by Ann Beattie
I had written the first letter to her in the fall, sitting near the low, square table I had taken from the living room and put under the window in my room. I couldn’t remember my exact words (they had been temperate, though), but I could remember the front door slamming just after I had finished writing the letter, and how I had felt that something peculiar and haunting—some essence of Elizabeth—had responded immediately, floating into the room with an unpleasant draft that came under the door. It was actually one of the people I shared the house with, I quickly found out: one of the men, bringing some girl home, but the slammed door reverberated as if Elizabeth had flown in to wordlessly haunt me for a few seconds. I do not believe in ghosts, or have any tendency to personify the wind, but when my heart began to beat wildly in my chest, it clarified what I really did fear: a vulnerability I always tried to deny. What if Bob simply came for me and took me back to Dell? What if Bob someday walked through the front door and—since physical force would have been unthinkable—argued me back? This could all be a dream, I thought. Simple freedom might be a dream. But then the autumn leaves had caught my attention, and they were more real—more consoling—than any salve. It was fall. I was in Connecticut.
When first semester classes were over, everyone left the house for the holidays except meepy Megan McCall, who drove me crazy by sleeping all day and prowling the house all night. Sometimes, around midnight, she would practice playing “A Whiter Shade of Pale” on the pump organ in the living room, which would result in another longer walk for Sparkle, who also avoided Megan like an imperious cat. I would see boxes of Super Tampax in the bathroom and worry about her—there were three large boxes of forty each per period, I guessed. Only years later would she tell me that she plunged the plastic Tampax tubes into dirt to provide support for the fragile marijuana seedlings she grew in trays in her bedroom, under a grow light. But all I knew back in Eastford was that one of the housemates was quite possibly bleeding to death, which made me anxious because I might be the only person there to save her.
Shortly after my visit to Dell, I had called Tom and told him that I understood he wanted the ring back, and he had been delighted to get the call. I said I would insure it and mail it, but he said he would be driving to New York with Bernie and the baby to spend Bernie’s birthday at the Plaza with her friends from Georgia; if it would be all the same to me, he’d like to stop and get the ring. He didn’t ask whether this was all right with Dara, and I wouldn’t have lied if he’d asked. She didn’t know anything about it; I’d thought over what Janey had said, and I’d decided she was right.
So he had come to the house in Eastford on an unusually mild December day, pulling into the driveway in a new blue van. Megan had been asleep, because it was only noon. From the front lawn, I could look back at the house and see the relentless purple glow of her grow light.
Bernie greeted me warmly and couldn’t wait to show me the baby. The baby was asleep in a car seat, and she pushed the material of his little shirt down so I could see his mouth and chin. I lightly touched the edge of the baby’s blanket, but I didn’t want to wake him up. I had on the ring, and I looked at it for a second—looked at my finger, instead of at the baby, as I ducked my head into the car—and I thought how pretty it looked, how wrong Bob was never to have bought me any pretty jewelry, and also that I was doing the right thing: the ring should be Tom’s to give to Bernie. They seemed like a happy family. If he seemed slightly more ill at ease than she was, that was only natural. I took off the ring and pressed it into his palm, saying that they must come in and have coffee.
“Honey, that’s lovely. That really is a beautiful ring your mother had,” Bernie said.
Was he going to slip it on her finger? Was I going to be the third wheel in a romantic moment? Apparently not. Tom nodded, but he did not give Bernie the ring. Instead, he reached into the car and got Dara’s John Wesley Harding hat from the backseat. “You can tell Dara that whatever she left in the room is still locked up there,” he said, handing me the hat. “Since I can’t open the door, I couldn’t toss this in.”
Later, the hat sat in the middle of the table. Bernie sat down in one of the oak chairs surrounding the oval table. The cloth was covered with crumbs. A prism in the window sent a jagged rainbow bouncing across the cloth. The dog came over and made friends. Tom crouched to stroke the dog’s head. The ring was on his pinkie. It sparkled in the afternoon light. The baby was sleeping in an armchair in the corner.
“I guess we’ve both been through a lot of changes since the last time we met,” Bernie said. Her accent sounded even more Southern. Her hair was in a French twist: it made her look elegant, but older. She had her figure back: tight jeans; a beige sweater; a poodle pin, with a rhinestone eye, just below the V neck.
“Your ex-husband’s taken quite a dislike to me,” Tom said. “Just out of curiosity: You don’t think I came back to Dell with any idea of opening a greenhouse, do you?”
“I don’t think they think it matters what you intended. They’re mad because it’s what you did,” I said.
“Please let’s not talk about things we can’t fix,” Bernie said.
“I understand that,” Tom said to me. “If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t do it.”
They stayed in the dining area when I went into the kitchen. The dog came in and got its rawhide bone and curled up at my feet, chewing. I had to constantly step around the dog as I found the coffee filters, put the kettle on to boil. I was rarely in the kitchen. I’d gotten a toaster oven and fixed things for myself at odd hours, bringing frozen food from the kitchen to the bedroom and putting it in the little oven that sat where the TV used to sit. I washed my plate in the kitchen, but that was about all I did there. I even had a small refrigerator in my room.
“It’s awfully nice to see you again,” Bernie said. She leaned against the door frame. “Just in case you think I have bad feelings of any sort myself, I don’t. I know Dara is your friend, and I respect friendship.”
I nodded. Dara was going to be furious when I told her I’d returned the ring.
“When you come back to Dell, you come see us,” Bernie said.
“I will,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Tom said you helped him to have some nice times in his house. He always enjoyed having you there.”
“It helped keep me sane,” I said.
“That room he was telling you about isn’t really locked anymore,” Bernie said quietly. “It’s the strangest thing. Really downright scary. I don’t go in there. Did you ever see it? Tom says he never went in when she lived there.”
“What about the room?” I said.
“Well, she did this silly artwork on the wall, over all her perfect coats of paint. Just a little thing, about the size of a pie plate, but it is about as weird as anything I’ve ever seen. It’s like something a teenager would do. I mean, it’s this silly spider’s web, painted in dark brown paint, and in the center is a picture of her face, cut out of some photograph—it sounds more funny than awful, now that I hear myself telling you about it. Anyway, she put herself right there in the center of the spider’s web, and then she took the paintbrush and she drew a big X through it. It’s like some awful, ugly tattoo. It scared Tom half to death. He thought about its being the baby’s room, but when he took the door off the hinges and saw that, he just leaned the door up against a wall, and neither of us ever goes in there. Imagine putting graffiti up on walls. There it is, in that room with the lace curtains and all the antique linen.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was the single craziest thing I had ever heard about Dara, and Bernie had described it graphically. So Dara was serious about despising herself: about being the spider who should starve. Or was it that, by X-ing it out, she had decided to leave that concept of herself behind?
“Forgive me if I shouldn’t have told you,” Bernie said.
“Oh,” I said lamely, “it’s fine.” What did I mean? What should I say?
“It’s just that I
know she’s your friend, and I thought maybe somebody should know.”
“Yes,” I said. Still, I had no idea what I should say. “Bernie,” I said, shaking my head, “I hope you don’t think that whatever Dara does, I automatically defend her. I don’t have any idea why she did what she did. But I appreciate your telling me, and I’m really glad that things are working out with you and Tom.” I looked at her, and said something else I had suddenly realized was true. “You know, you’re inherently nice,” I said.
“What does ‘inherently’ mean?” she said.
She looked so young when she asked the question. Her body looked more like an adolescent’s body than a woman’s. When Tom came up behind her, he overwhelmed her. It seemed almost sinister when he clamped a hand on her shoulder. For a dizzying second, I saw Dara, not Bernie—Dara, standing outside with Tom coming up behind her, as she’d described it to me—Dara, about to lie down in the scattered meadow. The image was as vivid as if I’d been there. Dara was as powerful a storyteller as any of my favorite writers. She had superimposed herself on Bernie, on the present, with a greater reality. Except that I was the only one who saw her. Then she wavered and went away, and Bernie stood there again. She was still waiting for an answer to her question.
“ ‘Inherently’ means something that’s intrinsic.”
Bernie’s eyebrows came closer together. She shrugged.
“It means sort of naturally. I meant that you were naturally nice.”
“You two forming a mutual admiration society?” Tom said.
“I wouldn’t mind that,” Bernie said.
The kettle whistled, and I took it off the burner, measuring coffee into the filter, picking up the kettle and slowly pouring.
“I want our baby to go to college,” Bernie said.
“I’d settle for not having to change his diaper until we got to New York,” Tom said.
“I also want him to be president,” Bernie said.
“And no more wake-ups at four a.m.,” Tom said.
“He’s embarrassed to say how many hopes he has for him,” Bernie said.
“Excuse me while I go sit down and die of embarrassment,” Tom said.
“It’s true,” Bernie said, picking up two of the mugs I’d filled with coffee. “He adores his son. It’s why we’re together.”
“He’s certainly beautiful,” I said.
She put the mugs back on the counter. “If you truly think the three of us belong together, make an exception,” she said quietly. “Tell her to stop writing Tom and me. Tell her to clean out that goddamn room. She’s haunting us,” Bernie said. “You said that you were glad that Tom and I could have a chance.”
She left the kitchen. I heard her cooing to the baby, who was still sleeping soundly. For a few seconds, I stared at the empty doorway. Then I put the things on a tray and left the kitchen also.
Dara’s black hat sat on the table. It looked like an unetched tombstone.
Tom held Bernie’s hand. When I came toward them, Bernie looked at me and smiled.
I had begun to spend time with an assistant professor in the psychology department. He, like me, loved Maria Muldaur music, and the two of us once slow-danced around his living room, he in pajama bottoms, me in pajama top, to “Midnight at the Oasis” and to Bob Dylan, singing the dirge-like “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” which Dylan explained, in the song, had been written at the Chelsea Hotel for the Sad Eyed Lady—his then wife, Sarah. The assistant professor’s name was Liam Cagerton, and the rest of his family was in England, where his brother was a composer and his sister a dancer and his father an accountant for a Greek shipping company. His mother sewed hats for the royal family and raised corgis, like the queen. We pretended that I would meet his family, or perhaps he did think that I would meet them, which was about as likely as my accompanying Bob on his European trip, or—years later, when I finally did see London—my really being the fiancée of a man I had met the previous night in a bar.
I met Liam at Rein’s deli, when he sideswiped my table and knocked over the bright green kosher pickles. What was a ploy to say hello became an occasion of misery for the busboy, who slipped in a rivulet of pickle juice as he ran to mop it up. Liam had only meant to jostle the pickle dish, as he later put it. He said that he had not assumed I was a university person (he had hoped I wasn’t), and he was disappointed when I told him that, the minute he began to apologize, I assumed he was a professor. That day, I’d had on Dara’s John Wesley Harding hat that Tom had left behind. I’d called Dara in New York several times after Christmas, thinking it would be easier to tell her what I’d done than to write her a letter, but each time the answering machine at Edward Quill’s had emitted a long beep, signalling that the tape had run out.
Finally, just before Christmas I had gotten a note from her, postmarked Provincetown. She said that she was having a reunion with her sister and her sister’s new husband. She said her Christmas would be magical, walking around the deserted beach and climbing sand dunes, staying in the grand house that her sister had rented for the winter, where there would be a huge Christmas tree with a ton of tinsel and a hundred strings of lights. She would call when she was leaving the Cape, she said, and try to rendezvous with me in Connecticut. The Brown Bomb was still ticking. She ended by using the same line she’d written me once before: “Write me a letter, my dear.” Little did she know how little she would like to hear what I had to say; until I told her about returning the ring, though, I was sure I was going to continue to feel queasy. I’d told Janey, and she had applauded my decision. I had thought about dropping Frank a note and telling him, too—letting him know I’d decided to allow myself to be caught in the middle, after all—but it didn’t seem fair to Dara that everyone should know before she did.
Just before Christmas, I had been invited to dinner at Gail Jason’s. She was having a dozen people, she had told me on the phone; she hoped I’d come if I didn’t have anything else to do. I’d had coffee or dinner at Gail’s apartment several times, and I thought I’d figured something out about her: I thought she kept her own loneliness at bay by becoming a sort of protector of others. I was doing as much for her by going to her home as she was doing for me by issuing an invitation. Gail’s invitation to Christmas surprised me, though. Didn’t she want to be with her family—or at least with close friends? I’d been considering the possibility that at the last minute I’d cave in and go to Frank and Janey’s, because according to her, the children would otherwise die of heartbreak, but I really didn’t want to return to Dell. The last trip had been too emotionally exhausting, too bizarre. So I accepted Gail’s invitation and then, that same afternoon, Liam called to say that his brother in Bath had come down with terrible flu, and all his children were ill, too, so he would not be taking his trip to England after all. He asked whether I’d like to get together on Christmas Day. I told him about Gail’s invitation. He sounded disappointed, and also said that he knew her.
“Why don’t I call and see if we can’t both go there?” I said.
“She’ll try to spook you about what a bad boy I am,” he said.
“I’ll tell her I already know,” I said. He was flirting by reminding me; I was reciprocating by alluding to our previous encounter.
I called Gail and asked if I could bring Liam Cagerton.
“Liam?” she said. “I didn’t know you knew him. He has quite a reputation for loving and leaving, which I guess you know.”
Liam had told me about this—about his peculiarly bad luck, and the mistakes he’d made in getting involved with unstable women.
“It’s fine, if that’s who you want to bring,” she said, when I didn’t respond, proving that I was right: she did really want me to be there. We were to bring two pies and whatever we wanted to drink.
I called Liam. He was obviously relieved to have somewhere to go. It was December 23. He suggested we have dinner in Hartford that night, at an Italian restaurant. After which we returned to his house and made love. After which
we danced in the living room.
In bed, I told him about having returned what Janey had described as the magic ring. It was meant as a good deed, to atone for the mistakes I’d made in the past year—a preemptive strike against having to make remorseful New Year’s resolutions, I supposed. From the ring I backtracked to the cast of characters: Tom and Bernie; Bob and his family; Dara; the people whom I’d lived among in Dell. It was difficult to know where to begin, but he seemed to find everything I said fascinating. “You know so many people,” he said over and over. “No, please go on,” he said, whenever I stopped talking and asked whether he hadn’t heard enough. We were in bed—the first time I had ever been in a king-size bed—drinking brandy. I remembered hoping to find brandy to put in the flask the day, early on, when I’d met Dara at Corolli’s. Then I remembered being inside Corolli’s in the late afternoon, and Bob’s saying to me that we both deserved to be happier. Here’s to you, Bob, I thought; here’s to you.
