Another You

by Ann Beattie

  There was a Time magazine with Bill Clinton on the cover. A coloring book left behind by some child, called Coloring China. He opened the coloring book and saw a Chinese man in a straw hat, running along pulling a rickshaw in which was seated an American family: Dad’s face was blue; mother’s orange, beneath a pale-pink pillbox hat; the children’s faces were uncolored, except for a mustache and goatee that had been added to the little girl. The Chinese man had not been colored in, either, but whoever had been working on the picture had added a few Keith Haring-like bursts around his figure to indicate movement. Marshall stared at it, enjoying the brief, imaginary transport of this travesty depicting a visit to China. It was better than thinking about Evie, whose face was also blue—though such a pale blue it seemed frighteningly translucent.

  Chère Martine,

  I write with bad news. At the end of a lovely evening dining with old friends from Boston days, Alice experienced dizziness and had to be taken to the emergency room at Lenox Hill. She is fine now. It was an ear infection that caused her no pain but that disturbed her sense of balance. After EKG’s and other tests, the unusual but rather simple problem was diagnosed, and we were able to return to our hotel with a prescription for antibiotics and a prescription for a sedative, as she was extremely upset—more from the embarrassment of not being able to sit upright in the restaurant and having to be supported on the way out than from any physical distress, I’m convinced. Back in the hotel we were both fine—she’d had a pill and seemed sleepy—when suddenly she began to pace the room, again holding her hand to her heart and trying to breathe steadily. At this point I must stop and assure you that everything is in fact perfectly fine now. Several times I led her to the chair or to the bed, though when it was clear that walking provided her some ease I simply walked with her. Eventually we opened the door and walked in the corridor, because there was no way to pace comfortably in the room. At one point I made a joke, stealing a rosebud from a vase on a room-service tray outside someone’s door, and I thought as she paused to laugh that she would momentarily be fine. Yet she held the rose to her side with the bud pointing downward like a dowsing rod. She said aloud, to a perfect stranger who passed us on his way to his room, that she was ill, and he stopped to see if he could be of assistance. To my chagrin, she told him about the tragedy, as if it had just happened, and he was of course at a loss for what to do, looking at me for some cue which I dared not give because she can become terribly angry if she thinks I’m giving any look behind her back. Fortunately the man was quite a nice fellow—he also had a suite that had been booked by his company, and he asked us to come in and sit for a minute. I was so astonished at her behavior that I was happy to think of sinking down into a chair myself. Inside the room she did seem calmer, but I found it odd that while in the restaurant she had been so embarrassed, with a total stranger she seemed to brighten. It ended with the three of us drinking port from a decanter on his desk. I must move on from this description and make a couple of points, lest I forget them. One is that as she became more composed, Alice mentioned that her dear friend Amelia was unhappy in New York and was looking for a way to move to San Francisco. Then she spoke glowingly of S.F. and told the man she and I had discussed a similar move, though I assure you we have not. There it seemed they had something in common, as both had stayed at the same hotel near Union Square, she on a shopping expedition many years ago, he on business. I felt uncomfortable, as she asked him rather personal questions: if he enjoyed practicing law, etc. All the while, she was clasping my hand or letting go of it to glance in the mirror and smooth her hair, which I’m afraid her friends and I had quite wrecked by dabbing her face with a wet napkin in the restaurant.

  Martine—only between the two of us: her demeanor changed so that she seemed to me almost flirtatious, so focused was she on the man’s every word. All of it was so curious, though—and after a bit I realized that I was completely exhausted, that the strain had gotten to me, and that if we did not leave the room at once, I might never be able to rise. By then, though, the two of them were firm friends. To my relief, Alice seemed willing to move along quite soon thereafter, so we stood and thanked him for his most generous hospitality.

  In our room, she insisted I call to find out how to reach this man in the future. I told her that if she found him so interesting, she should place the call herself, since she had not minded at all dragging him into our affairs in the first place, and we had something of a row. She said I was not receptive to new friendships and then—with a clarity I couldn’t deny—she said it would be far better if I called than she, because he would see that what we wanted in the future was a social interaction, whereas if she called it might seem improper. As it was, neither of us called. I thought I could be much more coherent about Alice’s strange behavior and our odd encounter, but details already slip my mind as I write. That night, I had a dream of trees being planted. In the dream, I realized they would not take root because concrete lay below the grass. The whole house rested on concrete, which extended far beyond the house’s foundation, and what that meant was that we would never be able to dig but so deep, and then things would be impossible. (Clearly, your point about my visiting Dr. St. Vance myself, about which I was once so perturbed with you, is not a bad idea.)

  This is so sentimental, Martine, but I keep having an image of you when you’d only recently arrived in our home, running from Alice around the dining room table because you did not want her to braid your hair, sunlight streaming into the room—more of the nonsense you and Alice often engaged in. That particular day, the sun bleached out your features, so that you seemed quite surreal. I felt very distant from the two of you, much older than I should like to feel.

  Affectionately,

  M.

  6

  “THERE WAS A COUPLE I was showing houses to last winter who’d adopted two children,” Sonja said to Jenny Oughton. “They let both kids rename the dog. Don’t laugh—it’s true. The wife explained to me that when they adopted the first child, they wanted to give him the same name they’d given the dog. The dog’s name was Jonathan. The husband changed the dog’s name to Sparks, because he said when it ran across the floor, sparks flew from under the dog’s toenails. Then when the kid was five, the father told his son about renaming the dog, and the kid went ballistic, pleading with them to restore the dog’s name. The parents disagreed with each other—I think he wanted to let the dog have its initial name back, but she thought it was a terrible idea—anyway, it happened, and the dog became Jonathan again, nicknamed J. Then they adopted a little girl, and eventually Jonathan told her about the naming of the dog, and she thought she should also name it. By then the dog was ten years old. She named the dog Cinderella. And the father said okay. He accused his wife of having a lower estimation of girl children than boy children because she wanted to overrule the little girl. Through all of this, there had apparently only been minor confusion, with the dog responding to its new name pretty quickly. Maybe because it was old, or maybe it had a will of its own, I don’t know, but the dog wouldn’t respond to Cinderella and stopped eating its food. They decided she’d have to think up another name, because the dog had simply rejected Cinderella. She cried and took it out on the dog, going wherever the dog was and saying, ‘You should be Cinderella, you’re Cinderella.’ Everybody else called the dog Jonathan, or J. And then the dog died. It developed asthma, and none of the medicine did any good. The wife said she thought the dog just knew it was leaving time. The kids were heartbroken, and on the headstone was every name the dog had ever had. The wife adamantly refused to get another dog. They could have cats, gerbils—she even let the boy have a snake. They had turtles and goldfish. They could call any of them anything they wanted, so there were a million names. She told me this whole story while the housing inspector was explaining to her husband why it would be so costly to switch from electric baseboard heat to oil. The housing inspector had brought his dog—this silly Pekinese or whatever the thing was, with a bow on top
of its head. Anyway: at the end of her story—I was trying to show her through the house but she wasn’t paying attention—her husband appeared at our side, and do you know what he said? ‘We have had a slightly fuller life than my wife is suggesting.’ I’ll never forget that: the housing inspector, with his little dog in his arms, and the husband’s barely disguised fury at his wife. I had the feeling she’d told the story a lot of times before, and that she’d tell it again. I just happened to be the one that day, showing them through a reduced-priced colonial.”

  Jenny Oughton turned into Trevi’s parking lot, shaking her head. In the summer there was valet parking, but the rest of the year no one was there to park cars; the valet parking sign had been covered with black plastic. The owner, Vincent, had sunk the parking sign, on an enormous pole, into concrete the second time the sign had been stolen. “Some hippie asshole wants it pointing at his toilet, I don’t know,” Vincent had told Sonja the last time she’d eaten there.

  Having dinner at Trevi had been Sonja’s idea; Jenny had offered to cook, but Sonja felt better about eating at a restaurant and not putting Jenny to any trouble. Walking from the parking lot to the restaurant, Sonja said to Jenny, “I probably shouldn’t have told you that story. It’s probably more of the same, for you. Or it was, before you switched from people to research.”

  “That was particularly good,” Jenny said. “I assure you.”

  Vincent was not behind the reservation desk. A young blond woman in an off-the-shoulder black dress greeted them, showing them to a table beside a window, as Sonja had requested. Though it was too dark to look out on the water, you could still sense that it was there, see it, almost, beyond the spotlights that tinged the frozen ground an eerie blue. In summer, it was lovely to walk in the gardens after dinner. This was the restaurant she and Marshall had come to on their last anniversary. Now she was here with a friend, with the ulterior motive of telling Jenny about her affair and finding out whether Jenny thought she might be … what was the euphemism for “cracking up”? Or was that the euphemism? So how had she gotten off the point so soon, telling the story about the strange family? Sonja wondered. Her best guess would have been that while she knew Jenny liked her, she sometimes felt she needed to establish with other women that she was a real presence, as if her being there, and talking casually, weren’t enough. That was what made her an intermittent raconteur. Tony, unlike her, was always self-assured, which allowed him to be quite direct, in business as well as in personal relationships. Once you’d gotten involved with Tony, though, he seemed so authoritative that you forgot to question him, and then he was actually able to act the way he felt most comfortable, operating not by direct lies, but through lies of omission. “Let me tell you some things I would be concerned about if I were buying this property,” Tony would say to prospective buyers, adding a winning hey-we’re-in-this-together smile, putting himself and the client on one side of the fence and the seller on the other. Then he would discuss the house’s more obvious superficial defects, which would deflect attention from potentially complex problems. With young couples who were obviously workaholics, he would stress the availability of interesting things in the community, mentioning scuba-diving classes they would love at the community pool, lying about “the best class I ever took in my life” (tango lessons given by an imaginary local Argentinean couple), suggesting that an exciting life could come with acquisition of the property, deliberately missing the point about their boring lives. Ah, Tony. “You see through me,” he’d said to her early on, cueing her that she should, making a preemptive strike in case she had and had some reservations. The attention would be deflected from Tony onto the other person—what an intelligent person, he implied, who saw through him. And then you were hooked and you began to talk about your life.

  Sonja suggested the Cakebread Cellars chardonnay when the waiter came to the table. “We could also order by the glass,” she said. This was the P.S. everyone added after suggesting a bottle, made guilty by other people’s health-conscious abstemiousness. But Jenny didn’t let her down.

  “A bottle of Cakebread,” Jenny said. “Great.”

  The waiter returned and put wineglasses in front of them. The busboy stood still until the waiter moved away, then poured water from a silver pitcher tied with a linen napkin into the tall, thin water glasses.

  “We’ve all missed you since you left the book discussion group,” Sonja said. “Not only do I miss you, but I always feel slightly guilty that while we’re sitting around talking, you’re still in the lab.” She took a sip of water. “Not that we weren’t all happy your project got funded.”

  “But I’ve been overdoing it.” Jenny sighed. “I finally realized that part of it was a retreat from my ex-husband. I knew if I was home, he’d be phoning me. We finally had a long talk, and I told him things had to change. I made him understand that from my perspective, it was over.”

  The waiter showed Jenny the wine bottle, although Sonja had ordered. When Jenny pointed to Sonja, the waiter turned the bottle toward her.

  “It’s good to take a hard line,” Sonja said. She said it emphatically, because she wanted to know not only what it would be like to speak so bluntly to someone who loved you, but to see if she could convince herself that such a confrontation might be good. She continued to think that she might tell Marshall about Tony. Though she wavered, thinking one day about breaking it off with Tony, thinking the next day that she’d continue, but quit her job. Or that she would tell Marshall and he would insist she leave her job.

  “I was glad you called,” Jenny said. “After I exerted all my authority on my husband, my ex-husband, I was lying low. It’s a mistake to withdraw from your friends, though. Just like it was a mistake to get so involved in things at the clinic. Because I wanted to tell you”—she looked up, her blue eyes outlined with brown pencil, the lashes carefully brushed with mascara—“I’m going to be moving to Santa Fe. I know that’s the last thing you expected to hear, because it’s almost the last thing I expected to do, but I went there for a long weekend and I fell in love with the place. I wanted to talk to you about putting my house in Dover on the market. Sonja, you look so surprised. You look like one big exclamation point.”

  “You’re moving?”

  “I went for Halloween. It was quite the celebration out there. Blue margaritas and pumpkin burritos. When the hot-air balloon we were in inflated, a huge orange balloon shot up over our heads, with black eyes and a black mouth, and there we were: amazed little people flying over that endless expanse of land, riding in the bucket of a big billowy jack-o’-lantern. I know this seems impulsive. It was impulsive to go there, so this is just the rest of my impulsiveness.”

  “Really?” Sonja said. “What are you going to do in Santa Fe?”

  “I majored in art in undergraduate school, not psychology, and I don’t know why I gave it up, because it’s so challenging, it’s so fascinating to see how forms play off against one another, which you really do sense out there because you have to strain for perspective; everything’s so far in the distance, you have no idea of actual size. I don’t want to paint landscapes exactly, I want the landscape to inspire abstract paintings. I was a figurative painter in school, but the place doesn’t make you want to paint people; they seem unimportant in all that natural beauty.”

  “I’ve never picked up and gone anywhere,” Sonja said. “I think it’s very courageous of you. But I guess if a place strikes you that way, you respond to it intensely.”

  “That’s it, exactly. The only other place I was ever in awe of in the United States was the Northeast Kingdom, that really rugged part of Vermont near the border.”

  “When are you going?” Sonja said.

  “I’ll actually be living with a few other people, in a tiny dot on the map outside Santa Fe called Ojo Caliente. There’s a big place under restoration now, and one of my friends is living in a wing of the house supervising the work. I’ve already kicked in my share for the rebuilding. I’m going to ha
ve a fireplace in my bedroom. Does this sound like bragging? Or madness?”

  “No,” Sonja said halfheartedly. “It sounds terrific.”

  “So terrific that you’ll visit?”

  She looked at the spotlit lawn, the shadowy sculpture near a fieldstone wall casting a dark shadow within pale shadows. She had sat on the wall and dangled her feet, Marshall jumping up beside her on their anniversary. They hardly went anywhere. Certainly, she never went anywhere alone. It was rare enough that she even had dinner with someone other than Marshall. It was an exciting and slightly startling prospect—that she might have a life separate from his. Though she had certainly moved in that direction by having an affair with Tony.

  “The place was a peach farm,” Jenny said, finishing her glass of wine. “The Rio Grande is right there, just across a field. At night there are more stars than you can imagine. I thought New Hampshire was starry until I went there.”

  Sonja nodded. “You know, tonight I was going to ask you if you thought I might be cracking up,” she said. “I was going to give you some information first, of course. But hearing this makes me think what people should do is think about themselves in relationship to something else, instead of thinking of everything else as things that attach themselves to you. Does that make any sense?”