by Ann Beattie
Also by Ann Beattie
Distortions
Chilly Scenes of Winter
Secrets and Surprises
Falling in Place
The Burning House
Love Always
Where You’ll Find Me
Picturing Will
What Was Mine
Another You
My Life, Starring Dara Falcon
Park City
Perfect Recall
The Doctor’s House
Follies
WALKS
WITH
MEN
Ann Beattie
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WALKS
WITH
MEN
In 1980, in New York, I met a man who promised me he’d change my life, if only I’d let him. The deal was this: he’d tell me anything, anything, as long as the information went unattributed, as long as no one knew he and I had any real relationship. At first it didn’t seem like much of a deal, but my intuition told me he knew something I didn’t yet know about the way men thought—and back then, I thought understanding men would give me information about the way I could make a life for myself. I liked his idea that nobody would know we meant anything to each other: not the college where he taught, or the magazine where he was on staff. Not my boyfriend in Vermont.
“You give me information, and I give you what?” I said.
“You give me a promise that nobody can trace anything back to me. I explain anything you want to know about men, but nobody can know I’m the source of your information.”
“You think men are that special?”
“A different species. One I understand very well, because I’ve sheltered myself there to stay out of the rain,” he said. “You’re smart, but you’re missing basic knowledge that will eventually stop you dead in your tracks.”
“Nobody talks to anybody this way,” I said.
He said (thumb gently rubbing my wrist): “You don’t think I know that?”
Neil had been the writer assigned to provide a perspective on statements I’d made when I was interviewed by the New York Times, about why my generation was so disillusioned, but unlike most subjects and commentators, we met. Soon afterwards, he made his offer, and I didn’t say no. I was interested. I’d only had two long-term relationships, and I had never had an affair.
We walked in the rain. I wore a Barbour jacket Neil bought for me on Lexington Avenue, in a store on the same block as my hotel. He expressed shock that I, a person of such good taste, didn’t already have one. This was the second time we’d met, and it wasn’t exactly a romantic occasion. He’d rounded me up at Mount Sinai after I had a laparoscopy. It was a minor procedure: in in the morning, out by early afternoon; apparently, my wooziness and vomiting on the sidewalk had not been anticipated by the doctors because it was not part of the usual scenario. (“A different species.”)
Neil and I had first met at lunch, when an editor of the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times suggested the three of us get together (there had been quite a few letters to the editor after my interview, and his “perspective” piece). When he found out I had plans to return to New York later in the month, he insisted on meeting me at the hospital. Afterwards, we took a cab to my hotel and sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the love seat staring into an empty fireplace with a sign above it saying that under no circumstances should the fireplace be lit (did they imagine travelers might get into a snit and destroy old love letters, or that they packed logs?). I felt woozy and headache-y; Neil—who I would soon find out thought often about presents, as ways to cheer people up—started thinking aloud, saying that while I called my mother and stepfather to tell them I was okay, he would go out and get me a better scarf to go with my jacket. What was that nubbly wool thing around my neck? It should be used to buff a car. And wasn’t the hotel room drab? (“Never trust a hotel that’s been renovated until the second year.”) Thus began my tutorial: a young woman who’d graduated from Harvard with honors, considering the advice of an older man. The medical procedure had gone well; I was okay, what about a glass of wine (he called it “a drink,” and told me that announcing what drink you’d order wasn’t done: one always said, simply, “a drink”) at the bar downstairs, and then he would tuck me in bed and get me a Burberry scarf—durable and stylishly understated; good enough for the Queen, it should be good enough for me—and then we could prop up in bed and begin our more serious talk. If I thought of the right questions, he promised to give honest answers, and . . . what? Everything would be known, between someone who was about to turn twenty-two, and the older man she was infatuated with, who was forty-four, all in the honorable cause of the young
woman’s enlightenment, so she would no longer make the mistakes she had made—might continue to make—if someone (Neil), the right person, didn’t intervene?
Italics provide a wonderful advantage: you see, right away, that the words are in a rush. When something exists at a slant, you can’t help but consider irony.
I became something of an overnight sensation, when I was twenty-one, for an interview I gave the New York Times, in which I—one of that year’s summa cum laude Harvard graduates—disparaged my Ivy League education, at graduation, in the presence of President Jimmy Carter, and stated my intentions to drop out and move to a farm in Vermont. Neil, a Barnard professor, had been hired to elucidate the issue of my generation’s dissatisfaction with the Establishment, writing a piece for the Times in which he contextualized my angst by quoting Proust, Rilke, Mallarmé, and Donald Barthelme. Then—though it had not been implied in the assignment—he concluded the piece by offering me a return to “the old ways,” with a facetious proposal of marriage. I dropped him a note when I read it, saying I’d let him know my answer soon. I didn’t get it: the ironies within ironies, certainly not the fact that he was only sending up a speculative thought balloon that I mistook for an advertising dirigible.
At the time this relationship began, I had been living in a tiny town in Vermont with a man named Benjamin Greenblatt, who’d graduated from Juilliard and
gone to work on a dairy farm, doing chores, growing and canning vegetables, and milking goats to make cheese (a fisherman; a wanderer; a hiker; a sometimes poet; a bass player). By the time I met Neil, though, the novelty of living in the country had worn off, and I was tired of trying to learn to play the pump organ so I could accompany Ben singing lyrics he wrote on napkins and notepads, or took down in shorthand on the palm of his hand. I’d had a yearlong bellyache I didn’t think was metaphorical, and had finally been referred by a doctor in Burlington to an OB-GYN (courtesy of my stepfather’s intervention) in New York.
The day I met Neil, I had almost signed with a literary agent who’d contacted me after the Times piece, and was scheduled, after lunch, to go to the studio of a photographer at the Gulf & Western Building near Columbus Circle. There was instant chemistry between Neil and me, and the presence of the section editor who was with us that afternoon was as annoying as a soggy cocktail napkin. I went to the photographer’s studio (the agent wanted me to have good photographs in hand; I didn’t think about the fact that she gave me no writing assignment), then met Neil at the place he’d written inside the matchbook: Grand Central. Not anywhere specific, just “G. Central.” He did not mention what time I should be there. I imagined he must know how long it would take to be photographed. When it was over, I rode the subway (good instructions from the photographer) and entered the station. I scanned the huge space, then stood by the Information booth, having decided on the most predictable meeting place. Eventually he came toward me, smiling, carrying a bag that held two chocolate cupcakes. The hotel key was already in his pocket.
I was young, and I wasn’t used to being secretive with my women friends. Some met us later that week for coffee (I lied to Ben and told him I needed to rest in the city before I could travel). During those hectic few days, my friend Ruby came over to a store where Neil was looking for old jazz albums, and afterwards the three of us went to Washington Square and sat on a bench and drank Cokes. Christa (who had gone to grade school with me and worked for a brokerage firm in the city) went to Mary Boone with us and looked at paintings. Later, when he and I started seeing each other, I found out that the editor who’d been at lunch had called Neil the next day, saying she had an extra ticket to hear Spalding Grey.
“What do you want me to do?” he would eventually say to me, “about your friend X, who called me at work and asked me to have a drink with her?”
He was teaching me even when he was not teaching me.
You make the reasonable assumption that two egotistical people had found each other, shipwrecked like millions of others on the island of Manhattan. It was 1980. Carter was committing adultery in his heart and not getting the hostages freed from Iran, and everyone felt unsettled. The seventies were grinding to a halt like stripped gears. When the talk wasn’t about the number of days the hostages had been held, it was about money. Being disenfranchised had about as much cachet as paying for things with cash. Bon Temps Rouler did not exist then—or, rather, it did, though it was not yet the name of a restaurant in lower Manhattan.
To stop me from feeling sorry for myself after the laparoscopy, he pretended the problem was vanity, not pain: “Okay, you have a couple of little marks on your body. Every woman has ear piercings, but you have a belly button that’s been stuck, and a tiny scar just where your pubic hair begins.” (His finger hovered near the edge of the scar.) “Never act like they’re imperfections. They’re who you are. They let anyone who’s lucky enough to see them know that you’ve been subjected to certain explorations.” (He loved stretching out words, mocking them for having so many syllables: “ex-plor-a-tions.”) “Somebody’s examined you the way the Lilliputians looked at Gulliver. The marks are the minuscule footprints left behind.”
Also: “Don’t use hair conditioner. Electricity is sexy. When your hair falls forward, it reaches out. It lets me know some part of you wants something.”
“You have to tell me,” I said. “The guy who meets the girl and they have a couple of drinks, maybe only coffee, and he holds her hand as she walks along the curb, she reaches the end and he tightens his grip so she can step down. . . . He’s gallantly escorted her, but the next day he doesn’t call. He never, ever calls. Explain that.”
“Let’s say it wasn’t a curb she walked along, it was a plank. At the end, he’d want to see her walk into the air, wouldn’t he? You’d feel the immediacy of that in your gut. If somebody’s walking a plank, the only satisfactory outcome is that the person reaches the edge and walks off, and you don’t get an escort when you do that. No guy wants to feel like he’s the MC escorting Miss America. Listen: if you set out on that walk, then that’s your moment. What the other person gets is that fabulous, queasy thrill of being with you until the second he has no more control. It’s sexual. Understand?”
At night, back in the life in Vermont I was edging away from, Ben Greenblatt sat in his Morris chair with cat-clawed arms, bought at auction for ten dollars, and read Kafka and Borges. Neither of us had real jobs. He made notes in the margins of his precious books. When I eventually snuck a look, I saw there was no punctuation: no exclamation points, no question marks. “Did we already know this,” without a question mark, still asks a question, I suppose. But “Foreshadowing catastrophe” without an exclamation point seemed peculiarly anticlimactic.
Ben’s mother had worked in a bank; his father, who died when he was twelve, had been a vice president of the bank where his wife worked. He had a sister, Johnlene, who’d been named after both his father and his mother, Arlene. Ben had no middle name. Apparently, his parents felt the previous child already represented both their names, so they hadn’t been creative in naming their son. Soon after we broke up, Ben became simply “Goodness.” He inherited forty acres of land—as promised, in exchange for chores—when the couple he’d worked for died. The people’s son got rid of the goats immediately, sold the remaining half of the land to a developer who eventually built town houses with white exteriors, in a strange configuration that made them look like teeth that needed orthodontia, along with two clay tennis courts and a heated pool. Over the rise, out of view of all this, Ben renovated the old chicken coop and created a yoga studio that was later christened by Pattie Boyd, wielding a bottle of organic cider. This became the famous Goodness Studio, where musicians came to do Downward Dog and the Sun Salutation: a little stretching, post-detox and pre-reunion tour. Bob Dylan himself once showed up during an afternoon session, opened the door, looked at the stunned faces, took off his hat and gave it a Frisbee toss into the studio, then said, “Where there’s no dogs, there’s no meaningful life,” got back in his Jeep, and drove away.
This all happened the year after I left. I heard about it from the postman, who kept in touch with me.
“Ben,” I said to him (this was after Grand Central, and after the hospital and the hotel), “I know this is going to be hard for you to believe, but I met a man in New York. He’s everything we hate: a professor who sounds professorial; somebody who writes for the mainstream press. But I’ve fallen in love.”
He looked at me for a long time before answering. Then he said: “Think of me disapproving when he asks you to move to suburbia.”
By spring, a book Neil had written, Prometheus in California: The Rise of the Executive Counterculture, became the way out of his full-time job at Barnard. Under an assumed name, he also began writing an advice column for a women’s magazine, with a panel of so-called experts that included a cross-dressing society haircutter, the owner of a jazz club, and a Ritalin-addicted SoHo veterinarian (his former Harvard roommate). They did it for the way-downtown expense account dinners with Neil, and made a joke of showing up at the restaurant with canned answers, though they didn’t know what question would be addressed in the next column. (He brought some letters and got their advice. He spoke to his teenage niece later, on the phone, and asked her to update their response with hip new ways of phrasing things.) With a few minor changes, the answers often worked. I found the lit
erary allusions amusing, the in-jokes droll. He was working on his second book, a novel—though his agent (my agent) had urged him to follow up his first book with more nonfiction—and that was the reason he worked in SoHo, in an extra room at the vet’s office, his concentration occasionally interrupted by an after-hours emergency. He’d once had to help his friend Tyler wrestle a bloodhound to the floor (forget the examination table) after it had gotten into a restaurant’s garbage bag containing the week’s coffee grounds. Another time he’d had to give the bad news to the owner of a ferret that had bled to death after being bitten by a rat that had come in through the window. (Tyler had been stoned, had always been phobic about ferrets, and didn’t think he could approximate proper sorrow.)
Me? I was doing research at the New York Public Library about birds in the South. (Neil had asked me to. It became a standing joke: how do you hint that someone go to the library and research birds?) I had also researched how moonshine was made, especially inside prisons (even harder to hint at). I had started doing a little freelance copy editing for Neil’s book publisher, when I was lucky enough to be called, and I was enrolled in a night school class in essay writing at NYU. I did my research, did my homework, and often went to the movies with friends. Some of them couldn’t imagine why I believed Neil was writing every night until dawn. (Because he came back to my apartment. We had early-morning sex. He told me writers wrote at night.)
Other things he told me, that I believed: that you and another person could do something and say the words “This never happened,” and it had not happened; that purchasing only the finest brands or shopping at thrift shops was the only way to acquire things—anything in between was bourgeois and pathetic; that only dumb people bought cars instead of leasing them; crystal wineglasses were for morning orange juice, and grappa was best sipped from the bottle; Turgenev was a greater writer than Dostoyevsky; using an exclamation point for punctuation was interchangeable with eating food and drooling; Irma Franklin was a better singer than Aretha. It was morally wrong to buy a purebred dog.
