by Ann Beattie
“You were selling azaleas near the side of the road,” Liam prompted. “What exactly are azaleas?” Liam had made me back up and explain how I had first met Tom Van Sant. But every time I tried not to digress, he had another question. I described azaleas as best I could, only to realize that when I had finished, he had them confused with rhododendrons. “The leaves aren’t waxy,” I said. “They’re paler green than rhododendron leaves. Some are rather large, but usually when you see an azalea, the leaves are quite small. The flowers can be a lot of colors, but the pink and red ones are the most prevalent. They could also be lavender, or white, or peach colored, and every shade of pink and red, really.”
“How on earth does anyone recognize one?” he wondered aloud. “Most confusing plant I’ve ever heard of.”
I skipped from the day Tom had bought the azaleas to the story Dara had told me about the Instant Meadow. “Doesn’t it all just blow away?” he said. “You can’t mean it really makes a flower meadow.” I had told him the story to see how he would react to Dara and Tom’s impulsiveness. He seemed to take it for granted, wondering only whether scattered seeds wouldn’t blow away before taking root. When I tried to tell him more about Dara and Tom, he interrupted me. He wanted to talk about what he wanted to talk about, and he was enjoying interrupting me. He was pretending to be preoccupied with what he called “the Rousseauish forest” that surrounded us up in New Hampshire. He was teasing, a little bit: “So then, with all these flowers and bushes and trees—I can only imagine the number of trees—people still open nurseries to sell even more trees and bushes to each other?”
“What about English gardens?” I said. “It’s no different from England, is it?”
“I suppose not,” he said. “But now, topiary. Do you have privet sheared to look like jumping rabbits, or deer standing on the front lawn?”
The image made me laugh. “Of course not,” I said.
“Very important to have your bushes do double time as bunny rabbits, or whatever,” he said. “And you absolutely must have a maze, with your birdbath in the center. Very important to make it almost impossible to get to the birdbath unless you fly in.”
“I don’t think Americans are very interested in obstacle courses,” I said.
“But everything you’ve described makes it seem like they are. No one seems to find the right person, or if they do, they muck it up. Everybody running all over the place.”
“No, no,” I said. “What I’ve been trying to explain is that they’re rooted to the spot. Nobody looks far afield—like my mother-in-law, marrying a man she’s known almost all her life, just because he’s there. And my sister-in-law, who’s given up her dream of living in Florida, and who tolerates anything, just to stay married.”
“Well, yes, but it strikes me that your husband was always off in Boston, was it? And then your friend, she sounds downright peripatetic, being in this man Tom’s house and then in her own apartment somewhere else, and then leaving there for some man’s apartment in New York, but then she’s away on the Cape for the holidays. It sounds like quite a bit of coming and going. Like a perpetual holiday.”
“It frightens me that I might be like Bob’s family,” I said. “I thought about that the other day—that I’ve been shut up in my room in Eastford for so long.”
“Yes, well, now you’ve come out to play with me,” Liam said.
“Liam, I’m serious. I was feeling so good about my independence, but since I’ve met you, I realize I’d begun to vanish. I was living like a hermit.”
“Oh, nonsense. You moved, didn’t you? And you tell me you’re going to be visiting your friend in New York, and until just recently you thought you were going to New Hampshire for Christmas, and when I mentioned our going to England together, you seemed quite excited about the possibility. I mean, one has to sit still sometime.”
At first what he said made me feel better, but slowly I began to realize that it bothered me that we all paled in comparison to Dara. She was living her life at least—following her instincts. Putting herself in New York to try to meet theater people, racing to her sister’s side in Provincetown—it seemed impulsive. She hadn’t even mentioned to me that her sister was back on the East Coast. One of the things I liked about her was that her life wasn’t a process of trying to restrain herself. She found a way to do what she wanted to do. She was out there, pursuing….
I drew a blank. Well, an acting career, of course. A relationship. She must want a new relationship, now that things had so clearly concluded with Tom. She was taking acting classes and playing indoor tennis, refusing to stay put in dead-end jobs. She borrowed money if she needed money; she found a way to keep moving—she’d gotten my car, which was not much of a car, but still: it was a car. I admired her. In a minor way, I was imitating her. Seeing her refuse to capitulate to difficult circumstances had inspired me, made me realize that I should go back to school, find out what I loved—to find out whether something couldn’t be my passion, the way acting was hers.
But then I thought of what Frank had said to Bob: that she had proposed grand passion, followed by extinction. And then Bernie’s words came back to me: Bernie, telling me Dara sent them hate mail. Dara kept moving, but she didn’t disengage from the past, or from the people she’d left behind, even when they wanted her to.
I had thought about her often during December. I was preoccupied, though, with the feeling that I was falling in love with Liam, with his gentle kidding, with the good sex, with his devotion to me. What would it be like to tell Dara not only that I had given back the ring, but also that another person had become important in my life? When Janey had asked me if I was afraid of Dara, the question had hit the mark. I wasn’t afraid in the sense that I thought she might strike out, or say terrible things—though there was certainly the possibility that if she was as volatile as people thought, she might. It was more the fear of disappointing someone who was already terribly disappointed. Though I had looked at her as an inspiration, another way of seeing her might be that she was barely holding on: she had no job; she was not getting acting parts; she was living in a borrowed apartment, and when (if?) she left there, where would she go?
She called me in January. She didn’t suggest a rendezvous. She was back at Edward Quill’s, and there was good news: he had found a performance space on lower Broadway. Someone—“a Wall Street type,” Dara said—had agreed to bankroll it. The one-woman show would be performed at the end of a brief rehearsal period, which was why she was going to be unable to pay me a visit. Between seeing Liam and trying to get a jump on the new semester’s reading, I was relieved to hear that the idea had been ruled out. She was so elated when she called that I decided against mentioning having returned the ring to Tom. I doubted that he would be calling her, or that she would be contacting him. Her talk was all about the coming performance, except for the few times that she told me—vaguely, but enthusiastically—about how wonderful it had been to be reunited with her sister for the holidays. “You haven’t been a bookworm, have you?” she said, near the end of the call.
“No,” I said. “Actually, I’ve been dating someone. He’s here now, in fact.”
“What’s his name?” she said.
“Liam Cagerton.”
For a few seconds, she said nothing. Then she said: “Well, darling: Is he wonderful?”
“He is,” I said. “We spent Christmas together.”
“Sounds serious,” she said.
“Might be,” I said.
“Well,” she said. “Leaving your old stomping grounds has worked out for you.”
She didn’t sound happy. She just sounded appraising. I was a little offended by her assumption that I had left my husband, moved, and enrolled in school again only to find a man.
“February twentieth,” she said. “Mark it in your book. But now I’ve got to run, sweetie. Edward is waiting for me downtown.”
“He’s back from London?”
“Yes, yes. Of all ironies, he met the man
who’s bankrolling this over there. They had dinner at Mr. Chow’s, and by the time they finished, it was a done deal.”
“That makes me feel good,” I said. “You know why? Because in New Hampshire too much seems to happen because of claustrophobia. I’m very glad that Edward found someone on another continent who wants to do the play.”
“Thank you, darling,” she said. “Spoken from the heart.”
When we said goodbye, I turned to Liam, stretched out on my bed. “You’re going to get to see her perform,” I said. “The one-woman show’s going to happen.”
“I’d rather see you perform,” he said.
His new mood was raunchy. He thought about sex a lot, and didn’t hide the fact that he did.
“I thought we were going out for pizza,” I said.
“But then the phone rang, and I stretched out on your bed, and when I’m in bed, I get horny.”
“Get up,” I said, taking his hand and trying to pull him up. “Come on—you said we’d get pizza.”
“But then you answered the phone,” he said.
“I hung up,” I said. He was tugging me down. The dog thought we were playing a game and jumped on the bed. The telephone rang again: two short rings, then silence. I couldn’t get to it in time, because Liam was wrestling me onto the bed.
“That’s it,” he said. “Two rings is the signal from God to have sex.”
“It’s Dara calling back,” I said. I felt sure that it was. That she was calling back because my news had surprised her, and because she wanted to ask more questions.
“What kind of a name is Falcon?” he said, pinning my arms to my sides.
“I don’t know,” I said. “And anyway, it’s a stage name.”
“A stage name? I thought those days were over. I thought that nowadays Norma Jean Baker would be Norma Jean Baker.”
“If she calls back, you have to let me get it,” I said, succumbing to a kiss.
“Yes indeed,” he said. “We must most certainly wait here and see if she calls again.”
“Come on,” I said. “Pizza?”
“I’m very worried about her,” he said. “I think we must stay put. Wait for the call.”
“You are? You’re worried about her?”
He drew back. “Why would I be worried about her?” he said.
“Liam—do you think she was calling back because something was wrong?”
“Use your amazing powers to examine my soul,” he said. “What do you intuit?”
“That you want to fuck,” I said. He had broken the spell.
I heard nothing from her for days. Several times I almost brought myself to call, feeling a mounting urge to confess that I had given back the ring, but I always found an excuse not to: my premonition that she would call that night; the necessity to study. Finally, I wrote her a note. In the note, I pretended she would be happy the ring was back with Tom. I didn’t mention his visit with Bernie or the baby. I told her only that he had asked for it, and that I had thought it was the correct thing to do to return it. I apologized for returning the ring without asking her, but pretended that it was no doubt what she would have wanted done. I decided against saying anything else of substance. At first I had thought to put the information about the ring somewhere in the middle, but starting out by telling her how wonderful and interesting and funny Liam was set the wrong tone, and chitchat about the weather seemed pointless. I didn’t want to tell her about what I was reading, because it hurt my feelings that she never responded. I had gotten used to the classroom discussions: I wanted, and expected, people to be serious about what I was serious about. But she never asked questions or commented on what I thought.
Her response came about a week later. It was typed in script on lavender paper that said “Edward Quill Productions” on the top. She, too, avoided bracketing what she had to say. The note read:
My Darling, my darling, I have just learned that my pretty bauble is gone. If I had given you my word, would you have erased it? If my heart, might you have squeezed hard to test its durability until it burst, and would you then have fed it to your dog, your much beloved dog—a treat for sitting up, or rolling over? Oh, but the forces of righteousness are on your side. Surely the ring was only a loan, a token of something vanished. What a silly romantic I am, trusting that trust was the scaffolding of friendship. My dear, the ring was not yours to give away, and with it has gone my trust. Will I recover it? One day, will we again be what we were to one another?
In general, I am finding life tedious and, at times, I begin to hate it—something that never happened to me before. Lengthy, stupid conversations, guests, people asking me for favors…
Dara
I was so upset by the letter that I called Liam and told him I could not spend the weekend with him after all. We had intended to visit Stonington: my first coming out; my first introduction to his friends. I knew he had been looking forward to the trip, but the letter had made me feel so horrible that I knew I couldn’t face anyone. I left a message on his answering machine, saying nothing about receiving the letter, but saying, emphatically, that I could not make the trip, and also that I needed time alone. I thought, nastily, of calling Janey and reading the letter to her, letting her hear the reaction to what she had wanted. I also thought furiously of calling Elizabeth and demanding an answer to my still-unanswered letter. Who did she think she was that she could avoid a discussion? But I did not make either call. It became increasingly clear to me that it was Dara I was angry with—Dara, with her flourishes of recriminations, her display of fragility. In her insular world, people existed only to serve her, whether it be me, or Edward Quill, or all the nicknamed, expendable people—expendable if they thwarted her, or didn’t cave in and do what she wanted: she made them caricatures then, and shrunk them with her scorn. In my mind, I wrote her half a dozen letters that night, all intemperate, all as succinct as hers were flowery. I had been her friend and loyal supporter. When I dared to do the correct thing though, she, thinking first and only of Dara, had tried to make me feel miserable and guilty.
Liam called and urged me to tell him what was wrong. He offered to delay the trip for a day. He begged me to talk to him: Was it something he had done? A problem with Bob? Something at the university? I told him I just didn’t want to talk, and that it was better to hang up, which I did.
My anger was diffuse: even Sparkle became dull: a creature of habit, curled up on the only comfortable bed that had been provided for him. In my new life, I had become a recluse. My liberation was nothing but a new set of patterns that had replaced the old: study; walks; coffee. It was sort of like: get the groceries; babysit for Janey; clean the house. Tom Van Sant: Why couldn’t he have stayed where he was, not tipping the balance of life in Dell so that he ascended on the seesaw while we bumped to the bottom? Why had he given away his mother’s ring if he hadn’t been sure the recipient was the right person? It was a valuable antique, not some varsity jacket. He acted like he was back in high school—which was probably the context in which he still saw everyone: date the prettiest girl; be a nice guy, then do whatever was expedient; get sympathy by invoking your troubled past. And Dara was every girl’s high school nightmare years later: didn’t run with the crowd; dressed with flair; flirtatious; artistic; able to attract any boy she wanted. It was a sign of my own arrested development that I had felt so privileged, so special: that the coolest girl liked me. But my real fear was that in leaving Dell, and in being separate from Dara, something disastrous might happen. More accurately, what I thought was that altering any pattern might make me like an airplane out of control. In a matter of seconds, there might be blackness; then nothing but fire. Or water.
I bottomed out. I sat on my bed and cried. I recast history so that I had always been intimidated: the scared, grateful little orphan in childhood; then, as a young married woman, a servant—what else was really meant by “domestic partner,” as Gail Jason had witheringly asked me the day we had sipped tea and she had talked about her
own divorce—and then, making progress, I crumpled at the first sign that someone did not approve of me, further punishing myself by staying away from the man who did love me.
The next day, a much more temperate note arrived from Dara. They had both been postmarked on the same day, but the accusatory note had arrived first. There was also a postcard from Derek: the famous photo of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blowing up. The postcard had been doctored, though, so that Goofy stood below the billowing fabric, staring up with his big, popped eyes. The message said that he would be happy to simply be my friend. He had moved. He gave me his new phone number. In another envelope was a picture of Janey, pregnant, surrounded by the three children, who all had clothes stuffed under their clothes, imitating Mom. Everybody but Joanna was smiling hugely. I rummaged in my desk drawer and took out scissors. I cut Goofy off Derek’s postcard and dropped him in an envelope. Then I wrote a brief note to Derek and addressed the envelope: “You’re officially out of the picture,” I wrote. “What happened between us meant nothing. Although you might like to think so, we have nothing in common. Find somebody else to get interested in.” Like Dara, I omitted a closing and simply signed my name.
The house was empty. I had retreated so completely that no one called goodbye as they went out the door anymore. For a while, Megan had pushed notes under my door, inviting me to “family spaghetti feasts,” but I never went, no matter how loud the polka music played on the stereo, or how amused everyone seemed with everyone else’s conversation. They weren’t my real family, so they had no way to coerce me. I also didn’t care at all what they thought of me. I knew that keeping my distance was peculiar, but I didn’t care. I was trying it as the flip side of having volunteered to do so many things for Bob’s family. All I felt that day was disappointment in myself for my cavalier treatment of Liam, but that, I hoped, could be remedied with a phone call. Yet I didn’t make the call. I walked the dog quickly, throwing only three sticks, not leaving the vicinity of the house. Anything that I was more or less required to do made me resist. Inside again, with the dog visibly disappointed, I tore up Derek’s postcard. I also tore up Dara’s second note, but as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t bring myself to destroy the first. I sat in the living room, which in itself was an adventure, because it was something I hardly ever did, and began to read Mrs. Dalloway.
