by Ann Beattie
Gradually it becomes clear that they are trapped together by the rain. Maria undresses her paper doll and deliberately rips a feather off its hat. Then she takes the pieces to Lenore, almost in tears. The baby cries, and Lenore takes him off the sofa, where he has been sleeping under his yellow blanket, and props him in the space between her legs as she leans back on her elbows to watch the fire. It’s her fire, and she has the excuse of presiding over it.
“How’s my boy?” George says. The baby looks, and looks away.
It gets dark early, because of the rain. At four-thirty George uncorks a bottle of Beaujolais and brings it into the living room, with four glasses pressed against his chest with his free arm. Julie rises nervously to extract the glasses, thanking him too profusely for the wine. She gives a glass to Sarah without looking at her.
They sit in a semicircle in front of the fire and drink the wine. Julie leafs through magazines—New Times, National Geographic—and Sarah holds a small white dish painted with gray-green leaves that she has taken from the coffee table; the dish contains a few shells and some acorn caps, a polished stone or two, and Sarah lets these objects run through her fingers. There are several such dishes in the house, assembled by George. He and Lenore gathered the shells long ago, the first time they went away together, at a beach in North Carolina. But the acorn caps, the shiny turquoise and amethyst stones—those are there, she knows, because George likes the effect they have on visitors; it is an expected unconventionally, really. He has also acquired a few small framed pictures, which he points out to guests who are more important than worshipful students—tiny oil paintings of fruit, prints with small details from the unicorn tapestries. He pretends to like small, elegant things. Actually, when they visit museums in New York he goes first to El Grecos and big Mark Rothko canvases. She could never get him to admit that what he said or did was sometimes false. Once, long ago, when he asked if he was still the man of her dreams, she said, “We don’t get along well anymore.” “Don’t talk about it,” he said—no denial, no protest. At best, she could say things and get away with them; she could never get him to continue such a conversation.
At the dinner table, lit with white candles burning in empty wine bottles, they eat off his grandmother’s small flowery plates. Lenore looks out a window and sees, very faintly in the dark, their huge oak tree. The rain has stopped. A few stars have come out, and there are glints on the wet branches. The oak tree grows very close to the window. George loved it when her brother once suggested that some of the bushes and trees should be pruned away from the house so it would not always be so dark inside; it gave him a chance to rave about the beauty of nature, to say that he would never tamper with it. “It’s like a tomb in here all day,” her brother had said. Since moving here, George has learned the names of almost all the things that are growing on the land: he can point out abelia bushes, spirea, laurels. He subscribes to National Geographic (although she rarely sees him looking at it). He is at last in touch, he says, being in the country puts him in touch. He is saying it now to Sarah, who has put down her ivory-handled fork to listen to him. He gets up to change the record. Side two of the Telemann record begins softly.
Sarah is still very much on guard with Lenore; she makes polite conversation with her quickly when George is out of the room. “You people are so wonderful,” she says. “I wish my parents could be like you.”
“George would be pleased to hear that,” Lenore says, lifting a small piece of pasta to her lips.
When George is seated again, Sarah, anxious to please, tells him, “If only my. father could be like you.”
“Your father,” George says. “I won’t have that analogy.” He says it pleasantly, but barely disguises his dismay at the comparison.
“I mean, he cares about nothing but business,” the girl stumbles on.
The music, in contrast, grows lovelier.
Lenore goes into the kitchen to get the salad and hears George say, “I simply won’t let you girls leave. Nobody leaves on a Saturday.”
There are polite protests, there are compliments to Lenore on the meal—there is too much talk. Lenore has trouble caring about what’s going on. The food is warm and delicious. She pours more wine and lets them talk.
“Godard, yes, I know … panning that row of honking cars so slowly, that long line of cars stretching on and on.”
She has picked up the end of George’s conversation. His arm slowly waves out over the table, indicating the line of motionless cars in the movie.
“That’s a lovely plant,” Julie says to Lenore.
“It’s Peruvian ivy,” Lenore says. She smiles. She is supposed to smile. She will not offer to hack shoots off her plant for these girls.
Sarah asks for a Dylan record when the Telemann finishes playing. White wax drips onto the wood table. George waits for it to solidify slightly, then scrapes up the little circles and with thumb and index finger flicks them gently toward Sarah. He explains (although she asked for no particular Dylan record) that he has only Dylan before he went electric. And “Planet Waves”—“because it’s so romantic. That’s silly of me, but true.” Sarah smiles at him. Julie smiles at Lenore. Julie is being polite, taking her cues from Sarah, really not understanding what’s going on. Lenore does not smile back. She has done enough to put them at ease. She is tired now, brought down by the music, a full stomach, and again the sounds of rain outside. For dessert there is homemade vanilla ice cream, made by George, with small black vanilla-bean flecks in it. He is still drinking wine, though; another bottle has been opened. He sips wine and then taps his spoon on his ice cream, looking at Sarah. Sarah smiles, letting them all see the smile, then sucks the ice cream off her spoon. Julie is missing more and more of what’s going on. Lenore watches as Julie strokes her hand absently on her napkin. She is wearing a thin silver choker and—Lenore notices for the first time—a thin silver ring on the third finger of her right hand.
“It’s just terrible about Anna,” George says, finishing his wine, his ice cream melting, looking at no one in particular, although Sarah was the one who brought up Anna the night before, when they had been in the house only a short time—Anna dead, hit by a car, hardly an accident at all. Anna was also a student of his. The driver of the car was drunk, but for some reason charges were not pressed. (Sarah and George have talked about this before, but Lenore blocks it out. What can she do about it? She met Anna once: a beautiful girl, with tiny, childlike hands, her hair thin and curly—wary, as beautiful people are wary.) Now the driver has been flipping out, Julie says, and calling Anna’s parents, wanting to talk to them to find out why it has happened.
The baby begins to cry. Lenore goes upstairs, pulls up more covers, talks to him for a minute. He settles for this. She goes downstairs. The wine must have affected her more than she realizes; otherwise, why is she counting the number of steps?
In the candlelit dining room, Julie sits alone at the table. The girl has been left alone again; George and Sarah took the umbrellas, decided to go for a walk in the rain.
• • •
It is eight o’clock. Since helping Lenore load the dishes into the dishwasher, when she said what a beautiful house Lenore had, Julie has said very little. Lenore is tired, and does not want to make conversation. They sit in the living room and drink wine.
“Sarah is my best friend,” Julie says. She seems apologetic about it. “I was so out of it when I came back to college. I was in Italy, with my husband, and suddenly I was back in the States. I couldn’t make friends. But Sarah wasn’t like the other people. She cared enough to be nice to me.”
“How long have you been friends?”
“For two years. She’s really the best friend I’ve ever had. We understand things—we don’t always have to talk about them.”
“Like her relationship with George,” Lenore says.
Too direct. Too unexpected. Julie has no answer.
“You act as if you’re to blame,” Lenore says.
“I fe
el strange because you’re such a nice lady.”
A nice lady! What an odd way to speak. Has she been reading Henry James? Lenore has never known what to think of herself, but she certainly thinks of herself as being more complicated than a “lady.”
“Why do you look that way?” Julie asks. “You are nice. I think you’ve been very nice to us. You’ve given up your whole weekend.”
“I always give up my weekends. Weekends are the only time we socialize, really. In a way, it’s good to have something to do.”
“But to have it turn out like this …” Julie says. “I think I feel so strange because when my own marriage broke up I didn’t even suspect. I mean, I couldn’t act the way you do, anyway, but I—”
“For all I know, nothing’s going on,” Lenore says. “For all I know, your friend is flattering herself, and George is trying to make me jealous.” She puts two more logs on the fire. When these are gone, she will either have to walk to the woodshed or give up and go to bed. “Is there something … major going on?” she asks.
Julie is sitting on the rug, by the fire, twirling her hair with her finger. “I didn’t know it when I came out here,” she says. “Sarah’s put me in a very awkward position.”
“But do you know how far it has gone?” Lenore asks, genuinely curious now.
“No,” Julie says.
No way to know if she’s telling the truth. Would Julie speak the truth to a lady? Probably not.
“Anyway,” Lenore says with a shrug, “I don’t want to think about it all the time.”
“I’d never have the courage to live with a man and not marry,” Julie says. “I mean, I wish I had, that we hadn’t gotten married, but I just don’t have that kind of … I’m not secure enough.”
“You have to live somewhere,” Lenore says.
Julie is looking at her as if she does not believe that she is sincere. Am I? Lenore wonders. She has lived with George for six years, and sometimes she thinks she has caught his way of playing games, along with his colds, his bad moods.
“I’ll show you something,” Lenore says. She gets up, and Julie follows. Lenore puts on the light in George’s study, and they walk through it to a bathroom he has converted to a darkroom. Under a table, in a box behind another box, there is a stack of pictures. Lenore takes them out and hands them to Julie. They are pictures that Lenore found in his darkroom last summer; they were left out by mistake, no doubt, and she found them when she went in with some contact prints he had left in their bedroom. They are high-contrast photographs of George’s face. In all of them he looks very serious and very sad; in some of them his eyes seem to be narrowed in pain. In one, his mouth is open. It is an excellent photograph of a man in agony, a man about to scream.
“What are they?” Julie whispers.
“Pictures he took of himself,” Lenore says. She shrugs. “So I stay,” she says.
Julie nods. Lenore nods, taking the pictures back. Lenore has not thought until this minute that this may be why she stays. In fact, it is not the only reason. It is just a very demonstrable, impressive reason. When she first saw the pictures, her own face had become as distorted as George’s. She had simply not known what to do. She had been frightened and ashamed. Finally she put them in an empty box, and put the box behind another box. She did not even want him to see the horrible pictures again. She does not know if he has ever found them, pushed back against the wall in that other box. As George says, there can be too much communication between people.
Later, Sarah and George come back to the house. It is still raining. It turns out that they took a bottle of brandy with them, and they are both drenched and drunk. He holds Sarah’s finger with one of his. Sarah, seeing Lenore, lets his finger go. But then he turns—they have not even said hello yet—and grabs her up, spins her around, stumbling into the living room, and says, “I am in love.”
Julie and Lenore watch them in silence.
“See no evil,” George says, gesturing with the empty brandy bottle to Julie. “Hear no evil,” George says, pointing to Lenore. He hugs Sarah closer. “I speak no evil. I speak the truth. I am in love!”
Sarah squirms away from him, runs from the room and up the stairs in the dark.
George looks blankly after her, then sinks to the floor and smiles. He is going to pass it off as a joke. Julie looks at him in horror, and from upstairs Sarah can be heard sobbing. Her crying awakens the baby.
“Excuse me,” Lenore says. She climbs the stairs and goes into her son’s room, and picks him up. She talks gently to him, soothing him with lies. He is too sleepy to be alarmed for long. In a few minutes he is asleep again, and she puts him back in his crib. In the next room Sarah is crying more quietly now. Her crying is so awful that Lenore almost joins in, but instead she pats her son. She stands in the dark by the crib and then at last goes out and down the hallway to her bedroom. She takes off her clothes and gets into the cold bed. She concentrates on breathing normally. With the door closed and Sarah’s door closed, she can hardly hear her. Someone taps lightly on her door.
“Mrs. Anderson,” Julie whispers. “Is this your room?”
“Yes,” Lenore says. She does not ask her in.
“We’re going to leave. I’m going to get Sarah and leave. I didn’t want to just walk out without saying anything.”
Lenore just cannot think how to respond. It was really very kind of Julie to say something. She is very close to tears, so she says nothing.
“Okay,” Julie says, to reassure herself. “Good night. We’re going.”
There is no more crying. Footsteps. Miraculously, the baby does not wake up again, and Maria has slept through all of it. She has always slept well. Lenore herself sleeps worse and worse, and she knows that George walks much of the night, most nights. She hasn’t said anything about it. If he thinks she’s simple, what good would her simple wisdom do him?
The oak tree scrapes against the window in the wind and rain. Here on the second floor, under the roof, the tinny tapping is very loud. If Sarah and Julie say anything to George before they leave, she doesn’t hear them. She hears the car start, then die out. It starts again—she is praying for the car to go—and after conking out once more it rolls slowly away, crunching gravel. The bed is no warmer; she shivers. She tries hard to fall asleep. The effort keeps her awake. She squints her eyes in concentration instead of closing them. The only sound in the house is the electric clock, humming by her bed. It is not even midnight.
She gets up, and without turning on the light, walks downstairs. George is still in the living room. The fire is nothing but ashes and glowing bits of wood. It is as cold there as it was in the bed.
“That damn bitch,” George says. “I should have known she was a stupid little girl.”
“You went too far,” Lenore says. “I’m the only one you can go too far with.”
“Damn it,” he says, and pokes the fire. A few sparks shoot up. “Damn it,” he repeats under his breath.
His sweater is still wet. His shoes are muddy and ruined. Sitting on the floor by the fire, his hair matted down on his head, he looks ugly, older, unfamiliar.
She thinks of another time, when it was warm. They were walking on the beach together, shortly after they met, gathering shells. Little waves were rolling in. The sun went behind the clouds and there was a momentary illusion that the clouds were still and the sun was racing ahead of them. “Catch me,” he said, breaking away from her. They had been talking quietly, gathering shells. She was so surprised at him for breaking away that she ran with all her energy and did catch him, putting her hand out and taking hold of the band of his swimming trunks as he veered into the water. If she hadn’t stopped him, would he really have run far out into the water, until she couldn’t follow anymore? He turned on her, just as abruptly as he had run away, and grabbed her and hugged her hard, lifted her high. She had clung to him, held him close. He had tried the same thing when he came back from the walk with Sarah, and it hadn’t worked.
“
I wouldn’t care if their car went off the road,” he says bitterly.
“Don’t say that,” she says.
They sit in silence, listening to the rain. She slides over closer to him, puts her hand on his shoulder and leans her head there, as if he could protect her from the awful things he has wished into being.
Colorado
P
enelope was in Robert’s apartment, sitting on the floor, with the newspaper open between her legs. Her boots were on the floor in front of her. Robert had just fixed the zipper of one of the boots. It was the third time he had repaired the boots, and this time he suggested that she buy a new pair. “Why?” she said. “You fix them fine every time.” In many of their discussions they came close to arguments, but they always stopped short. Penelope simply would not argue. She thought it took too much energy. She had not even argued with Robert’s friend Johnny, whom she had been living with, moved out on her, taking twenty dollars of her money. Still, she hated Johnny for it, and sometimes Robert worried that even though he and Penelope didn’t argue, she might be thinking badly of him, too. So he didn’t press it. Who cared whether she bought new boots or not?
Penelope came over to Robert’s apartment almost every evening. He had met her more than a year before, and they had been nearly inseparable ever since. For a while he and Penelope and Johnny and another friend, Cyril, had shared a house in the country, not far from New Haven. They had all been in graduate school then. Now Johnny had gone, and the others were living in New Haven, in different apartments, and they were no longer going to school. Penelope was living with a man named Dan. Robert could not understand this, because Dan and Penelope did not communicate even well enough for her to ask him to fix her boots. She hobbled over to Robert’s apartment instead. And he couldn’t understand it back when she was living with Johnny, because Johnny had continued to see another girl, and had taken Penelope’s money and tried to provoke arguments, even though Penelope wouldn’t argue. Robert could understand Penelope’s moving in with Dan at first, because she hadn’t had enough money to pay her share of the house rent and Dan had an apartment in New Haven, but why had she just stayed there? Once, when he was drunk, Robert had asked her that, and she had sighed and said she wouldn’t argue with him when he’d been drinking. He had not been trying to argue. He had just wanted to know what she was thinking. But she didn’t like to talk about herself, and saying that he was drunk had been a convenient excuse. The closest he ever got to an explanation was when she told him once that it was important not to waste your energy jumping from one thing to another. She had run away from home when she was younger, and when she returned, things were only worse. She had flunked out of Bard and dropped out of Antioch and the University of Connecticut, and now she knew that all colleges were the same—there was no point in trying one after another. She had traded her Ford for a Toyota, and Toyotas were no better than Fords.
