by Ann Beattie
This spectator sport was something I’d started doing once or twice a week, as the sun began to set: sharing a joint, having a glass of wine with Etch and Kim, looking out the window while they undressed (an odd bit of propriety: I’d wait until I heard Etch get into bed, then watch while Kim slowly took off his robe and did his little undressing dance). I sat in the corner chair (discarded, one night, by the famous actress, snapped up immediately by Etch) to watch. The box’s storm was a little too theatrically noisy to be scary, but it wasn’t quite funny, either. The strange thing was that other times, when real thunder rumbled, I always thought of the box and burst into laughter. Kim was a dancer, so the sexual pyrotechnics were often quite impressive. But I also became fascinated with the way his white robe pooled on the floor, thinking that if I knew how to take photographs, I could have quite a collection of images. The robe had real personality.
Then, around six, Etch showering, Kim sometimes sleeping, sometimes pulling on the robe, I’d wander out without saying goodbye and find myself ascending the stairs as if the climb was out of my control—just something that happened. And then, a little exhausted myself, I’d make a reservation for dinner, or think about going out to the Korean grocer, what I might buy there, what I might cook.
Neil and I stood at the red light.
“Negative Capability: ‘When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ You’ve got to love Keats. Forget his figures on the urn. He’s using the word irritable, as if facts should make a person irritable.”
Rollerina streaked by, curving into Washington Square Park: a guy on skates, in a ballgown.
The light turned green.
One of the runaways who’d been in Chaff got in touch with me through my agent and invited me to her high school graduation. She was going to start school at NYU in the fall. She’d been diagnosed as bipolar, and being on medicine was a miracle. As an infant, she’d been sold at a shopping center in Paramus, New Jersey. The adoptive parents had had to pay the teenagers (her parents) in deutschmarks. This had all been facilitated by an ex-nun who worked for a phony Catholic organization funded by the CIA. And that was just the beginning.
On the telephone, I told her I didn’t like ceremonies, but I was proud of her, and would like to take her to lunch. She named the restaurant, and the date. It was an Italian restaurant on Mulberry Street, Via. Her name was Destiny.
She’d made a reservation: “Destiny, for two.” She’d matured into an attractive girl with high cheekbones and an aquiline nose who might have been a model if she’d grown taller. She was still very thin, her cuticles still bitten, her nails ridged. She’d been in rehab and ordered bottled water with a slice of lemon. I ordered the same.
“One big bottle’s better,” the waiter said, walking away.
It turned out lunch was free, because the owner’s daughter had gone through rehab with Destiny; they’d been roommates, and the daughter felt Destiny was responsible for turning her life around. She didn’t come to lunch because she was nine months pregnant and couldn’t walk.
“You never told us about you,” she said. “I guess it didn’t matter, but we were always so curious. About anybody who wanted to hang out with us who seemed okay, I mean. We’d decided we could do without most adults.”
“Yeah, it didn’t seem proper, or whatever word I’m looking for,” I said. “I’d never done anything like that before. I happened to have the good luck to be called in to fix a script, and Larry was so impressed he let me completely rewrite it.”
“When it won the award, I peed my pants,” she said.
“So you’re doing it yourself, huh? Going to study film? And I’m so happy about your graduation.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I think a lot of us would like to get in touch with you, but maybe a few of us aren’t doing so well, or they didn’t necessarily finish school, and sometimes it makes them think they’re not, you know, somebody you’d feel good about seeing, even though they’re not still messed up, really. June Bug still is.”
“Well, I hope they realize they can contact me if they want to. Is there someone in particular you’re thinking of ?”
“No. Just, you know, some of them. You were a big hero to us. Getting us to talk about our reasoning. I mean, how cool is it that it won the Academy Award?”
“Incredibly cool.”
“We had this fantasy life about you. We weren’t all hanging out together or anything—we didn’t even all know each other—but when we did meet, at that party at that place in Brooklyn? The girls were saying you were going to tell us about your life. That you’d been a druggie, or one of them thought you’d been raised in a convent.”
“Neither thing is true,” I said.
“I still see Blake and Sharon. She has a picture of herself with you at the party; she keeps it on her altar, what I call her altar: scented candles and all her jewelry. That picture, and a picture of her brother. And then Blister said he knew where you lived, and that you lived with a dancer.”
“My husband’s a writer.”
“Your husband’s Asian?”
“No. He’s American.”
“I guess Blister got the wrong idea,” she said. “He said he ran into your husband in Chelsea. That he was on the way to dance practice?”
“Not my husband.” I thought for a minute. “Blister knows where I live?”
“Yup, because his sponsor’s some seminary guy. He was over there for lunch, and the seminary whatsit told him who was on the block, and you were, and some actor, was it some model?”
“I wonder why he didn’t ring the bell.”
“I don’t know. But he did run into this guy who claimed he was your husband, and he was pulling a big box along?”
I suddenly understood. The only thing I didn’t understand was why Kim would have said he was my husband.
“That guy visits somebody who lives in the building,” I said. “He’s trouble. Blister should stay away from him.”
“It seemed odd to me. I told Blister I didn’t believe it, because Blister picks up on zero, right? The guy wanted—it doesn’t matter, since he’s not your husband … the guy sort of asked him if he’d be interested in a threesome.”
I put both hands on the edge of the table and looked at her.
“I told him that was bullshit,” she said. “Not that it’s wrong, or anything, if that’s what you’re into. It’s not like he sees his sponsor there, usually. The sponsor had a broken foot, so he got Blister to come down, and they had a picnic or something out behind the place. And when Blister was leaving, he saw this guy who flirted with him, and he’d come out of your house, so—”
“We only rent the top floor. There are quite a few tenants in the building.”
“Oh. I thought you might have been like us, because that’s what everybody said—you’d been like us, but you went straight and figured out a way to get rich.”
“People talk about other people, and they make things up. Then it becomes real to them. But it doesn’t have anything to do with the other person.”
Food was brought by the owner and a younger man from the kitchen, who pointed at the plates: “Manicotti. Insalata mista. Bread, just baked. No meat.” The owner smiled broadly, poured water in our glasses, squeezed Destiny’s shoulder, and left.
“He’s nice, but he’s not speaking to his daughter,” she said, when they walked away.
“I lost my best friend when I got married,” I said. “She didn’t think my husband was worthy.”
“Well, you’re very cool,” she said. “Is he?”
“He’s sort of a Svengali.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means someone who’s manipulative. More than that: somebody who makes you think you need him in order to accomplish anything.”
“Your husband?”
“I’m on to him,” I said. “I realized he was acting the way he did because he was insecure. W
hat I was drawn to were the other parts of him: his brilliance; his spontaneity. I’d say his sense of humor, but every woman is deluded into thinking whoever she’s with has a superior sense of humor. It’s a way women approve of themselves.”
“You live with a guy you think manipulates you?”
“No, I live with a guy who’d like to have that power, but who’s lost it.”
“And you’d tell me if it was the guy who wanted the threesome, right?”
“Destiny: that’s not my husband.”
“So what are you working on?”
I was silent for a while. The image of Kim dropping his robe on the floor popped up in my mind. The sash, streaming away. My copy editing work had dried up. I couldn’t think of anything I’d done in a long time, so I lied; I pretended the research I’d done for Neil was more current. “I’ve been at the library researching birds of the South,” I said. “As a favor to Neil. He had a contract—well, he decided it was too academic, but he had a contract to write about Southern writers, like Flannery O’Connor, and the use of birds in their work. When you talk about what you’ve turned up in your research it always sounds esoteric.”
“I don’t know what that word means.”
“It means something only a few particular people would understand.”
“Give me a chance. What did you find out about birds?”
“They’re all different.”
She continued to look at me expectantly.
“Take turkey buzzards: they’re so big, they take off very slowly. They’re vulnerable because of their weight. Clumsy. Sometimes easy prey. They have a highly developed sense of smell, and they ride the wind, looking for anything that might be, you know, dead.”
“Carnivorous,” she said, proud to let me know she knew the word.
“Neil, Neil, Neil. Do you miss locking eyes, moving your lips up my ear, whispering? You could do it all again, it just wouldn’t have any power.”
“Listen to yourself. These are the remarks you make, pulling on one of my T-shirts, thumping down on the bed, at one in the morning.”
“If you’ve really reformed, don’t you sort of hate yourself ? Because what would you be? Some middle-aged guy who goes off to work and writes in a room papered with gold fleur-de-lys wallpaper some gay guys rent out?”
“You’re acting like you think New York is a sane place.”
“You’re not listening. If you don’t want to think about yourself, how about me? You used to do an awful lot of thinking about how to educate me, before you’d convinced me what things of quality I could have a taste for, or acquire, to be a more sophisticated person. Now I drink Earl Grey tea—loose tea—and wear a Burberry raincoat with the belt tied in the back, and go to the tailor. I sleep on five-million-thread-count sheets, but I’m a reverse snob. I drink Prosecco instead of champagne. I get it, and there’s no going back. You have plenty of money to support my desires, which are conveniently your desires.”
“You don’t think there was an electrical charge between us the minute we met?”
“We were both in dead-end relationships.”
“Don’t talk in clichés. Also: if you put this many duvets on the bed, why don’t you sleep under them?”
“There are only two. Throw one off if you’re hot. Feel my head.”
“Jesus!” he said. “You’re burning up.”
“Flu.”
“Flu? We had flu shots. Are you serious?”
“What do you think? I soaked in near boiling water, then came to bed?”
“We had flu shots.”
“With inoculation, the flu will lack severity.”
“What the hell!” he said. “Have you been talking to me while you’re delusional? Where’s the thermometer?”
“We don’t have a thermometer. I didn’t know which brand was the only brand to buy.”
“Don’t be a bitch just because you’re sick.”
“But you have an opinion, don’t you? On which thermometer is best?”
“A ‘bible’?”
“Right. Think of it as an outline of a TV show,” my agent said.
“If I write the bible, what happens?”
“It gets approved, we hope. They make a pilot. Jonas says he has a lot of clout right now. The thing is, he needs it in a hurry.”
“I don’t know—”
“I’ll messenger over some samples. But think wives. Waiting. Their daily life, the way they grow close, some become more patriotic, others don’t, somebody gets breast cancer. Somebody gets pregnant by the roofer. You know. Children everywhere, always having to take care of the children.”
“I wouldn’t know—”
“Listen, it is a fabulous kill fee.”
“Greetings, Jane. Though we never met, I get in touch with you and express my sympathy about Ben’s passing and, to offer you some baby pictures if you would like them, perhaps in exchange for some memento from his more recent life such as a book that meant something to him or a paperweight, or also perhaps a pipe or something like that, if he smoked one. As children we made toys out of pipe cleaners and twisted them into various shapes such as eyeglasses which would also be nice to have as a remembrance of Ben. I visited Vermont one time but you were not there at that time. I appreciate, night skies with many stars. I will always remember my brother and the times we had in, for instance Vermont. If you ever find yourself in Sandusky please call and I hope you have pleasant memories of the person I loved so much as I do, and wish you well. With personal regards, Johnlene.”
“Where’s your robe, Kim?”
“That? I threw it out. Bottle blondes in Hollywood wear that trash. Faggots who wear mascara.”
Neil and I were in a coffee shop in Chelsea, after seeing a show at the Guggenheim. Neil reached across the table and took my hand and narrowed his eyes—it was the way he punctuated important moments, as if time were a vowel he could elongate simply by staring. He seemed nervous, though, which got my attention; almost like a young man about to propose. I was used to his whispering, which he did to create intimacy—even though I’d told him I was on to him—and which he also did as a way of communing with himself, or mocking the illusion that he was.
He reached across the table for my hand. “What I’m about to say is going to come as a surprise, but because I love you, I have to tell you. I want you to accept it, but I don’t have any control over that. I won’t be able to answer any questions, whatever you ask. Don’t look at me that way. It’s going to be all right. I’ve loved you, and I always will. But I’m going to disappear.”
From the way he said it, I knew he wasn’t kidding. His eyes were almost squeezed shut.
“Do you really think I’m going to accept that?” I said.
“I know what I want you to do,” he said. “Think about it: would it have been easier if you’d gotten up and found a note? Would you want to think you’d been married to a coward?”
“This doesn’t happen,” I said. “People don’t get married, then …”
I stopped, because of course it did happen.
“Who is it?” I said. “It’s someone I don’t know about at all, isn’t it?”
“Nobody else. In an hour”—he looked at his watch—“more like half an hour, I’m going to get in a car. You can watch me get in, if you want, but that will break both our hearts. A lawyer is going to call you at five.” He paused. “A different lawyer—not anyone either of us used drawing up the pre-nup.” He said the term sneeringly. “The lawyer doesn’t know where I’m going, but he knows what he’s supposed to do. His name is Richard Flager. Everything I have is yours, including my heart. You’re going to be fine.”
“Did you kill somebody?” I said.
“Shhh,” he said. “I love you, and I thank you for our life together.”
There was no possibility he was kidding. None.
In such moments, very unrelated thoughts can occur to someone. In my case, I remembered an angry phone call from long ago as if it had just happene
d, in which my stepfather tried to persuade me to attend my college graduation for my mother’s sake, and I had hung up screaming. I could still feel the scream, but not remember its sound. It was definitely the last time I had ever made such a noise. Now, I was not entirely optimistic about being able to speak again.
Time passed, but his eyes never widened, and never stopped looking into mine. His expression was very recognizable. I remembered the term Negative Capability, his little lecture standing at the stoplight. Keats’s frozen figures. The transvestite zooming into the park. Neil blinked. It seemed for a few seconds that he might be on the verge of crying, but he was simply looking at me with the same eyes he had always trained on mine, in which I could see kindness, interest, perhaps even love. Quite possibly, love.
I thought about how I would stand up. I knew how to do that, of course, but we were in a booth, and sliding across the seat was not going to work because my legs had become numb.
“Where is this car going to come?” I said, looking away from his eyes, which had contained kindness, interest, and probably love.
“To the apartment,” he said, and it was the last thing he ever said to me.
“Why the fuck does she care about some trashy robe? She went through the garbage? You two want the robe back? I can’t believe this. And you think I’m the crazy one? It was shoplifted from Bloomie’s. It wasn’t your daddy’s money that bought me the robe. It was my robe, and I divested. I wear a serape now. I’m not Jean Harlow. I’m a man who wears a serape.”
Months passed, and my agent called, trying to jolly me into writing: “The world is waiting.” Irony always exerted a persuasive pull. I felt better when it was present, like stacked duvets, even if it was necessary to turn some back for a while. That spring, the building went co-op, and I bought the fourth floor. Raymond, the psychologist, moved, as did the writer for the Village Voice. (He’d been living with another model in NoHo, anyway: eventually, he married her in a Buddhist ceremony in Mustique). Etch and Kim had a huge fight, followed by a commitment ceremony in P’Town, where I was the ring bearer: for the groom, a white gold band, set with onyx and a half-carat, channel-set canary diamond; for the bride, a Tiffany mesh bracelet fashioned into a jockstrap.
