by Ann Beattie
“Hey, how’s it going?” the blond man said.
The man looked familiar. Someone who worked in the library?
“Not ruining your café au lait with two-percent milk, I hope.” The blond man smiled.
The cop. Worse than a student who wanted to talk, it was the cop. He stuck out his hand to shake hands with Marshall, calling over his shoulder, “Hey Sharon, float some cream on my friend’s coffee. He just went off his diet.”
Sharon looked skeptical. She turned a nozzle, and hot milk squirted noisily into a tin cup.
“You know, I’m not really a very curious fellow,” the blond cop said. “I have to force myself to keep on my toes in the curiosity department. What I mean is, I lack certain instincts I ought to have, so sometimes I just zero in on details. To overcome my lack of natural curiosity, so to speak.”
Marshall nodded. The cop seemed sincere. Slightly apologetic, almost.
“Wife doing okay?” the cop asked.
“Yeah,” Marshall said. “Quite a shock. All of it.”
“Caffeine to soothe the pain,” the cop said.
“Absolutely,” Marshall said.
“Great place here,” the cop said. “Makes me happen to find myself in the neighborhood.”
Marshall nodded.
“Orchids,” the cop said, pointing to two orchids blooming on tall thin stems.
“Very nice,” Marshall said.
“Wife likes orchids,” the cop said.
“No,” Marshall said. “Roses. She likes roses.”
“Mine,” the cop said. He tapped his wedding ring. “My wife,” the cop said. “Brought her in here last weekend, she decided she wanted an orchid like that one. Owner sells them. Not inexpensive.”
Marshall nodded.
“Sort of the giraffes of flowers,” the cop said. “Does that sound like an accurate description, Professor?” He smiled at Marshall, who was pulling out his wallet to pay the waitress. He waited while Marshall pocketed his change, then walked ahead of him and held open the door. “I don’t really care what anybody does with a lost hour or so,” the cop said. “Just in case you were worrying.”
Marshall’s heart missed a beat. Was the inquisition about to start all over again?
The cop shrugged. “You don’t look like you believe me,” the cop said. “I want to tell you, though. I lose track of time myself. Half an hour, an hour—you’re not looking at your watch, how do you know?”
A redhead in a black Toyota rolled down the window and said, “Come on.”
“I take longer than she likes,” the cop said. He stuck out his hand. “And so, farewell,” he said. Instead of continuing toward the Toyota, though, he stood on the sidewalk grinning, watching Marshall all the way to his car.
Approaching his office, Marshall quickly registered that the door was open. Fear seized his stomach: more police awaiting him? He didn’t trust that the door could be ajar without anyone’s being inside, felt sure every space he inhabited was now going to be turned into a free-for-all, whether it was Cheryl Lanier’s hallway, or his home, or his office, not believing the wedge of sunlight slanting across the corridor could wash through an empty room that contained no unpleasant surprises. That would be too much to ask: that he be allowed to walk into a sunlit room and sink down in his chair, with no further problems awaiting him. Or was it Cheryl Lanier—the initial messenger of the bad news that had started him on this exhausting routine he might never extricate himself from? Cheryl, of course. And the moment he saw her he would do what he should have done all along: draw back from the situation; apologize for some of his admittedly strange reactions; ask her—no: instruct her—to say nothing of his going to her apartment, to say nothing of the ride he’d given her to Dover, to please not keep him posted on Livan Baker’s state of mind, because he did not want to be compromised, and he had had enough of Livan’s and McCallum’s, and even Cheryl’s, largely self-inflicted problems. His house was a mess: furniture overturned, blood on the walls, specks of blood everywhere, so he had no idea how Tony Hembley could have reported the house was essentially fine. People were crawling all over it, measuring bloodstains; for God’s sake, they’d sent the carpet-cleaning service away—his house was filled with unfriendly cops who stood staring at him like bulls staring at a matador, the blood-spattered walls having made them more frustrated and angrier, more reluctant to budge.
It was not Cheryl Lanier in his office, but Sophia Androcelli, sitting with her pleated skirt tucked between two large mounds of knees, reading from a spiral notebook. She registered no embarrassment at occupying his chair; she looked up as if she was slightly surprised and dismayed to see him—this girl who, he immediately understood, had come as Cheryl’s messenger, just as Cheryl had once approached him as Livan Baker’s. If she was slightly dismayed to see him, he was more dismayed to see her: if Cheryl had been there, he could have revealed how perturbed and imposed upon he felt and begun the process of his own salvation by laying down the new ground rules, but Sophia Androcelli’s presence did him no good at all. That was why he simply looked at her, disappointed and vaguely bothered by her existence, saying nothing. For the first few seconds she met his eyes but said nothing, either. Then she ripped two pages out of a notebook and held them out to him, planting her Doc Martens on the floor astride the backpack as she rocked forward to look him directly in the eyes. Mickey Mouse stared up her pleated skirt from the red leather backpack dropped in front of his chair, and Marshall thought: Yes, this has all been pretty Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse except for McCallum’s wife’s version of let’s-turn-Marshall-and-Sonja’s-house into Frontierland.
“Just one thing before I go,” she said, picking up one strap of the backpack with a sweep of her hand (the nerve! not even saying “Hello,” let alone “Excuse me,” as she rose from his chair!). “Cheryl thought I’d be a good person to talk to you and explain more than she explained in the note, but while I was waiting for you, I realized that even though you’re a good lecturer and you’ve always been perfectly fine toward me, the bottom line is that I don’t trust you. I think Cheryl made a big mistake getting involved with you, and personally, I’m glad it’s over.”
“You waited here to express your dislike of me and to hand me two pieces of paper?” he said.
“Buildings and grounds was waxing your floor; I said I had an appointment with you, you must be late. Somebody making minimum wage apparently didn’t care to argue the point. At first I was going to sit at your desk and write you a note of my own, telling you what you’d done wrong, but before I’d even begun, it seemed like wasted effort. Because you condescend to people, you know? The look you get on your face when you start using ‘Ms.’ very histrionically. The ‘Ms. Lanier, Ms. Androcelli’ stuff, while at least the guys in the class you like get the respect of being addressed by just their last name. The minimalist approach to male bonding. The secret society wink.”
“Sophia,” he said. “In the past twenty-four hours I have noticed a remarkable lack of civility in my life. Perhaps you could enlighten me: You’re saying you sense mockery on my part? Mockery, when I should take seriously, say, a teenage girl’s accusations of sexual trauma that are quelled by the delivery of a Domino’s pizza? Colleagues whom I should address seriously about matters of the human heart when they are so narcissistic that the simplest polite question from me results in a blow-by-blow account of their encounter with a bag lady near Boston Common, hoping to impress me with their deep sensitivity toward schizophrenics? Colleagues who have made the sort of marriages in which one member expresses herself by stalking her husband to my home and attempting to stab him to death because he is insensitive? ‘My weariness amazes me,’ to quote a prophet of my generation. My weariness fucking amazes me.”
“Your weariness doesn’t ‘fucking amaze’ you; it amazes you because you’re fucked. Get it?”
“Sophia,” he said, after catching his breath. “Look at it from my point of view. After too long a period of being involved in the pr
oblems of others, after a very traumatic event, I come into my office to find you having taken over my desk, after lying to the floor polisher about your right to be here—and let me point out that you are as guilty of stereotyping as you accuse me of being, if you assume that being paid minimum wage was necessarily the reason why the floor polisher did not throw you out—let me just say that it seems to me I should occupy less of everyone’s attention, if everyone has the amount of equilibrium he or she claims.”
“Cheryl was right,” Sophia said. “You really are impossible.”
“What does that mean? That I don’t take shit?”
“Listen,” she said, sinking back into his chair, pushing pleats between her legs, “you just don’t get it. You don’t get it that things have changed and now you’re required to be a more genuine human being. For example: many people might look at what had been put in their hand before starting in with their own complaints. Even normal human curiosity might have set in with a lot of people. But all you want to do is banish me, like you’ve banished her.”
This was the first time Sophia Androcelli seemed disturbed; he watched her bottom lip as if watching a once-tugged fishing line. But the fish went free, the lip relaxed into a ripple as her expression devolved from angry to blank. “Banished her” hung in the air, more perplexing to him the longer it hovered.
He sat in the chair beside his desk. He unfolded the pieces of paper and scanned what seemed to be a hastily scrawled note from Cheryl.
Marshall,
I’m writing this to explain, as best I can, some of my thoughts before I get the bus and get out of here. When Timothy came back from the library and found me gone, he hitched a ride to the house in Dover and we had a long talk that resulted in my realizing that I’d gotten very caught up in Livan’s situation because it bore very strongly on my own life—things I was going to tell you that we never got around to talking about because everything got so hectic. You were the first person, male or female, I’d ever felt as mature as I know I am around, because in spite of the way you act sometimes, I could see that we were (forgive me) kindred spirits. I put up blockades too, and like me, I’m sure you have your reasons. It’s not your fault that I also fell in love with you, but as Timothy says, I have to suspect that reaction, too. Let me tell you something you have to know. When Livan was telling me about what McC. did to her, it was pretty vague. I sort of told her how to embellish it, though what I thought I was doing was sharing some private things about my life with her, and then she picked them up and said them back to me as if they were hers. That thing with her godfather never happened, but it did happen to me, but not when I was very little, only five years ago, because my mother had me baptized and then later she insisted I have a godfather. I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye because next year I’m going to come back and I’d like us to be comfortable when we pass each other in the corridors. I understand that you didn’t do anything to me and that you were just reaching out to me in the car, but it made me see that there was a subtext—that we weren’t that far away from being Livan and McC. This is an apology as well as a confession, because if I hadn’t told Livan about my experience with my godfather she probably would have chilled out eventually, but once I did tell her, and then she told it all back to me as if it was hers, it was like I’d really given it away and it was someone else’s. I know that you’re closer to McC. than you say, so I’m asking you to tell him about this because inadvertently I did cause McC. problems, and I’m very sorry for that and also sorry that you and I (I know this is going to sound stupid, but I’m going to say it anyway) aren’t the same age, that I couldn’t really be close to you. But we’re close enough that I had to write this note. Goodbye, and take care.
Cheryl
He looked at the corner of the room, and out the window, familiar with the sameness of what he looked out on, yet still hoping for something: a group of students passing, a car driving through campus, Llewellyn’s black dog in the snow. “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow” went through his mind—a line of poetry he had probably first read when he was Cheryl Lanier’s age, the meaning of which escaped him even as it stopped him dead. So much depends upon what? he thought now. What does it depend on? That people make confessions and provide you with new understanding? Or that you look high up into the corner of your office and see the dusty remains of what must have been an inefficient spiderweb—that you take pride in being more farsighted than your myopic middle-aged colleagues. So much depended on making eye contact with your fellow man, in this case Sophia Androcelli, who clearly had read every word of Cheryl’s letter, who had become his accuser though her friend Cheryl had not. How would she not be upset with him if she knew he’d kissed her friend in a car? Jealousy, perhaps. High-mindedness. A lack of sophistication about the way things were. All that was left to him was to move his eyes to hers, to see if the situation was impossible, or if there might be a chance he could present his case.
“I’ll tell you what she said when she gave me her notebook,” Sophia said quietly. “She said, ‘I wasn’t totally honest. He deserves to know the way things really are. He’s got his problems, but he’s basically a very kind person.’ So I end up the messenger for her note, delivered to a guy on the make who isn’t worthy of her compassion. Your weariness. Tell me about it,” she said, picking up the backpack, standing, and walking past him.
When she was gone, he looked back to the spider’s web for any missed signs of life, wrinkling Cheryl’s missive the way he’d once ruined schoolboy drawings he ran out of school with, taking them proudly to Evie, the same way he’d pressed the life out of lecture notes his thumb worried into blurred lines of type, practicing some difficult new lecture by reciting it silently the night before he intended to give it, walking back and forth in his living room. His living room. His bedroom. The smeared blood in the hallways.
Okay: now it was known that Cheryl Lanier, for reasons of her own, had intentionally or unintentionally added her own unpleasant experiences to Livan’s, thereby fuelling Livan’s fury. Not the end of the world, but certainly worth factoring in. Though it was not pleasant to acknowledge that the world could be such a terrible place that well-intentioned Cheryl could at one point in her young life have been exploited by a man assumed to have her best interests at heart. What if he either rushed after Cheryl or paid a hospital visit to McCallum, to tell McCallum what Cheryl had told him—what if, instead of being made to feel guilty because he’d been compromised, he asserted his control over the situation by standing firm and insisting that enough was enough, that henceforth he was entitled to a private life, that he would not willingly accept other people’s projections, that he had a right to his former life, that he was entitled to peaceful domestic tranquillity.
In that state of mind he shuffled some sheets of paper on his desk and looked at the telephone, dialled information, dialled McCallum’s hospital, reached the switchboard, and was finally connected with patient information. In a pleasant, calm voice, the woman who answered the telephone told him that no information was available on the patient he was inquiring about. “That’s NOS, sir. Although the patient is at the hospital, we are not provided with information, ourselves, about his condition.” What kind of an answer was that? “It’s marked NOS, sir; it’s not on the screen, at someone’s request. Perhaps the family. The doctor.” He thanked her and hung up. Perplexed, he stared again at the spider’s web without really focussing, brought his eyes back to the piece of paper. That long night of conflict seemed long ago. To remember it tired him physically, as if the episode existed concretely and he had brought it down on his shoulders like a boulder he should not have reached for. Should not, should not: Wasn’t it the new accepted groupthink that people give up thinking in terms of what they should or shouldn’t do and think, instead, originally? If so, what original thoughts might he have had? Perhaps a bit like thinking of a snappy rejoinder a day late, and yet he was tempted by his little challenge to himself. One answer might be
that he could have turned his back on the situation. Or even that, setting out, he might have changed course, followed the car full of kittens being jostled about. He could have turned his life into an existential errand, an amusing bit for a farcical movie on the subject of middle-aged angst. Without his phone call, was there even a remote possibility McCallum would have ended up at his house? If McCallum had always considered him his friend, then just maybe. But couldn’t he and Sonja have sent him on his way, wouldn’t the drama have been diffused by sending him home after a brief conversation, and if he’d gone home, would his wife have become so enraged? Still, he did not feel personally guilty about what had happened to McCallum. At the very least McCallum probably knew the woman was violent, knew—or should have known—enough not to deride her over the telephone, reporting on her irrational actions to the first person who happened to call. How peculiar it was: that you could just edge over into someone’s life, like a cat creeping through an open door, dashing in unseen, perhaps dashing out again, too, except that in place of the tinkling-bell collar of warning, McCallum had dangled words, and they had felt obliged to respond to them, to weigh them, and to consider them, instead of smacking their hands together and hurrying him out. McCallum had told a fascinating alternate account of what had happened between him and Livan Baker, and as he’d done it he’d been both in character and also enough out of character that the account had seemed convincing, much the way certain artists could pull things off, Marshall thought now—artists who’ll tell you the quickest way to attain verisimilitude is to improvise, not to translate exactly. McCallum could have gone on stage with his Bag Lady monologue. Of course this was not to say that he hadn’t told it the way it had happened, not to say the inherent awkwardness and the painful truths hadn’t registered on him so that now he could show them to others, as easily as touching ink and holding up his hands to prove where he’d been. An image of a dirty-palmed McCallum came to mind—wishful thinking, or a true insight?—McCallum as the archetypal boy with his hand in the cookie jar, McCallum as the member of a species tagged to trace its eating habits, its migratory patterns. Well, for all that, a bird’s wing could be tagged, some animal’s ankle banded, and presumably by tracking it, you would have information—but McCallum had only tagged himself, and with no one to watch, or at least with no one but a bag lady and the clearly unbalanced Livan. So here it was: so-called real life, which he’d analyze totally differently than he would a text. He looked again at Cheryl’s note and was surprised that he felt a little pang because not only the note, but also the slightly harried way it was written, let him know immediately that everything was heartfelt. The way her handwriting revealed that the writer was young—female handwriting, not male, though of course such things could only register privately; it would be anathema to reveal such politically incorrect assessments. If she was gone, so much the better. As he began the process of resuming his normal life, he could do without recriminations. He could also do without facing the guilt he felt—okay; he felt it—because, acting like a person younger than his years, he’d been too quickly taken in by overblown problems, found them perplexing and then compelling. He’d become a little tantalized by his increasing involvement, which he knew, deep down, had been tinged with another kind of curiosity—all right: sexual curiosity. And he’d known it before she wrote what she did about that moment in the car—that almost inconsequential moment that had registered on him as strongly as it had registered on her, the connection that defined a missed moment.
