by Ann Beattie
“Why?” the boy said.
His question made her remember that he was sixteen. What she had said would never have provoked another question from an adult. The adult would have nodded or said, “I know.”
She shrugged. The boy took a long drink of beer. “I thought it was funny that he didn’t teach you himself, when Mrs. Larsen told me you were married,” he said.
They had discussed her. She wondered why Mrs. Larsen wouldn’t have told her that, because the night she ate dinner with her she had talked to Mrs. Larsen about what an extraordinarily patient teacher Michael was. Had Mrs. Larsen told him that Natalie talked about him?
On the way back to the car she remembered the photographs and went back to the drugstore and picked up the prints. As she took money out of her wallet she remembered that today was the day she would have to pay him. She looked around at him, at the front of the store, where he was flipping through magazines. He was tall and he was wearing a very old black jacket. One end of his long thick maroon scarf was hanging down his back.
“What did you take pictures of?” he said when they were back in the car.
“Furniture. My husband wanted pictures of our furniture, in case it was stolen.”
“Why?” he said.
“They say if you have proof that you had valuable things, the insurance company won’t hassle you about reimbursing you.”
“You have a lot of valuable stuff?” he said. “My husband thinks so,” she said.
A block from the driveway she said, “What do I owe you?”
“Four dollars,” he said.
“That’s nowhere near enough,” she said and looked over at him. He had opened the envelope with the pictures in it while she was driving. He was staring at the picture of her legs. “What’s this?” he said.
She turned into the driveway and shut off the engine. She looked at the picture. She could not think what to tell him it was. Her hands and heart felt heavy.
“Wow,” the boy said. He laughed. “Never mind. Sorry. I’m not looking at any more of them.”
He put the pack of pictures back in the envelope and dropped it on the seat between them.
She tried to think what to say, of some way she could turn the pictures into a joke. She wanted to get out of the car and run. She wanted to stay, not to give him the money, so he would sit there with her. She reached into her purse and took out her wallet and removed four one-dollar bills.
“How many years have you been married?” he asked.
“One,” she said. She held the money out to him. He said “Thank you” and leaned across the seat and put his right arm over her shoulder and kissed her. She felt his scarf bunched up against their cheeks. She was amazed at how warm his lips were in the cold car.
He moved his head away and said, “I didn’t think you’d mind if I did that.” She shook her head no. He unlocked the door and got out.
“I could drive you to your brother’s apartment,” she said. Her voice sounded hollow. She was extremely embarrassed, but she couldn’t let him go.
He got back in the car. “You could drive me and come in for a drink,” he said. “My brother’s working.”
• • •
When she got back to the car two hours later she saw a white parking ticket clamped under the windshield wiper, flapping in the wind. When she opened the car door and sank into the seat, she saw that he had left the money, neatly folded, on the floor mat on his side of the car. She did not pick up the money. In a while she started the car. She stalled it twice on the way home. When she had pulled into the driveway she looked at the money for a long time, then left it lying there. She left the car unlocked, hoping the money would be stolen. If it disappeared, she could tell herself that she had paid him. Otherwise she would not know how to deal with the situation.
When she got into the apartment, the phone rang. “I’m at the gym to play basketball,” Larry said. “Be home in an hour.”
“I was at the drugstore,” she said. “See you then.”
She examined the pictures. She sat on the sofa and laid them out, the twelve of them, in three rows on the cushion next to her. The picture of the piano was between the picture of her feet and the picture of herself that she had shot by aiming into the mirror. She picked up the four pictures of their furniture and put them on the table. She picked up the others and examined them closely. She began to understand why she had taken them. She had photographed parts of her body, fragments of it, to study the pieces. She had probably done it because she thought so much about Andy’s body and the piece that was gone—the leg, below the knee, on his left side. She had had two bourbon-and-waters at the boy’s apartment, and drinking always depressed her. She felt very depressed looking at the pictures, so she put them down and went into the bedroom. She undressed. She looked at her body—whole, not a bad figure—in the mirror. It was an automatic reaction with her to close the curtains when she was naked, so she turned quickly and went to the window and did that. She went back to the mirror; the room was darker now and her body looked better. She ran her hands down her sides, wondering if the feel of her skin was anything like the way the sculpture would feel. She was sure that the sculpture would be smoother—her hands would move more quickly down the slopes of it than she wanted—that it would be cool, and that somehow she could feel the grayness of it. Those things seemed preferable to her hands lingering on her body, the imperfection of her skin, the overheated apartment. If she were the piece of sculpture and if she could feel, she would like her sense of isolation.
This was in 1972, in Philadelphia.
La
Petite
Danseuse de
Quatorze Ans
H
is father was Joseph Berridge, the painter. Her father was Horace Cragen, the poet (to be distinguished from Cragen the pianist, his brother Philip). They met in Cambridge, just after he had dropped out of Harvard at the end of the fall term. She was sharing a one room apartment with a girl who went to B.U. The girl was the one who introduced them; she had gone to high school with Griffin, and he had looked her up when he moved to Cambridge. In the short time since high school he had changed a great deal, and she no longer felt very comfortable with him. Had he not literally stumbled into her table, where she sat with Diana, just before Jacks bar closed, she would have avoided talking to him. She certainly would not have introduced him to Diana. She had nothing on her mind about introducing the children of famous men to one another—he pitched into her table, and when the boy he was with pushed him by the shoulders so that he slumped into a vacant chair at the table, she tried to make the best of the situation by pretending that he was not as drunk as he was by introducing him. Or perhaps part of the lurch into the table was show to begin with: outside, he had not been too drunk to ask for, and scribble down, Diana’s phone number. “I lost yours,” he said to Louise. “I know hers is the same, but if I don’t have yours—” Griffin’s friend clapped his hand around his neck and began to move him away from the two girls. “His father’s Joseph Berridge,” Louise said to Diana when they turned to begin the walk back to their apartment. “And Griffin decided to be fucked up about it all of a sudden and dropped out of Harvard. I think he’s faking—I knew him in high school, and there was nothing wrong with him. When he got here he started drinking and not going to classes. He’s just doing it to spite his father.”
Louise answered the phone when Griffin called. She said, “One moment,” and handed the phone to Diana and went into the kitchen. She thought that Griffin had a nasty streak, and had even in high school, when he was usually fun to be with, and it irritated her that now he was pretending they were not even friends. On the phone he had only asked her formally to speak to Diana.
She listened as Diana hesitated, then agreed to see him over the weekend. She was glad that even though Diana was shy, when put in a bad position, she would fight for her rights. She thought that Diana could—and would probably have to—handle Griffin.
“We’
re going to the movies,” Diana told Louise, coming into the kitchen and grinning like a girl who had just been asked on a first date.
“What are you going to see?”
She shrugged. “Whatever’s at the movies.”
Louise had to smile. Not to have smiled would have looked as if she were sulking.
Louise was average in height and a little overweight, with hair that was pretty and wavy, even though it was no special shade of brown. Next to Diana she looked almost petite; Diana was a little taller than five nine, and her hips and shoulders were broad, so that people thought of her as a big person, even though she was slender. When Diana was depressed, Louise remembered not to stand by a mirror with her. She had done that once, inadvertently, walked up to Diana slumped in the hallway and tried to cheer her by insisting that she was pretty, and Diana had turned and stood facing forward, next to Louise, the mirror in front of them, and said simply, “See?” Louise had seen. Mirrors seemed to distort Diana’s body in some way, so that she actually did look taller than she was.
The “Griffin Berridge” that Diana scrawled on the bathroom mirror with lipstick was a real shock to Louise. And because she knew the message had not been left for her, she did not know whether it was all right to wash it off. She decided to be good-humored about it—even though it was her tube of lipstick.
On Saturday they went to the movies, and on Sunday afternoon he drove to her apartment in his black Volvo. It was a first-floor apartment, so Diana went to the window when the honking started. Diana thought it was hilarious that he sat outside blowing the horn, and grabbed her sweater and keys, and calling goodbye to Louise, ran to the car.
They went to the Museum of Fine Arts, and kept getting lost as they searched for the modern paintings. He said that Monet’s haystacks were his favorites. He knew so much more than she about all the paintings, but had she not commented or occasionally asked a question, she was sure he would have said nothing. She asked how he knew so much, forgetting, momentarily, who his father was, and he told her that instead of bedtime stories, he had heard about the lives of the painters.
“And my father read me Blake’s poetry to put me to sleep,” she said. “When I was very young, the Songs of Innocence and Experience. When I was a little older—six, maybe—he jumped right into The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s hardly a normal childhood.”
She was a little startled by how quickly he answered, cutting her off, because from the fond way she spoke about Blake she thought that Griffin understood that those memories were pleasant.
“He used to roller-skate with me,” she said—wondering herself at the non sequitur, saying it only to let Griffin know how pleasant and interesting a relationship she had had with her father.
“My father used to compensate like mad, too. He’d go on tirades against Kandinsky, actually standing over my shoulder and pointing to tiny spots of color with a pencil, when he knew I didn’t give a damn. Then the next minute he’d be pulling a baseball cap on my head and throwing me my catcher’s mitt, wanting us to go off to the game. My mother thought that was so wonderful, but I knew he didn’t care about baseball, and that he was suspicious because I liked it so much.”
They wandered into another room of paintings, and she went up to a piece of sculpture she had not noticed the other time she came to the museum: a statue by Degas, of a young dancer, foot delicately extended, head held high, tilted back.
“Snob,” he said.
“No she isn’t. She’s fourteen years old and she can dance, and she’s proud.”
He started to walk away.
“Not proud, I guess, but she feels regal. She can do something and she’s poised for a moment before she moves.”
“Are you kidding?” Griffin said.
“No. I’m serious.”
“You really like that?”
“I like it a lot.”
“Well, don’t sound challenging. Is it an important issue?”
“You don’t like it?” she said.
“No. I don’t like it much.”
They moved away, went to one of the seats in the room and sat down, looking at the large dark painting in front of them.
“I don’t know why I spend so much time at museums,” he said. “I thought that the minute I got away from home I’d never look at a painting if it wasn’t in a book, but I end up here all the time.”
She said nothing, wanting to look at the ballerina again, but not wanting to shut him out, either.
“That was quite a scene back in Rye, New York: my father always pretending to be happy when the Yankees had home games, my mother always pretending excitement about the different shows at the galleries in Manhattan, the dog probably pretending she enjoyed playing tug of war with the stick.”
She said nothing. She was wondering if she could have been wrong—if he might have not liked roller-skating.
“It’s freaky,” he said. “That I’d end up taking a dive into the table of Horace Cragen’s daughter.”
She hated being spoken of as Horace Cragen’s child. Her image of her father, which was always in the back of her mind when she was not actually thinking of him, dimmed a little. She moved her head to get the picture back: her father, in his baggy slacks and cardigan, smiling down at her, poised on the edge of her bed with his large hands turning the pages of a book as delicately as if the paper were feathers.
Her eyes came to rest on the sculpture.
“You like it,” he said, looking at her looking at it, “because you were an aspiring ballerina when you were little. Right?”
“No,” she said. “I never took dancing lessons.”
“What did you do? You didn’t have a treehouse and play touch football, did you?”
She laughed at the notion. No—her father had always seen to it that she wore a ribbon in her hair and that she was a feminine little girl; if she had taken dancing lessons, she would have been like the statue. But she told him that she had taken lessons in nothing. She had belonged to the Brownies, until she got sick of it, but you could not really call that taking lessons.
“Then tell me what you did,” he said.
“Oh—I didn’t do so much. I was very shy when I was a child. I stayed home a lot of the time.” She smiled at him. He continued to look at her, not challenging, but interested: he wanted more. “I went sleigh-riding in the winter and I roller-skated a lot—sometimes at roller rinks. My father and I used to play tennis.”
“But you weren’t a little ballerina, huh?”
“No,” she said.
“They made me go to dancing class. Ballroom dancing. Can you imagine that? They wanted me to be a proper gentleman. My father always used to wear a jacket to dinner. He even painted in an old paint-smeared corduroy jacket. We went to the ball game and I’d wear my baseball cap and he’d sit beside me in his sport coat, with one of those porkpie hats on. It used to embarrass the hell out of me. He must have been embarrassed, too, to have been so handsome and to have such an ordinary-looking son. What he wore looked stylish, and whatever I wore looked wrong. At the time, I thought his hat was embarrassing, but he looked good in it—he was the sort of man who can look more serious because he’s wearing something silly and it doesn’t look funny on him. Do you know what I mean? He was six feet tall, and here I am, not even as tall as you.”
She felt uneasy again; she hated to have her height talked about. She had been a tall child, and that was part of her reason for being so shy. What she had always wanted was to fade in, to be like everybody else.
When they left the museum he talked no more about his father, or her father. She was glad, because some of the things he had said had disturbed her. And then when he kissed her, at the bottom of the museum steps, she smiled widely. She had started to be depressed, and then he had made her forget it.
Neither of them was sure it was not a mistake, but still they decided before Christmas to live together. Louise, who suspected it would happen, alr
eady knew a person who would share the apartment. Diana had made it clear that she would not move out until Louise could find someone to take her place, but that was accomplished quickly, much to Diana’s joy and Louise’s dismay. Louise had even spent a Saturday loading books into cartons and taking them by car to Griffin’s apartment.
When Diana and Griffin got back from New York, where they had gone to the wedding of Griffin’s good friend Charlie to a girl named Inez, they were going to stop at Louise’s and pick up Diana’s clothing. Everything else had been moved out. Driving back, Louise felt sure that Griffin would send Diana alone. It must be, she thought, that he knew she disapproved of his leaving school and drinking, that she did not like it when he called her when he got to town, and then saw her once and never called again. She did not think he was a nice person anymore, and she hoped that he would not be unkind to Diana.
For Christmas, Diana and Griffin went to Rye to stay with his parents, and on Christmas Day drove into the city to have dinner with her parents. Both places were loud and festive, with relatives from both sides sizing up the new person; Chopin waltzes were played at Griffin’s house as the family sipped afternoon wine, and at Diana’s parents’ apartment in the Village the radio was tuned to the Messiah, and Caroline—her favorite aunt—gave them a bottle of champagne and tall etched pink glasses and made them promise that they would visit her at her farm in Pennsylvania.
Above the mantle hung a poem of Horace Cragen’s, hand-lettered on parchment and framed in an old walnut frame—a gift to Horace from Diana’s mother. The poem was lovely, but as she admired it she also had the uneasy feeling that her mother should have given her father something else. Was it appropriate to—in a sense—give someone back what he had already given?
She wondered, at dinner, what her family thought of Griffin. She knew that her mother did not approve of her living with him, but she also knew that her mother would not allude to it. And her father? She looked at him across the table, eating roast goose, seeming happy but preoccupied, as he so often did. He had asked if the Griffin Berridge she was dating (he called it “dating”) was Joe Berridge’s son. He had called him Joe, so naturally she had asked if he knew him. “No,” he had said. “Know of him.” In conversation he did not mind speaking bluntly; his poems, though, were full of surprises and confusions. No matter how many poems were framed and hung in the house, she understood that where her father really lived was not there, but somewhere in the cloudy, starry world of poetry. “How is the roast goose?” her mother asked. “It’s fine with me,” her father replied. She and Griffin and Caroline nodded assent. “Very good,” Griffin said. Her mother nodded approval, and again they cut their meat and ate. The meal was more restrained than usual—because Griffin was there?
