The State We're In

by Ann Beattie

  “She hasn’t graduated, is the thing. What I don’t understand is that this failure to graduate came as no surprise to her, but why she let her mother and father arrange a celebration and book two rooms—Rand came from San Francisco with his girlfriend. Why Hannah didn’t say something beforehand, I don’t understand, though now she tells me they’re intimidating. That her father roars at her. That was her exact word. Not the stereotype of someone who lives in San Francisco, is it? I understand that Leigh can be quite bullish. It’s a crisis of some sort, that’s obvious, and at the college there was absolutely no one to see about it. The dean couldn’t meet with them at all yesterday because of her responsibilities at graduation. What we were all expected to do, other than sitting around the motel, I can’t imagine. There was only one blessed time-out when everyone agreed not to discuss it and we had gelato. It was over in twenty minutes, then the accusations started again and the tears. Hannah seemed to have calmed down by the time she and I left. There’s a boyfriend who’s coming for her tonight, on the bus from Boston. He’s premed. I’m awfully sorry to be dumping all this in your lap. I really must shut up.”

  “Not on my account. I don’t get many visitors, let alone people who are caught up in a great drama. All I understand so far, though, is that for some reason this young woman didn’t graduate.”

  “She didn’t take any of her final exams! You’d think they’d get in touch with her, see if there was some reason for it. Maybe they did try to contact her. I don’t know. She called this Boston fellow her fiancé and Leigh acted like she’d said ‘my shaman’ or something. What if he is? Her fiancé, I mean. Not that I have the slightest idea what that would have to do with her not finishing her work.”

  “Have you spoken to him?”

  “I don’t know his name. I’ve never met anyone she’s dated. She keeps that information top secret. You try to listen, to let them talk about what they’re inclined to talk about, isn’t that right? What do I know? I’m not a father.”

  “I’m not a mother, so I’m not the best person to give advice.”

  “I don’t quite know how to handle it. Not that I know what ‘it’ is, if you’ll excuse me for sounding like Bill Clinton. Leigh went absolutely berserk, pointing her finger at me, saying, ‘You’re so sympathetic, you figure this out, you support her so I’m not working two jobs.’ She was exaggerating there. She has one part-time job, and I know for a fact that Rand gave her a very nice financial settlement. If she thinks of her volunteer work as a job, I suppose that’s fair enough, but money’s not a problem. Actually, she may have been a bit unnerved from the moment she met Rand’s girlfriend, who plays with the San Francisco symphony. These aren’t inherently strange people, a musician and a medical student. I do agree with Hannah that in this circumstance, Leigh’s temper was quite terrible.”

  “The girlfriend’s young?”

  “She’s thirtysomething. Leigh and I are both forty-eight. We met when I had my first job. We were guides in Colonial Williamsburg.”

  “Really? I grew up in Charlottesville.”

  “Ah, that’s also a beautiful place. We drove there a few times for Leigh to see a shrink. She got pregnant by the candlemaker, during the time she was in love with the blacksmith. She couldn’t decide what to do. I must say, back then when she leaned on me it was much easier to take than her finger pointed in my face like a witch, as though I shared any responsibility for this.”

  “So Hannah is the child of Leigh and a candlemaker?”

  “No, that happened five years before she had Hannah. She had an abortion.”

  “I see. But her relationship with her daughter was good, you thought? Why do you think Hannah did what she did?”

  “I’m not saying this to dodge the question, but I think I just don’t understand women. I don’t mean to disparage women. There’s something I don’t get. Me. That I, personally, don’t get.”

  “But how can you understand them if they won’t discuss the situation? The Perrier’s on the top shelf, if you’d like more.”

  “Let’s go to Dockside! I’m terribly sorry to have brought my problems to you. I’m entirely sure she’s in her room, trying to figure things out, for all I know she’s called her mother and apologized and everything’s fine. I felt like Humbert Humbert checking in with her. The woman at the desk gave us such a skeptical look, even though I said two bedrooms and explained that she was my goddaughter. Hannah’s eyes were red and almost swollen shut at that point, which the woman no doubt noticed. We both had to show our driver’s licenses. I guess that’s become routine. When you check in anywhere.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “Rand flew back home from Bangor. He’s a surgeon. There was no way to stay. And the girlfriend couldn’t miss another rehearsal. It was the first time she’d met Hannah, so what use could she be?”

  “Are you using vacation time from your own job to make this trip, Terry? Which is a not very subtle way of asking what you do, I guess.”

  “What I do? I’m a writer, like you. I published a book in England about Emily Dickinson’s neighbors. An expansion of my thesis. I majored in psychology at Brown, with a minor in American studies.”

  “Ah. Understanding psychology would be a prerequisite for writing about Mr. Capote, I should think.”

  “I’m not so much writing about him as about people who have negative effects on other people’s lives. People are always writing about their mentors and thanking everyone they’ve ever met on the acknowledgments page. Everybody has wonderful, supportive, devoted people in their lives. All their pets are perfect. I think there needs to be another kind of book, a more realistic book, out there.”

  “I see. So how does Truman Capote fit into this?”

  “Being responsible for Ann Woodward’s suicide, for example. The woman who pretended she thought her husband was a burglar and shot him?”

  “And now Pistorius. Plus ça change. But let me understand: you’re writing a book about people who have adversely affected other people.”

  “I suppose that’s it, in a nutshell. Other famous people, of course. America loves celebrity.”

  “Any small anecdote I might have about Capote isn’t likely to justify your investment of time.”

  “At least you know who he is! When I reeled off some names to Hannah, she’d hardly heard of anybody—even though quite a few lived in Maine. She’d heard the name Truman Capote and she thought he wrote Christmas stories for children! She’d never heard of Diane Arbus, she’d never heard of Elizabeth Bishop. She’d heard of Robert Lowell, though she’s never read anything by him. I suppose he isn’t taught in school anymore.”

  “Cal—Lowell—was so much older than we were, but he was very kind to Dem. He wrote a letter that got him a Guggenheim when we badly needed money. That poem Elizabeth Bishop wrote after his death is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read. Will Lowell be in your book? Because of his negative effect on almost everyone?”

  “Not on Bishop. They loved each other.”

  “That’s true. So he’s exempt?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re serious? Being in love with one person is all it takes to get off the shit list?”

  “I never considered including him. Phil Spector is in the book.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “Wall of Sound?”

  “I’m afraid I have to let you down, just like Hannah.”

  “Not at all! It’s very nice of you to make time for me. Please, let me take you to lunch. Hannah won’t . . . she won’t spring out from behind a bush, or anything. You know how they are. They want to be off by themselves to text and listen to their music and reapply all that makeup that doesn’t look like makeup, and then they’re exasperated if you suggest they put on some lipstick and comb their hair.”

  Clair got up and lifted her key ring from the nail by the door. She’d never changed the key ring; it was still the clunky little geode dangling from the end of a brass chain Dem had
always carried, saying he’d gotten it from the Lilliputians, who swung it to knock out their Lilliputian enemies. Enemies. What a concept. Something people emphasized during wartime. Or that they still might call political opponents or predators in the animal kingdom. Down the street, the lawn service was unloading a riding mower. The violets would go under, and the dandelions with them. The service had pulled up where Adver’s ex-wife lived—the woman he still sometimes dropped by to see after he made repairs. Those times he wasn’t too hungover to make the repairs he’d promised to make. (“Just turn off the valve. I’ll be there early Tuesday.”)

  “So you knew Lowell,” Terry said. “I envy you that. Did you ever meet Elizabeth Hardwick?”

  “I did. At a dinner in New York. I sat next to her and we talked about Trollope. Or she talked about him and I listened.”

  “That was one classy lady.”

  “She was. She had very curly hair and it kept blowing all through dinner, though there wasn’t a fan anywhere. It just blew.”

  “How do you account for that?”

  “Maybe her ideas, disturbing the currents of the air?”

  “You’re quite funny. I’m sure people tell you that.”

  “At my age, friends don’t pronounce on other friends any longer, and no one new I meet ever takes the slightest notice of me.”

  “Do you miss Virginia?”

  “Particularly in April, when spring doesn’t come here, and doesn’t come.”

  “Blackflies do,” he said.

  “That’s right. What about you? Do you miss it?”

  She realized, now that the talk had turned banal, that earlier they’d been having a little flirtation. To no end, but they’d had an amusing volley. She touched her hair. She rubbed the tip of her nose, delicately. It never helped to scratch the itch in allergy season.

  “I try not to miss places, because they’re all so different now. Maybe not the heart of Williamsburg, but that’s a sort of Disneyland, isn’t it? Everything else changes.”

  “You’re too young to think that way. You’re supposed to see it as progress. Or not to notice at all.”

  “I’m a writer. I have to notice.”

  The waiter introduced himself. Michael was six feet tall, with blazing blue eyes. He recited the specials like a choirboy sight-reading complicated music for the first time. His eyes locked on the nothingness of the middle distance as he spoke. When he walked away in his white shirt and black pants, Clair saw that he was wearing yellow sneakers without laces. Had Terry, with the imperative to notice things, noticed that? They both ordered coffee.

  Clair said, “I’ll tell you my one Truman Capote story and get it over with, then you must tell me something you’ve discovered writing your new book. What you know will be far more interesting than anything I have to say, but here goes: I was friends with one of Johnny Carson’s ex-wives, Joanne. She took a road trip with Capote to visit her sister, who lived just outside Charlottesville, but her sister suddenly came down with what turned out to be mumps so they ended up staying with me for a night. Dem wasn’t famous then. He and I were housesitting for some university couple who’d gone to Spain, taking care of their garden and feeding their cat. I cooked a chicken and made a salad. I wasn’t going to a lot of trouble just because the famous Truman Capote was coming to dinner. He’d like me or he wouldn’t. Dem always said one of the things that attracted him to me was my self-assurance. Anyway, to my surprise, he was rather shy. He kept calling some friend named Leo on the telephone and leaving dollar bills ‘for the phone bill.’ Maybe ten dollars. When he was leaving, he reminded me that the money was by the phone and said that if I wanted, he’d sign his name on the bills. Can you imagine? Sometimes people say things like that to test you: how impressed are you that they’ve been in your house? Did I say Dem was away on an assignment? I said something like ‘Do whatever you think best,’ and he hesitated, then walked back to the kitchen. We stood there while he autographed dollar bills. Joanne was rolling her eyes, but she adored him. She thought everything he did was amusing. After they left, I saw that all the signatures were different. They all said Truman Capote, but some of the writing was slanted backward, and some of it looked like calligraphy, and in one the T had curlicues at the top like ram’s ears. If I still had them, I might be able to list them on eBay. He also guessed almost to the penny what the phone bill would be.”

  “I’ve never heard anything like that. He wasn’t drunk?”

  “We shared the bottle of wine Joanne brought, but three people on a bottle of wine? No, hardly drunk. He slept on the couch and she slept in the other twin bed in the room Demeter and I shared. In the morning when we got up he was playing with the cat.”

  “Were you tempted to keep the money?”

  “It was money. I spent it.”

  “That was the only time you ever saw him?”

  “He came one other time to the house in Maine right after we moved in, but he obviously didn’t remember meeting me in Virginia. Either that, or I’d changed more than I realized. We never want to think that, do we? I’d had long hair when we first met—another thing Dem said he’d loved about me, at first sight—but by the time I saw Truman Capote again, I’d had it cut. I was just Demeter Farrell’s middle-aged wife. He looked right through me, even when he asked in that whispery voice where the loo was. I pointed and he hesitated. He sort of lingered in the kitchen as the others went out to the back porch—there’d been talk of his writing something about Demeter’s new show for the New Yorker—and then he set down his iced tea, I think it was. He turned his back on me and walked upstairs, where he must have known there’d be another bathroom, and he used that one instead. That’s the end of my Truman Capote stories. Now they’re yours!”

  “What did you think of someone coming in and accepting your hospitality and basically brushing you off?”

  “I was only the famous photographer’s wife.”

  “Would women have treated you that way?”

  “Most all our visitors were men.”

  “But you mentioned Diane Arbus in your letter.”

  “Her daughter went to school in Maine. She built her own yurt to live in. She loved her school. Diane was skeptical of how much education she was getting, but she was glad Amy—that was her name—had found a place she felt she belonged. Diane Arbus certainly didn’t autograph anything before leaving!”

  “Didn’t May Sarton also live in York?”

  “She did, and we went out of our way to avoid her. She was a very contentious person.”

  “I’m obviously lucky you agreed to see me! Here comes the coffee, finally. They aren’t in any hurry here, are they? Just meeting you has put my mind back on my project. What a strange story about Capote, though. Do you think he mistook himself for Picasso and thought anything could be his merely for signing a napkin?”

  “See the man coming in, in the Boston Whaler? Diane Arbus should be here. He used to be Karen Welber. Had surgery at Johns Hopkins. Ken’s been married for thirty years to a German girl who doesn’t speak a word of English, or pretends she doesn’t. She pantomimes to the butcher how she wants the meat prepared. The butcher hates it when she comes in.”

  “Is that right? Really?”

  “Yes. There’s also a midget who lives in town.”

  “But you like it here? You haven’t thought about getting away for the winter, at least? Florida’s not for you?”

  “Not for me, no.”

  “Some dependable people who shovel you out? All that?”

  “I haven’t had any trouble doing the walkway and the steps myself, and if Adver isn’t too drunk or hungover, he gets to my driveway quite fast, since his ex lives on the same street and would kill him if he didn’t drive the plow over before the snow stopped falling.”

  “Your husband did a different sort of photography, of course, but did he . . . for his own purposes, I mean—did he photograph people in town? Landscapes? Anything like that?”

  “A lot of nude shots of
me, but no landscapes, no.”

  “Oh, I see!”

  “I was kidding.”

  “Oh! Right!”

  He blushed! She’d made him blush!

  “What exactly are your plans when your young friend’s fiancé comes on the bus, Terry? Hadn’t you better check on Hannah’s state of mind? Everyone seems to have ditched you with a twenty-one-year-old girl. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  “I know what you mean. I’m feeling a bit sorry for myself, like I’ve got to see that this comes to some good conclusion, even though it’s not really my responsibility.”

  “It’s none of my business, but when you were younger, were you Hannah’s mother’s boyfriend? I couldn’t make that out from the way you told the story.”

  “Well, I—I don’t really know if I was. I mean, at the time I thought I was, or at least that that might happen any moment. She always had her various unhappy romances going on. But we had something special, I know we had that. It was probably just wishful thinking on my part that there would be anything more. You know, I don’t tend to talk about her. No one’s ever asked me that.”

  “Your being her daughter’s godfather, and your long friendship . . .”

  “Oh, perfectly logical question, exactly right. I don’t think I knew quite what to do. I didn’t want to ruin the friendship, I suppose. So I never did anything—anything that a real boyfriend would do, I mean—though sex alone doesn’t account for closeness, does it?”

  “As you mentioned earlier: Bishop and Lowell.”

  “Exactly. Perfect example. They had so much in common and they were so much on each other’s side. Really quite remarkable, that friendship. And then at the very end, you have to wonder what he was thinking when he was going to visit her here. Here being Maine, I mean. He meant to bring Mary McCarthy along, and Elizabeth Bishop was living with a woman, and she didn’t want Mary McCarthy to see that, or whatever it was she feared, so Lowell didn’t come. It was obtuse of him, really stupid. They never saw each other again. It would have been the last visit. It’s really too sad to think about.”