by Ann Beattie
“Ibis,” Carl repeated loudly.
“Well, that’s a relief: if it was ibid, I guess I’d have to wonder what the hell that book had been!” Stanley said.
We walked past the antiques store. Three cadets from VMI came down the street. One was eating an ice cream cone.
“Your mother was a little jealous that you had such success and lived in New York,” Carl said. “She used to say, ‘Do you think if her name was up in lights she’d think she’d accomplished enough, and settle down and have a normal life?’”
“My mother was an alcoholic. I think she was more interested in drinking than in how her daughter turned out.”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have told you that,” Carl said.
We turned the corner. A tall man in a sports jacket, walking very upright, and a shorter, dark-haired man came toward us.
“Evening, Cy,” Stanley called out behind us. “There’s a Hieronymus Bosch painting waiting for you just around the bend.”
“Maybe better to turn back and have a cocktail, then!” the dark-haired man said. He spoke with a strong Italian accent.
“Evening,” Carl said, nodding as we passed.
These were the quick greetings of small-town people who crossed paths too often to really talk.
“What do you think of that—someone as famous as Cy Twombly, moving home from Italy for part of the year, back to his roots, I guess,” Carl said.
Stanley caught up with us. “Cy, out for his evening stroll,” he said. “Can you imagine if Ricky Ricardo came home with one of Cy’s paintings and tried to put it on the wall? Can you imagine what Lucy would have to say about that?”
Carl gave me a look; Stanley was obsessed.
“That husband of yours,” Stanley said. “Carl and I were wondering: Did you ever think he might have gone into the witness protection program?”
“Stan!” Carl said.
“What? How many possibilities are there? Do you have a better idea?”
“I did think about that,” I said. “He had some relatives who were pretty frightening. People I met just after we got married and never saw again. So you might be right, Stanley. Or he could have been like Gatsby, who went pretty far before he got shot in his swimming pool.”
“Is that what happened to The Great Gatsby? Died in his pool?”
I nodded.
“Who shot him?” Stanley said.
“It’s not entirely clear. He was in love with some other man’s wife. His real name was Jay Gatz. He had some connection with criminals.”
“You can never know a person,” Stanley said. “Never know ’em any more than you can figure out their life story by looking at their photograph.”
I had almost no photographs of Neil, even if I’d wanted to study them. He had an aversion to cameras, put his hand up if someone tried to photograph him, or even the park in which he sat. I had no photographs of our wedding party. But of course I had tried to figure things out, and I’d had written documents, information (as Neil would have pronounced the word)—misinformation, I eventually realized. Reading Neil’s notebooks, I had slowly begun to understand that what I was reading was fiction. He thought up profound one-liners so he could seem to effortlessly drop them into conversations. He knew I’d find his notebooks—that was why he’d written, so often, about how much I meant to him. They weren’t even hidden. He knew I would discover them in his desk drawer when he left.
His ashes had blown back at me. Comedy skits loved to joke about that. It repulsed and delighted people to think of such a thing happening: the wind lifting the ashes off the waves, blowing them back into the rowboat; the little gray clump that rolled like tumbleweed, getting caught under the survivor’s heel. First his ashes had blown back—not even his ashes, of course; make-believe ashes for a make-believe person—and at that moment two boys had raced toward me on the path, one coming up too close and colliding with the other, both boys suddenly wailing on the ground, the boy pinned underneath with a broken nose, the boy on top with a broken thumb. Their father had come running, confused at first—seeing me bending over them, the blood on the ground. Blood speckling the empty Tiffany box. Of course he understood in a second that I was just another person out walking. Like Cora in Vermont, he realized I was harmless, a person carrying a box, for whatever reason, taking a walk.
“Maybe that husband turned into a buzzard,” Stanley said. “Should we get the binoculars and go back and examine those fellows in that tree?”
“I don’t know what’s gotten into him,” Carl said.
“I can hear you, you know,” Stanley said, ruddy-faced, hair slick with sweat from the walk. “I’m right here beside you.”
About the Author
Ann Beattie has published seven novels and eight collections of stories. She has been included in four O. Henry Award collections and in John Updike’s Best American Short Stories of the Century. In 2000, she received the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story form. In 2005, she received The Rea Award for the Short Story. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Key West, Florida, and Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.
