Secrets & Surprises

by Ann Beattie

  “We ought to get moving,” Tom said. “Thank you, Margaret, for your hospitality.” He held out his hand.

  Margaret shook his hand.

  “Snow forecast,” Max said. “I heard it on the radio when I was warming up the car.”

  The car was running. Elena could hear it. This departure was too abrupt. Earlier Tom had carried out two boxes of books and her papers. Max was swinging her suitcase.

  Max kissed Margaret’s cheek. Perhaps earlier he had said he would call her. Perhaps Margaret already understood that, and it wasn’t as bad as it looked. After all, Margaret had been pretty silent about other things. Hadn’t Tom made that clear?

  Max held open the back door. Elena hugged Margaret and told her again that she’d be back.

  “Stay put if you’re happy,” Margaret said. It was hard to tell with what tone she said it.

  They walked single file to the car. Elena sat between them. The radio was on, and Max turned up the volume. Margaret disappeared from the door, then reappeared, waving, wind blowing the white poncho away from her body. Elena could not tell who was singing on the radio because she never listened to country music. When the song ended, she changed stations. There was a weather forecast for snow before evening. She looked up through the tinted glass of the windshield and saw that the snow would start any minute; it wasn’t only the gray glass that made the sky look that ominous.

  “God, I’m happy,” Tom said and hugged her. Max moved the dial back to the country-music station and began to sing along with the song. She looked at him to see if that was deliberate, but he was looking out the window. As he sang she looked at him again, to make sure that he wasn’t teasing her. Her father had loved to tease her. When she was small, her father used to toss her in the air, to the count of three. Usually he gave one toss for each count. Sometimes, though, he would throw her high and run the words together “onetwothree.” That frightened her. She told him that it did, and one time she cried. Her mother yelled at her father then for going too far. “How is she going to be an acrobat if she’s afraid of height?” her father said. He always tried to turn things into a joke. She could still close her eyes and see him clearly, in his silk bathrobe with his black velvet slippers monogrammed in silver, coming for her to toss her in the air.

  They stopped at a restaurant for lunch. Max put a quarter in the jukebox and played country songs. Elena was beginning to dislike him. She already regretted leaving her sister so abruptly. But everything Tom said had been the truth. Margaret probably wanted her to go.

  “Your shrink would be happy to see that smile on your face,” Max said to Tom. “He’d know that he was worth the money.”

  “How long have you been seeing a shrink?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “Six months, maybe. Is that about right, Max?”

  “His ladylove left him,” Max said, “almost six months to the day.”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Tom said. “What did you say that for?”

  “Was it a secret?”

  “It wasn’t a secret. It’s just that I hadn’t discussed it with her yet.”

  “Sorry,” Max said. “I’ll wash out my mouth with soap. Believe me, I intended nothing by it. If you knew how lousy my own love life was, you’d know I wasn’t passing judgment.”

  The snow started as they ate. Elena looked toward the window because there was such a draft she thought it might be open a crack, saw that it was closed, saw the snow.

  “I guess we’d better hit the road while the road’s still visible,” Max said, waving to the waitress. Tom took Elena’s hand and kissed her knuckles. She had left almost all of her sandwich.

  Outside, they all stopped. They stood staring at a van, with a deer strapped to the top. Elena looked down and fingered the buttons on her coat. When she looked up, the deer was still there, on its side on the rack on top of a blue van. Tom went over to the van. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and wrote “Murdering Motherfucker” and swung open the door and dropped the paper on the driver’s seat.

  “Let’s get out of here before he comes out and starts a fight,” Max said.

  Tom took a turn at the wheel. Max stretched out in the back seat. The driving was getting more difficult, so Tom let go of Elena’s hand to drive with both hands on the wheel. She turned off the radio, and nobody said anything. “That bastard was the one who should have been shot,” Max said. She turned around and saw him: eyes closed, knees raised so his feet would fit on the seat. She no longer hated him. She hoped that Margaret had taken in wood before the snow started. The place where it was stacked was hardly sheltered at all.

  When the car started to swerve, she grabbed Tom’s arm—the worst thing she could have done—and sucked in her breath. Max sat up and started cursing. She watched as the car drifted farther and farther to the right, onto the shoulder of the road. It bumped to a stop. “Goddamn tire,” Max said, and opened the back door and got out. Tom got out on his side, leaving the door open. Snow blew into the car. No cars had been behind them when it happened. They had been lucky. Elena heard Tom complaining that there was a jack, but no spare tire. “I’ll walk back,” Max said and kicked his foot in the gravel. “There’s got to be somebody who’ll come out, snow or not. I’ll call somebody.” He did not sound as if he believed what he was saying.

  Tom got back in the car and slammed the door. “How stupid can we be, to take this trip without a spare?” he said. “Now we sit here and freeze, like a couple of idiots.” He looked up into the rear-view mirror, at Max walking back to where they had come from. No cars came along the road. Elena took his hand, but he withdrew it.

  “We’ll get going again,” she said.

  “But I can’t believe how stupid we were.”

  “It’s Max’s car,” she said. “He should have had the spare with him.”

  “It’s Max’s car, but we’re all in the same boat. You took that I-am-not-my-brother’s-keeper lecture too much to heart.”

  “You believed what you told me, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, leave me alone. I’ve had to argue and discuss all weekend.”

  She turned the rear-view mirror toward her to see what progress Max was making, but the back window was entirely covered with snow. The light was dimming. She took Tom’s hand again and this time he let her, but didn’t look at her.

  “You’ll hate me again,” he said, “because I never change.”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  “What about what Max said in the restaurant? You don’t want to hear about all that crap, do you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “If I bullied you into leaving Margaret, you can go back. I wouldn’t hate you for it. Maybe I said too much. It just struck me that I’m not the best one to be giving advice.”

  “What are you trying to do?” Elena said. “Are you trying to get me to back out?”

  Tom sighed. Elena moved over next to him for warmth. As they sat huddled together, a car pulled up behind them. Tom opened the door to get out. Elena looked around him, hoping to see a policeman. She saw a short man with a camouflage hat that buckled under the chin. Tom pushed the door shut behind him, but it didn’t click and slowly swung open as the man talked. Elena reached across the seat to close the door, and as she did that she looked farther than she had the first time and saw that it was the blue van with the deer on top. She was terrified. Certainly the man had seen, from the restaurant, who put the note in the van. She took her hand off the handle and leaned across the seat to watch the conversation. In a while the man in the camouflage hat laughed. Tom laughed too. Then he walked to the man’s van with him. Elena moved into the driver’s seat and stuck her head out the door. She felt the snow soaking her hair. Max was nowhere to be seen. Tom and the man were nodding at the deer. Then Tom turned and came back to the car, and Elena moved into her seat again.

  “Did he know it was us?” she said.

  “How would he know?” Tom said.

  �
��He could have looked out the restaurant window.”

  “No,” Tom said. “He didn’t know it was us.”

  “I thought something awful was going to happen.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Tom said, but she could tell from his voice that he had been frightened too.

  “Did he make you look at it?”

  “No. He was nice about stopping. I thought I’d take a look at his deer and say something about it.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” Tom said.

  Elena stared ahead, into the falling snow.

  • • •

  When they were on the road again, Max made small talk about how smart it had been to stop to eat, because otherwise they would have starved as well as frozen. On the highway, guide lights had been turned on. Elena rubbed her window clear of fog so that she could see a little, and made a game of silently counting the lights. She got no farther than the third one before the one-two-three she had counted reminded her of her father throwing her in the air, hollering “onetwothree, onetwothree.” She could remember how light, how buoyant, she had felt being tossed high in the air, and thought that perhaps being powerless was nice, in a way. She stared at the guide lights without counting, as the car moved slowly along the highway.

  The

  Lawn

  Party

  I

  said to Lorna last night, “Do you want me to tell you a story?” “No,” she said. Lorna is my daughter. She is ten and a great disbeliever. But she was willing to hang around my room and talk. “Regular dry cleaning won’t take that out,” Lorna said when she saw the smudges on my suede jacket. “Really,” she said. “You have to take it somewhere special.” In her skepticism, Lorna assumes that everyone else is also skeptical.

  According to the Currier & Ives calendar hanging on the back of the bedroom door, and according to my watch, and according to my memory, which would be keen without either of them, Lorna and I have been at my parents’ house for three days. Today is the annual croquet game that all our relatives here in Connecticut gather for (even some from my wife’s side). It’s the Fourth of July, and damn hot. I have the fan going. I’m sitting in a comfortable chair (moved upstairs, on my demand, by my father and the maid), next to the window in my old bedroom. There is already a cluster of my relatives on the lawn. Most of them are wearing little American flags pinned somewhere on their shirts or blouses or hanging from their ears. A patriotic group. Beer (forgive them: Heineken’s) and wine (Almadén Chablis) drinkers. My father loves this day better than his own birthday. He leans on his mallet and gives instructions to my sister Eva on the placement of the posts. Down there, he can see the American flags clearly. But if he is already too loaded to stick the posts in the ground, he probably isn’t noticing the jewelry.

  Lorna has come into my room twice in the last hour—once to ask me when I am coming down to join what she calls “the party,” another time to say that I am making everybody feel rotten by not joining them. A statement to be dismissed with a wave of the hand, but I have none. No right arm, either. I have a left hand and a left arm, but I have stopped valuing them. It’s the right one I want. In the hospital, I rejected suggestions of a plastic arm or a claw. “Well, then, what do you envision?” the doctor said. “Air,” I told him. This needed amplification. “Air where my arm used to be,” I said. He gave a little “Ah, so” bow of the head and left the room.

  I intend to sit here at the window all day, watching the croquet game. I will drink the Heineken’s Lorna has brought me, taking small sips because I am unable to wipe my mouth after good foamy sips. My left hand is there to wipe with, but who wants to set down his beer bottle to wipe his mouth?

  Lorna’s mother has left me. I think of her now as Lorna’s mother because she has made it clear that she no longer wants to be my wife. She has moved to another apartment with Lorna. She, herself, seems to be no happier for having left me and visits me frequently. Mention is no longer made of the fact that I am her husband and she is my wife. Recently Mary (her name) took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. She broke in on me on my second day here in the room, explaining that she would not be here for the croquet game, but with the news that she had visited New York yesterday and had taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. “And how was the city?” I asked. “Wonderful,” she assured me. She went to the Carnegie Delicatessen and had cheese cake. When she does not visit, she writes. She has a second sense about when I have left my apartment for my parents’ house. In her letters she usually tells me something about Lorna, although no mention is made of the fact that Lorna is my child. In fact, she once slyly suggested in a bitter moment that Lorna was not—but she backed down about that one.

  Lorna is a great favorite with my parents, and my parents are rich. This, Mary always said jokingly, was why she married me. Actually, it was my charm. She thought I was terrific. If I had not fallen in love with her sister, everything would still be fine between us. I did it fairly; I fell in love with her sister before the wedding. I asked to have the wedding delayed. Mary got drunk and cried. Why was I doing this? How could I do it? She would leave me, but she wouldn’t delay the wedding. I asked her to leave. She got drunk and cried and would not. We were married on schedule. She had nothing more to do with her sister. I, on the other hand—strange how many things one cannot say anymore—saw her whenever possible. Patricia—that was her name—went with me on business trips, met me for lunches and dinners, and was driving my car when it went off the highway.

  When I came to, Mary was standing beside my hospital bed, her face distorted, looking down at me. “My sister killed herself and tried to take you with her,” she said.

  I waited for her to throw herself on me in pity.

  “You deserved this,” she said, and walked out of the room.

  I was being fed intravenously in my left arm. I looked to see if my right arm was hooked up to anything. It hurt to move my head. My right arm was free—how free I didn’t know at the time. I swear I saw it, but it had been amputated when I was unconscious. The doctor spoke to me at length about this later, insisting that there was no possibility that my arm was there when my wife was in the room and gone subsequently—gone when she left. No, indeed. It was amputated at once, in surgery, and when I saw my wife I was recovering from surgery. I tried to get at it another way, leaving Mary out of it. Wasn’t I conscious before Mary was there? Didn’t I see the arm? No, I was unconscious and didn’t see anything. No, indeed. The physical therapist, the psychiatrist and the chaplain the doctor had brought with him nodded their heads in fast agreement. But soon I would have an artificial arm. I said that I did not want one. It was then that we had the discussion about air.

  Last Wednesday was my birthday. I was unpleasant to all. Mrs. Bates, the cook, baked me chocolate-chip cookies with walnuts (my favorite), but I didn’t eat any until she went home. My mother gave me a red velour shirt, which I hinted was unsatisfactory. “What’s wrong with it?” she said. I said, “It’s got one too many arms.” My former student Banks visited me in the evening, not knowing that it was my birthday. He is a shy, thin, hirsute individual of twenty—a painter, a true artiste. I liked him so well that I had given him the phone number at my parents’ house. He brought with him his most recent work, a canvas of a nude woman, for my inspection. While we were all gathered around the birthday cake, Banks answered my question about who she was by saying that she was a professional model. Later, strolling in the backyard, he told me that he had picked her up at a bus stop, after convincing her that she did not want to spend her life waiting for buses, and brought her to his apartment, where he fixed a steak dinner. The woman spent two days there, and when she left, Banks gave her forty dollars, although she did not want any money. She thought the painting he did of her was ugly, and wanted to be reassured that she wasn’t really that heavy around the hips. Banks told her that it was not a representational painting; he said it was an Impressionist painting. She gave him her phone number. He calle
d; there was no such number. He could not understand it. He went back to the bus stop, and eventually he found her again. She told him to get away or she’d call the police.

  Ah, Banks. Ah, youth—to be twenty again, instead of thirty-two. In class, Banks used to listen to music on his cassette player through earphones. He would eat candy bars while he nailed frames together. Banks was always chewing food or mouthing songs. Sometimes he would forget and actually sing in class—an eerie wail, harmonizing with something none of the rest of us heard. The students who did not resent Banks’s talent resented his chewing or singing or his success with women. Banks had great success with Lorna. He told her she looked like Bianca Jagger and she was thrilled. “Why don’t you get some platform shoes like hers?” he said, and her eyes shriveled with pleasure. He told her a couple of interesting facts about Copernicus; she told him about the habits of gypsy moths. When he left, he kissed her hand. It did my heart good to see her so happy. I never delight her at all, as Mary keeps telling me.

  They have written me from the college where I work, saying that they hope all is well and that I will be back teaching in the fall. It is not going to be easy to teach painting, with my right arm gone. Still, one remembers Matisse in his last years. Where there’s a will, et cetera. My department head has sent flowers twice (mixed and tulips), and the dean himself has written a message on a get-well card. There is a bunny on the card, looking at a rainbow. Banks is the only one who really tempts me to go back to work. The others, Banks tells me, are “full of it.”

  Now I have a visitor. Danielle, John’s wife, has come up to see me. John is my brother. She brings an opened beer and sets it on the windowsill without comment. Danielle is wearing a white dress with small porpoises on it, smiling as they leap. Across that chest, no wonder.

  “Are you feeling blue today or just being rotten?” she asks.

  The beginnings of many of Danielle’s sentences often put me in mind of trashy, romantic songs. Surely someone has written a song called “Are You Feeling Blue?”