My Life, Starring Dara Falcon

by Ann Beattie

  Dara might have wanted to give the impression that she knew someone by her ability to define them in one sentence, but she was actually only doing what was expedient for her; she wasn’t really trumpeting the arrival of the other person. I caught on to that pretty quickly, but what did it matter if she defined me as the person who had gone to England with a man the day after meeting him? That was true enough. Who doesn’t understand that lives are lived in off moments, in out-takes, and in snapshots, as well as in public appearances? I look back now and see, more than I did then, that certain people in my life—Dara, among others—gave me the message that men (or relationships in general) were not to be taken overly seriously. Easier in theory than in fact, but still: something to temper ridiculous passions. From my friends at the time, I got positive reinforcement for what they saw as my justifiable skepticism toward men. Joyce, and particularly Gail, were well on their way to becoming strident feminists, and I got the benefit of their perspective. Janey, who moved to Albuquerque with the children after Frank’s death and became increasingly spiritual—at least, that was how she presented herself in her letters; after the funeral, I never saw her again—used to write me that she had come to admire my lack of connectedness to worldly things, a category in which she included people. At the time I was doing it, it didn’t occur to me that pulling the wool over the eyes of some Brit’s aunt in order for him to get money from her for a nonexistent wedding might have been my version of retaliation against Liam, for what he’d done years before. But for whatever reason I’d done it, I did like the outcome. I liked my ten percent of the cash, and I liked the grudging respect it got me from the regulars at Cafe Central.

  Years after leaving Bob, I met a man in New York. He was a hotel manager, and I met him when I went to a conference about near-death experiences. I went with a woman I did volunteer work with, who had almost died when an elevator she was in plunged five floors and killed the other occupants. I strung along just to have something to do that night and heard people recount stories about seeing lights at the end of tunnels as doctors did CPR; women who had been lifted from their wrecked automobiles by some enormous being with a kindly face, whose arms safely enveloped them. I hoped that had happened to Frank, because I believed them. At least, I believed that they believed what they said. The closest I could come was to remember what it had felt like to learn that my parents had both died in a plane crash, but that was my experience, not theirs, and frankly, what I remembered was my aunt Elizabeth sitting on the sofa, the big picture window behind her totally dark, weeping. Looking at her head and seeing dandruff. Thinking: Something terrible has happened, and she is crying, with dirty hair. I must have been in shock, and that shock must have lasted for a very long time. When I think about it, my life has been bracketed by that shock, and by the shock I felt when I first learned about Frank’s death. Frank’s death closed the parenthesis.

  I met the man who was to become my husband as I stepped off an elevator. He was behind the front desk, and he looked at me as though he recognized me. It wasn’t the perfunctory look he’d give hotel guests—Well attired? Yes, they belong here—it was the happily surprised look of an old friend, yet it was also the look of a person who wanted a relationship closer than friendship. How interesting that just when I’d realized that two terrible deaths had bracketed my life, the person who was going to be my way out locked his eyes with mine and stopped me before I left the hotel. My own version of the enormous being with a kindly face, no doubt. My big chance, and I wasn’t going to blow it. I still think of him as my big chance. He’s my chance to live a moderately eventful, often pleasurable life. My chance for a new start—because, to this day, every moment lived on the lam from Dell and its inhabitants seems a potential new start. I look at my husband’s brother, suffering because of his wife’s infidelity, embarrassed because he was duped, cynical because his wife committed adultery with their minister, of all people, and I think: Be glad you have a chance to float free. Be glad to be cut loose, whether you cut the string, or someone cut it for you. Although I suppose you could argue that I might not be empathic enough, having resolved never to be close to the brother of a husband again.

  I lived with my husband-to-be, John, for a year before marrying him, during which time he was rotated to a new hotel in San Francisco. Then we returned to his home state, Connecticut—full circle; appropriate enough?—where he was given a job managing the golf resort he still runs today. The hotel has a reciprocal agreement with many other hotels, and we travel often. For a while after college, before going to New York, I taught at a community college, but the money was bad, and most of the students were trying to learn a trade and only suffering through my course because they were required to take it. A year was enough of going through the motions—especially when all around me I saw the most innovative teachers being asked to conform, and the brightest lecturers eventually deciding to keep quiet and take better-paying jobs in corporations. The year I graduated, Gail Jason took a job with Exxon. I don’t suspect she had many occasions on the job to bring up her favorite Virginia Woolf novels. Back in England, Liam became a contributing editor to the English edition of Esquire, specializing in long, gory true-crime pieces. He sent me tear sheets of several of them, without comment, but when I didn’t respond, they eventually stopped coming, though I have no doubt he continued to chronicle people who tortured and murdered one another. My husband says that when he first looked up and saw me, he was immediately attracted to me, but at the same time, because he knew that much of the crowd in the hotel was there for the “Near Death Experiences” seminar, he hoped that I wasn’t among them; that I was—this is as much a favorite word of his as “dreamy” was Dara’s—“normal.” It wasn’t that he disbelieved near-death experiences; it was just that he thought that anyone who had gone through such a thing must be hugely changed, and he is convinced that once subjected to such a trauma, a person will spend his or her whole life trying to regain equilibrium. He sympathizes in the abstract with people who have suffered something terrible and are trying to put their lives back together, but he doesn’t want to be around those people. His brother, yes—of course he will extend himself to his brother. But he does not wish to know about people’s suffering, for the simple reason that he doubts that there will be a good outcome. He thinks the world is wicked, and that it is not changing for the better. He believes that most often suffering leads to nothing—and that is one of the things I find most interesting about him. That while his own view of things is bleak, he is happier not to expound on it; similarly, he does not welcome other people’s angst and well-articulated despair. I realized soon in our relationship that he didn’t want me to dredge up every bit of unhappiness so he could turn it over and over in his hand, examining it like some strange shard found on an archaeological dig. He actively hoped I would be cheerful, and happy, and he believed that one way to accomplish this was not to dwell on the negative. It was that second thing that set him apart from Bob. I should probably give Bob credit for having good intentions, but in his reluctance to believe that happiness could be achieved, he backed off totally. He didn’t plan pleasant moments together, or buy silly little presents, or tell me I was beautiful. Bob left me to myself, while John is—as he likes to put it—“always nudging.” It is a standing joke between us: he pokes his elbow in my ribs if he thinks I might be sad, making his nudging literal.

  In all the years of our marriage, I have spoken Dara’s name only a few times, when she’s part of a story I’m telling—a minor character. From England, Liam wrote me a letter, when he first left Connecticut, urging me to go into therapy to find out why I had such a fixation on Dara. He maintained that his involvement had been one of brief curiosity. But my own involvement…did I realize how focused I was on her? How she always seemed to have been part of our life, as real as if she stood in the room? Had she represented something that I embraced precisely because it was haunting? And if so, what exactly did she embody?

  He was wrong a
bout my being fixated. I was interested; I was in some odd way validated; I was sometimes titillated, I admired some of the things she did and was repelled by others. Ultimately, I was had, and things spun out of control, as they do when you’re dealing with any volatile substance, but Liam had met me at a strange point in my life. I was never as fascinated with Dara as he thought. He was the one who apparently couldn’t forget her, even miles away. He was the one who had written to reintroduce the subject, in the guise of helping me. It wouldn’t have surprised me if they had gotten together. Which they might have, for all I know. Or perhaps, if she was more of a prankster than I thought, she could have sent her sister in her place. Dara always liked to see things through to their conclusion. It was just that she alone was the one who decided when they concluded.

  A little less than a year ago, I got a letter from Dara. She had only an old address, but somehow the letter survived two forwardings. The mailman handed it to me on top of the pile, and I thought he might have put it there deliberately, because the handwriting was so interesting. It arrived at the golf club when I was alone in the house, for which I was grateful. As I opened it, I remembered the awful letter she had sent me when I returned the diamond-and-ruby ring, expressing her self-righteous anger in an attempt to hurt me more than I had hurt her. Dara always had to get even. First, she made everything into a competition; then she had to win, even if she was only the self-declared winner. Time had not changed her handwriting. It was as lavish as ever, nearly filling the envelope with sweeps of brown ink. I was amused to see that on an envelope, though not in life, she felt the need to spell everything out: no “Cir.” for “Circle”; no abbreviation for the name of the state. The letter said:

  Dear Jean,

  I hope this finds you well and happy. I think of you often and hope that you and your husband are still travelling and seeking the sun, when appropriate, and the moonlight whenever romance fills the heart. I still get the odd letter from Trenton, who passes on whatever news he has of you from Bob, who says that from time to time, people tell him if they’ve heard anything about you. It is wonderful that you have opted out of the workaday world, and it is equally wonderful that you’ve learned to golf. I’m sure it’s wonderful fun. Do you ride in a cart, and if so, do you feel like the president? For a few astonishingly wonderful months I was involved with a man who made my heart leap, but his misery at having his young children living on the West Coast so far from him made him decide he must pull up stakes and return to Los Angeles. I suppose the way you felt about Dell, I have come to feel about L.A.—that it is an amorphous place that pretends to be a city. Well—maybe that is not pretending to so much, but I, at least, cannot pretend that it is where I belong. Though acting jobs have dwindled almost entirely, it would be stupid of me to think that I could go home again, either to L.A. or to New York. I was part of a book discussion group at the local library for a while, but so many of the people really wanted to talk about politics in the guise of talking about books that we never really seemed to discuss literature. I came upon your copy of GODOT a month or so ago, which I remember once having taken from your bookshelf. As though the world—as though even you—cared what my perceptions were! I was jealous that you were pursuing something I thought was the exact right thing for you, and I suspected that I did not have what it took to prevail as an actress over time. Not long ago I found one of my notes to you (I admit it freely; I was so vain that I kept carbons; I was that thrilled with my words!)—one of the many I “lifted” from Chekhov, as you told me so irately shortly after that long-ago, black, bleak night in Provincetown, and now I freely admit it, darling: I have eventually been able to see what you found so infuriating. Do you remember? The letter I found was (yes, it was wrong of me to omit attribution; yes, it was also unfair, not to quote the ending) Chekhov to S.N. Plescheyev, 1889. I have the carbon before me now, and I can see that the way I wanted to speak to you was too lofty—something that could not be successfully lifted from its context, though I’m afraid the attempt to transcend contexts has often been a personal failing. My affection for you was sincere, though. I hope you know that. Will I risk condemnation if I write the words again, if this time I quote them exactly? It has a tone that still brings back exactly how I felt, but my God! The youthful pomposity! Who was I, to think myself the equal of Chekhov, just because I, too, was skeptical about so much of mankind? “Write me a letter, my dear. I love your writing; when I see it, I grow cheerful. Besides, I shall not hide it from you, my correspondence with you flatters me. Your letters and Suvorin’s I treasure and shall bequeath to my grandchildren: let the sons of bitches read them and know what went on in times long past.”

  Tell me that you still read voraciously and that you still love books. Or tell me something. Tell me about your life, tell me what to read, tell me a story that is distracting. There seems no way to state bad news except to be blunt: I recently saw a doctor, and it seems that my worst fears are confirmed, and that there is something seriously wrong. That’s a euphemism, but I can’t (won’t) write the word. I am going to Sloan-Kettering for further tests, though I understand that the odds are not in my favor. However things turn out, I regret having been out of touch (which has been my doing, my envy, my inability to ask for help, those times I really needed it). For what it’s worth, you have a piece of my heart, and whatever drugs or radiation might damage, that has already been sent to you. Long life, much love, and may all your cappuccinos be laced with rum.

  It was signed simply with her initial—the one abbreviation in the letter.

  I finished reading it while sitting on the living room sofa. I got up and looked out the window, where I could distantly see a party of men putting on the green of the fifth hole. Two golf carts awaited them. When the last ball was putted into the cup, they would head for the carts, some jubilant, others discussing the quirks of fate that interfered with sinking their balls on the too-high, brushlike grass, or their bad luck—their simple bad luck—in ending up in the rough. Sometimes I made the rounds with my husband. I knew what the talk sounded like. You could usually predict early in the game—as they teed up for the first drive actually—which people would be quick to blame themselves, and who would blame the world. More tended to blame themselves, which was the opposite of what I would have expected. Very rarely do you hear about the grass being too high, or about the stifled sneeze that ruined their swing. I amused John by calling golf one of the talking sports. Swimming was a silent sport.

  I went to my bedroom and stretched out on the bed and read the letter a second time. There was nothing accusatory in the letter. I was glad that she was not trying to manipulate me, relieved that it was not one of those letters from years ago—something perverse that she had impulsively sent. Those letters had turned me against her, so that it was difficult to read the letter she had just sent with compassion, and I felt ashamed of myself—ashamed, but relieved that she didn’t know my telephone number, glad that I would have time to compose a response.

  In my head, I wrote several drafts of the letter I thought I would send, though I never did send it. In all of them, I told her how sorry I was to hear such bad news: in some, I feigned optimism; in others, I joked bleakly; in my final imaginary attempt, I simply asserted that in time, in spite of the ordeal she would have to go through, she would be fine. That, I felt sure, was a lie, since she had never been fine in her life. But perhaps that would have been the most appropriate response of all, because a liar could appreciate another liar. I scanned her letter a last time. What did she mean when she said that the world would not care about her opinion, let alone me? I had cared all too much about her opinions, and she certainly knew that. And the idea that she could not bring herself to ask for help…what did she think not giving her my new address meant? That I still welcomed her requests? Hadn’t I done enough, with all the things I had given her?

  I rubbed my hand idly on the bedspread. It was pretty: quilted, with a pattern of small autumn leaves swirling across the materia
l. The resort provided everything: our linen; the bed covers; the soap. They were all of good quality. Every morning, new soap replaced the old. Each winter and summer the bedspreads were replaced. Finally, I got up. The golfers were gone. It was late afternoon—not the most popular time to be on the links. I watched for a while, but no one appeared. I turned on the stereo, which was tuned to the classical-music station. Something smooth and melodic was playing—music Dara would have called “dreamy.” I listened for a few minutes, then folded the letter and put it in my night-table drawer. I didn’t want John to see it. I had had enough discussions about Dara’s letters in my lifetime, and even if my lifetime was very long (thank you, Dara) she was not going to be a subject in my marriage.

  When I eventually read Dara’s obituary, I decided to keep quiet about that, too. Because the truth was I couldn’t imagine at what point I would begin describing Dara—which, at least, was an improvement, or at least less torturous, than all those years in which I had not known at what point to stop.

  As for her last letter, perhaps she had been finally drained of energy, had simply run out of steam, because I wasn’t enough of a friend, but I also wasn’t enough of an adversary. Even without my presence that always gave her something solid to bounce off of, she might have had fleeting moments when she saw the present clearly, at the same time she saw the future darkly. And since she’d left nothing in her wake unharmed, it seemed appropriate that what remained was to curse the future. In her scattershot indictment of “the sons of bitches,” Dara had found her perfect exit line.