by Ann Beattie
“What exactly are you talking about?” Jenny said, pouring wine into her glass and Sonja’s. Before Sonja could answer, Jenny said, “Don’t think of me as a shrink. Don’t be analytical to get the jump on the doctor. Just tell me as your friend.”
The waiter pretended not to hear this. He came to the table as if he were gliding in on ice, hands clasped behind him. He recited the night’s specials and asked if there were any questions.
“Bruschetta,” Jenny said. “We’ll eat that while we read the menu.”
“Excellent,” the waiter said. “Brushed with the finest extra-virgin olive oil,” he said to the air, as he walked away.
“No, no,” Sonja said, slightly embarrassed. “I want to hear more. You’re going to be living with other people on what used to be a peach farm?”
“There’s a flagstone patio connecting the main house with the new addition. They’ve transplanted lots of old rosebushes that were here and there so that now they line the patio.”
“And you have the money to just … do this?” Sonja said.
“Pretty much,” Jenny said. “I also took out a personal loan, just in case, while I’m still gainfully employed and a good credit risk.”
“I envy you,” Sonja said. “Evie—my mother-in-law, who’s so sick. She always wanted to move back to Canada, but it got more and more built up, and she got older, and it never happened. I guess I’m thinking of that because—why am I thinking of it? Because I suppose it’s good to act when you first know you should, to go someplace at the exact moment the place calls to you.”
“You’ve talked about Evie a lot,” Jenny said. “I’m sorry I never met her.”
“I’m sorry, too. I hope she gets through this, somehow. I hope you can meet her.”
“Ladies,” the waiter said, “any questions about the menu?” There were no questions. Jenny ordered veal. Sonja ordered chicken.
“I’m glad you’re enthusiastic about Santa Fe,” Jenny said. “I was worried about your reaction.”
“I think it’s great,” Sonja said. “I can’t wait to visit and float over the desert in a pumpkin balloon. Santa balloon. Whatever.”
“My son’s going out with me. He’s trying to get me to agree that if he stays, I’ll buy him a highrider. He’s crazy about lowriders and highriders—anything but Dad’s geeky car. Of course, Dad’s not such a geek that living with him and his new wife and the babies isn’t preferable to living with a bunch of pond scum lesbo dykes. He’s just checking out Santa Fe, according to him, to eat some good food, see Los Alamos, and figure out whether he could hack the place even if he had a highrider. ‘It would have to be way cool for me to stay,’ he told me. Completely skeptical that his mother would ever discover anything cool.” Jenny bit into the last small bruschetta toast.
Sonja had stopped listening. She had stopped one second—one delayed second—after Jenny let her know she was gay. She was so surprised, the silence must have echoed for Jenny as much as it did for her. She simply could not think what to say. Jenny shrugged her shoulders. “Okay, I knew you didn’t know,” Jenny said. “I suppose I’ve been leading a somewhat deceptive existence: the research I’m involved in indicates that certain personality types respond positively to skepticism—but how do I live? As a sort of glorified housemother to whoever drops by my house in Dover, validating their experiences whether they’re an introvert or an extrovert. And then my sexuality: I give off vibes I’m heterosexual, actually I’m attracted to women. I do put out clear signals that only women are welcome at the house, though. And my vanity: the sin of pride. I like it when they imitate me. Hell—if somebody goes out and buys clothes that I have, I’m flattered. I know it’s insecurity, but it pleases me. If they buy gloves like my gloves, it pleases me. I’ve created a commune for myself. All my research about how people can best get along, and what I really want is my own little world. A secret society of women.”
“What about your husband?” Sonja said.
Jenny shrugged again, poured wine into Sonja’s glass, gesturing for her to drink. “He’s straight,” Jenny said.
“It’s none of my business. I’m sorry,” Sonja said.
“He knew I was bisexual when we got married. I got pregnant, and he really, really wanted to marry me. So we got married.”
Two waiters put their dinners down in unison, lifting the warming lids and handing them to the busboy, who held them straight in front of him like two headlights of an old roadster.
“Ladies,” the waiter said. “Anything else?”
“No thank you,” Sonja said. Sonja was glad to be able to eat, sure anything she said to Jenny would come out wrong. There was no way to pretend to any sophistication now—her silence had blown it.
“Oh, eat your dinner,” Jenny said, as the waiter moved quickly away. “See: gay or not, I’m just a Jewish mother.” Jenny picked up her knife and fork and cut a slice of veal.
“It never occurred to me. Am I really dense?” Sonja said.
“What do you mean? You mean, have I been playing footsie with some woman and you didn’t see it? That right this minute, the jewelry I’m wearing sends a signal to everyone in the gay world?”
“Isn’t there something about which ear is pierced?” Sonja said. She realized as she spoke that she was a little drunk.
“Now everybody’s ears are pincushions,” Jenny said.
Sonja looked up. Jenny was wearing small diamond studs. A gray turtleneck. A man’s watch, but many women wore men’s watches. A crepe skirt.
“Boo!” Jenny said, and Sonja jumped.
“Oh, I’m sorry. That was cruel,” Jenny said.
“Well,” Sonja said, taking a deep breath and exhaling, “I’ve been having an affair with the man I work for. We let ourselves into houses that are up for sale and chase each other—we take turns chasing each other. Sometimes we play hide-and-seek and duck into closets, or Tony will double up under the kitchen sink. He can wedge himself in places so tiny most kids wouldn’t attempt them. We always take off our clothes immediately. This only happens naked. Lately I’ve had an irresistible urge to tell Marshall.”
Jenny’s eyes widened as Sonja spoke. She had leaned her knife and fork against the edge of her plate. “A person with her own surprises,” Jenny said.
“All those bruises, and Marshall never asked. He hardly ever noticed. Once he was running his thumb up my thigh, and I winced, and he said, ‘Oh no. I hurt you.’ The bruise was already there, yellow and green, days old from a tumble I’d taken when Tony made a flying leap to catch me.”
Jenny raised an eyebrow.
“I was going to ask you if you thought I’d snapped.”
“Clearly,” Jenny said.
“Really?”
“Well, yes. Don’t you think so?”
The waiter glided to the table, poured the wine.
“Dinners like this are a lot more fun than book discussion groups,” Jenny said.
Sonja, suddenly hungry, picked up her fork and pierced slivered zucchini. She nodded.
“Do people have … I don’t know what to call it. Episodes and then they regain their equilibrium?”
“Of course.”
“You don’t seem particularly worried.”
“You seem okay. Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“No, I mean, is this what you’d say if I came to you as a patient?”
“You haven’t. You haven’t because you know you don’t need a shrink. You’re having an affair with your boss. Why tell Marshall?”
“I think because I’m angry with him. His life, the way he loves routine, his isolation. I guess I wanted him to know his isolation isolates me, too. You know, I look at Evie and I think time shouldn’t be wasted. People should act on their impulses. Is that sane, or reckless?”
“Reckless,” Jenny said, summoning the waiter. “Two glasses of chardonnay,” she said. “We’re working up to brandy.”
The waiter nodded.
Jenny shrugged. “Listen—i
f you need a vacation from everything, I mean it about Santa Fe. I know how upset you are about Evie being hospitalized. I mean, that’s enough to have to deal with right now. Don’t add to your problems by telling Marshall. It should go without saying that nobody in Santa Fe would misunderstand what you were doing there.”
“Thank you,” Sonja said.
“What book would we have been talking about this week if I hadn’t dropped out of the group?” Jenny said.
“Last Letters from Hav,” Sonja said. “Jan Morris wrote it.”
“The Scarlet Letter drove me out,” Jenny said. She ate another piece of veal, lifting her eyebrows to indicate its deliciousness. She put a piece on Sonja’s plate. “Wasn’t it interesting we’d all forgotten Hester’s husband was a real presence in the book. None of us who’d read it back in high school remembered he’d gone to haunt poor Hester.”
“High school,” Sonja laughed. “What did we know about men haunting women in high school?”
Jenny looked up, perfectly serious. “What’s made Marshall withdraw from you?” she said.
“Withdraw? What makes you think that?”
Yet it was a perfectly simple question, based on the reasonable assumption that that explained part of what was happening. Sonja had to question herself when she did not have an answer. Was it possible that not only had Marshall failed to see her bruises, she had failed to notice his?
The waiter placed the glasses on the table, his lips puckered.
The chardonnay was the same bright yellow as a large bruise on the side of her leg she’d gotten in a struggle with Tony, but it was deliciously cold when she took the first sip.
Martine des Fleurs (as Alice says)—
If a comma is more familiar than a colon, then what is a dash? A running start?
I write, having recently concluded our conversation of an hour ago, to say that my plans have changed. I am terribly distressed that I must stay in New York until the end of the week. I have done my best to convince Alice to proceed to Boston and have you pick her up, but she feels that until her nausea subsides, she does not want to travel. I have offered to drive her myself and return the next day. Amelia’s doctor has been to see Alice, and she has kept her last appointment to see him, though until the last minute she was insisting that she would not go to his office. Alice has become skeptical of any doctor, including Dr. St. Vance (in absentia). The New York Dr. feels it is only fatigue, and the combination of wine with the tranquillizer that made her dizzy a second time the other night. She is finishing the course of antibiotics for her ear, but has been feeling fine in that department almost from the minute she began taking those pills. The N.Y.C. doctor is always quite worried about medicines that conflict, and in fact seems not much to like medicine at all, but I’ve known enough doctors of whom this is true not to be surprised. It did distress me a bit that he all but suggested that Alice’s having taken one calming pill after a party during which she’d ingested several glasses of champagne was not only unwise, but potentially life-threatening. I took him aside in the corridor and asked whether he seriously thought that one calmative taken two hours after drinking one or two glasses of champagne in the course of an evening was suicidal, and he looked at me as if I’d poured the champagne down her throat and then handed her a pill bottle. Then he said, “I examined her. She did not drink only two glasses of champagne.” Well, Martine, I was at her side the entire evening. Even if she had three, this would be the absolute maximum, and she was by no means drunk either at the party or afterwards. The doctor asked me, “Do social occasions make your wife nervous?” At first I thought it the oddest question, yet perhaps her indecisiveness is a response to social pressures. It has grown worse of late; I know the two of you chide me about how easy it is to pull on one of my “uniforms,” but her trouble in arriving at a decision is now much worse than when last you saw her. If I see him again, I mean to reopen the discussion, but correct me if I’m wrong here: I assume he meant to imply either that she was generally in not very good shape, or perhaps that in point of fact she was sneaking a drink in the hotel room, or something of that nature, in which case I can swear this was not so. I am probably being overly analytical here because it is a sensitive point—that she might not be doing very well, that is. Nevertheless, I am glad I did not take issue with him at the moment, and of course he is a concerned man, having come out initially on a very rainy night to a hotel to see a patient whom he’d never met before.
The party, by the way, was for my godson, Neil, who sends you his best regards. He has just passed his bar exam. He says to tell you that you should send flowers! Neil, Alice tells me, goes rollerskating in Washington Square Park on the weekends.
We cannot wait to see you. Living in a hotel is only fine for a couple of days. We are both sorry that the company has not yet decided on what to purchase as a corporate apartment. Why did they let the old one go? Real estate prices are going to begin rising again the nearer we get to the election.
It was lovely to hear your voice. I hope to soon hear you humming, as you so often do, arranging the flowers, which by now must be quite plentiful.
Until Friday,
M.
7
“I TOLD HER I told you,” Cheryl said. “At first she was really upset I did this behind her back, but now she’s agreed to talk to you. But the thing is, she says she absolutely will not go back to student health. I’m sorry to lay this on you. I really am. She just—she seems to want to talk to you to see if you think Professor McCallum was deranged or something. My guess is that she wants to think the closest thing she can to its not having happened, which would be that it was some momentary aberration.”
God, McCallum, he thought. You are an insane fucking fool.
“Are you—I hate to dump this stuff on you, but she and I were just watching the weather, and when the weatherman talked about snow and pointed to asterisks over Boston on the map, she leaned forward and puked on the floor. And it was the first time that day we’d gotten her to eat. I know this isn’t your problem, but—”
“I’m sorry,” he said. What was he sorry about? Was he sorry that for almost a week, Sonja had gone to the hospital to see Evie every day, while he had dropped out days ago? Sorry he had picked up the telephone just now to get Cheryl’s call? Or was he simply sorry that McCallum had done such a thing? Sorry to be involved in this, that was for sure, yet he sympathized with Cheryl. She’d been dragged into a messy situation, and he was about as useful, right now, as McCallum’s hearty, but ultimately dismissive, “God bless.” He hadn’t gotten in touch not only because he didn’t want to be kept posted on Livan Baker’s sad situation, but also because he didn’t want his own life to become a sad situation: a middle-aged man paying too much attention to a teenage girl, himself not so unlike McCallum in being another opportunist, a person who barged into another person’s life just because the opportunity was there. Tonight, Cheryl’s voice was weary, the fatigue barely disguising real alarm. Just thinking about what happened to Cheryl’s roommate made him so depressed he was tempted to personify the weather, to see it as pathetic, this long winter of cold asterisks with diagonal slashes moving in behind and dark puffs of cloud streaming over Boston like steam escaping from a train, obliterating what clarity there was in the sky. McCallum and some kid: Goddamn.
“If somebody can’t talk sense to her, I don’t think she’s going to recover,” Cheryl said.
“I understand,” he said. “I’ve put in a call to my wife’s friend at student health, but there’s been something of a crisis here, and I wasn’t able to keep the appointment.”
“She’s not going to eat tonight,” Cheryl said.
“You’re doing what you can,” he said, realizing as he spoke that he was deliberately missing the point: the point was not that Cheryl felt bad, but that her roommate was losing ground. He was aware of that, but he was sitting on a stool by the phone, about to cook a package of Ramen noodles and eat them in front of the fire he’d just starte
d in the fireplace in the living room—the simple, sensual pleasure of it almost made him laugh: as a young man, would he ever have thought an ideal evening would be sitting cross-legged by the hearth, slurping up twenty-cent noodles, reading an essay in The New England Review by McCallum deconstructing Arthur Bremer’s diary?—when suddenly the quality of his evening, already under a gloomy cloud of anxiety because of Evie’s critical condition, was yet again being tempered by a big dose of reality, the asterisks falling on Boston like footnotes offering bad prognoses about sexual aggression, the devil’s face more ominous than usual, seen on the fireback through flames crackling off burning logs. McCallum’s face … stupid, deranged McCallum, who earlier in the week had walked past his office, flanked by several students, raising his hand in a distracted, two-fingered wave, an odd gesture as if he were speaking in sign language to his troops: There it is, guys; destroy it. That was, of course, what Marshall feared: that somehow, once he was dragged in, it would be war and he would become McCallum’s enemy. Opening the package of noodles, he flinched at what a coward he was, saw himself (chin wedging phone against his shoulder) as self-absorbed, a middle-aged man dodging responsibility in order to eat some fast food while basking by a pleasant fire. He should be interrupting his evening to talk to Livan, if only as a token adult, someone whose sympathetic presence might in some small way mitigate the aftershock of the dreadful trip.
“… at your apartment,” he heard himself saying.
“I would really appreciate it,” Cheryl said. “I would really, really appreciate it.”
He scribbled directions to her apartment on the back of an envelope. He put the package of noodles with its torn corner back on the shelf, turned off the boiling water, walked to the living room doorway and looked briefly at the already dwindling fire, and with as many misgivings at leaving the fire unattended as with dread about what he was setting out to do, he pulled on his coat, picked up his car keys, wrote a note to Sonja saying he’d explain where he’d been once he was back, then went out to the driveway. In spite of the snow and slush, a boy was riding by on a bicycle, and for a moment he remembered the springtime rides he’d taken with his father and brother, his father’s exercise program meant to keep demons at bay and also to wear the two boys out, because of course, in those days, no one jogged, and if his father had gone running, what would anyone have made of the two of them running behind? He watched until the boy grew small and disappeared in the graying distance. The kid on the bicycle made him feel out of shape and out of sorts, so that as he settled himself in the car, he had to remind himself that winter always got him down, that he was going off to do a good deed, that Cheryl Lanier had a crush on him, that, ridiculous as it seemed, he took a little pride in not being the sort of jerk who would exploit those feelings, let alone take a student off to where the hell had it been? Revere. It didn’t take much imagination to think of someplace classier than a triplex in Revere for a seduction, though McCallum had probably been cynical enough to do what was convenient. Sort of like opening a package of Ramen noodles when your wife was keeping a vigil at the hospital—anything would do. Sex as Ramen noodles. He remembered, again, McCallum’s wave, which had come just as he’d lifted his eyes from a very beautiful poem about a forever-missed moment by Jay Parini, more of the words that rose in front of his eyes every day, as inevitably as the fog that now hazed his windshield. McCallum’s wave had been a slight acknowledgment to a colleague already greeted too many times that day, more a gesture that acknowledged one should make a gesture than the gesture itself. An allusion to a gesture that would allude to their complicity in not speaking meaningfully. A postmodern gesture, he thought, amused at his own bemusement. In fact, of the people who were predictably around the department, conversations devolved into sound bites, most often attended by vague kidding or chiding, a tacit admission of I-know-what-you’re-interested-in/you-know-my-own-preoccupations. Where did a person go from there? Into a corridor, a real and symbolic corridor, where any connecting or reconnecting would be done between teacher and student, not between teacher and teacher, a hierarchical system in which adults played king-of-the-hill, with their knowledge a caveman’s club to keep those wishing to ascend far below: I’m saying this as a friend. I think that you should tone it down. He heard her words as he drove down the hill, aware that his anxiety about the house’s catching fire was displaced fear, more certain as the seconds passed that he was a coward, whether or not he’d been lured out of the safety of his house, a coward for not having taken McCallum aside when he’d first heard about the outrage he’d perpetrated, instead of looking up, blank-faced, letting McCallum walk by the door simultaneously greeting and dismissing him. Marshall had swivelled his chair to look at the empty space left behind McCallum, finding in it the ghost of a question. Wasn’t it at all possible that Livan was hysterical, or crazy in some way, a liar, a young girl who wanted to destroy her professor because … because what? Because he had what she didn’t have: a mate, a home, a life. Money and vacations. What if McCallum hadn’t done anything to her? What if there had been no trip to Revere, what if her boyfriend had gotten her pregnant and she decided McCallum could be the fall guy, maybe because they had gone to Boston together, even visited Revere, but they’d been in a hotel: room-service strawberries and quadruple-priced California champagne, a quick night of laughing at old movies on TV, Livan knowing none of the actors’ names, McCallum having remembered wrong, for years, all the famous lines, feeding each other expensive morsels, the two of them slightly tipsy.
