by Ann Beattie
“Maybe he’s trying to outdo Frank,” Janey said with consternation when I told her about Bob’s recriminations. The night Grace: A Graceful Life was to premiere, Bob informed me that I was a sycophant, a person who lived vicariously through the dubious accomplishments of a woman who sponged off men, tried her best to wreck marriages, and who was conceited enough to think that her paltry performances in vastly overrated dramatic productions would add up to a meaningful life, while in reality she was a liar, a home wrecker, and an opportunist.
This despicable creature had given me her ring. She had tried to return it to Tom Van Sant weeks before, and he had taunted her about how willing she was to just give up on their relationship the minute the going got tough. Bernie had decided it would be best to give the baby up for adoption to a couple in Georgia; he was not in favor of the plan, and was always on the phone with her, or with his lawyer, and when he was not communicating with them, he was trying to change Dara’s mind about how nice it would be to have a baby in the house. (“Sweetie: Can he possibly, possibly, have misunderstood what is already my complete and absolute misery at being dragged even this far into this mess?”) She had flung the ring at him, and it had taken him an hour, on his hands and knees, to find it, and as he searched, he had begun to cry. His crying had become contagious, and then Dara had wept half the night, and she had told me on the phone the morning she asked me to take the ring for safekeeping that no amount of makeup was going to disguise her swollen eyes. She told him she had no intention of marrying him, in large part because he had never banished Bernie from his life, and she had come to doubt he ever would, if he sought custody of the child. She reiterated that she would not consider having children—not her own, and certainly not anyone else’s—before she had a career. She gave him a book by Germaine Greer. She said his anguish was manipulative—that he was torturing Bernie, as well as her. He had insisted on too many things, she had come to see: he had pressured her to move in; he had tried to control her financially, even if he manipulated through generosity. She wanted him to take the ring back. She would offer it calmly, and if he truly had her best interests at heart, he would take it back. He had said to her: “It would break my heart if I had to put it back in that little box. It would be like burying my mother a second time.” She had suggested he put it in a dish. He had said he hated her. She had said she knew that. It turned into quite a fight, she told me, but in the end, when he had begun to weep again, she had been so drained that she stopped defending her rights. So much anger and bitterness. She would have to be glad she had something to command her attention. She would have to be happy that now, rather than being so unhappy at home and then playing trapped, miserable Nora, she could at least portray a woman whose life had not been lived in extremis.
There were not many people in the theater. Edward Quill made the rounds in the lobby, and two pretty high school students offered cups of tea. One was the daughter of the architect who had renovated the barn; the other was a foreign exchange student from Bolivia, who lived with the first girl’s family. Placing a sugar cube in my cup, the Bolivian girl had giggled when the sugar cube began to bubble. They were charming, dressed in crushed-velvet dresses, slightly elegant and slightly awkward in the way they served tea. They both wanted to be actresses, Dara had told me. Outside, about fifty people were noisily chanting, “Seabrook no, Seabrook no, save our earth, Seabrook no.” The demonstrators were waving signs. Some carried dolls painted black. In the distance, I could hear the wail of sirens. “Seabrook no,” the voices continued.
“Ghastly riffraff,” Edward Quill said to a man standing near me. He was becoming more and more nervous that the protesters, who were mistaken about the governor’s being at the play, would discourage people from coming in. I gave an usher my ticket, got a program, and walked behind the usher to my seat. More people arrived in the five minutes before the curtain rose, but the crowd was still disappointing for opening night. One of them was Tom Van Sant. Wouldn’t you know it: just when Dara had given me the ring because she feared she might do something impulsive with it, like throw it out the car window, Tom came in and sat down in an aisle seat two seats away. He must have suspected he was out of favor with a close friend of Dara’s, because he only nodded hello and then quickly looked away. I twirled the ring so the band was on top of my hand. I said what I hoped was a polite hello. He nodded. His eyes were quite red. I knew Dara had asked him not to attend the performance, but he’d gone back on his word.
When the lights dimmed, Edward Quill walked from behind the dark brown curtain. Vaguely, faintly, the protesters could still be heard. At first I assumed he would be welcoming the crowd, but instead, he began to recite his preface: “She was a woman of her time in each time she lived,” Quill said. He had memorized the lines. Looking at some distant point, he said: “She was an artist who recorded the day’s subtle nuances as…” Everyone sat listening attentively, though as he continued to talk, Tom eventually slid forward in his seat and covered his eyes with one hand. The preface was short, but the audience’s attention span was even shorter. Quill was the warm-up act keeping them from the main event. He was a curiosity they would have been just as happy to dispense with. I think I was reading minds correctly: the longer Edward Quill stood there in his cowboy boots and Count Dracula cape, the itchier the men in the audience became. Men began to whisper to their wives. In my peripheral vision, I was watching Tom Van Sant, and wondering if he was crying. When he lowered his hand I looked quickly at him. He did not seem to have been crying, but he did say, quite conversationally, as though there were no space between us, “The poor bastard’s hanging himself.”
“Shh,” I said, but many people overheard him.
“…Nora, in Ibsen’s masterpiece, A Doll’s House,” Edward Quill said, then clasped his hands like the good student who has finished his formal recitation, and exited stage left.
To my surprise, when the curtain rose, I saw the enormous faces of Mrs. Bell and Mrs. Denton projected onto a screen at the back of the stage. Dara had told me nothing about the production, because she wanted it to be a complete surprise. It certainly was: their faces were so alarming I jumped back in my chair. I felt like an ant, staring up at a skyscraper. They had been filmed talking about their friend Grace. But what the purpose could have been—why they had been filmed in such extreme close-up—was a mystery. Instead of revealing character, the closeness of the lens tended, rather, to impart an abstract quality to what we looked at. The enormous faces crowding the screen made me so uncomfortable—who wanted to see craterous moon chins, the worms of wavily pencilled eyebrows?—that I wanted to look anywhere but at the screen. My eyes darted around, and finally locked with Tom Van Sant’s. He shook his head slowly from side to side. I looked away quickly, afraid that he would start talking again. The only talk, though, except for a few whispers, a few initial gasps, was coming from the two old women on the screen, who were chattering away the same way they had in our car after the funeral. They were discussing Grace Aldridge’s various marriages, and they must have been excited to be filmed, because instead of one waiting for the other to finish, each chimed in with asides and contradictions. They were having a great time, but the size of their faces, and the rush of their words, became increasingly surreal. Finally, someone decided that whatever was going on was meant to be humorous, and laughed. No one else laughed, but people began to whisper. By then, though, I was trying hard to concentrate on what the two women were saying: it was something about quickie divorces and marriages in Reno—or was it Las Vegas? Mrs. Bell wanted to know. It was essentially a rundown of Grace Aldridge’s early marriages, but I only followed what was being talked about because the two women had discussed the same things riding in the backseat of our car. They were so animated, and their mouths so fun house large, that you tended to divide your attention between listening and staring. It was going on much too long. It was gossip, only gossip, in extreme close-up.
As the old women’s voices gradually became
fainter, the audience began to realize there was a person onstage. I suppose because she was dressed all in black she looked even smaller, but below the enormity of Mrs. Bell’s and Mrs. Denton’s faces anyone would have looked tiny. Their faces, with mouths gaping, were frozen on the screen. They had become silent. Below, as if taking a casual stroll, Dara walked slowly for a few paces, then turned and glanced in the direction of the audience, though it was clear that really she was looking into the distance. She was like a person sleepwalking, and everyone became hushed, observing her. Every motion was almost Kabuki slow. I began to think that she might never speak, and it made me—as was no doubt intended—terribly anxious. I was used to Dara’s asking a probing question looking deep into my eyes, as if she were trying to see the answer appear on the back of my skull.
“You,” she finally said, in a small voice. Again, she was looking somewhere, and nowhere. “Have you been married? Were you a bride at nineteen?”
In fact, I had been. I had married Bob near the end of my sophomore year at the University of New Hampshire, against the advice of Aunt Elizabeth, my guidance counsellor, and my best friend. There was nothing wrong with Bob; I was just too young. They all said that, in various ways. I had thought: I wasn’t too young to handle everything else that happened. Maybe by choosing something, I’d get the upper hand with fate. I didn’t really believe it, but at the time it had seemed important to have instigated a plan. Not to wait for something to happen. My master plan had been: sex; more sex; engagement; marriage. Joining a ready-made family had been a bonus.
Dara was narrating the story of Grace Aldridge’s unhappy first marriage. That had not been part of the manuscript. Edward Quill must have learned about it from the old ladies. Dara moved around the stage looking like a totemic bird: lean, and darkly elegant; you wondered what its wing span would be. There was that possibility: that out of her smallness, something expansive would eventually emerge. As Grace, she spoke quietly, her tone of voice underscoring the unremarkability of her life. The cumulative effect, however, was quite different: as Dara moved, standing in one quadrant to narrate her first marriage, moving elsewhere for the continuation of the monologue, I began to perceive of her as a chess piece that could miraculously move itself, and as the husbands died, or as the marriages were annulled, and the men never seen again, it was as if Grace Aldridge—self-propelled—was winning a game of chess; after much consideration, Dara would move in a way that seemed very deliberate, and then the conjured-up person whom she had convinced you all the while she talked was so real would vanish, as if plucked from the game by invisible fingers. Between each marriage, Dara would stand immobile as the sound track of Mrs. Bell and Mrs. Denton’s chatter resumed, and the screen revealed the old ladies’ faces reanimated from the freeze-frame. “I suppose we’ve all heard of Our Lady of the Flowers,” Mrs. Denton said, “but what you have to know about Mr. Dubbell is that he was Our Tyrant of the Vegetable Patch.” They chortled and sighed and banished people with a blink. Were they the stand-ins for God, the way Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, had made T. J. Eckleburg a haunting visage that presided over a godless world? I was thinking back to my classes at the University of New Hampshire. About meeting Bob, becoming determined to marry him. No, I didn’t want an engagement ring—a simple wedding band would be fine. I had promised Aunt Elizabeth I would finish college, but then I had quit. I thought Bob and I needed more money, and I was willing to work for it. Bob was the good student. Bob was the one who would really need a college degree, I had thought. Underneath my finger, I felt the tiny bulge of Dara’s ring: the rubies and diamonds. The person who had given it to her was sitting two seats away, and he had no idea I was wearing it.
There was no intermission. After half an hour, a man and woman sitting in front of me whispered urgently for a few seconds, then got up and walked up the aisle. During the next half hour, several other couples left. I began to be extremely annoyed. Dara was mesmerizing as she recited the story of Grace Aldridge’s life, and I saw for the first time, in the way Dara moved, in the way she softened her voice to inaudible whispers so that connecting sentences elided, that Grace Aldridge did, after all, have some personal sense of culpability. In the manuscript, she had seemed only to have been acted upon, but Dara’s performance gave you the sense that Grace realized she bore responsibility for the deterioration of so many unions. How could Dara herself, that night she and Tom and I had sat in the kitchen looking at the carbon copy, have ever laughed, if now she could see such inherent power and tragedy—such dimension—in Grace’s life? I felt envious of Dara’s power. She really had made a silk purse. That people were walking away from it was as unbelievable to me as people not chasing money blowing around in a windstorm. They didn’t get it: they didn’t see the pathos; they couldn’t see their narrow, monogamous lives as having anything in common with a woman who had married and divorced and married again—they didn’t see that having taken the first step themselves implied that they, too, might become habituated to marriage.
I thought it was an inspiring performance. I liked it so much, while almost everyone else apparently liked it so little, that I wrote a piece for the local paper, explaining the play. The paper printed it. Among people who knew me, it was taken as a position paper: a quite unexpected feminist stance—which elicited from my former employer, Penny, at least, an approving letter. Edward Quill later carried a copy with him when he talked to off-Broadway producers. Dara was grateful that I had validated her as much as she had validated Grace Aldridge. Angry theatergoers wrote letters to the newspaper, refuting my essay, but I was convinced I was right. What Bob, chagrined, called “the tempest in the teapot” was really the beginning of the whirlwind of self-confidence that picked me up and took me away from him.
At the end of August, Bob and I separated. He acted as if, by leaving, I were betraying him. Suddenly Dell was no longer a meaningless small town, as he’d chosen to portray it the night he’d said I overestimated Dara Falcon’s talent, but a quintessentially advantageous place to be. I was turning my back not only on Bob and the family, but also on Dell’s advantages, pretending there was nothing I could do there, as if Dell were so different from any other place. Even the great Dara Falcon had moved back to Dell, hadn’t she? He urged me to move in with Frank and Janey for a while if I was so dissatisfied living with him. When I insisted I was leaving and was going to get a college degree, he wouldn’t talk about school at all and insisted upon seeing my unwillingness to intrude on Frank and Janey as my dislike of his family. “Frank and Janey would be a dead end for me,” I said. “Sure, they’d have me, but what would I have? I have to get an education. Quitting school was a big mistake, but it’s not too late to go back.”
“Then go stay with your great friends Tom and Dara until you get over your snit,” he said. “Go drink champagne and think everything they do is amazing. Maybe he’ll flirt with you again, or you and Dara can lock yourselves up in the room he gave her the money to decorate and despise men together. She can read her stupid scripts, and you can continue to hide your face in every book you can find. Or maybe you’d like to work at Snell’s. Why don’t you go ahead and join the competition? Give Barbara the big test: see if she’s able to find a way to think that’s perfectly wonderful, the way it’s suddenly so wonderful to be with that robot, Churnin—the way opening day at the competition’s just another occasion for a lovely party.”
“Bob, listen to yourself: first Dell is a great place, and then when you start talking about who lives there, it’s hell. A place is who lives in it. That’s what a place is.”
“And a place is also what you choose to make it,” Bob said. “I admit that the wrong sort of people are doing the wrong thing here now. It’s getting built-up; people are taking advantage of the place; they’re living on the fringe, and not contributing anything. Does Van Sant ever show up at a town meeting? In fact, did you ever consider going to a meeting?”
“Oh, stop trying to force small-town life down my throat.
I read Main Street in school.”
“You quit school,” Bob said. “I don’t know why you did, but you did. And now you don’t know what to do, and I’m to blame, and the only solution is to go running back to school because Dell is a nowhere place that offers you nothing.”
“I’m going to get a degree,” I said. “I’m going to learn things and I’m going to meet people. People who’ll actually talk about things that matter.”
“Well, aren’t you self-righteous. Should I have interrupted you while you sat around all summer, keeping your nose in a book? Were there things you were dying to talk to me about? Excuse me, but I was working.” He glared at me. “You know, Jean, you intend to do whatever pleases you. And I think you always have,” Bob said. “I look back, and I think I fell for the oldest trick in the book. I thought that because you couldn’t keep your hands off of me, you were in love with me. What was that about—all that sex? You don’t have any interest in sex. And God forbid if it might lead to pregnancy. God forbid if we were like Frank and Janey, instead of angst-ridden like Van Sant and his ménage à trois. Ask Dara whether she doesn’t have to put out to continue sponging off Van Sant. Ask her if she’s really getting a free ride. Learn some lessons from your great friend about how to pretend, why don’t you? Maybe we could be very modern and settle for pretending—if you come to your senses and want to come back, that is.”
