by Ann Beattie
Out the window she saw the tracks she had made in the snow the night before, taking out the garbage. Snow had drifted in, softening the impressions, making it seem someone delicate and narrow-footed—certainly not a large, shivering person wearing her husband’s heavy rubber boots—had trod in the snow. The outside world was made both simple and lovely by the snow. You could become fascinated, if you forgot you had seen it the day before, and the day before that. Like a sad situation, or a problem, it could seem quite captivating if you were thinking it through for the first time, not the ten thousandth. And what good did it do to think about it? Now that she was forty years old, did she really want to undergo surgical procedures done with no guarantee of success to risk having another miscarriage? The snow that had drifted into her footprints seemed to have already answered the question, but she would have to be a poet to explain, metaphorically, how the question and the observation were related. Just the sort of thing Marshall would present to his class, exciting them with strange new connections, implied complexities. He liked to shake them up; he’d admitted that.
As if some such far-fetched poem really existed, and had already been shared by the two of them, he came into the kitchen smiling.
Dear Martine,
I begin this note with a comma after your name, having been corrected previously by Alice, who tells me that a colon should be reserved for business correspondence. A comma is apparently a more pleasant way to begin.
I enclose a brochure of wicker rockers, which I mentioned before I’d try to get to you as soon as possible. Alice cannot decide between the ones on p. 4 and the larger ones, p. 16. In my experience, Macy’s may well be out of both styles, and if one is in stock and the other not, that solves our problem right there. But I think either would be fine and leave it to you to cast the deciding vote.
Let me change my mind about something I told you to mark on the calendar before we left for New York. I don’t think, after all, that it would be a good idea to have the dinner on July 4th, even though that is the only day the Burks can be with us. We recently viewed a performance during which several flares were shot into the sky, and I could tell that Alice was very unnerved. I suddenly envisioned us out on the back porch, having dinner, and realized how upset she would be to see fireworks in the distance. I am trying as much as possible to keep her happy, and also to see that she enjoys the house again. Frankly, if she did not think of it in conjunction with your presence, I’m not sure she’d be eager to return. You may already know more than I; surely it cannot always be easy to keep everyone’s confidence and not feel that sometimes, in your silence, you are misleading someone else. These awkward situations arise often enough in business. I’ve had to smile through recitations of situations-in-the-works when I’ve already been the recipient of privileged information about the outcome; I’m all too aware that people’s private circumstances are often the exact opposite of the way they are presented. I’m not above sneaking off a letter to you behind Alice’s back, as we see! Something must be done so that she does not equate private gestures with possible betrayals, though.
Item #2. Do you think we should get a dog? I think you are the best person to ask, because dog owners always tell you to get a dog (though they’re full of warnings), and people who don’t have dogs seem to feel you shouldn’t even take on a house plant. Alice has often reacted with immediate warmth when she sees certain dogs, though in thinking back, it doesn’t seem to me that this has been true lately. But please do not worry: I am not sending you off to find us a dog, just asking you to order a set of rocking chairs. We can discuss the dog when I get there. Maybe whispering as she leaves the room.… Oh, I should not make fun. Or I should make fun of myself for being so unsure of what would please my own wife that I feel I must consult you.
I don’t say this to burden you, but you do realize how we both depend on you. Nothing could come as more of a surprise to me, because I think of myself as rather reluctant in matters of true friendship.
With affection,
M.
3
WHEN MARSHALL WALKED into the house and checked the answering machine, he found three messages: the first was from Emmet Llewellyn, President of Benson College, asking Marshall if he would be available to have sherry, late in the afternoon, with a wealthy woman whose daughter had graduated from Benson. The girl’s mother was now considering sponsoring an annual poetry prize, which the President understood would be the first step toward working with the college and offering an endowment to bring in visiting poets. “I hate these machines,” Emmet Llewellyn said, with much more conviction in his voice than when he asked Marshall to appear on short notice to help entice a rich woman to donate money. The second message was from Sonja; she had called to say that Dr. Llewellyn’s secretary had called her at work because they were trying to track down Marshall about something very important. “Sherry and a hit up,” Sonja said with a sigh, telling him to call her if he hadn’t already received Llewellyn’s message, or if he needed further clarification. Was she exasperated with him, or with them—she should only blame them—because they’d called her at work about something that was clearly not an emergency? The third message was from “Barbara. Secretary to President Llewellyn. The President would appreciate your calling him as soon as possible regarding the visit of Mrs. Adam Barrows.” She pronounced the last three words very slowly and distinctly, as if she were saying “I need help” in a foreign language she was unaccustomed to speaking. She left the President’s phone number at the beginning and end of the message. As he picked up the phone to return the call, he briefly considered telling the secretary that he was sorry he hadn’t called back sooner, but he had some trouble finding the phone number. What the hell: he had tenure. And if you didn’t keep yourself amused at Benson, certainly no one else was likely to amuse you, unless you still had a taste for students’ outrageous stories about why work was late or enjoyed tracking the course of the plague that inevitably killed numerous family members during the time the students were scheduled to take final exams.
“Thank you so much for calling,” President Llewellyn said. “And I very much hope you can make yourself available for about an hour this afternoon.”
The one thing Marshall liked about Llewellyn was that he had a big pig of a dog, a rottweiler-black lab mix, he thought it was—that he brought to school with him. Why not send in the dog? It would be just as charming as anything he could muster.
“Yes,” Marshall said. “But in your note to me, when you thought Mrs. Whatever-Her-Name-Is—”
“Mrs. Adam Barrows. She refers to herself that way. Keeps us guessing about her first name, but not about what generation she’s from,” the President said.
“Yes. You thought she was coming at the end of the week. I said—”
“You said you didn’t remember her daughter, but let me tell you, Professor Lockard, that girl remembers you, and as you must realize, our college would be most pleased to have an endowment that would allow us to bring in a visiting poet. No need at all to state what you don’t remember.”
“I’ll pretend that I’m being tortured,” Marshall said. “I’ll just state my name—”
“Good one,” President Llewellyn said. “I was in Korea. You?”
“Flunked the physical during the Vietnam War,” Marshall said. “Mental illness.”
“That aside,” President Llewellyn said. “I can count on you?”
“Sir, where Spanish sherry is poured, I am never far away.”
“We have red wine, too,” President Llewellyn said, sounding more on the offensive than he had when he spoke about serving in Korea.
“Beaujolais?” Marshall asked.
“Good one. Three-thirty, in the Irving T. Peck Room. I appreciate it.”
He hung up.
For a while, Marshall considered taking some poetry books with him, reading aloud from them whenever he could pretend a stanza or so was pertinent, watching the President squirm. To add to the impression of preoc
cupation and self-absorption, he could wear the black beret Sonja had found—something that had been mysteriously left hanging on the car aerial in the grocery store parking lot, she said. She had thought about putting it on someone else’s aerial, assuming that it must be a lost hat someone had wanted to call attention to, but as she was walking toward the nearest car with an antenna, she realized that a man was sitting inside, watching her. She had pretended to be looking for someone, then quickly returned to her car with the hat still in her hand, feeling as guilty, she had said, as if she’d been caught about to spray graffiti. So: the poetry books; the beret. And perhaps he could bring a bottle of Beaujolais, if there was one in the house. Draw a mustache over his top lip, call her Madame. Such ideas were what Sonja called not funny and also self-defeating. “You’re not one of the college kids,” she often reminded him. “Why do you have to let the nonsense get to you so much?”
Because it was what he did for a living. Because he hadn’t published a book when he should have, which would have been his ticket out of Benson College, and the possibility of a serious academic career. And now it was too late, because all anyone cared about was theory. No one read books and got excited about them anymore; they argued that transparent plots were murkily opaque and incomprehensible, they projected political interpretations onto literature, then decried the offensive political implications. The day before, while he was getting a drink of water, Susan Campbell-Magawa had tucked a pamphlet in his back pocket—hey: what if he cried sexual harassment?—announcing a conference she knew he wouldn’t want to attend: Natty Bumppo and the Postmodern Predicament. Susan Campbell-Magawa and her husband would be renting a Rent-A-Wreck to drive through Southern California in order to go to an air-conditioned conference room in a windowless building, to express outrage, with other academics, concerning the improper politics and convoluted neoconservatism of a fictional character named Natty Bumppo. Mr. Magawa did not live in New Hampshire. He lived in Ann Arbor, where he had a job at the University of Michigan. He and his wife commuted: one weekend a month he would fly to New Hampshire; one weekend she would fly to Michigan. With their frequent-flier miles, they vacationed every summer on Maui, where this year, no doubt, they would continue their discussion of Natty Bumppo while walking the beach with leis around their necks, and eating suckling pig, as Susan Campbell-Magawa continued to try to conceive a child. He knew this because Susan Campbell-Magawa, who had no use for him, was fond of Sonja. They had talked in September, at the welcoming party for new faculty. Mr. Magawa, who applied every year for a job at Benson and who was inevitably rejected because he was overqualified, was not in attendance. One year, he had distinguished himself by fainting while talking to President Llewellyn and later sending a note of apology, saying that his hectic life of commuting had recently begun to cause his physical collapse. Behind Susan Campbell-Magawa’s back, Jack McCallum and Darren Luftquist had worked up howlingly funny imitations of her husband passing out. The idea was to enact this as soon as possible after Susan Campbell-Magawa left the room, to try to make whoever remained in the room laugh, which usually meant that she would return to see if they were laughing at her. Once, Jack McCallum had almost been caught. From the floor, he had pretended to be tying his tennis shoe, and Dr. Gerold Ziller (as he always signed his memos) had appeared peculiarly cruel, to be laughing so hard at a man down on one knee, having trouble tying a shoelace, as Susan Campbell-Magawa reappeared and stood frowning in the doorway.
When Marshall first got the job, he had worked harder and been more collegial. But his real friends had moved on, publishing books that got them better jobs, or dropping out of teaching and going to business school, and as far as he was concerned, the serious study of literature had gone out the window when the theorists marched in. As he got older, the students got younger. Enrollment fell, and more local students began to enroll. Now he routinely taught a course in composition, as well as his poetry seminar and his survey course on modern American literature. He was considered stodgy, but admirable. The newer people taught Third World literature and women’s studies. McCallum taught a seminar on the unreliable narrator in twentieth-century fiction, as well as offering a course in popular fiction, informally known as “shit lit.” Well, he thought: as one student had recently written, “It’s a doggy dog world.” He was a mutt, and the purebreds were at Stanford or Columbia or Harvard. So, he wondered, who else would be at the sherry fest? Dr. Gerold Ziller was only on campus one day a week, on the orders of his proctologist. Susan Campbell-Magawa had probably already left for the City of Angels, to fly among her airheaded own. McCallum. Would they bring out that wild card? Or would it be other people in the department, or people from the administration? Someone from campus parking, perhaps, to explain why Mrs. Adam Barrows had had to park half a mile away, since the mudflat that was once visitor parking had been paved over to provide an area for safer Rollerblading?
At exactly three-thirty, his hands empty of books, his head bare, Marshall walked into the Irving T. Peck Room. Barbara, the voice on the phone, was there, emptying ice cubes into an aluminum ice bucket beneath the portrait of Professor Emeritus Irving T. Peck. In the portrait, Peck’s long neck stretched high, like a chicken or turkey looking for a way out. The folds of skin, relentlessly detailed by the portrait painter, added to the impression of the man as a startled fowl. He had retired the year before Marshall came to Benson, though questions about his sexual preferences still remained, indelibly, in the men’s room.
Barbara greeted him with delight. She was younger than he’d thought from her officious voice on the phone—young and, it turned out, quite pleasant. The President was showing Mrs. Barrows around the library, she told him. He wondered aloud whether Mrs. Barrows would be shown the easily jimmied-open window in the history stacks, through which books could easily be dropped from the second floor. Barbara blushed, as if she had personally arranged the book drop. She emptied the ice cubes into the bucket, shook the ice cube tray over the floor, and dropped the tray in her backpack. She set the sherry bottle in place—there was no red wine—and put out plastic glasses and paper napkins on the mahogany drop-leaf. Today, the table was protected by a series of place mats imprinted with pictures of wolves running along under grapevines or through snowy fields, or leaping in midair, about to pounce on a frightened rabbit. Barbara surveyed everything and announced that she would take her leave, lifting the backpack from the floor, shrugging her shoulders to center it on her back as she inserted her long, thin arms.
“I won’t drink it all before they show up,” he said.
“Oh. No,” she said, blushing again, as if she’d actually had such a concern.
Then she was gone, relieved to be away from him, no doubt. He looked around. The barometer on the wall indicated rain or snow, the needle right on the line between the two. Outside, the sky was gray. It didn’t look like a snow sky. He sat in one of the brown leather chairs, thinking how inelegant all of this was. The room was a shabby, cheap imitation of an English library, with bookshelves that contained more magazines than books, and a rug that looked like Jackson Pollock had been recruited, in the last thirty seconds of the rug’s creation, to drizzle some color over its grayness.
“Hello, hello,” President Llewellyn said, extending his hand. “It’s just terrific that you could make time in your schedule to see us. Marshall, may I introduce Mrs. Barrows. She’s the mother of Darcy Barrows, whom I know you remember fondly. Mrs. Barrows, Marshall Lockard.”
“Oh, this is such a pleasure,” Mrs. Barrows said. “All of it. The library. Dean Llewellyn’s lovely office with that magnificent sunlight streaming in. I hoped it would last, too, but the weather can’t be trusted this time of year. Hello, Professor Lockard. You have inspired my daughter and made her the art-conscious young woman she is today. Not a day passes that she doesn’t read to me and to Adam from her poetry manual.”
“That’s—”
“It’s a wonderful thing. That’s what it is,” President Llewellyn s
aid, gesturing for Mrs. Barrows to sit. “What’s that song?” President Llewellyn said. “ ‘It’s a great big wonderful world we live in’?”
“But it isn’t!” Mrs. Barrows said, as excited as if it were. “How does anybody get along now, with so many pressures from within and from without?”
Marshall looked at President Llewellyn. President Llewellyn looked at the sherry bottle and moved so quickly Marshall had the feeling the bottle might be knocked out of the field if the President didn’t stop it. It was a quick catch. In seconds, the cap was unscrewed.
“Ice, Mrs. Barrows?” the President asked.
“ ‘Some think the world will end in fire, some think in ice,’ ” Marshall recited.
The President shot him a dirty look, but it faded when Mrs. Barrows said, “Robert Frost!”
“ ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,’ ” Marshall said, as if Frost’s name were an association test.
“ ‘My little horse must think it queer!’ ” she called out.
“ ‘Whose woods are these? Whose woods these are I think I know,’ ” President Llewellyn said, not to be outdone.
But what he said ended the exchange. Marshall sat with his hands on the chair arms, smiling. He had decided to pretend that this was a 1940s movie and that he was a famous, wealthy man in his study, and that two mad people had come to call. The movie would be a comedy.
