by Ann Beattie
“He doesn’t know who bought cigarettes there this morning. He was sick and his mother was at the register, and his mother is eighty-eight and he won’t call her at home to ask because she went home to go to sleep. It’s stolen,” Freed said, looking around. “It’s obvious that it’s stolen. How am I going to get back to Maine?”
“Maybe back at the house you ought to get some sleep and then call the cops.”
“I told you, I don’t want to call the cops.”
“What do you intend to do—just forget about the car?”
“I need cigarettes myself,” Freed said, “and I forgot to buy them.”
Perry made a U-turn and went back to the store. Freed didn’t thank him for doing it. He got out and slammed the door again. He came back with a newspaper and a pack of Trues. Perry backed out and headed for Francie’s house, suddenly remembering clearly the large canvases Francie had painted recently, in greens and grays, of herself, naked. He had come down the weekend she showed them to him determined to sleep with her, but as usual something happened—the showing of the paintings happened—and he thought that it would be crass if he asked her after she showed him her work.
“What do you hear from Beth Ann?”
“I don’t hear anything. Her sister sent me part of a letter Beth Ann sent her, about how she and Zack had managed to borrow the money for a restaurant and how they’d just found a building. It was about a quarter of a piece of paper that her sister cut off for me with pinking shears. On the back was some drivel about the Grand Canyon.”
“That was a surprise to you she left,” Freed said.
“I thought she was going to New York. I didn’t know she was going to Albuquerque, and I had no idea she had any interest in Zack.”
Freed shrugged. “None of my business to have brought it up.”
“It’s okay. I’m not that touchy.”
“Yes you are. You’ve always been touchy. You were pissed off at me for months after we went to the baseball game and I rooted for the Red Sox.”
“I was just kidding.”
“No you weren’t. You care a lot about sports and you don’t approve of my taste.”
He turned onto the unpaved road that went to Francie’s house and parked his car beside three bushes that were trimmed in the shape of triangles. Francie had had them shaped a few summers before because she thought it was funny. Nothing else on the property was pruned. “They’re pyramids,” she said, making her eyes look crazy. “You can walk up to the bushes and derive power from them.”
Going into the house, he noticed that T.W.’s car was in the driveway.
The front door was closed, but when he rapped quietly on it, Francie answered. She was wearing her blue nightgown, and somebody’s plaid shirt in place of a robe.
“My car was stolen,” Freed said.
“What do you mean? Somebody took your car from here?”
“The kid I brought to the party stole it. I’ve got to call the cops.”
“Oh hell,” Francie said. “Do they have to come here? Have I got to have cops in the house?”
“No. I’ll call them from the store and sit there and have a cup of coffee with them while I tell the story.”
“Oh Christ,” Francie said. “Who was that guy, anyway?”
“Somebody who was hitching. I don’t know who he was.”
“What did you pick him up for?” Francie said. When Francie first woke up she was always argumentative.
“Because I’m stupid,” Freed said. “Did you know that T.W. was here in the bedroom?”
“Yeah. He said he was going to come back after he took Katie home.”
“Maybe we ought to wake him up. It’s noon, isn’t it?”
“Go ahead and call the cops,” Perry said. “They’re going to wonder why it took you so long to report it.”
“Good morning,” Francie said to Perry.
“Hi,” he said.
Freed sighed and unzipped his jacket and went to the kitchen phone.
“Maybe you should wait,” Francie called. “Maybe he’ll come back with it.”
Freed came into the living room and sighed and sat down. He and Francie both saw the puddle of red wine that had seeped into the rug at the same time.
“I don’t know why I have parties,” Francie said.
Perry remembered Delores’ phone call, and wondered if there was any point in mentioning it to Francie. Francie went over to the wine stain and looked down at it. “How do you get wine out of a rug?” she said.
“Don’t you transform the wine into blood and the rug into a turnip?” Freed said. “Francie, if you didn’t have such drunken parties, my car never would have been stolen.”
“I guess you should call them,” Francie said. “If he really stole it, he’s not going to bring it back.”
“Delores called last night from Miami,” Perry said. “She was looking for her oak table.”
“What oak table?”
“That one with the wide-board top. You used to have it, didn’t you?”
“I never had it here. I think it was in my room in the house we rented.”
“I think T.W. has that table,” Freed said.
Francie took one of Freed’s Trues and sat down by the stain. She had on black knee socks that were covered in lint, and she sat so that he could almost see between her legs.
“Or maybe I did have it here. Maybe it’s the table I used to stack things on in the kitchen, that Delores took out of here and traded Beth Ann for a chair she wanted. Yeah, that’s what happened to it: Beth Ann has it.”
“Oh goddamn it,” Freed said. “Goddamn it to hell. It’s freezing out and I’ve got to start discussing how my fucking car was stolen with a bunch of New Hampshire cops.”
“Let’s have some music,” Francie said. “Does anybody have a headache, or can we have music?”
The music got T.W. out of bed. He came looking for his shirt, and when Francie had to hand it over, she decided to get dressed herself. Before long they were all dressed, and Freed was down at the store, and Francie and T.W. and Perry were eating eggs Benedict that T.W. fixed and drinking leftover champagne mixed with ginger ale.
“I’ve got to drive all the way to a job in Stowe,” T.W. sighed. “But that’s not until tomorrow.”
Perry looked out the window and saw his own car gone from the drive. Freed had taken it to go to the store after he called the cops. It had started to snow.
“Why don’t we have another party tonight and invite your other set of friends, Francie? There’s food left over.”
“What other set of friends?”
“Just kidding,” T.W. said.
Perry and T.W. went out to the shed and loaded in kindling and wood for the fire.
Nick and Anita came back that night, bringing with them a huge pan of Anita’s fried chicken. Francie got out the last gallon of Chablis and they sat by the fire talking about the snow storm and eating and drinking. T.W. and Freed were talking about architecture. They both knew more than Perry, and he kept entering into their conversation, hoping they could tell him some things he needed to know about fixing his house. He had hired people to fix the heating system, but he was doing the carpentry work himself. It was a large house, oddly shaped because it had been added onto without much thought for aesthetics at least twice, and probably three times. T.W. and his band had been up a lot on the weekends, and T.W. had been a lot of help.
“You lonesome up there in the woods?” Anita asked Perry.
“Sometimes.”
“Ought to come back to the city,” Nick said. (He was kidding; he and Anita lived in a town with a population of three hundred.)
“Bring your dirty pictures out,” Anita said to Francie.
Francie laughed, embarrassed, knowing that Anita meant the canvases.
“Don’t you freeze your butt standing in here naked?” Freed said.
“Maybe I should have asked my other friends,” Francie said to Perry. He smiled at her, no longer inter
ested in T.W. and Freed’s talk about architecture. He was thinking about Francie, in the big house, painting herself.
“Aren’t we an artsy bunch?” T.W. said. “Perry a poet and Anita a photographer and Perry a poet—or did I say that?—Francie a painter …”
Freed moved the jug of wine away from T.W.
“To say nothing of our music maker,” T.W. said, touching his chest. He reached for the jug of wine, but Freed was pouring the last of it in his glass.
“I need it more than you do,” Freed said. “My car was stolen.”
The phone rang and Francie got up to answer it. Perry saw her turn on the kitchen light. Things looked better in the living room, where it was dark except for the fire. The clutter from the party the night before was still all over the room, but sitting and looking into the fire, he could forget about it. He intended to help her pick it up on Sunday, before he left to give Freed a ride to his house in Maine. He looked back to the kitchen, where Francie stood with her back to him, talking on the phone. Sometimes it bothered him that he was just one of the people she liked to have around all the time, although it meant a lot to him that they had all been friends for so long.
As they sat silently they could hear Francie talking on the phone. Perry heard the name Beth Ann twice and concentrated on the log crackling in the fire. He had gotten so he didn’t think about her much, and that day he had had to listen to her spoken about too much.
“That was odd,” Francie said, coming back and sitting next to Perry. “That was Delores’ mother, and she said she wanted me to know that Delores and Meagan were coming to my house—that they had left yesterday in a hurry and had asked her to call. Did Delores say that to you?”
“I think she said she was coming this way, but she didn’t say she was about to leave.”
“And her mother said that Delores is going to live with Carl in New Hampshire. Do you know anything about that?”
“No,” he said.
“We ought to get going,” Nick said. “We’ve got to go to Anita’s mother’s tomorrow.”
Anita groped behind her for her cowboy boots. They were fine boots, her Christmas present, with red roses painted on the sides and pointy toes and high heels.
“You ever want to borrow these, you could add a little kink to your dirty pictures,” Anita said, and Francie smiled in embarrassment. Anita rolled her white wool slacks down over the boots and pushed herself up with a groan. Nick stood with her, holding the pan that had once held chicken but now held bones.
“Thanks for the good dinner,” Perry said. “Thanks for cooking it, Anita.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” Anita said, fanning out her fingers and pushing her fingertips into her chest. She had on a cashmere sweater that looked electrified in the firelight. Her belly protruded because she was four months pregnant.
“Good night,” Nick said, kissing Francie on the forehead. Freed reached up and silently shook hands with both of them. T.W. got up and walked them to the door. When he had waved them off, the door closed and the draft stopped. T.W.’s hair was dusted with snow when he came back to the fire.
“I’m going to bed down in your spare room, Francie. You’re welcome to share the bed, Freed,” he said.
“I think I’ll sleep in the attic,” Freed said.
“I’m sleeping there,” Perry said.
“I know it, asshole. I was just kidding.”
Freed and T.W. walked out of the living room, clowning, with arms around each other’s waists, swaying their hips with all the grace of cows walking on ice. Francie looked after them without saying good night.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“I’m annoyed is what’s the matter.”
“Why?”
“First of all, that phone call. People’s mothers calling me and informing me of what’s going to happen to me—some woman I’ve never met calling to tell me that her crazy daughter and grandchild are headed for my house to stay with me.”
“Come on,” he said. “You’ve always felt sorry for Delores.”
“And all that talk about her oak table. I never asked for the damn table to begin with—she put it in my house and then she took it out, and now she wants me to track it down.”
“It’s sad,” he said. “It’s sad if she’s so crazy that she’s trying to track down a table nobody has seen for years.”
“And I’m touchy about Anita, and her talking about my dirty pictures. She’s trying to embarrass me because she resents it that I have a career, when she’s pregnant.”
He remembered going to Francie’s house once when Francie was still married, and he and Francie’s husband had sat on the mattress playing checkers while she painted. The radio was playing. People and noise didn’t distract her, usually. He liked it that when she painted, she acted like a painter: she backed up from the canvas, tilted her head from side to side, moved forward to put a small blot of paint on the canvas, stood back, smiled. He lost the game of checkers. Winning had never been very important to him, but it would have pleased him if Francie had known that he had won—if the “Aha!” had come from him instead of from Francie’s husband. Francie herself was both casual about her art and competitive. She would paint quietly, showing nothing, for many months. But if she entered a show and didn’t win first prize, she would be furious, drag out all her canvases to show her friends, pointing out how good they were. Sometimes there was some doubt in her mind—you could tell by the way her enthusiasm came out with a questioning tone—but most of the time failure made her angry, and she resisted the idea of it by talking about all the things that were done right, with originality, in her work. The first time she did that it had taken him aback—all his friends were humble, if not self-deprecating, and he had thought at first that Francie was putting him on. He probably listened to her talk about her work for half an hour with a silly smile on his face before he realized that his expression was inappropriate. Though when other people said, occasionally, that she was an egomaniac, he defended her, saying that it was mature to believe in yourself. Sometimes even Francie knew that she went on about the importance of what she was doing too much; she had a sense of humor about it, and would mock herself: she had a long gray apron she painted in, with GREAT ARTIST stenciled across the back.
He looked at Francie, slumped by the fire.
“You’re in a bad mood,” he said.
“You don’t think Anita said that to embarrass me?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He threw a chip of wood into the fire.
“Anita and her hundred-dollar boots she walks around in the snow in.”
“Go to bed,” he said. “You’ve tolerated all of us for long enough today.”
“Everybody has to be so teasing. Nobody can talk straight. Freed has to pretend he’s taking the attic. T.W. and Freed have to pretend they’re gay because they’re sleeping in the same double bed. Everybody’s got their act down.”
“What’s the matter with you?” he said again.
“What’s the matter is that it will be six months before I have a show, and nothing happens. I sit around here all day alone and I paint. When people come they want to make jokes about my being my own model, as though I’m narcissistic.”
“Your paintings are good,” he said. “You know they are. Nobody else paints the way you do.”
“You like them?”
“I admire them. They’re very good. I think you should hang them on the walls.”
In the living room there was one picture—a photograph taken by Anita of oil drums in the snow in New Jersey the winter before. It was a large 11” × 14” photograph hanging on the longest wall of the room. When Francie’s husband left, she took down the drapes and gave him the pictures from the walls. Perry didn’t ask about it because he thought he understood.
“Put some up,” he said. “You shouldn’t just lean them against your bedroom wall.”
She bent her knee and put her forehead to it. “I guess I am in a bad mood,” she mumbled
. “I guess I might hang some of them up. But the earlier ones—not the ones of me.”
“Loan me one,” he said. “I’d like to hang one in my house.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Then I’ll give you one. Which one do you want?”
She got up and went toward her bedroom. He walked behind her and noticed, as they passed the kitchen, that she had left the phone off the hook.
There was a mattress on the floor of Francie’s room. There were hooks shaped like eagles on the wall in front of the bed, on which she hung clothes. There were bamboo curtains, and in the corner there was a tall plant with four leaves at the top. He thought the room was even more depressing than the one she had lived in, in the house they had shared. Her husband had taken the furniture when he went, and although she had gone to auctions and replaced some of the furniture in some of the rooms, she had put only a mattress back in the bedroom. Seeing the clothes on hooks reminded him of the way coats were hung in his schoolroom in the winter when he was young. In place of the line of yellow boots beneath them were Francie’s self-portraits.
“This one?” she said. The painting she propped against her side was one of her best; she had painted it in front of the fire, and the pink glow of the firelight on her bare legs was just right. He looked from the picture to Francie, wanting to say that what he would like was the person propping up the painting, but the expression on her face (shy but earnest; it was easy to see that she took her painting seriously) kept him from saying anything except that it was one of her best, she should keep that one and give him another.
She shook her head. “I’ll leave it in front, and you can take it when you go.”
He touched his lips to the top of her head with a small kiss and gave her a hug and went out of the room for a drink of water, then climbed the stairs to bed. His foot felt sore, and too large for the cast. He put the light on in the attic and went over to the stool with the piece of fabric and the shell on it. He stroked the fabric and held the shell to his ear to listen to the roar, carefully holding his free hand on the material so he wouldn’t disturb her still-life arrangement. The sound inside the shell was very loud in the attic. He put it back and turned off the light bulb and lay on the bed. Like a child, he scrawled “Francie” on the fogged windowpane above the mattress, then, before falling asleep, erased it with the side of his hand.
