My Life, Starring Dara Falcon

by Ann Beattie

  I got up and took the note out of my coat pocket. “Here,” I said to Gail. “Read this. Tell me if she’s right.” I looked down at the floor. “I guess I already know that she was right,” I said.

  “What is it?” Joyce said.

  Gail took the note out of the envelope. She began to read, frowned, then frowned deeply. She reached for her glass and drank the last of the wine. Then she did the last thing I would have expected. She burst into laughter. She held the letter in her left hand and slapped her hand over her heart. “Oh, Jesus!” she gasped. “I don’t totally get the joke, but is this what you’ve been worrying about? This is a put-on.”

  “It’s not a joke,” I said angrily. “She’s taking me to task. Worse than you did.”

  “Jean—do you know what this is?” She held the note out to me. “This is Chekhov, writing to some friend of his.”

  “What?”

  “Is this woman so histrionic that you took these for her words? I suppose that says something in itself.”

  She got up and went to the bookcase. She found the book she was looking for. She began to flip through it. Joyce poured more wine in everybody’s glass, and I sipped mine quickly, utterly confused. Gail did not touch her glass until she found the page she was looking for, put the book in my hand, then pounced on her wineglass triumphantly. I read

  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, handouts of a ruble or two rubles, or three, having to pay cabbies for patients who don’t give me a cent—in a word, everything is so balled up that one might as well run out of the house. People borrow money from me and don’t pay it back, walk off with my books and don’t consider my time of any value. The only thing lacking is an unrequited love.

  I was completely speechless. It might have been odd—it might even have been some in-joke I couldn’t possibly have knowledge of—except that the last line rang so true that I finally understood what had been the issue all along. I was the unrequited love. She might even interpret that love as being far from sexual, but still: her bitterness was because I was not what she wanted me to be. I had loaned the money. I had lent the books. I was more in the position of the letter writer, more in Chekhov’s position, than Dara—except that she was the only one who bore a grudge. She was also the only one who thought in terms of unrequited love.

  It was ironic, of course. I couldn’t have invented a stranger context in which to have come to the realization: the minute Gail handed the letter and book to Joyce, holding out her offering with one hand and clasping Joyce’s free hand in her other hand, I realized they were lovers.

  “I don’t understand what’s so terrible,” Joyce said. “If painters steal from one another, it’s called appropriation.”

  “Joyce, look at the whole picture: the histrionics; the grandiosity of choosing a famous person’s voice instead of her own; the unkindness of playing a sort of in-joke on a person who was obviously already in a state of conflict. I don’t like her, sight unseen.”

  Joyce eventually became quiet, deferring to Gail. She also let Gail have the last of the wine, and the last word: “Keep your distance,” Gail said to me. “Not from us—from you know who.”

  Liam and I made up. In Liam’s house, I baked pork chops while he was teaching his night class. I had all but moved in, taking Sparkle with me. My housemates had been very generous in agreeing to let the dog go, but I suspected that some of their reaction had to do with their relief in getting me out of the house; I hadn’t really understood how much they had worried about me, always shut up in the room. When we finally did have a long talk, the more I tried to reassure them I was fine, the more doubtful they had seemed. But the truth was, for a long while I hadn’t been able to socialize with anyone: a combination of guilt, fear about whether I’d made the right decision, or perhaps even simple relief had nevertheless depleted all my reserves. I was spooky to them, the ghost of the house, who could be easily appeased by letting it drift off with the already vanished dog—Sparkle had been my unfailing companion since the first day I laid his pallet and began to feed him the same turkey potpies I ate for dinner.

  As Liam and I ate dinner at the big rectory table that had been shipped over from his father’s house in England, I decided it was time to tell him about Dara’s letters. He was tired from having taught his class, and tired, too, from having fought his way home in the snow. He wasn’t completely concentrating, which, surprisingly, didn’t bother me: I both wanted to tell him, and I also wanted him not to question me, because I didn’t have any good answers about why Dara had done what she’d done. Dara, also, was not Liam’s favorite subject. He had told me more than once that I thought about her too much. In a way, I think he thought she was my scapegoat, the way I thought—still did think—she was everyone else’s. In his mind, she tied me to Dell—and therefore to my unhappiness. No matter that she was gone from Dell herself; to Liam—and possibly to me—she typified much of what was wrong with a dull small town. In stirring things up, she had called our attention to the fact that there was little to stir. Everyone who knew her had ended up realizing more intensely what his or her boundaries were. Everyone who knew her had ended up, for one reason or another, more disappointed.

  “ ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre…’ ” Liam intoned portentously, when I mentioned Dara’s name.

  “Stop trying to sidetrack me before I’ve begun,” I said. “This is not about William Butler Yeats. It is about a friend of mine.”

  “Yes,” he said. “She wrote you letters, one of which—the more pleasant—you ripped up. Go on.”

  “Liam—do you think I’m the sort of person who puts out signals that she’s, I don’t know, naive? Easily co-opted?”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t make you do anything. You’re hardly easily co-opted.”

  “But I didn’t know that Gail was gay.”

  “Who goes about wondering all the time? Something of a surprise to find out, but ultimately, so what?”

  “Liam—it worries me that I don’t see things as they really are.”

  “Much debate about that ‘actually are.’ Not a concept anyone buys anymore.”

  “You’re just defending me because you like me.”

  “First you were worried about being a hermit. Now you think you’re a functional idiot. I think you have many peculiarities, your willingness to see yourself as a naïf every time anything unexpected happens among them.” He put his cutlery down. “Let’s say you’re a naive person. What things might you do to function better? We all try to grow and change. You’re studying literature. That can’t hurt. You’ve left the shelter of your former life. That’s a big move. Why should you expect instant improvement?”

  “Then you do think it,” I said.

  “In fact, I don’t. I fail to understand your relationship with the self-named bird of prey, but I do acknowledge that this is a relationship you’re struggling with. I personally wish that she would just leave you alone, but that’s neither here nor there, because you, yourself, do not wish it. And tomorrow we will be driving to New York so that I can see this strange creature. Almost worth it, snow and all.” He cut into his pork chop. “You do cook wonderfully well,” he said.

  “You don’t have to listen to the story,” I said.

  “I will listen to the story. Continue.”

  “Well—she wrote me two letters after I wrote to tell her I’d given the ring back. And one of them, maybe both of them, for all I know, were lifted from Chekhov. Gail knew it the minute she read the letter.”

  “How would anyone know that who hadn’t studied Chekhov?” he said. “Is that the problem?”

  “Aren’t you even surprised that she’d do something like that?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Was it apt?”

  “Was it apt? Was it apt? Are you trying to out-English yourself, Liam?”

  “I have grea
t patience,” he said. “I feel sure that, in time, you will stop ascribing every speech pattern that is not your own to the fact that I am English, which you equate with being humorous.”

  “Liam. Answer me.”

  “Answer me,” he said. “What did she pilfer from Chekhov? I don’t see it as the end of the world, if that’s what you’re getting at. If she had put quotation marks around it, would you be so upset?”

  “But she didn’t. She pretended they were her thoughts.”

  “Being…?”

  “That, well, in one letter she said, ‘My correspondence with you flatters me.’ ”

  “Most apt,” he said. “She seems to do nothing that doesn’t flatter her. Buying hats and scarves all the time, according to you. Always dressed up for a different party. Going after everybody’s husbands, or leading on homosexuals who she thinks can make her famous.”

  He was confusing me. He was trying to defuse the power of Dara, as he always did, but he seemed sincere in not thinking her letter was as weird as Gail had. Maybe I had overreacted. Maybe the letter was not so insidious; maybe Gail had really just wanted to gloat about her knowledge and sophistication.

  “But at the end of the letter there’s a line she didn’t include, and the minute Gail gave it to me to read, I knew why she had left it out. Can I get the letter?”

  He shrugged. “You are obviously intent upon convincing me,” he said. “What does it matter what I think, if you’re so convinced?”

  I went into the bedroom and dug around in my bag. I found the letter and went back to the table. I handed it to him. He read it.

  “Whether it’s Chekhov or not, it’s a letter from an actress, capital A,” he said.

  “But at the close of Chekhov’s letter, there’s a sentence that sent chills up my spine. Liam, you know about my lending her that money? And the books? That’s all there, in Chekhov’s letter—he’s complaining the way I might have reason to complain. It’s almost as if she got inside my head and then sent the letter to make a preemptive strike. But the last sentence is—” I flipped the letter over. On the back, I had copied down Chekhov’s words from Gail’s book. “His last sentence is: ‘The only thing lacking is an unrequited love.’ ”

  “What of it?” he said.

  “If you read the letter the way I just said—if you read it as her cueing me about what I should complain about…”

  He continued to eat. I watched him delicately lift applesauce to his lips. “What are you asking me? Whether she’s trying to plant the idea in your mind that you’re in love with her? Really, it’s too absurd. You’re overthinking this.”

  “You think I’m crazy,” I said.

  “I think that the woman baffles you, and probably she would baffle anyone. But how you make the leap to thinking that some hitherto unspoken love is the issue between you, I don’t quite understand.”

  “Because she selected that particular letter. And she’s always been so seductive. Part of the thrill has always been to be observed. She dresses to attract attention. She told me things about Tom and her that I wouldn’t have known. She said that Bob tried to kiss her, which I now think was a lie. Liam—I think all along it’s been a seduction.”

  “Well, it certainly seems to have worked. Every time she drops you a note, she has your undivided attention. I really do think that whatever’s going on, you could use a cooling-off period. Both of you.” He looked at me. “She’s quite indiscreet, at the very least,” he said.

  “But I think if you knew Dara—”

  “She sounds like my idea of hell. It makes you wonder why anyone would befriend a person when they could befriend a dog.”

  “Tomorrow night, I don’t want you to say anything that would embarrass me. Will you promise not to do that?”

  “When have I ever embarrassed you?”

  “You haven’t,” I said, halfheartedly.

  “Why we have to go to New York to see this woman perform is beyond me. Why we couldn’t at least wait for the roads to clear…”

  “Because I have this odd premonition that there might not be a second performance.”

  “What a tragedy that would be, I’m sure.”

  “I’ll go alone if you don’t want to go,” I said.

  “Don’t be silly. If you’re going, I’m going. I’ve got to meet this seductress.” He smiled tiredly. “This does occupy much of our conversation. We’ve had very little time together lately. Couldn’t we talk about something else?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It bothers me when you jump to conclusions and think I find you crazy. I happen to have been involved with one or two women who were really quite crazy, and it bothers me when people use the term loosely. Please give me credit for realizing that you’ve been going through a difficult period. I care for you. I don’t rush to pass judgment on your every action.”

  “You were angry that I didn’t come to Stonington,” I said.

  “We’ll stop and see my friends another time.”

  “We could see them on the way back from New York.”

  “I just saw them.”

  “You could see them again.”

  “Jean—you have nothing to atone for. You were upset, and you didn’t want to socialize. That’s fine. I accept that, and you should, too.”

  “You’re still angry.”

  “This is most certainly the way to fan the flames, if that’s what you intend. I would suggest that we watch a movie on the television, or that we draw a bath and sink into some bubbles. Would you like that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re not that easy to seduce,” he said. “Don’t worry about yourself.”

  I picked up our plates and took them to the kitchen. He walked behind me, stopping first to put music on the stereo. In the kitchen, he ignored me as he rinsed our glasses in hot water and put them upside down in the dish drainer to dry. I decided that I was a monster. He was a very nice man who had agreed to go to New York with me, and I was sulking over something that no longer seemed as apparent as it once had. I was withdrawing from him because of my insecurity, pure and simple: I couldn’t shake his equilibrium, and that shook mine. Ever since Dara berated me for returning the ring, I had alternated between anger at her and anger at myself. I probably wanted Liam to decide for me: bad Dara, or bad Jean.

  I drew a bath and went to get him in the kitchen when it was half filled. He was still washing dishes in the small trickle of water that came out of the tap.

  “You’re perfectly fine, except for the times when you’re upset by this so-called friend of yours. It’s like Superman getting hit with Kryptonite,” he said.

  “I’m not Superman,” I said, squeezing between him and the sink, leaning into his chest. “I’m Lois Lane, and I just don’t get it. Something is right in front of me, and I just don’t get it.”

  “I’m right in front of you,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt. “You get me.”

  Later that night, wearing Liam’s pajamas and watching an old movie on TV, doubt began to creep in again about Dara. Maybe all the times she’d called me darling and sweetie she hadn’t been speaking loosely, or histrionically, which was a quality both Liam and Gail had noticed. But that made no sense, really; she’d never put a hand on me, never suggested in anything she said or did that she was desirous of anything more than she was already getting. Maybe she didn’t realize it herself, I thought; maybe she would have been as surprised to articulate her desire to herself as I was when I felt I was the recipient of that desire. I shrugged lower in the bed, throwing my arm over Liam, as if to weigh him down. I felt better when he was near me; it was almost as if—even though she was miles away—I did fear her on some level. It was her caginess that troubled me: her poker face; her perfect timing. Like any good gambler, she was good at playing her cards close to her chest. It was my sense that however much she said, she was still always withholding something that bothered me most—not the idea that in much she’d said and done she had been o
bliquely making a proposition. I didn’t think she liked it that I had gone away. Of course, people were always sad when their friends left, yet even if I had stayed, she would still be in New York, while I was in Dell. She would have gone, just as I had. Or would she? Was it possible that if I had stayed, she would have? They were unanswerable questions, but because it was late at night, I fixated on them, wondering and wondering about the answers, which receded farther and farther each time I tried to arrive at some conclusion. I rubbed my hands on Liam’s chest, as if I were trying to pin down the truth. That he took it as an invitation for lovemaking was only logical, yet I was amused that something I’d been doing with my mind elsewhere had provoked his lust. We were so much in our own worlds. Perhaps Dara was only in her own world, too. Perhaps everything meant much less than it seemed—which was either a relief or, sadly, something that presented its own set of problems. In my literature classes, I was being trained to look for connections. Searching for subtleties was sometimes exhausting; it was tempting to throw up my hands (now linked with Liam’s) and say that things meant less, rather than more, than they seemed. If I was really going to become a different person, though, I felt sure that it would help me to be able to decipher Dara. It was just that I couldn’t turn to anyone for help; people were biased against her, or knew her only in passing, or they’d quickly made up their mind when they’d seen she was a person who stole words from someone else. I still thought that I was the person who might be capable of seeing her most objectively, yet the more I knew, the more confused I felt. I could understand that my vanity had been flattered because someone so mercurial had chosen me to be her friend. I could even understand that I had been easy prey (okay, Liam) because I had been in an unhappy marriage, lonely, looking for a way to escape. She was outgoing—intoxicated with her high regard for herself, really—while I was introverted. She was always steps ahead of me, though it was also slightly interesting that often we had found ourselves on the same path. I had done as much to establish the relationship as she had: I had been available; I had taken pride in being useful; I had been needy, too. But now I no longer felt I needed what she had to offer. Liam had changed that, with his obvious devotion to me. Being involved at the university had given me confidence. Escaping Bob, and his unarticulated despair, had freed me to have my own thoughts and perceptions. I even felt a little sorry for Dara, because her power was dwindling, through no fault of her own. No one could be larger than life unless you let them occupy that position, and Dara—whatever and whoever she was—had been cut down to size as soon as I began to assert myself. That was the way I congratulated myself the night before we went to New York, silently, proudly. I had seen, when she visited, that I could have power over her, too. I was eager for her to see me with my lover. I wanted her to see I had something she did not. It was not a kind impulse, but I did not want my own version of success to be lost on Dara.