by Ann Beattie
He was trying to find a way to blame the victim, he realized. Why bother? If McCallum didn’t know to keep his hands off undergraduates, this was exactly what he deserved. But was it really possible that McCallum, striding along in his black sweater and his gray-and-white-striped jeans that were so out of fashion they could quite possibly be of-the-moment, hipper than hip—was it likely that he had tortured one of his students, then returned to campus to deconstruct coming-of-age novels, walking and talking the same way, offering passing waves to colleagues, his vampire fangs retracted into small, slightly buck teeth he self-consciously covered with his hand when he spoke? That was it: there was something about his embarrassment about his protruding teeth, there was some awkwardness in the way McCallum carried his body because of his shame about his teeth, that made him question whether the events in Revere were as unambiguous as Livan made them out to be.
Thinking this, he noticed, sadly, a cluster of dead elm trees as he pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store and tried to think what to do. There was an outdoor phone, over by the pyramid of stacked soft drink cartons—what did they do, disassemble the pyramid every night, so the Cokes wouldn’t freeze?—and he eyed it, wondering whether he should call Cheryl and tell her they needed to talk before he got to her apartment, or whether he should simply call home (if the house hadn’t burned, his house would be right where he’d left it) to ask Sonja’s advice, or even whether he should call McCallum to ask for his side of the story. Of the three possibilities, calling McCallum seemed the most upsetting, so he decided he would, indeed, call McCallum. He would at least give the man the benefit of the doubt so he could address the accusations.
A teenage girl came out of the store, her arms thrown around a boy’s arms, pinning them to his sides, giggling. She had on a cap with a tassel, and on her feet the same camouflage boots Sonja was so fond of, though purple leg warmers rose from the girl’s boots to just below her knees. Even in her padded jacket, he could see that the girl was scrawny—a word his father had used, which he realized no one used anymore—scrawny and full of enthusiasm, teasing the boy about something and laughing. They got in their car, a beat-up Ford of some indeterminate color that reminded him of the walls in a house he had toured recently, when it was first listed with Sonja’s agency. What had Sonja said they were called? Sponged and glazed. The half-rusted, sun-faded car looked like the sort of paint job rich people wanted on their walls now. He watched them climb into the car, and then, as the headlights went on, noticed a strange blur of movement inside the back window: cats, it was—kittens, five or six of them, their legs slipping out from under as the boy abruptly gassed the car, many of them thrown back against the window, or, Marshall guessed, spilling onto the backseat, one or two dark shapes remaining as tires squealed and the Ford lurched onto the road, bucking as if it were about to stall, then shooting into the far lane. What was the story behind that? Two teenagers with kittens from some stray cat they’d taken in. It was sad, but at the end of every school year, abandoned cats and dogs—even turtles and snakes—would prowl the campus looking for their owners, growing gradually thinner as they tried to find a new friend, many of the dogs and some of the cats following everyone and anyone, in desperation. Once, an obviously malnourished yellow lab had jumped in Marshall’s car and sat hopefully in the passenger’s seat. He had found a starved cat dead in front of a Coke machine outside the gym. But McCallum’s having found a box turtle, HIS HIGHNESS MR. TURTLE painted on its shell with red paint … wait: McCallum had been dismayed and angry to have found the turtle upside down in the center of the sidewalk—a football; he had taken it, at a distance, to be a football—did it stand to reason that a man who rescued a turtle would take a student to another city and tie her to a bed? Of course, Hitler had been a painter, a vegetarian. Too many people were bored with what they were doing, and also passionate about something else they did: the internist a lepidopterist, his nurse a blackjack player, the accountant in the waiting room a collector of Byzantine coins. Most of the time Marshall found such things wonderful, but in a way such situations also made him sad—his suspicion that so many other people were not pursuing those things they really loved, as if only the young had immunity from society’s questioning a person’s desire to be a doctor who catches butterflies and who enjoys discussions about ancient coins, with a few other interests thrown in, such as figure skating, raised-bed gardening, an attempt to read the complete writings of Henry James, plus an interest in the occult and a passion for rappelling. Which, in fact, was true of the doctor Marshall had seen for five or six years, who had finally left the area to study neonatal surgery, while attending whatever performance art was happening in Seattle, as the blackjack-playing nurse, who had become his wife, began to think seriously about adopting a second Rumanian baby. With this multifaceted man, he had once discussed a burning feeling when urinating. A peculiar stiffening of his knee. A rash behind his ears. Those odd yet invigorating office visits: a shot of cortisone for the knee, but how could Marshall, a professor, not have read The Golden Bowl? An ointment for the rash, but had Marshall thought about the possibility of learning to scuba dive instead of settling for snorkeling? He felt a kind of hero worship toward the doctor, while at the same time being in the man’s presence too long could exhaust him. They’d kept in touch, exchanging books and Christmas notes, and Marshall felt that if the man had stayed in New Hampshire, they would probably have become friends. In fact, for all his colleagues and in spite of Sonja’s love, he sometimes felt that he had no friends: they would be, like Sonja, more than friends, or, like McCallum—God, McCallum, you insane fucking fool—people who gave intermittent signs of being a friend, but were not.
He parked and went inside the store, where he poured himself a cup of coffee and paid with a dollar bill to get change for the phone. Sonja might be back at the house, and he could ask her advice, tell her about the visit he was about to make. He deposited the money, hunching his shoulders against the wind. The line was busy. As he redialled, the amusing thought crossed his mind that calling home to explain his whereabouts was not something Shelley or Keats would ever have worried about. Yeats. Could anyone imagine Yeats chatting on the phone? The beautiful closing line of Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” passed quickly through his mind. Here he was, in a rather ridiculous situation, suddenly contemplating life and death, which could only mean that he was very anxious, he thought the stakes in his mission were high, or feared they might be. Sonja, of course, would think his involvement in this was a big mistake. Maybe not the involvement so much as the way he was handling things. Though how was he handling things? So far, by conjuring up lines of poetry written by Yeats, while loitering around a convenience store and wondering about the lives of people who got in their cars, by sipping coffee which would keep him awake later that night, by being on sensory overload.
He got McCallum’s number from information. The phone was answered by a woman, and in the long time it took McCallum to pick up, Marshall thought seriously about replacing the phone in its cradle, driving to McCallum’s, and asking him to take a ride with him, confronting him in person.
“Yes?” McCallum said.
Yes, instead of hello?
“McCallum,” Marshall said. As he spoke, he was struck, for the first time, that while everyone called McCallum by his last name, they almost all called each other by their first names. “McCallum,” he repeated, as if by repeating the name, he could build up steam. “It’s Marshall. I’m at a phone booth outside a convenience store.”
Why had he felt that was a necessary detail?
“Hello, Marshall. What can I do for you?”
Marshall detected a tenuous tone to McCallum’s voice. Perhaps because of the mention of where he was calling from, or the Coke can clattering across the parking lot, sent rolling by a sudden gust of wind. “I’m on my way somewhere, and I have to talk to you first,” Marshall said.
“Isn’t that true of all of us,” McCallum said
. “All of us, on our way somewhere.”
There was a long pause, as though McCallum thought he had answered the implied question. Though even McCallum seemed wearied by his oddities tonight; you could hear the fatigue in his voice. He could also hear, above the racket of the Coke can that never stopped rolling, a squeal of brakes in the distance and, from people coming out of the store carrying a boom box, the escalating volume of Whitney Houston, singing about what she would always do. Sometimes the ordinariness of the world he inhabited made him yearn for more excitement. Except that, like McCallum, he was fatigued; maybe that was why people stayed where they were, doing what they were doing: because few people had the doctor’s energy.
“The reason for your call, Marshall?”
Hadn’t he told him?
“I need to see you about something.”
“Tomorrow? Bright and early?”
Very sarcastic, that “Bright and early.” As if being up early, on a bright day, were inherently ridiculous.
“I’d prefer to see you now,” Marshall said.
“Well, the thing of it is, Marshall, we’re sitting around rather stunned, at the moment, because a blue ring has appeared in the little pee jar, which seems to have confirmed that Susan is pregnant. In fact, she was just naming the blue ring when you phoned. I believe she has selected the name of a distant relative, Gemma, off in the kitchen, doing a sort of dance with the pee jar—a sort of twist, if you remember the twist. ‘Let’s twist again, like we did last summer,’ ” McCallum said. “That twist.”
“Do you know a girl named Livan Baker?” Marshall said.
A missed beat on McCallum’s end. “Baker. Yes, slightly.”
“She’s your research assistant, right?”
“Do I want to be dead?” McCallum said. “Is this a phone call asking whether I wouldn’t rather be dead?”
“What?” Marshall said.
“Do I know, and would I rather?” McCallum said. “I do—slightly, as I so circumspectly stated—and would I? I might rather. Yes. Because when I think about it, the weather is dreary, and our jobs don’t mean much in the long run, and Susan and I already have a child who poses considerable problems, and now she is overhearing me to say—on this night when she has farmed out the beloved boy to the Luftquists, so we can have a glass of champagne and celebrate, all cautionary warnings about alcohol consumption aside for this last fling, while doing the twist on the new kitchen linoleum—she is overhearing me to criticize the direction my life has just taken, on top of which you call with this disturbing question, wanting to probe something I do not want probed, whether or not Elavil may now mitigate my downward mood swings.”
Marshall found McCallum’s response so bizarre, so discomfiting, that he said the first thing that occurred to him: “Do you find it impossible to talk like a normal human being?”
Something crashed to the floor in McCallum’s house, the noise overlaying the slammed car door to Marshall’s right, a tall blond woman in a scarf looking murderous as she stalked into the store, a red handbag clutched in her hand like a brick. Was there ever truly a time when Marshall and Gordon and their father, bicycling through the streets, had rung the bells on their bikes to warn people of their approach, to ward off danger? Bicycling—it seemed like pushing hoops down cobblestone streets.
Following the crash, McCallum had said, “Signing off. God bless,” and hung up. So: it had been the wrong thing—certainly the wrong moment, probably even the wrong thing—to try to talk to McCallum directly. Maybe he should take that as a signal against calling Sonja, also. Maybe it was best he simply proceed to Cheryl’s apartment, talk to Livan, get at least the preliminary things over with. She won’t eat, he remembered Cheryl saying with McCallumesque resignation in her voice.
Knowing it was wishful thinking, he went into the store and picked up a bag of Oreos, a six-pack of Cokes. In front of him, the blond woman was checking out, the clerk placing a bottle of Pepto-Bismol and Soap Opera Digest in a plastic bag and pushing the bag toward her. He refilled his coffee cup and handed the clerk a ten, from which he received change arranged as if by a mad origami master, so it was impossible to grasp the money the clerk placed every which way in his palm all at once: dollar bills pointing left and right, coins on the man’s fingertips, more scattered on top of wildly splayed dollars. He pocketed it, losing several pieces of change on the counter as he disturbed the balancing act. It was the clerk’s routine, meant to be troublesome. If a manager had been there, Marshall might have complained, but the only other person who seemed to be in a position of authority was mopping up a broken bottle of Gatorade, the swamp-green liquid trickling away in rivulets amid shards of glass.
He drove to Cheryl Lanier’s, pulling into the safety lane once to turn on the overhead light and recheck the directions scribbled on the envelope. For the first time, he also examined the front of the envelope and found that it was a letter addressed to both of them, from his brother. He opened it. The letter had been typed. It read:
Chers Bro and So:
Thank you very much for passing on the book on Kissinger. Beth is reading it and says that the man was an unconscionable monster. You know me—I don’t read the paper, so thought Nixon and Checkers were still together shitting in the White House. Beth says K. was in no way spiritual. She’s read some of the stuff aloud to me, and what I say is—that man needed to drink a few beers and lighten up. Cross your fingers that Watanabe-san decides to buy the dive shop. Hope he doesn’t think you have to put on a tank and go fifty feet down to muff dive. Ha! Can’t wait to see you in the Conch Republic.
Love, Gordon
“Won’t eat,” Marshall had written on the envelope’s other side, and underneath that, a list of roads, left turns and right turns noted, plus a doodled star and some crosshatching.
He found the roads, but not the star. The night sky was empty of stars, though there was a blur of moon he looked at, wishing it could be the sun in Key West, where Gordon and Beth lived. As he walked toward the apartment building, which was as anonymous and dreary as he’d remembered from the night he dropped Cheryl off, he wondered what other objects were now broken at McCallum’s. Here he was, going up a flight of stairs carrying a package of cookies, his thumb looped into a six-pack of Cokes, about to try, absurdly, to atone for some other adult’s mistake, some other adult’s pathology—whatever it had been that McCallum so mercilessly displayed in Revere. He was glad he’d made the call in one respect: it had convinced him that McCallum almost certainly had done what the girl accused him of doing, and he was slightly dismayed at himself that for a few minutes he’d tried to give such an unpleasant person the benefit of the doubt. But what was his scenario now? To sympathize with the victim, to pretend that Oreos could do some good? Maybe part of the reason he was doing this was pride: a sort of preening for Cheryl Lanier. And if that was so, did that make him much different from McCallum—leaving aside the fact that kinky sex had never interested him, but even if it did, would he ever do such a thing to Cheryl?
