by Ann Beattie
I couldn’t tell her. All the time she had been rattling on, I had thought of various ways to bring it up. It was not going to be possible.
“I don’t think you and he are a good team,” I finally said.
“I assure you: I completely understand that.”
Was it so disastrous that she had to break up a business relationship, when I had had the courage to leave my husband? When the first man I cared about since leaving Bob had summarily dismissed me?
“The icing on the cake was that he threw me out,” she said. “I had to go to Bayonne that night and get my car. I couldn’t face that garret in Portsmouth. I’ve made it to the bosom of my family, at least, here in Alaska.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Provincetown,” she said. “I’m with my sister and her family in frozen Provincetown.”
I almost blurted out the bad news. I almost said the three words, but I just couldn’t do it.
“I want you to know something, in case anything happens to me,” she said. “I want you to trust me about this: Edward is a violent and dangerous man. Anything he might—.” She broke off. “It’s times like this when you can really, truly, hate men, isn’t it?” she said. “Sweetie: I’ll write you.”
I sighed, but said nothing. I had become fatigued by everyone’s demonizing everyone else. It was like the flu: everyone who lived, or had ever lived, in Dell eventually caught it. And furthermore, what did she intend to write me? Were there more letters from Chekhov that would seem appropriate? I bit my tongue. I remembered her so clearly, holding the cake box she had joked was a birdcage, standing in Tom Van Sant’s kitchen. How interesting that she had been thinking in terms of traps, when she had returned to Dell to entrap us all. I had needed a friend so much—any friend, apparently—that I had ignored the mounting evidence that I was just a convenience for Dara. I also had reason to feel guilty, though: I had taken the easy way out and put another person on a pedestal instead of doing the hard work of putting my own life in order. One thing we had in common was that we had been complicitous.
“Dara—I’m sorry,” I said. Meaning: about everything. I was sorry she wasn’t famous. I was sorry Frank was dead. I was sorry for Janey. For everyone, myself included.
“I know you are,” she said quietly. “But we have to go on, don’t we? You’re my shining example of that.”
And do you know—my heart softened. Something loosened inside my chest like an internal sigh. I was flooded with the realization that everything was complicated, and that within that complication, she and I might still find a new footing for friendship. Chekhov himself had remarked on finding life tedious. If it was, even for someone as talented, as brilliant, as Chekhov, then surely I needed to cut myself some slack about having romanticized someone who was ordinary into someone who was extraordinary.
Her goodbye was so quiet, I didn’t even have to respond.
I called Janey. Sandra answered the phone. “How are you, dear?” she said to me. She had called me dear every time I’d called since Frank’s death. I was surprised she was still at Janey’s, because Janey’s brother had flown in from California, and he would be staying indefinitely to help her.
“The question is, how’s Janey? How are the kids?”
“Well,” Sandra said, “her brother is very—I don’t know what you’d say. He’s very hearty. He had Max out tossing the football in the backyard. Pete hangs around Janey like a two-year-old. He’s started to suck his thumb again.”
“How’s Janey holding up?”
“You know Janey: she’s trying to do the best she can so everybody else will keep it together. She put on her coat and went out and sat on the swing set, trying to look interested while the football tossing went on. It’s worrying me that she doesn’t eat.”
“She has to eat,” I said.
“Well, yes. Of course.” There was a pause. “Maybe now that we’ve shooed Barbara and Dowell out, she’ll feel a little more comfortable with…with, you know, just the younger members of the family around.”
“Can she come to the phone?”
“She went into the bathroom to shower just before you called,” Sandra said. “I hear the water running.”
“Oh,” I said, disappointed.
“Jean, Marie wants to say one brief thing to you,” Sandra said.
Marie’s voice: “Aunt Jean?”
“Hello, Marie,” I said.
“Have you ever heard of the fashion designer Halston?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” she said, “because I’m writing a paragraph about him for school. Halston always has all his friends that he dresses and goes to the disco with to his New York apartment for Thanksgiving, and he does the cooking himself. His real name is Roy Frowlick, and before he was a famous designer, he made hats.”
“Put Sandra back on, Marie. You can tell me about Halston another time.”
“Marie, let me have the phone now,” Sandra said. There was a rustling sound. Sandra came back on.
“Bob’s come for dinner,” Sandra said. “I don’t suppose you’d like to say hello?”
“No,” I said. “No, I’ll call another time.”
When I hung up, I got my telephone book and looked for Elizabeth’s number in Montana. I wanted to be angry at someone. I was irrationally angry at Sandra for moving in with Janey the way she had; I was angry that unless I called Janey’s house, no one called to let me know how things were. If Bob could go to dinner there, why couldn’t he call me? He knew how much I cared about Janey. He must have known that I’d like to know what was going on. Probably, like Elizabeth, he was ignoring me out of cowardice. Elizabeth also was trusting that I wouldn’t call and press the point. So what if she had done many things for me when I was a child? She had also stolen from me. She had taken what by rights should be mine. I searched for her number with shaking hands.
Her husband answered the phone and was very matter-of-fact about what he told me when I asked to speak to her. He was neither pleasant nor unkind. He said that Elizabeth had been gone for many months. She had gone to get groceries and simply vanished. Her car was found at the airport with a grocery bag in the backseat. It was from a store where she never shopped. The police had tried to find her. He had no money to conduct a search of his own. He told me that to keep his sanity, he had stopped guessing about what might have happened to her. Before we hung up, he wished me “a very happy New Year.”
There it was: the woman who had raised me, lost in space. Perhaps gone wherever my parents had gone. When the shock registered, I began to wonder whether I might be the next to mysteriously disappear. The fear of abandonment was obvious. Less obvious was the fragile foothold I suddenly thought I had on planet Earth. My long period of anxious, silent counting—touching inanimate objects over and over; putting the dog on a leash and fearing constantly that he would be run over anyway; awakening repeatedly at night when I did fall asleep, because I’d heard brakes squealing, seen the dog tumbling—those things began soon after my phone call to Elizabeth’s husband, but gained on me slowly, exhausting me, making me question my sanity, while another shock broadsided me, proving that bad things always come in threes. For a while, after the phone call to Elizabeth’s husband, whose name I couldn’t even remember, I lay on the bed, looking at the ceiling. Then I turned on my side and looked across the room, to the empty fireplace. I stayed that way for some time. Then in an attempt to shake myself out of my sorrow, I called Liam and asked if I could see him. Exactly how much I was kissing the hand that slapped me, I had no way of knowing. I heard music in the background, but no voices. He asked what was the matter, as if seeing me was conditional on his judging my crisis worthy. I considered blurting out the news about Frank, but while I knew he would express sorrow, he hadn’t known Frank. Frank would be just another sad story to Liam. And it wasn’t because of Frank’s death that I was calling. It wasn’t even to report on my surprising call to Elizabeth’s husband—though Liam had urged me many times to call if Elizabeth refused to
respond to my letters. So why was I calling him? I must have sensed that there was more bad news to come and wanted it all, in a landslide. Instead of hanging up, as I should have, when I realized he wasn’t particularly happy to hear from me, I simply stayed quiet, waiting for him to say something. “Please leave the dog at home,” he said. “I’ve gotten myself a puppy, and I think it would cause too much commotion.”
A dog? He had gotten a dog?
Obediently, I left Sparkle behind, pushing him back from the door gently with my knee. So many comings and goings, as Liam had once said, kidding me fondly. On the drive to his house, I felt, in some odd way, that Liam would always be on top of things because he arranged for replacements for losses, while I muddled through, accepting a dog I had co-opted as a sort of replacement for both husband and lover. And look at who I accepted as friends: Gail, holding on to a semblance of the life she wanted, surrounding herself with admirers, entertaining to distract herself; Megan—well: even in my sourest mood, I could not really criticize myself by pretending that I had cultivated Megan as a friend.
Liam was in jeans, bare chested, with a green satin robe I had never seen before tied at his waist. His hair was rumpled, as if he’d already gone to bed. The Irish setter puppy was adorable, small and clumsy, awakened from sleep by the sudden nighttime activity. Liam had turned the music off. The light was on only in the living room. He let me know by his remoteness that I was intruding, but still he would surely be shocked when I told him the news. But talking about Frank’s death would be too much for me; I realized that I didn’t want to say anything about that. It would be too difficult to give him a sense of who Frank was. Had been. I was even wondering myself who Frank had been. And if I was wondering, what thoughts must have been going through Janey’s mind? She had not even known he wasn’t in bed the night of the accident. When she had gone to bed, Frank had been beside her. What had made him get up in the middle of the night? Insomnia? The desire for a drink?
Liam listened to my story about the phone call to Montana. I had gotten up my courage to do something, and I had been so unprepared for the result. Of course, Elizabeth’s disappearance was not something I could have anticipated. Yet the idea of existing without what little was left of my own family so soon after having severed myself from Bob and his family…it was all so abrupt. So painful, and perplexing. Liam had said—implied—that I was a competent person. Did he still feel that way? I could not have been more obvious about asking for reassurance. I didn’t notice that he did not offer me anything to drink. I assumed—if I assumed anything—that the magnitude of what I had to say was probably perplexing him, making him think—wasn’t it possible?—about his own position, exiled from his family in England. Was I talking to him because we were similar, or dissimilar? Or was I talking to him just because we had once been close, and I was grasping at straws? I told him a disjointed version of what Elizabeth’s husband had said to me, my story full of digressions and self-doubt. “When we hung up, he said to me, ‘Have a very happy New Year,’ ” I said. “Do you think he was being sarcastic?”
“I don’t think so. Probably trying to be unemotional. Trying to go on with his life.”
I wished the puppy was in my lap, not Liam’s. I wished the puppy could be on the floor, and I could be in Liam’s arms. But the puppy stayed, and I sat where I had first seated myself when I came into the room: in a chair I’d always avoided because I’d never found it comfortable.
“I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “She might be fine, of course. People disappear every day. There’s still a chance you’ll hear from her eventually. Since she was a gambler, this might just be another form of gambling. Gambling on a new life, I mean.”
“But that doesn’t excuse—”
“Oh, Jean, you’re not a judge. You might not know what her life was like. You might agree with the decision she’d made if you did.”
“You sound like you know all about it.”
“I know exactly nothing. I realize that this was a big shock. But we don’t know all the facts, either of us.”
“That’s just an easy way to dismiss the subject.”
“I’m afraid any words I say would be inadequate. I can see that this would be shocking to you.”
“Liam—what’s made you so cold toward me? You were angry at me before we ever set out for New York to see Dara. What is this all about?”
He looked at me, his thumbs tucked under the sash of his robe. “Well, since it is inevitable that you mention her, maybe this would be an opportune time to tell you something I do know something about,” he said. “I met her before we went to New York. She came here. I talked to her. But before you jump to conclusions, it’s not what you think.”
“You met her before that night? You’re serious?”
“She arrived in the much-discussed Brown Bomb,” he said. He raised his hands and imitated the motion of a driver holding a wheel. “She even borrowed fifty dollars,” he said. “I admit she tried to seduce me, but she settled for disturbing me. What started as a sort of game between us escalated to something quite contentious and upsetting. I can see that people would be taken in by her. But I’m afraid this is a case of unpleasant, but not expected, on my part, pathology: in the guise of caring deeply about you, she actually cares most deeply about gaining ground by disparaging you. She feels a great sense of entitlement, and she’s quite jealous of what you have.”
“When did all this happen?” I asked hollowly.
“I’ll tell you the whole story if you promise me you’ll do something more with the information than have a tantrum or be perverse and keep on just as you’ve kept on, forgiving her at every turn.”
I couldn’t say anything. I wanted to hear, but I couldn’t speak. I knew—deep down, I knew—that whatever Liam had to say would be horrible. After a few seconds of silence, he began to speak, without any promises on my part: “Well, she rang me up, ostensibly quite worried about you, thinking you might go back to your husband.”
I could hear it. I could hear the breathless voice; the tone of harried self-importance.
“I met her for a drink at the tavern in Ashford. How exactly that resulted in her going home with me, I’m still not sure, but at first I listened with interest because she was so keyed up. I thought perhaps you hadn’t wanted to tell me, of all people, about your quandary, if you were torn between me and your husband. And in all the pregnant pauses—because I was listening, not talking—between her telling me what she’d come to tell me and our leaving the bar, we did get slightly tipsy, and that was when she suggested, rather obliquely, that you and she were lovers, of a sort. She explained that since taking up with me, you had given away her token of love and that furthermore you had decided to stonewall, pretending you had done the morally correct thing. What she told me was that although the love between the two of you was platonic, that only made it stronger; nothing, ultimately, could come between you. If you think this is easy to tell you, it isn’t.”
I listened, believing it at the same time it seemed incredible—which was so often my attitude: the only attitude anyone could have toward Dara, I was coming to think. He said that by the next morning, he began to sense her hidden agenda. While she said how much she cared for me, she was too heavy-handed in cueing him that I might not be everything he hoped. Increasingly, it seemed she wanted me to get back the diamond-and-ruby ring that had, as Liam put it, “such a history.” He saw clearly that it was not the token she described. She seemed frankly materialistic, wanting to know whether he was renting his house or if he’d bought it, what salary he was paid at the university. In the light of day, he just didn’t like her. He suspected her motives, and worried that she would not stop with him in her campaign to disparage me, but he was too embarrassed about what he’d done to come clean. It had been easier when he’d had it confirmed in New York that she wasn’t a great actress. Until he saw her there, he had tried to convince himself that she might be mad, but brilliant. “She’s got nothing left for th
e stage, if she ever had it,” he said. “The truly great acting goes on every day, and she calls it a life. How can there be much of anything left over?”
“Why didn’t you tell me at the time?”
“Because I had the distinct sense she was about to fall on her face, and I guess I thought you might hear it better if what I said followed your observing that. I wasn’t sure she’d fall on her face onstage, so to speak, but however she did it, I sensed she was about to self-destruct.”
“Are you lying about not sleeping with her, Liam? What did you two do?”
“Well, we started talking, and she somehow worked the conversation around to her wanting to perform for me. She was flirting, I admit, but since I wasn’t interested, I thought I’d just let things play themselves out. She wanted to say some lines for me—performing for Daddy, no doubt. And appropriately enough, they were lines from A Doll’s House, not from that travesty that we both know is absolute hog-wash. Anyway: it was bitter cold, and we had a brandy back at my house, and when she did her little performance, she fixed her eyes on me and gave me what-for, as if I really was that egotistical man Nora was married to, and she his newly assertive wife. And I thought: Maybe she truly hates all men; maybe she is gay, and she’s projecting onto Jean. Still, I wasn’t completely and entirely sure: I thought there might be something between you; that it might even be sexual.”
“You’ve changed your mind?” I managed.
“Yes. Certainly. The next morning everything was crystal clear. That night she was extremely interesting, if nothing else, and I realized almost immediately that what she intended was to get me to her level of excitement. I expect she thought sex might follow. I’m not saying she wasn’t on the make. But she was clearly willing to settle for exciting me in any way she could. So she did her scene, and really—the drink did not explain why she simply could not act very well. She was passionate but awful: it was all about her, trying to stare through my eyes clear to the back of my head. And then something impish took over in me, because what she’d done from start to finish was embarrass herself, which she didn’t know she had. I said: ‘I should have this on tape. Let me get this on tape,’ and she was flattered. She wanted to do it again and have it taped.”
