by Ann Beattie
Blood oranges. (And also the novel, by John Hawkes.)
Rain. (And also the poem, by Robert Creeley.)
“Stella!” (And also the Italian cookies: crumbly Stella D’oro.)
I sometimes play a little game and think of myself as “Jane.” It’s a good game, because it really does give you some distance from yourself, and it lets you sort out what’s important and what’s not. If a character named Jane does this or that, you are only a kind of reporter. And you can report on something any number of ways.
Flashback: Jane and Neil are at a restaurant with a magazine editor, who is urging wine on them. What’s the point of having her job if she doesn’t make use of the expense account ha-ha-ha. Neil raises the glass to swirl the shallow liquid—the red of fluorescent-tinged puddles at night. It has started to rain, streaking the restaurant window. He takes a sip, nods. “Fine,” he says, a bit querulously. (Is the waiter hyperalert to mixed messages—is that why he hesitates before he pours, first into Jane’s glass, then the editor’s, then—very tentatively—into Neil’s?)
Jane is accepting a compliment from the editor. She picks up her stemmed glass of Côtes du Rhône. Later, she will be informed by Neil that she should ask for wine in “a short glass.” The cocktail napkin sticks to the bottom. Later, he will tell her to discard them, because they are always (a word he likes to avoid in most cases so that when he does use it, it has great emphasis) only a hindrance. She will remember this all her life—both when it seems appropriate to the circumstances, and when such knowledge would not seem to apply. She will always remember this and always push away the cocktail napkin.
What sort of information is this for getting through life?
Extremely good information, she decides. He is dead (make that “dead”)—the insurance company has investigated, though they have not yet closed the case. She is set to inherit several million dollars from his life insurance policy, as well as the money she has already withdrawn from the bank account, and stock—some of which she has cashed in—that was bought during their brief marriage, after the sale of property in Sonoma. This wonderful, generous man—and she had once signed a pre-nup for which she consulted her own (her stepfather’s) attorney! That wife, that aggressive wife … wouldn’t you think she’d resurface after his death? But she doesn’t.
Raymond left New York in October to run a boutique hotel in Miami Beach that has no sign, and an unlisted phone number.
Etch and Kim fought about whether to go to Italy on a vacation they couldn’t afford.
All facts that could be flashed on the screen at the end of the movie. But there is no movie. Jane remembers those years, though, as if they had been—in part because her friends (who dwindled to only those people in the building) always talked about everything as if it was over (“Remember last night?”), while holding out the possibility that whatever happened could be rerun. Neil didn’t have that sense of things. He thought people shouldn’t romanticize ordinary life. “Our struggles, our little struggles,” he would whisper, in bed, at night. Sometimes he or she would click on some of the flashlights and consider the ceiling, with the radiant swirls around the bright nuclei, the shadows like opened oysters glistening in brine. (In the ’80s, the champagne was always waiting.)
Jane is driving north to Vermont: rental car, white Toyota Corolla, whizzing up the Merritt Parkway. She’s listening to Chet Baker on the radio, wondering how someone with so little talent, so clearly only seductive, could have become so famous.
She stops to get gas and pee. The restroom smells of ammonia, and in the next stall, a woman is trying to hush her crying child.
Hours pass. She stops one more time, sits in a booth and has coffee. She remembers the red vinyl seat at the coffee shop in New York—a place she has never returned to, actually fearing it, as if it were the site of a real disaster. She thinks about Ben, in the hallway, with his pamphlets. Etch, saying something sarcastic about her taste in men.
Jane is not doing something sensible. She intends to try to rid herself of the memory of two men, though. The only person she told about this plan—Etch—agrees she should try something.
She drives and drives, and eventually gets to the house she lived in with Ben and sees the driveway, now paved, with a gate off its hinges and one upright, one leaning column. There is a FOR SALE sign. She pulls in, takes a deep breath, and opens the car door, gets out, and walks into the backyard.
The ring of phlox—her cutting garden—has disappeared. It is all scrubby lawn. She decides not to peek into the 4 x 4 windows of the house, but she likes the way they seem more like mirrors reflecting the sun than real windows. A nice quality of old glass. (As she wanders around, she is being watched by a security camera, but does not know it. The man who owns the property is cautious; there is an arsonist—who cares if it can’t be proven?—two towns over.) The rosemary bush is gone—Vermonters always say they’ll make it through the winter and sometimes they do, but not several consecutive winters. The azalea is spindly; the peach tree has grown. She walks around clumps of mud, clumps of grass, rock.
What happened to the family Ben told her about? She looks back at the gate.
(The man who owns the property looks at the wall monitor, says, “Damn,” and lowers the footrest of his La-Z-Boy. He calls for his wife.)
It is terribly inappropriate, but Jane has not been able to think where to scatter Neil’s ashes—of course, there was no trace of him when he was declared “dead,” but she and Etch decided something symbolic needed to be done (“You two are ridiculous!” Kim shouted at them, before rushing out of the apartment), so Jane and Etch burned some of Neil’s papers, and one of his shirts, in Etch’s fireplace. They are in a Tiffany box, a blue Tiffany box, that once contained a cut-glass vase Neil gave her to hold the flashlight bouquet. Crazy, all of it, in retrospect, but it’s the life she had. She has convinced herself that the ashes in the box represent Neil, and thinks he might like to be freed. She’s weary, not concentrating on where she’s walking, and almost twists her ankle in a gopher hole.
It was Ben she lived with here in Vermont, but part of her feeling sentimental has resulted in her notion that in some way, all men you love become similar because of that fact.
(“Where the fuck are you?” the man who owns the property yells, scaring the cat. The La-Z-Boy is a piece of shit. He can tell from the way the footrest flapped down that it isn’t going to come up again. Where is his wife when he needs her? Is he supposed to get in the truck and drive over to the property himself, with his bad foot?)
Two completely different human beings, Ben and Neil. Still, she imagines that if she gathers up something belonging to Ben, even if it is ground he walked on, her act may set them both free. This probably is pretty crazy, but who’s to know? Only Etch, who adores her no matter what.
She turns away from the house—it is cold; she wraps her scarf around her neck—and tries to transport herself to Chelsea, to the golden oak bed, but she remembers, instead, the way it felt sleeping on Jan’s floor, the hard wood under the sleeping bag, the two weeks she spent there that felt like two years, and she is overwhelmed with guilt that she stayed so long.
The heat at Jan’s went off before eight, and didn’t hiss on again until after 10 a.m. Where might Jan be? She hopes somewhere warm.
She paws the grass with her boot. Clever Hans. Does she instinctively understand signals from others and respond the way people want? Was that what was going on with Neil?
She read in the obits that Dr. Fendall died of
cancer.
Adjacent to the property, there had been a row of boarded-up town houses. And the conflicting signs: DO NOT ENTER. FOR SALE. Meaning what? Don’t come in here, but if you look it over, you might want it?
Who gets to go back? Nobody.
She’s a little anxious because she’s been trying to remember details of the journey to Ben’s farm, and she can’t remember stopping for gas, or anything she saw while driving. Well, she remembers trees
, but nothing very specific. Other cars. The traffic thinning. The change in the air. She remembers a child crying in a restroom, and the child’s mother trying to comfort it. As for the rest of the drive, she might pretend, mention big trucks when she tells the story to Etch, but she doesn’t really remember passing anyone, or being passed.
Right before she got married, she had done what her stepfather suggested, and called an attorney who was a friend of his in Washington, who’d had the surname Prettyman.
When they first met, Neil had said: “It’s not about having things figured out, or about communicating with other people, trying to make them understand what you understand. It’s about a chicken dinner at a drive-in. A soft pillow. Things that don’t need explaining.”
“You never told me what your favorite movie was,” she’d once said to him.
Then he disappeared. Not melodramatically, that second, but soon thereafter.
His favorite movie had been Blowup.
Now, having spent another day of the rest of her life alone, she is standing in a field in Vermont. She’s driven a long way to realize that she has no vivid memories of her life inside the house, or outside the house, or even of the time she’d seen Ben in New York. Or, rather, standing outside the house they’d lived in, it is not revealed to her that anything means more than it does.
Jane is sitting on the ground, clutching her knees.
“Something I can do for you?” a woman bouncing over the lawn in a Jeep calls out, her big forearm leaning out the open window, a red cap on her head.
“I used to live here,” she says.
“So did I,” the woman says, “in one of those houses down by the road, before the whole thing went belly-up. Now we live in a trailer.”
They consider each other. Jane wonders if she will be asked about the blue box on the ground beside her.
“My husband picked you up,” the woman says. At first, Jane does not understand.
“That’s a monitor on that shutter,” the woman says, pointing. “So you been auditioning for my husband, who must have kept looking, thinking you might do a lap dance.” She laughs, amused with herself.
Jane is not entirely sure she believes the woman, but perhaps it’s true. Perhaps she has been observed. Who can see as far as the shutter?
“My husband said somebody was checking it out to break in. I thought it would be somebody who had an eye on the antiques in advance of the auction.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Maybe there’s something that would strike your fancy. I’ve got the key.” The woman points to a cluster of things dangling from the truck’s rearview mirror.
“It doesn’t … I don’t think it would make me feel better to go inside,” she says.
The woman nods. “It’s private property, marked DO NOT ENTER, and my husband’s in a bad mood today.”
“I’ll be leaving.”
“New York plates. You drove from there? To look things over and drive back?”
“Memory lane.”
The woman brushes her hair out of her eyes. “Anything you’d want to share?”
“It was a long time ago. The town houses weren’t put up. When we lived here, the old farmer and his wife were alive. Ben rented, and worked on the land.”
“You know Goodness?” the woman says, her voice suddenly changing.
“I did. He died.”
“What do you mean, died?”
“He died. There was … it was an accident, in New York.”
“Fuck!”
“I’m sorry.”
“A car accident?”
“That’s the general idea. I’d appreciate it if I didn’t have to talk about it right now.”
“Waaaaaait a minute,” she says. “Are you the girlfriend?”
Jane nods.
“I heard about you. My brother-in-law met you one time, Dwight? He built the tennis courts. He said one night you three played Monopoly in a big snowstorm. He’s bankrupt. I heard about you when I hung out with Goodness after you left, back when I was in high school. He taught me to park so I could pass my driver’s test. I can’t believe he’s dead, that doesn’t make any sense. Are you here to dig up the time capsule?”
“What?”
“I’m not dumb just because I live in Vermont.”
“What?” Jane says again.
“I’m not gonna stop you! I was worried about what was going to happen to it, because the tree’s half dead. Whoever buys the property will probably take it down. Of course, if the bank repossesses it, they’re too stupid to take down a half-dead tree.” She is big-hipped, in jeans that end above her ankle. She is wearing thick white socks. There is a wedding ring on her puffy finger.
“Nancy Drew stuff, right?” she says, striding past Jane.
Jane catches up, and falls into step. “A lot of things happened after we broke up,” she says. “I married somebody else, and he just died too.”
“Do you have any good luck? That’s what Dwight says to me: ‘Got any good luck to tell me?’ He’ll be watching both of us, bored to death but too lazy to come over here and see what’s up. What do I care if he knows about the time capsule?”
They walk. It is as if the blue box isn’t even there. How will she scatter Neil’s ashes? What, exactly, was her initial idea?
“My name’s Cora,” the woman says.
“Jane,” Jane says. “Where we’re walking, there used to be a bed of phlox.”
“I remember. All died from mildew. Those other people who came after Ben left, they thought it was a sin to pick flowers! I’d come with my pruning shears and that woman would have herself a heart attack, worried to death I might be committing a sin. They didn’t last the winter. Speaking of the phlox back there, that wouldn’t have been a good place to bury the capsule. Bad drainage.”
“Where are we going?”
“Stop pretending. That tree, over where the woods start.”
“Will anything convince you I don’t know what you’re talking about?”
“Not if you’re here. It’s not a big deal, I saw what was in it, it’s not like it’s a million dollars. Hey, if it was, don’t you think I’d be out of here, living in Florida?”
“Let’s leave it where it is, whatever it is. I don’t think I’m going to be able to deal with this.”
“It’s my responsibility to give it to you so it won’t be destroyed.”
The tree’s trunk is partly hollow. Three boards nailed to the tree form rickety steps. A fourth swings free, having slipped a nail. The others are high off the ground; you’d need a ladder to climb them, and you still wouldn’t get anywhere near the top.
“You know, this is going to sound really strange, but I brought a box with me of my husband’s ashes. To scatter somewhere beautiful. Like in the woods. That’s what’s in that blue box back there.”
“None of my business,” the woman says. She kicks aside some leaves and lifts out a brick from the hollow of the tree. In the distance, a dog begins barking. She digs where the brick was with a stick and then with her hand. “Not such a good job burying it,” she says. “You know what? I do believe my husband’s lost sight of us, but you know what else? He’ll go back to his chair and take a nap, that’s what.” She stops rummaging and holds out a brown rectangle the size of a cigarette pack, but thinner. It has two rusted clamps, one on each side, and a cord that’s mostly deteriorated. She wipes the dirty rectangle on her jeans, as if she’s polishing an apple. She flips up the clamps and extends her hand.
Inside is a folded piece of paper that turns out to be a photocopy of the famous picture of the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, though now there is a cut-out photograph of her face where the nurse’s face had been. Above it, in a hand-drawn heart, is written: Ben and Jane 1979–1980.
It’s like something a child would make, more curious than moving. Something rattles in the rectangle: a cheap ring you’d get from a vending machine. “I wore it on my pinkie before
he put it in,” the woman says.
“You did? An engagement ring?”
“Noooooo, it’s a mood ring. I put it on and it turned pink, so that meant it was love. He wasn’t really in love with me, but I had a crush on him and we made out a little bit. Just fooling around.”
“He buried this?”
“I told him to. I bought it at a flea market. He liked it, but he didn’t want to take a present from me until I explained it could be a time capsule. There should be a pill in there, too.”
“Cyanide?” Jane says, amused.
Jane turns the pack over. Nothing falls into the palm of her hand. The woman takes it back and peers inside. “It got crapped up,” she says. “I see it down there. It was one of those pills you drop in water, and it unfolds into a flower. If he ever got you back, you’d put on the mood ring, and he could be really romantic and grow you a flower.” Cora looks at the ground. “I was just a kid,” she says. “Stop looking at me like I’m retarded.”
“What should I do with this?” Jane says, tucking the piece of paper back inside.
“I knew one day we’d meet. Of course, I didn’t know you’d come here to tell me he was dead. I’m just as glad it’s some other guy’s ashes, not his. Goodness’s ashes blowing around would make me pretty sad.” Cora looks away, into the trees. “It wasn’t anything but fooling around,” she says, “and also, it was a long time ago.”
“I’ve got to get going,” Jane says.
“The key’s in the truck if you want to go in. I know I keep saying that, but I can’t believe you don’t want to.”
“No thanks.”
“The furniture’s got tags on it. The flower pictures are already sold. It might make you sad, I guess. I’d go in sometimes and lie on the bed and dream I was the butterfly flying over the rose, or the moth in the moonlight. He brought back a whole box of them. I never asked where he got them. He had a romantic streak. Not that I saw much of it.” Cora looks straight into Jane’s eyes. She says: “Do you want to stay here by yourself and pray?”
