made up a neighborhood—died. Some died of AIDS. Young people moved to Brooklyn. Or to the West, or to Atlanta. After 9/11, quite a lot of young people made an exodus from New York Cit
y to Portland, Maine, with its big waterfront buildings already being turned into artists’ studios and condos and ground-floor boutiques. Cool Portland, with its summertime tourists boarding boats and hoping to see a seal as they cruise out to one of the islands. Back on land, its time-warp hippies cross paths with people who live in brownstones and don’t have to think about money. There’s street art, and folding chairs are set up in music clubs. Used bookstores are still in business. If you’re a certain age, Portland more or less exists in ironic quotation marks (though of course no hipster would dare scratch them in the air).

  Recently, on Airbnb, I saw my old apartment. There was even a picture taken out the window, where someone had pulled down enough of the vine to allow a view. They’d created a kitchen out of part of the hallway and what used to be the coat closet. It looked like the floor had been painted black, with an Oriental rug placed on it. The photographs were taken with a fish-eye lens because it was only a small apartment under the pitch of the roof, so you couldn’t even stand up beyond where the bed sat in the bedroom. But it’s all deception, right? You understand that the picture shows more space than exists. You fall for the vase of fresh flowers on the nightstand that in real life probably has the circumference of a pie pan. You know the neighborhood’s hip without reading the specifics: Galleries! Bookstores! Chelsea Piers!

  A whole vase of flowers in the photograph. So lavish, its extravagance conveying more than a sense of romance or the idea of a luxurious life inside a welcoming apartment. Flowers that will be picked up and whisked away after the shot, as the curtains are pulled together against the daylight that will fade the rug. Close down the set, bring on the travelers, light it up again.

  Indelible, the yellow pollen on the floor.

  ROAD MOVIE

  Rose petals blew off the trellis, and the small pots of lantana outside each of the five motel rooms fell over in unison, like Lego pieces swiped by some kid’s hand. Moira picked up a clump of dirt near her door and put it back in the pot, but she was on vacation, she didn’t have to clean, she didn’t want to ruin her manicure. She kicked aside a bit of what remained with the toe of her sneaker.

  June in California was great, and the motel was amazing: the Nevada Sunset, in the Russian River Valley. She’d found it on the app that showed hotels discounted that day and managed to get the same rate for the rest of the week. It was Wednesday. She and Hughes wouldn’t have to check out until Saturday at eleven. She knew at least one time when they’d be having sex: at ten forty-five Saturday morning. He loved to have sex before checking out of a motel. He just loved it.

  Also (as he’d made clear) he loved his longtime girlfriend who had never thrown him over, never had a problem with alcohol, didn’t want children. This paragon, Elizabeth, was also conveniently allergic to pets and didn’t eat red meat. Her negative traits were that she worked all the time and took calls from her colleagues up until midnight; she was borderline anorexic; she woke him up when she had nightmares about rabid animals; her mother, a psychiatrist, was always hovering. Most shocking of all, Elizabeth chewed cinnamon gum.

  Moira herself had drawn up a list of pluses and minuses, half kidding, half hoping he’d see that he should break off his relationship with neurotic Elizabeth and make a commitment to her, instead. Drinking weak margaritas at the swimming pool wasn’t helping her cause, though. (She was doing it because her impacted molar hurt. She didn’t look forward to the surgery she was going to have in September to dig out this remaining molar. The other extraction had caused her a lot of problems and pain. Right now she was taking two or three more Advil Liqui-Gels at a time than the label suggested and trying not to think about fall.)

  “It doesn’t suggest. It tells you the correct daily dose,” he’d said the night before, tossing the bottle of Advil aside, watching Louis C.K. on his iPad mini. She’d only been having a ginger ale at that point, from the vending machine at the end of the row of motel rooms. Like everyone, she’d brought The Goldfinch on vacation. He’d read two or three pages and not fought her over it. He was, at the moment, reading The Economist poolside.

  Kunal, the nice young cleaning person with perfect posture, had been mobilized by the wind. He suddenly appeared with a broom, also pulling a wagon behind him carrying the ceramic planters he and the motel owner no doubt wished they’d gotten the plants into before the wind blew up. “More tonight, maybe no electricity, so there will later be flashlights, ma’am,” Kunal said. “One time, no storm at all, squirrels did an acrobatic act on those power lines. See up there? No power for a day and a half. Some people came to play cards by the light of the oil lamp. I like the owner, who is very adaptable, as people often are in their second careers. He won at cards himself! He said, ‘If I were Ben Affleck, and you were the casino owners, I’d be turned out of my own house!’ Then later in the night he lost what he had won and some more. I’ve never seen him gamble before or after. Let me tell you, this job is so much better than driving a taxicab. Every morning he squeezes fresh orange juice for us. He says, ‘Here’s to whatever’s going on in Silicon Valley,’ and we clink rims.” Kunal talked over his shoulder, going past all the doors, lowering the plants into the blue and green striped ceramic pots. “Okay, I think the Dustbuster is fine for this slight problem,” he said to himself. Earphones were draped around his neck. He listened to what he called “native music” but was embarrassed if anyone asked to hear. “He’s probably listening to porn tapes” had been Hughes’s opinion, when it turned out both he and Moira had asked about what music was playing and Kunal had demurred both times. Usually you could hear a bit of sound leaking out, but neither had.

  A storm. How dramatic. It would be another occasion to have sex. After sex, it might be another occasion to bring up their future, long term. Though to be honest, she wasn’t one hundred percent sure she thought being with Hughes was a good idea. He was sort of a tyrant about personal cleanliness and watching one’s weight and he even—this was unbelievable—wanted her to put on a hairnet when she prepared food. This, from someone who enjoyed the kind of sex he liked?

  Five was an unusual number of motel units. Unit three, rented to a wan-faced Norwegian couple who could barely even pantomime English, was the largest, Kunal had told Hughes, when he asked. It had been formed from half of room number four, the rest of which had been converted into closet space. In the afternoon the closet door was often open and the owner’s six-year-old daughter, of whom he had joint custody, could be seen doing her almost alarmingly good paintings of trees and the pool area across from the motel units, sitting at a little easel, listening to music through her own earbuds (She liked xx). She, Lark, had told them that her mother was “a burned-out hippie.” She’d been surprised when they laughed. “What’s funny?” she’d said, frowning. Hughes had quickly said something to spare her sensitive feelings. “We just don’t remember that there were hippies, ourselves, most days, so that took us aback,” he’d said. Why did he think he’d be such a bad father? He wouldn’t. But she accepted that there was no way to change his mind.

  She answered a call from her mother as she was undressing to take a shower, sweaty and itchy from the suntan lotion that felt like wet moss when it was applied. A white glob of wet moss. They were really going to have to buy a better brand. “Mom!” she said. “How goes?”

  Her mother was at a spa, getting a pedicure. It was a lovely place, not one of those dubious Korean scrub joints, where the women looked off into space and chattered as they exfoliated your heels. Every now and then she and her mother made a day of it, ate lunch at the fabulous Thai restaurant, then had some wonderful treatment, followed by a neck massage. It had been a while, though. Her mother had been preoccupied with insurance problems Will had somehow caused by checking himself out of rehab midprogram and being gone for twenty-four hours before being readmitted. It was June, and her mother had not yet been able to pay their taxes, though she and Larry (her accountant) had filed for an extension.

  “Are you at the Nevada Sun
set motel, is that what you told me?” her mother asked.

  “Yeah. About to step into the shower. And I’m not just making that up. Why?” she said.

  “Because today I heard about two places—I wrote both of the names down, because one sounded so familiar. Have you heard of Hope’s Cottages, in Healdsburg?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Well, Larry’s wife came with me to the spa, and their son is interning for some protégé of Roman Polanski’s, and that young man is going to be doing a film at two places, and one of them is the motel you’re staying at, and the other one is the cottages place. I forget—some famous musician lives in Healdsburg, who’s doing the sound track. You’d know the name if I could remember it.”

  “When’s this happening? You think they might need extras?”

  “Oh, I remember when you did want to be an actress, and then when you sang and played guitar with your brother and you two harmonized with those sweet voices, and his singing was almost as high as yours. He became a tenor, which amazes me. He loves to sing again, did I tell you that? They’ve formed a band with some sarcastic name. Last week he called in the middle of the afternoon to apologize to me for all the trouble he’d caused. I know they make them do that.”

  “They can’t make them.”

  “Then they said they’d double their meds and give them no ice cream, or something. I don’t know. It’s not that pleasant to get calls like that in the middle of the afternoon. I was having a quiet moment, and suddenly there was your brother’s voice, all choked up. He went into the whole thing about the skirmish last year when he got back to my car and it had been booted. I had to live through that again, his punching the policeman. What a traumatic day.”