Secrets & Surprises

by Ann Beattie

  “Perry, this house is as big as a barn. Doesn’t it get depressing here in the winter?” Delores said, coming into the living room.

  “Did you go to Bard?” Carl asked Roger.

  “Yeah,” Roger said. “I was there for a couple of years.”

  “In ’sixty-five or ’sixty-six?”

  “ ’Sixty-six, sure,” Roger said, his face lighting up. He and Carl shook hands and laughed.

  “Gordon Liddy was the fucking Assistant D.A. of Duchess County,” Carl said to everybody. “Did you know Inez?” Carl asked Roger.

  “Was she the tall girl who hung out with Little Ruthie?”

  “No—she was a musician.”

  “Right, right.”

  Delores sighed. She had not gone to college, and Carl was always running into people from Bard, which bored her. She asked Perry if she could use the phone and went into the kitchen. Suddenly Carl stopped reminiscing. He hollered, “Who are you calling?”

  “I’m calling Freed. I thought we’d stay here a couple of days and look around and then go see him in Maine.”

  “I’m not going to Maine to see Freed,” Carl said.

  “Why not?”

  “Why don’t you call and see if your kid stopped sulking?” Carl said. “That’s what I think you ought to do.” They could hear her dialing.

  “Delores,” Carl said. “If you’re calling Freed, don’t tell him I’m going there, because I’m not.”

  “Inez used to go to Adolph’s and drive everybody crazy playing “Heat Wave” on the jukebox over and over,” Roger said.

  “Don’t be that way,” Delores said, coming out of the kitchen. “He wrote us that nice letter.”

  “I don’t give a shit what he writes us. If you want to go visit Freed, I’m not stopping you.”

  “I suppose you’re going to give me your car too.”

  “If it really means that much to you to visit him, Delores, you can take the car.”

  “I’m going to stretch out,” Roger said. “Excuse me.”

  Delores watched Roger walk out of the room and go up the stairs. “You seriously won’t go to Maine?” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  She went back into the kitchen. Perry sat in a chair and waited for the fight. As he waited, Beth Ann and T.W. came back to the house. “Carl!” Beth Ann said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Hey!” Carl said and stood to hug her. “How are you, T. W.?” he said.

  “Hey, Carl,” T.W. said. “Are you going to fill in on bass if our bass player doesn’t show?”

  “I’d throw you off—I’m not good enough,” Carl said. He looked toward the kitchen. “In every respect,” he said.

  “Is Roger still sick?” T.W. said, looking around the room. He saw his slide on the floor and took out a joint and offered it around. Only Beth Ann would have any of it.

  “Is that Delores in there?” Beth Ann said.

  “Yeah,” Perry said.

  Beth Ann went to the door and waved to Delores and stood by the door, waiting for her to finish. When Delores kept whispering on the phone, she walked away and sat by T.W. and asked where the band was playing. He started naming names of bars.

  Carl took a hit off of T.W.’s joint and walked into the kitchen. He came out with a beer.

  T.W. offered the joint again and Carl had another hit. “I’m very tempted to go get in my car and drive off,” he said.

  “Sit down, Carl,” Perry said. “We’re all going to go get pizza in a minute.”

  “This is humiliating,” Carl said. “Why did she have me bring her to your place if what she wanted was to be in Maine with Freed?”

  “I don’t know,” Perry said. “Sit down.”

  “I’m going,” Carl said. “This is ridiculous.”

  “Where are you going?” Beth Ann said.

  “I’m just going. I apologize for making a scene. I’m just going.”

  He stood in the middle of the room for a minute, then pulled his wallet and sunglasses out of Delores’ bag and went outside. He sat in the car for quite a while. Then they heard the car start.

  “Who is she talking to?” Beth Ann said. “She’s talking to Freed?”

  “Let’s get Dickie and go eat,” T.W. said.

  “Maybe there’s something here to eat,” Beth Ann said.

  “There isn’t,” Perry said.

  “I’m willing to spring for pizza,” T.W. said. “I want to eat so we can start practicing. We’ve got to get up early to drive to the job.”

  Delores came out of the kitchen, seeming oblivious to Carl’s departure. She went over to Beth Ann and rumpled her hair. “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “Don’t tell her,” T.W. said. “We’re going for pizza. Want to come?”

  “Sure,” Delores said. “Did Carl stalk out?”

  “He drove off. In the car.”

  “Did you ever see anybody have a temper tantrum like that?” Delores said. “Don’t you think that was irrational?”

  “I want pizza with mushrooms and onions,” T.W. said. “Will you split that kind of a pizza with me, Beth Ann?”

  All of them got up and followed him out of the house.

  “We can take my bus,” T.W. said. “Come on—pile in the back.”

  “How far do we have to go?” Beth Ann said.

  “Come on, get in. Should we ask Roger if he’s feeling better?”

  “He’s sick,” Perry said. “Let’s just go.”

  “Tell me about Meagan,” Beth Ann said to Delores. “Does she still have skin like porcelain?”

  “You can see the veins in it,” Delores said. “It scares me sometimes. It looks like silk instead of human skin.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s with Francie. Francie’s taking her to a dog show.”

  “Bring her to see us,” Beth Ann said.

  Perry wondered if the “us” was inadvertent. He wondered how long she intended to stay, and what Delores intended to do about getting out of the house with Carl gone.

  “It’s so beautiful here,” Beth Ann sighed as they rolled down the driveway.

  They were sitting on wood seats on opposite sides of the van, facing one another. The floor of the van had been painted with a picture of the sun coming up over the mountains. T.W. drove with the dome light on, and the painting was positioned right under it; that made it seem as if the sun was actually glowing.

  “Where’s Borka?” Perry called to T.W.

  “I don’t know. If she doesn’t show this time, I’m firing her.”

  “It’ll break Roger’s heart,” Perry said.

  “Roger doesn’t have a heart. Roger’s got religion.”

  T.W. put on the brakes. Dickie was standing up to his knees in the stream, clearing rocks out of it.

  “There’s Dickie,” T.W. said. “Hey, Dickie! You going to eat with us?”

  “I can eat mud,” Dickie said, stumbling around in the stream and making a wild face and holding a cupped hand of mud in front of his face.

  “You want us to bring you a pizza?” T.W. called.

  “I eat mud!” Dickie screamed.

  “What’s that all about?” Perry said.

  T.W. shrugged. They pulled out of the driveway and T.W. headed toward town.

  “Somebody remind me to call my mother,” T.W. said.

  T.W., as usual, set two alarms, and at nine in the morning they left in the van, taking Delores with them and dropping her at the bus stop so she could get the bus to Maine. Perry didn’t know she was going until she tiptoed into his room to say that she was going to Freed’s and that if Carl came back, he could tell him whatever he wanted. Perry sat up in bed and smiled at her and said, “It was good to see you.” When she tiptoed out, he couldn’t sleep because that had been such a lame thing to say. Beth Ann had left late the night before, with Roger, who was going to drop her at the train station so she could go to her parents’ house in Westport. It crossed his mind that she and Roger would get somet
hing going. He could remember his anger and outrage when she pulled out for Albuquerque, and was surprised when she came to him again that he felt very little hostility. That was because, as Freed had been telling him for a long time, the person he was interested in was Francie. He thought that he should call her because she might not know where Delores had gone. Her line was busy when he called, though, so he forgot about that for a while and went outside and looked at the new paint on his house. He walked down to the brook and inspected and approved of the work Dickie had done clearing it. In spite of smoking dope too much, Dickie got a lot of work done. He sat on a mossy rock and thought about Zack’s death and wondered if there might not have been one split second during the fall that was pleasurable, when perhaps his body was weightless and his mind clear. He tossed a pebble into the stream below him and it hit the water unremarkably—it just fell and went plop. He smiled at himself in dismay: he would have to do better than that if he was going to be a poet. Writing poetry was still an embarrassing idea to him, and Francie was the only one he thought really approved of it and urged him on. He thought that the more practical thing to aim for would be to repair houses. It seemed that this might be a part of the world where he could establish himself as a carpenter, now that he had some experience. He and T.W. had even tossed around the idea of a partnership, with T.W. working when it was more profitable to do that than play music.

  He thought again of what Dickie had said; Dickie had been right to wonder what gawky Zack had been doing scaling mountains. The truth was that there was something very debilitating about being with Beth Ann—Zack had said that to him, which was why he assumed Zack didn’t like her—and probably Zack had felt the urge to break out to do something physical and in that way escape her. The last time he saw Zack, before Zack picked up Beth Ann, they had played a quiet game of poker. He could not remember at whose house they had played, but he remembered that Zack had won the game. Later, in his journal, he noted that as a nice irony and as a neat little foreshadowing of what was to come. Zack had always been quiet and clumsy, and while a lot of people came around to liking him, he didn’t have one close friend in the group. It occurred to him that Beth Ann might have picked Zack the way she had picked out the runt of the litter when they went their separate ways when the lease was up on the house they all rented, and she had to take a kitten from the litter. He could remember Zack’s ornate denim jacket, with a mandala embroidered on the back. Since his parents had arranged the funeral, it was certain that he wasn’t buried in that. Zack claimed that he got the jacket by trading a Porky Pig bank to a friend named Famous Malcolm he had since lost track of.

  He walked back to the house and took off all his clothes but his underwear and stretched out on the chaise longue. It was missing several strips, so his body sank low to the ground and he could feel the cool of the earth on his buttocks. He sat there enjoying the quiet, listening to the birds. Then after a while he got up to call Francie and stopped on the way in to study an ant war in the grass by the front door. That was when he heard the unfamiliar car in the driveway and looked up to see Borka in a beat-up Chevrolet.

  “They’re all gone,” he said.

  “They can’t be. We have to practice.”

  “The job is today. The practice was yesterday.”

  “You’re putting me on,” she said. “Are they inside?”

  “I’m not putting you on. They’re gone.” He was pulling his jeans on.

  She put her hand to her face and was about to sink down in the grass, but he took her by the arm and steered her away; she had been about to sit where the ants were having their war.

  “T.W. is never going to believe this wasn’t on purpose,” she said.

  Borka had on a scarf tied around her breasts and several necklaces: one that looked like a little magnifying glass, a necklace of tiny silver birds, and a necklace with a large moon dangling from it that seemed to be made out of pottery. She had on cut-off lavender jeans and black spike-heeled shoes. She was eighteen. It was T.W.’s opinion, Perry knew, that she dressed that way because she was a virgin.

  “What am I going to do?” she said. “You can even look at the book I wrote the date down in—it says today, not yesterday. Maybe he told me the wrong day.”

  She was upset, and it was unlike her; he was used to her silence, or her mockery.

  “I know the name of the bar they’re playing at. Why don’t you call the bar—or you could even make it there in about three hours.”

  “He’d kill me. I don’t have the nerve to call him.” Borka went over to her car and sat on the hood and stared into the woods. “I blew it,” she said.

  He went inside to call Francie. If Borka was going to cry, he didn’t want to have to watch. Before he got to the phone, it started ringing. He answered the phone, and it was Freed.

  “Let me talk to Del,” Freed said.

  “She left hours ago. She was on her way to Maine.”

  “Yeah, well, Carl called and told me he was going to slit my throat, and I really don’t want that to happen, and I’m very willing not to have that woman here if Carl is going to kill me over the issue.”

  “Freed. What have I got to do with it?”

  “Do you think I should call the cops? Does he know where I live? What have I suddenly got to be involved with the cops all the time for? I’m growing grass in my garden this summer, and the cops are going to take a liking to me and stop around for fucking coffee.”

  Borka came into the house and got a Coke from the refrigerator. She had been crying.

  “Leave your house,” Perry said.

  “Leave. That’s fine, except that he specifically said that he was coming to the school to slit my throat in front of my class so that I would be embarrassed before I died. I mean, I know Carl isn’t going to kill me, but I really don’t want to deal with Carl.” Freed coughed. “Carl is jealous because I have a job and he doesn’t.”

  “I don’t think Carl will even show up, Freed.”

  “I’ve got to hang up,” Freed said. “My phone bill was a hundred and forty dollars last month.”

  He said goodbye to Freed and sat down opposite Borka. “T.W.’s temper always cools off,” he said to her.

  “No, I think he really dislikes me. And I keep making mistakes like this, and that makes him dislike me more.”

  “You like him?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t think he knows that,” he said.

  “He isn’t interested in knowing it. All he cares about is music. Anyway—he told me if I fucked up again, he was throwing me out of the band.”

  “I think what you ought to do is drive to the place in New York State and go on stage with them. You’ll do okay without practicing, and they’ll be relieved to see you, even if they’re pissed off.”

  She hung her head. Perry could see the dark hair down her center part; it became golden again about an inch from the scalp.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For the Coke,” she said and hit the edge of the empty can on the table.

  When she left he picked up the things the band had thrown around, and emptied the ashtrays and sat at the kitchen table again, listening to the birds and to the sound of a dog barking far away. It was too much for him when the house was full of people, but when everybody was gone he felt a little depressed. He was grating cheese and sprinkling it over a can of pinto beans for an early supper when the phone rang.

  “You wouldn’t know where Delores is, would you?” Francie said.

  “Yeah. Carl left and Delores went to Freed’s.”

  “Freed’s?”

  “Freed’s. What the hell.”

  “Where’s Carl?”

  “He was supposed to go there too. I heard from Freed that Carl called and threatened to kill him.”

  “This is wearing me down. I’m going to call Maine. Meagan is coming down with a cold and she wants her mother.”

  “Did you get your paintings cra
ted?” he asked.

  “Some of them. I’m going to fix Meagan and me some supper and go back to it.”

  “I put your painting—” He cut himself off from what he was going to say: that the painting was hanging in his bedroom. “I put it up, and it looks wonderful, Francie.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “When I become famous, don’t sell it.”

  He wandered around the house. He wondered if this was what someone who was going crazy would be like. Then he berated himself for thinking about that again, and for still believing in the back of his mind that the most honorable activity was working from nine to five. He put on a John Coltrane record and sat in his favorite Morris chair to calm down. After he had sat there quietly for a while, he started to get his perspective back: the house was a wreck, after all, not because he didn’t care enough to live decently, but because his friends had taken it over and wrecked it. When Dickie sat in a chair, it seemed to come unglued. Pieces of paper on which T.W. had scrawled words and chord symbols were scattered everywhere, amid tangles of broken strings. Cigarette butts were floating in half-empty glasses of bourbon. He knew that it was Francie again when the phone rang.

  “I can’t reach Delores,” she said. “If you hear from her, tell her to call me.” Francie hesitated. “Is it because I’m a Capricorn? What is it about me that makes people drop their kids with me and come stay with me, and why is everything always so confused?”

  “People take advantage of you.”

  “It’s such a nice night out,” Francie sighed. “Meagan has a cold and I’m going to get it. I don’t think that’s fair. I was going to go for a walk, but I can’t drag her along when she’s so droopy, and I don’t feel right about leaving her.” Francie lowered her voice to a whisper. “I don’t think much of Delores walking out on Meagan to take a vacation. I only took Meagan because I felt sorry for her.”

  “Call her at Freed’s and tell her to come back.”

  “I have to cut aspirin in half and give her a half aspirin,” Francie whispered. “I called my doctor.”

  “Would you like me to come there to be with you?”

  Francie waited a minute before answering. “I’d like it, but that would be silly.”