by Ann Beattie
“Listen,” he said, “I don’t want you to think I’m obtuse.” He put the three coffees in front of our places. He put the cookies in the center of the table. “I realize this isn’t the absolute best thing that could happen for your family’s business, but they’re going to be such different places, it won’t be as much of a problem as you think. We’re going to have a lot of cut flowers, and dried flowers during the winter, which I know you don’t carry. And in the greenhouse, I’m going to have a lot of gesneriads: hypocerta and columnea and things like that. The bushes and trees in the summer—to be honest with you, that’s going to be somewhat competitive, but I’m limited in how many special sales I can have. Maybe there’s a way we can figure out things you want to stock that aren’t available to me, or that I’m not really interested in, and I could offer things you don’t have.” He bit into a cookie. “I’m sure there’s enough demand for both of us. I think this can work out.”
He was soft-pedalling. He would still have the Route 1 location. His would still be the newer greenhouse, with piped-in music and wicker furniture.
“There’s no chance we could talk you into opening some other franchise?” I said. My tone of voice indicated that I knew there was no chance. His slow shake of the head from side to side let me know he had no intention of backing down.
“It was Dowell’s idea, did you know that?” Dara said to me. “He has a cousin in the business, somewhere in western Massachusetts. If Dowell hadn’t found Tom, he would have found someone else.”
Tom shrugged, looking helpless.
“Well,” I said, “I didn’t think you were going to abandon the plan. At least, as you say, we can try to have a good relationship with each other.”
The teenage girls drifted away from the table, carrying knapsacks and embroidered shoulder bags heavy with possessions. Their Tampax and their cosmetics and their diaries and their mail. I had once had purses bulging with those things.
“And now for a bit of good news?” Dara said.
I looked at her. So did Tom. I was sure she was going to tell me they were getting married.
“Yours truly,” she said, “has just been selected for the role of Nora, in A Doll’s House. I have now come full circle, from high school actress to mature talent. Beginning September fifteenth, I may be viewed all nights except Tuesday and Sunday as the Star. Complimentary tickets await you.”
“That’s wonderful!” I said. “That’s really wonderful.”
“We’re going to be living together,” Tom said, taking her hand.
“Well—that’s wonderful, too,” I said.
“We’re in the process of packing up that terrible dump in Portsmouth,” she said. “Tom is being an absolute saint helping me.”
“Too bad you can’t move the bedroom intact,” I said.
Tom looked at Dara. “She’s seen your bedroom?”
“Only once,” she said. “On a day when she absolutely saved my life.”
“Consider yourself privileged,” he said.
“This move does not mean I am auditioning for the role of wife,” Dara said. “Someone else will do the cooking and cleaning. I will continue to act, and to function as a sex object. When I’m all set up, we’ll have a feast,” she said. “We’re going to have a huge lobster salad and champagne.”
I was wrong to have demonized Tom. He looked younger than I remembered, and, after all, he was doing everything he could to ensure we’d work things out about the businesses. They were in love, and however many qualifications Dara put on things, their happiness was contagious. I did want to go to their house. I did want to have champagne and lobster salad, and for everything to work out well.
There Dara sat: the star, with stars in her eyes. And I felt illumined, as if lit by ambient light. All at once, the day had become magical. It seemed as if, by merely being their friend, I could move at a faster speed. It was a little as if I’d already sipped several glasses of champagne. As if I could fly home, instead of sitting in traffic. I bit into a cookie, which was chocolaty and sweet, and if I could have smiled at the same time I chewed, I would have.
Bob had decided—quite impulsively for him—to go camping with his friends Peter, Chris, and Trenton. Chris had given him a ride back from Boston; he’d gone in to use the medical library, to research the latest article he was writing. He did the medical writing to support his poetry habit. He lived with his son, two dogs, two cats, and—until they pecked at the paint outside their cages and died—two birds, in a mixed neighborhood of blue-collar workers and hippies. Someone had dubbed his house “the Saint Christopher Menagerie.” Bob reported that Chris’s house was complete with the newest technology—he had an expensive word processor—but he slept on the couch, because he saw no sense in a bed that you slept in only at night and that just took up space the rest of the time. As well as his love of poetry—Gerard Manley Hopkins, in particular—he loved the outdoors. And he always packed tons of gear. Bob had once gotten furious at him because Chris had volunteered to pack everyone for a three-day hike (he was a real origami master of packing), and, at the top of the mountain the first night, Bob had discovered that one of the heavy packs he’d been hauling uphill all day contained surgical instruments. Chris was prepared to remove a burst appendix, or to tie a tourniquet around any limb that might suddenly start spouting blood.
Peter and Trenton were painters, though they painted very differently. Peter loved the Impressionists, and Trenton loved Poussin. Peter lived down a dirt road through the woods, where, in recent years, two Boston exiles had built. A wooden sign directed you to Peter’s house, but instead of giving his name—Greek, and containing most letters of the alphabet—there was a hand-lettered arrow in purple Day-Glo paint tacked to a tree that said: FUN; THIS WAY. His good friend Trenton lived fifteen minutes away, in a house that had been owned by the principal of the grade school. Every door in the house was one that had been discarded during renovations at the school, and they still had graffiti on them—kids’ graffiti, which doubly appealed to Trenton’s sense of humor—and that institutional shellac that made everything sparkle. Trenton’s studio was the only part of the big old house that wasn’t an eyesore: twelve hundred square feet of attic, with a shiny new oak floor and only one chimney interrupting the clear sweep of space. He’d put in dormers, and there were skylights and big, tall windows that allowed you the tiniest peek at the river. In the fall, Trenton always had a cocktail party so his friends could see the summer’s work. We’d be high up in the treetops, amid all the shocking color of the trees. Binoculars were provided so we could see the leaves more clearly, and one autumn, Peter had been looking through the binoculars when a squirrel fell from one of the highest trees at the edge of the property, hit the ground, and lay there. As Peter and Trenton ran down to inspect, the rest of us saw the squirrel get up and, doglike, shake its head. We stood there, holding our little shish-kebab skewers of marinated mushrooms, and watched as it ran into Trenton’s cellar. The hors d’oeuvres were provided by the mystery woman Trenton lived with. She considered herself a writer, and wrote all the time (if you believed Trenton’s reports) on her old Royal typewriter. Joyce Carol Oates could not have put in as much time as Trenton’s girlfriend, but what that meant was that we never saw her.
The guys were going camping and kayaking in the White Mountains, and as Bob pulled things out of his drawers and ran in circles, forgetting one thing, overlooking another, he didn’t have much interest in my report on my day, and my discussion with Tom Van Sant. He was looking for—of all things—his flask. I told him I’d borrowed it and that it was downstairs, on the shelf where the soup bowls were kept.
“Borrowed it?” he said. “Why?”
“I filled it with rum and took it to the new bakery. It improves cappuccino remarkably.”
“Yeah, sure you did,” he said.
“Don’t you think that’s a possibility?” I said, trying to continue the conversation I’d started earlier. “If they primarily sold houseplants,
and things like that—”
“Van Sant is going to do whatever’s required to make money,” Bob said. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
“He said it was Dowell’s idea. Only a quarter of the money that was put up was Tom’s.”
“It doesn’t matter where the money came from. It’s going to be built, and there’s nothing we can do but roll with the punches.”
I didn’t know whether he was resigned because he was depressed about Snell’s, or because he was just pretending to have come to terms with things because he was in a hurry to leave. He was angry with me, on some level. For quite a while, he’d been absent even when he was home. He was resigned to everything: to the cancellation of the family dinners; to the new business that was about to move into town; to the routine of coming and going—endlessly packing to leave for Boston and coming back and leaving it to me to unpack: to take his shirts to the dry cleaner, and to wash his clothes. I had never in my life shined shoes—including my own—but now no one shined them, because he wore running shoes. All the shoes in his closet just sat there, useless except as a place to hide other people’s love tokens.
“Did he give her the ring?” I said.
“No,” Bob said. “I moved it, by the way. I thought the locked tackle box was a better place for it.”
The tackle box was Bob’s ultrasecret hiding place for important documents and for cash and now, apparently, for the diamond ring. Bob had glued the box to the back of the closet in a small room we never used. The winter blankets and quilts were piled on top of it.
“I’m following you around like a puppy,” I said. “If you have no interest in any of this, just say so.”
“I have no interest in any of this,” he said.
“Do you have any interest in anything?” I said. “How your wife is doing? How your family is?”
“I hear how the family is all the time. My mother calls every day. Grandma bends my ear from the minute I get back at night until I go to bed, unless I put the TV on, and then, on top of that, she talks all through the show. Drake wears earplugs to study. He’s got the right idea: if you don’t want to be inundated with the fucking family, what you have to do is become a mute. Cut yourself off. Don’t say anything. Don’t even hear anything.”
His vehemence took me aback.
“You forgot to mention your fucking wife,” I said. “Is she part of the problem, too?”
“Maybe you should consider this,” he said. “That there’s a whole world out there, not just this little dot on the map with our teeny, tiny little microscopic dot of a family. I mean, why couldn’t you have assumed that the ring wouldn’t have anything to do with you? The whole family has become so self-referential that it would be an insult if something wasn’t personal, wouldn’t it? So I suddenly become the bad guy. Whoops! There’s a ring! He’s leaving me for someone else. I’m probably also not going camping with Trenton and the guys. Right. I don’t think I am. I’m going around to bars, I think, and offering the engagement ring to pretty girls. That sounds right.”
“I apologized,” I said. “I wouldn’t have been the first wife to—”
“Stop thinking of yourself vis-à-vis everybody else. Why are you a ‘wife’? Why aren’t you just you?”
“You are in a really horrible mood,” I said.
“You know what Barbara had the nerve to say to me?” he said. “She wanted me to come over and help pump out the septic tank. She’s hired a company to do it, but she still wanted me there. Why did she want me there? Because I’m an expert on septic tanks? Or just to have me by the nuts?”
“Bob, this is crazy. She probably just misses you. She knows you’re not going to go over there and drink a cup of coffee with her.”
“I’m not? Why not?”
“Have you ever done that? Ever once?”
“No, because there’s always something to do. She punishes all of us because she doesn’t have a husband. He dared to die on her. My God! Something happened that wasn’t in the plans! Well—just have all the rest of them rally around forever, then. They’ve got the time. They’ve got the obligation.”
I was so taken aback that all I did was stare at the floor. It hardly seemed the time to make more demands on him, if this was the way he felt. It hardly seemed the time to rephrase my question in terms of “me” instead of as “your wife.” I left him in the bathroom, where he was cursing because he couldn’t find the disposable razors. He hadn’t looked far enough back in the second drawer, where they were always kept, but he could discover that for himself. I went downstairs and looked at the movie listing. I was happy to see there was a Bette Davis movie on. Probably Barbara would be watching the same film, I thought, not missing the irony. Still: I had always been a big fan of Bette Davis’s. It was a movie I hadn’t seen before. I turned on the little fan by the chair, aimed it at my face.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” he said, standing in the doorway, holding a duffel bag and wearing a backpack. Trenton’s car had just pulled up: he’d swapped the bashed-in brown Toyota he’d driven for years for a red Toyota convertible, after completing a commission for the lobby of a building in St. Louis. I turned and looked through the slightly open slats of the venetian blind; Trenton was loping up the walk in his characteristic way, his slightly bent-kneed walk making him look like a slow-motion animation of how the dinosaurs ran, drinking from a bottle of Coke.
“I think going camping will do you good,” I said.
“Bette Davis, huh?” he said. It was the last thing he said before opening the screen door to let Trenton in. I never answered him. I never said anything else except to greet Trenton and to wish them both a good trip. But when they left I could have bored holes through Bette Davis. If she’d been a punching bag, I could have pushed her over. But she was only an image on a television screen, so I slumped lower in the chair and watched. Unfortunately, though, something about the way she held her head reminded me of Barbara. I’d tuned in late, and I couldn’t really understand what was happening. I heard Bob and Trenton laugh, and then the car radio come on. Dionne Warwick was singing “Walk On By.” Trenton’s Coke had looked good. I went into the kitchen and poured some out of a big bottle into a glass. It was flat. I dropped in three ice cubes and shook the glass, making as much fizz as possible. Then I opened the cabinet door and looked on the soup-bowl shelf. Bob had left the flask, and I took it down. I opened the next cabinet door and took out the bottle of rum. I got a funnel and poured rum into the flask, then Coke. I dumped the ice cubes in the sink. I went back to the TV, this time sitting upright and concentrating on Bette Davis, as if I were about to learn a lesson. Though maybe I had already learned it, I thought sourly. Maybe the lesson was that if you cared about people, and were involved, they just left you holding the stick. I thought about that as I sipped from the flask. After half an hour, I called Tom and asked if Dara was there. She was. She was painting a room at Tom’s to make it a replica of her previous bedroom. It would be painted the same color. With the same lace curtains hung. But this time, with a lock on the door. It was a condition of her moving in with him.
“You’re not watching Bette Davis, are you?” I said.
“That silly cow? Of course not. Did you call to ask me that, sweetie?”
“No. I called to see if there was any leftover spaghetti sauce. I was going to come over.”
“Really? Oh, that would be wonderful.” She lowered her voice. “You will be doing much better for yourself than spaghetti sauce, my love. We have made a moussaka and we have very cold white wine and there is nothing we would like more than to have you as our dinner guest.”
The next day, the day when Bob was out on the river, Barbara called twice. Bob was supposed to be at the house to hear about a new septic system the company wanted to install, she said, puzzled that he’d never shown up. “I don’t know anything about it,” I said. “He went off kayaking with Trenton and the guys.” Late in the afternoon she called back, to see if he was home yet. I told her
he wasn’t. I also said that I thought Bob needed time to be by himself and to do what he wanted to do. I was still mad at him, but I had thought about what he’d said, and I was also quite put out with Barbara.
“I see,” she said. As if the problem were me. As if her son weren’t doing exactly what he intended to do, with no thought of either of us.
I spent the day working on the last section of Mrs. Aldridge’s manuscript. Her third husband, while quite an outdoorsman, also gambled on the horses. He put out water and cat food for the neighbors’ cats, even though she snatched up the bowls as soon as she found them (alas: he was a very early riser), and soon there were numerous birds dead, or left mauled, as prizes on the Aldridges’ front stoop. One summer, at Saratoga, he lost half their savings at the racetrack. A horse called Daisy Buchanan placed, but that wasn’t enough to save them. They fought, and Mrs. Aldridge hit him on the head with her purse. At this point in the manuscript there was an asterisk: *I had taken one too many mint juleps. If nothing else, Mrs. Aldridge did try to be honest. But what did she think, finally, of her three husbands? Should the reader just assume that each husband was distinct, and that nothing could be inferred by thinking of them as a trio? She had set up the book, which she called “an autobiography,” in three sections, so clearly she saw herself vis-à-vis (as Bob would say; what did he read, or where did he hang out, that people said “vis-à-vis”?) her husbands.
“She sounds like a feminist’s nightmare,” Dara said, when I told her how the book was organized, on the phone. “But it also sounds like a laugh riot. I want to see it.” Her voice changed again. “No more projects you martyr yourself over for other people,” she said.
“I’m not martyring myself. It’s just a boring book, and I’m just a boring typist,” I said. “It’s what I do to make money.”
