Secrets & Surprises

by Ann Beattie

  Nick and I had breakfast, and although he was in his first year of law school and worked constantly, didn’t even question that we would leave the apartment. We had coffee, then walked to his car. Our plan was to drive to the North Shore to climb the dunes and walk on the beach. But the plan got changed to going all the way to my mother’s house. It was Friday, and we could spend the weekend. Nick loved the house. More amazing, Nick loved me. He had been living with a girl named Anita when I met him, but a few months before, he had called it off, come to my apartment one day and made it plain that the scene with Anita had been a bad one. He had come, but he wouldn’t look at me for a long time. “You didn’t come cheap,” he said.

  We stopped for more coffee, but even that plan changed. Inside the restaurant, with the windows open, coffee was too much a winter drink. We sat on stools at the counter and drank cold chocolate milkshakes.

  When we got there, Sebastian’s old white Buick convertible—top down—was in the drive. He was the first to see us, from where he was digging in the side yard. I gave him a hug and Nick shook his hand. “Great minds with a single thought,” he said to me. Whenever he could take a day off, he would leave the city and go to New Hampshire. He was planting a little evergreen. Nick and I went around to the back of the house, where my mother and a woman who had moved into the LaPierre house next door and Curtis were talking. My mother stood and rushed across the lawn, happy to see us. She had on a sundress, and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and looked young.

  It started out as such a happy day that what happened seemed even worse than it might have, because no one expected anything. We had all gone down to the beach (Sebastian was talking to the new woman, who was a widow; I was hoping that she would like him), when Sebastian mentioned Joseph. For months it had been all right to talk about him, so there was no reason why it hit her wrong. I guess that it was such a perfect day that we had all been thinking of him: he thrived in the warm weather, bought tulip bulbs and planted them in the rocky side yard every spring, sailed from the dock that we were now walking past every day that it didn’t rain.

  “I might try to fix the boat,” Sebastian said, as much to himself as to any of us. Except that he must not have said the boat, but Joseph’s boat. And it was my brother’s boat. He had bought it, and my mother and I had hardly ever rowed out in it alone.

  “Why do you have to mention him?” my mother said, her mouth quivering. “What do you have to talk about Joseph for?”

  Then she put her hands over her face and ran, without lowering her hands, like a person running from an explosion.

  Sebastian’s face was perfectly white. He looked like he might cry himself. The woman he had been walking with was the only one who stared after my mother. She had been living in the LaPierre house a week or so, and I don’t know if she knew, then, who Joseph was.

  “Oh hell,” Nick said, putting his hand on Sebastian’s shoulder. Then, though it was a dumb and obvious thing to say, he said, “She’s just upset.”

  Sebastian didn’t move. I went over to him and said, “Hey—it’s okay. I was thinking about him too.” I had been thinking that that night Nick would sleep alone in Joseph’s room.

  We continued the walk down the beach. Nick took my arm and we walked a little ahead, and Sebastian and Carolyn Little trailed behind. Nick chattered to me as nervously as he had when he had started to tell me how he loved the woman he lived with, but ended up, instead of telling me anything about his life with Anita, talking about how some noises that cars make can indicate serious trouble. I strained to hear what Sebastian was saying to Carolyn Little, but there was a hollow sound all around us—the whole beach was echoing like a conch shell. It was that constant, almost inaudible noise—background noise—that distracted me. I turned to look at Sebastian. He was holding Carolyn Little’s arm, talking to her, and she was looking at the sand.

  I had been thinking about Joseph all day, long before we got to New Hampshire. I had started to think of him when Nick touched my shoulder. Joseph used to do that when I was falling asleep and he still wanted my attention. I could not stay awake long when I went to bed, but once he began his storytelling he would be energized. If I wouldn’t listen to him, he at least wanted me to be awake. “Look at the stars tonight,” he’d say, or he’d show me, in winter, sites for the snow fort we could build in the morning. More than once I fell asleep in the middle of one of his stories, and he nudged me awake.

  I don’t know if it took him a long while to die, or if he died suddenly. I don’t know the name of the place he died in, or if it had a name. Although there were many random facts in the letter, the questions I really wanted answered were not answered.

  I went back to the house ahead of the others, leaving Sebastian and Nick sitting on the dock after Carolyn Little went home. As I had expected, my mother was there, in the kitchen, drinking coffee. She was hanging her head and I expected her—as she had done in the past—to make me feel worse by apologizing for having made a scene. She did not say anything for a minute, and then she said, “You know what I hope? I hope that when he was over there he spent all his money on dope and laid every whore in Saigon.”

  She looked up. It was a challenging look, but she didn’t mean to challenge me. “I didn’t even have the courage to tell him, and you did. I heard you telling him, and I should have told him too—‘Go to Canada.’ ” She said “Canada” with the reverence a minister would use pronouncing the word “heaven.”

  “At least I hope he went crazy over there and did whatever the hell he wanted.” This time she just looked at me sadly. We both knew he was not the kind to storm through Vietnam. More likely, he would sit and listen to the radio. When songs by any of the people on the list his friend sent us came on the radio, my day was ruined. All the lyrics took on horrible, ironic meanings.

  “And your father’s great grief—all I get are ‘remember when’ letters from Mexico. They weren’t even close. Joseph and I weren’t very close either. You two were.” She looked up again, no real expression on her face, just a person stating facts. “It was mean of me to yell at Sebastian,” she said.

  “Don’t stay in here sulking,” I said.

  We sat there for a while, and then she pushed the coffee cup away and went out. I imagine she went to the dock. I got up and went to the bookcase and took down the cookbook. The letter from Vietnam was still in it. I already knew it by heart, so I just looked to reassure myself that the letter was where I had put it. It was strange that she had never asked where the letter was. Strange, too, that she cursed when she got a letter from my father (most of the letters, inevitably, maudlin with memories of Joseph) but kept all of them in a basket on her dresser.

  When I went outside, Nick and Sebastian were gone, and she was sitting on the dock where I had left them. She was sitting there on the dock just where Joseph and I had sat after our argument about his going to Canada. As we sat there, I was already sure that if he went, he would be killed. In the kitchen, he had argued against going to Canada because it was dishonorable. On the dock, I began to understand the real reason: it wasn’t a matter of principle, but simply that he thought he wouldn’t die; he thought he was indestructible. He really thought that he would always be in control, that he would always be the storyteller. I don’t think I said to him in so many words that I knew he was going to die, or that he actually said he knew he was going to live, but that’s what our conversation was about. He didn’t understand how bad, and how pointless, things were in Vietnam. No matter what I said, his attention didn’t focus on it, and I couldn’t make him understand.

  I went out to the dock, where my mother was, and crouched there. A bird flew overhead. There was a nice mossy smell the breeze was blowing in off the water.

  “Know where Nick and Sebastian went?” I said.

  “Look at his poor boat,” she said.

  I looked down. The water was slopping against it, the breeze blowing ripples of water toward shore. The water made a slapping sound: put-p
ut.

  “I just can’t snap out of it,” she said.

  I leaned over and kissed her cheek. Nick did that most mornings when it was time for me to wake up. Joseph had nudged me awake with his hand, squeezed my shoulder in the dark. It was nicer than any kiss.

  • • •

  I went to bed early and slept for a little while, then woke up. I put on an old lacy robe that belonged to my mother or grandmother, and went out of the room. The clock in the kitchen said one-thirty. Everyone had gone to bed. Going back to the bedroom, I saw the small lamp on and detoured to the living room. Sebastian hadn’t gone home. He was stretched on the sofa, but not sleeping. There was a bottle and a glass on the table. “Howdy,” he said quietly. My mother was asleep—or at least she was in her room in the dark. Her bedroom opened onto the living room. The door was cracked open a few inches. I waved to Sebastian and went back to my room. I looked at all the books that I couldn’t remember having read, and at the pictures I no longer found attractive: a Picasso poster of a hand holding flowers, a drawing of lobstermen casting their nets, done by a boy who had had a crush on me in high school.

  Joseph would have interrupted the silence with a story. I went out of the room and passed by Sebastian in the living room without looking in, and climbed the stairs to the attic.

  It smelled the way it always smelled. The two beds were still there. When I moved out, they left that bed in place. Nick was sleeping in the far bed. Without knowing who had slept where, he had chosen Joseph’s bed. Nick had slept upstairs the other time he came to the house, but that time I hadn’t gone upstairs to see where he slept. In fact, I hadn’t been above the first floor in a long time. With the exposed beams and the low, triangle-shaped window, it still looked snug, like some room in a storybook.

  “What are you doing here?” Nick whispered.

  I went over to his bed. The room seemed to exist in a time warp; I could imagine stepping on one of Joseph’s socks.

  “She’ll hear you,” Nick said. He reached out his hand from under the covers. He had been asleep.

  I sat there and held his hand. Then I lay on the bed. Finally, I got under the covers.

  “We shouldn’t upset her any more today,” he said.

  It was a rational, and even a nice thing to say, and I knew that I was wrong to hate him for saying it. He lay still in the bed and I lay beside him. My eyes were getting accustomed to the dark. I was looking around the room and thinking of how Joseph’s shadow tiptoed to me, the pitch of his whispery child’s voice. As I got older, if I told people about my brother, the stories would always be about my brother as a child—I got older, but Joseph was still frozen in childhood.

  “What?” Nick said sleepily.

  I had moved and thrown my arm over him, inadvertently. I wanted to say: Nick—my whole life just rushed by.

  Nick fumbled for my hand and we held hands again. His hand was so warm. I could see in the dark now: his eyes closed, his mouth like the mouth of a Botticelli angel.

  “There’s a demon in the corner.” I pointed. (Starlight on two metal coat hooks.)

  He mumbled again: “What?”

  He was trying to be kind, trying to stay awake. I looked at the coat hooks. They did look like eyes glaring, and I had scared myself a little by calling them demons.

  “A demon,” I said again, and something in my voice told Nick he had to rouse himself, that the talk about demons was flippy.

  “Okay,” he said, struggling up, half sighing the second “Okay.”

  He smoothed my hair from my face and, kindly, kissed my neck, moved his hand up my ribs. It was not what I wanted at all, but I closed my eyes, not knowing now what to say.

  Tuesday

  Night

  H

  enry was supposed to bring the child home at six o’clock, but they usually did not arrive until eight or eight-thirty, with Joanna overtired and complaining that she did not want to go to bed the minute she came through the door. Henry had taught her that phrase. “The minute she comes through the door” was something I had said once, and he mocked me with it in defending her. “Let the poor child have a minute before she goes to bed. She did just come through the door.” The poor child is, of course, crazy about Henry. He allows her to call him that, instead of “Daddy.” And now he takes her to dinner at a French restaurant that she adores, which doesn’t open until five-thirty. That means that she gets home close to eight. I am a beast if I refuse to let her eat her escargots. And it would be cruel to tell her that her father’s support payments fluctuate wildly, while the French dining remains a constant. Forget the money—Henry has been a good father. He visits every Tuesday night, carefully twirls her crayons in the pencil sharpener, and takes her every other weekend. The only bad thing he has done to her—and even Henry agreed about that—was to introduce her to the sleepie he had living with him right after the divorce: an obnoxious woman, who taught Joanna to sing “I’m a Woman.” Fortunately, she did not remember many of the words, but I thought I’d lose my mind when she went around the house singing “Doubleyou oh oh em ay en” for two weeks. Sometimes the sleepie tucked a fresh flower in Joanna’s hair—like Maria Muldaur, she explained. The child had the good sense to be embarrassed.

  The men I know are very friendly with one another. When Henry was at the house last week, he helped Dan, who lives with me, carry a bookcase up the steep, narrow steps to the second floor. Henry and Dan talk about nutrition—Dan’s current interest. My brother Bobby, the only person I know who is seriously interested in hallucinogens at the age of twenty-six, gladly makes a fool of himself in front of Henry by bringing out his green yo-yo, which glows by the miracle of two internal batteries. Dan tells Bobby that if he’s going to take drugs, he should try dosing his body with vitamins before and after. The three of them Christmas-shop for me. Last year they had dinner at an Italian restaurant downtown. I asked Dan what they ordered, and he said, “Oh, we all had manicotti.”

  I have been subsisting on red zinger tea and watermelon, trying to lose weight. Dan and Henry and Bobby are all thin. Joanna takes after her father in her build. She is long and graceful, with chiseled features that would shame Marisa Berenson. She is ten years old. When I was at the laundry to pick up the clothes yesterday a woman mistook me, from the back, for her cousin Addie.

  In Joanna’s class at school they are having a discussion of problems with the environment. She wants to take our big avocado plant in to school. I have tried patiently to explain that the plant does not have anything to do with environmental problems. She says that they are discussing nature, too. “What’s the harm?” Dan says. So he goes to work and leaves it to me to fit the towering avocado into the Audi. I also get roped into baking cookies so Joanna can take them to school and pass them around to celebrate her birthday. She tells me that it is the custom to put the cookies in a box wrapped in birthday paper. We select a paper with yellow bears standing in concentric circles. Dan dumps bran into the chocolate-chip-cookie dough. He forbids me to use a dot of red food coloring in the sugar-cookie hearts.

  My best friend, Dianne, comes over in the mornings and turns her nose up at my red zinger. Sometimes she takes a shower here because she loves our shower head. “How come you’re not in there all the time?” she says. My brother is sweet on her. He finds her extremely attractive. He asked me if I had noticed the little droplets of water from the shower on her forehead, just at the hairline. Bobby lends her money because her husband doesn’t give her enough. I know for a fact that Dianne is thinking of having an affair with him.

  Dan has to work late at his office on Tuesday nights, and a while ago I decided that I wanted that one night to myself each week—a night without any of them. Dianne said, “I know what you mean,” but Bobby took great offense and didn’t come to visit that night, or any other night, for two weeks. Joanna was delighted that she could be picked up after school by Dianne, in Dianne’s 1966 Mustang convertible, and that the two of them could visit until Henry came by Dianne’s to
pick her up. Dan, who keeps saying that our relationship is going sour—although it isn’t—pursed his lips and nodded when I told him about Tuesday nights, but he said nothing. The first night alone I read a dirty magazine that had been lying around the house for some time. Then I took off all my clothes and looked in the hall mirror and decided to go on a diet, so I skipped dinner. I made a long-distance call to a friend in California who had just had a baby. We talked about the spidery little veins in her thighs, and I swore to her over and over again that they would go away. Then I took one of each kind of vitamin pill we have in the house.

  The next week I had prepared for my spare time better. I had bought whole-wheat flour and clover honey, and I made four loaves of whole-wheat bread. I made a piecrust, putting dough in the sink and rolling it out there, which made a lot of sense but which I would never let anybody see me doing. Then I read Vogue. Later on I took out the yoga book I had bought that afternoon and put it in my plastic cookbook-holder and put that down on the floor and stared at it as I tried to get into the postures. I overcooked the piecrust and it burned. I got depressed and drank a Drambuie. The week after that, I ventured out. I went to a movie and bought myself a chocolate milkshake afterward. I sat at the drugstore counter and drank it. I was going to get my birth-control-pill prescription refilled while I was there, but I decided that would be depressing.

  Joanna sleeps at her father’s apartment now on Tuesday nights. Since he considers her too old to be read a fairy tale before bed, Henry waltzes with her. She wears a long nightgown and a pair of high-heeled shoes that some woman left there. She says that he usually plays “The Blue Danube,” but sometimes he kids around and puts on “Idiot Wind” or “Forever Young” and they dip and twirl to it. She has hinted that she would like to take dancing lessons. Last week she danced through the living room at our house on her pogo stick. Dan had given it to her, saying that now she had a partner, and it would save him money not having to pay for dancing lessons. He told her that if she had any questions, she could ask him. He said she could call him “Mr. Daniel.” She was disgusted with him. If she were Dan’s child, I am sure he would still be reading her fairy tales.