Another You

by Ann Beattie

  “Hi,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? I’m sorry. I don’t know how things went so out of focus”—he saw the white line painted up the center of the highway running along, as if it were a conveyor belt—“I’m here without you. This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I thought you had to see your brother, and McCallum had to have a vacation,” she said.

  “You’re furious at me,” he said. “Why? Why are you?”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I thought a trip would do you good.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “Have you called to start a fight about a trip you told me you wanted to take?”

  “Is he standing right there?” he said.

  “ ‘He’ Tony? No, he’s not in the office. He does own the place, though.”

  “I don’t care what he fucking owns, he doesn’t own you.”

  “I realize that,” she said.

  “You just don’t realize that I love you,” he said. “And maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe I’ve really blown it. McCallum—McCallum went off to apologize to some woman he knew from years ago when they were kids in summer camp. After all this time, he needed to apologize to her. I understand that. It’s not easy, sometimes. Too much time passes. You don’t know what to say. I don’t exactly know what to say now.”

  “Write me a love poem,” she said. Her voice softened slightly.

  “I’ll build you that tree house and climb up into it with you and read it to you there. How’s that?”

  “It’s funny you teach poetry and you never write poems,” she said. “Do you write them and keep them hidden from me?”

  “No,” he said. He shuddered as he remembered the grotesquely inept poem written by Mrs. Adam Barrows. “What are you doing?” he said quickly.

  “Sitting here, waiting for an electrician to stop by and explain something to me about an exploding stove,” she said.

  “You could fly to Key West,” he said. “Meet me.”

  “Maybe we should take another vacation. Another time.” A pause. “McCallum is setting right some wrong? New lease on life and all that?”

  “He jumped ship. He’s flying back.”

  “And you wouldn’t be calling just to get me to pinch-hit for McCallum, would you?”

  “I love you. Don’t you know that I love you?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  He looked again at the highway. The line was no longer moving, but cars were. The sun had begun to shine on his back. He turned away from it, facing into the phone booth. “The reason I called was to say I loved you. I’m afraid you’re going to leave. Have you been thinking about leaving?”

  “I’ve given some thought to a brief vacation in Santa Fe, floating over the desert and eating blue corn tortillas.”

  “That would be great,” he said. It sounded terrible. Far away, and pointless.

  “I think I’m going with Jenny. Maybe after you write me your poem, you and I can go to, oh, Niagara Falls.”

  “Anywhere,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I love you. Can you say you love me even if you’re at work?”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “You’d say it if Tony was there, right?”

  “I’m not in love with Tony,” she said.

  “Does Gwen know about this? Did everybody besides me know?”

  “You mean, did I confide in McCallum that night we had our little chat?”

  “You did?”

  “In fact, I didn’t. Listen: here’s the electrician. Once this stove situation gets fixed, everything’s going to be fine. We’ll be fine. Write the poem. Buy the lumber.”

  “Niagara Falls. Hell, I really will take you, if you want to go.”

  “I was kidding,” she said.

  “But not about the other?” he said.

  “No,” she said, lowering her voice. “I do love you. You’re always so distracted. I mean, you didn’t even pay attention to Evie. I don’t know if it was your class you were thinking about, or—”

  “Don’t say any more,” he said. “This isn’t sounding as good as when you just said, ‘I love you.’ ”

  She laughed. “You do make me laugh,” she said.

  “I didn’t do well enough by Evie. I haven’t done well enough with you.”

  “We’ll talk about it when you get back,” she said.

  “I will,” he said. “I’ll get back.”

  He looked around him, smacking his lips dryly to send her a small kiss as he hung up, his hand still shaking as he replaced the phone in its cradle.

  It would be good to get to Gordon and Beth’s. That would be his own version of McCallum’s sitting by the hearth, nestled in a chair, himself the center of attention, a drink on the table, forget the coffee and tea, a drink. It would be interesting to start from the beginning, with two people who knew nothing about the situation except its outcome—its ostensible outcome, since who knew what McCallum would do, and who knew what would happen to Susan, when and if she was released from the prison psychiatric ward to stand trial?—to discuss how McCallum had for reasons of his own decided he was entitled to be a part of Marshall’s life, which was in counterpoint to Marshall’s having decided he would distance himself from Gordon. Absenting yourself was a decision made by default, wasn’t it? What had happened that he and Gordon had for years kept a distance from one another? Wives? Geography? Their jobs? All those things, though Sonja had encouraged him to see more of his brother (more time for Tony?), and he’d always had the same amount of vacation time he had now, he could have gotten on a plane. It was too far to drive. He’d just driven because McCallum had stars in his eyes about being out on the road, though now he saw that McCallum had an ulterior motive. That left the category “jobs.” Okay: his had allowed him to turn inward, to spend his time passively, reading and thinking. Things that had once seemed a great luxury had become habit. Following the complexities of books had ultimately made him naïve about what was happening around him: everyone’s complicated lives; their difficult-to-articulate desires. Perhaps, having no ability to compete with his brother, he’d taken the opposite path, learned vocabulary while Gordon was learning skills, surrounded himself with other thoughtful people, while Gordon had concluded the optimal life was about more action and less thought.

  He was worried that he’d dropped out of Gordon’s life too long, that it was going to be difficult to reconnect. There was every possibility Gordon thought that too; that Gordon was signalling he’d left not only Marshall, but the whole family behind when he didn’t come to Evie’s funeral. Gordon had said that exact day was when a Japanese businessman would be meeting with him to discuss buying the dive shop. But who knew? And what should his brother have done? Put everything on hold, since no doctor would say whether she was getting better or worse? Truth was, Gordon had never been as attached to Evie as Marshall. He had liked her, but not loved her. As a child, Marshall had thought that admirable: that Gordon was still loyal in his thoughts to their mother, while Evie’s kindness eroded more and more of their mother’s memory. It had been easier, probably, for Evie to embrace the younger child—physically embrace him—because Gordon was standoffish; Gordon saw his mother’s death as a way to increase his independence, because the adults were so preoccupied. And Gordon didn’t want his father to have any excuse to think him the sissy he thought his younger son. They had both known that was the way he had thought of Marshall. His father had asked Gordon to repair things, while he’d asked Marshall to help Evie wash dishes. It was to Gordon’s credit that he deemphasized his own achievements, that he had so convincingly made their father seem silly in his reactions toward Marshall. Well, Marshall thought, what if the payoff for having been such a good person was that one day Mr. Watanabe from Tokyo, Japan, made Gordon a rich man. What if Mr. Watanabe was an original thinker—no taking over Hollywood, no buyouts of companies in Silicon Valley: acquiring a diving-supply and boat-chartering business in Key West,
Florida, the end of the line, Cuba floating ninety miles away, across all the gleaming water filled with million-dollar fish that were loaded onto airplanes still flopping, flown to Japan to be filigreed into sashimi. According to Sonja, who had talked to Beth, Mr. Watanabe’s other businesses included a drugstore chain in Kansas, and a meatpacking factory in Omaha. That sounded so dreary that the guy was probably looking for a business that would provide a little excitement.

  The music had gotten lugubrious, so he pushed the “seek” button, thinking wryly, Yes indeed; yes indeed—that’s what I’m out here on the road doing, all right. It was the McCallum mentality, communicable, like a cold. He pushed his thumb against the tiny button above which a green light quivered, locking in Bette Midler singing “Skylark.” Another song that should make him watch his foot on the accelerator. A cop car sat in a gulley where the road sloped, but he’d seen it in time. He looked at his watch, saw that it wasn’t time yet for lunch, and reached into the bag and broke off another piece of muffin. The muffin disintegrated, which made him think again of McCallum, who, the night before, reaching for Marshall’s leftover cornbread, had found himself holding bright yellow crumbs.

  The prospect of days without McCallum, the idea of sun, palm trees, ocean breezes, lifted his spirits. He flipped down the visor as the car moved in line with the sun.

  19

  IN CHARLESTON, South Carolina, he decided to call it a day. For the past three or four hours driving rain had pelted the car, the jagged patches of light between clouds narrowing until early darkness erased what Sonja would have called “the fill-in parts of the puzzle”—the maddening, uniformly toned blue pieces of the one puzzle they owned, which depicted a small, colorful desert below an enormous, even-blue sky. The puzzle had been a gift from Gordon and Beth several Christmases before. Usually they sent a carton of grapefruit and oranges, but that year they had sent the desert, the orderly little desert with its one prairie dog peeking from its hole and its red-flowered cactus blooming. More than he wanted to, he had thought for much of the ride about McCallum, imagining scenarios in which Cheryl’s mother raced into McCallum’s arms, or, alternatively, the woman’s husband taking exception to his presence, going after him the way McCallum’s wife had. He thought that maybe he had gotten addicted to McCallum’s life the way other people got addicted to soap operas, though instead of being allowed to tune in to watch, he had been given constant synopses of what had happened, as if McCallum were reading from outdated issues of TV Guide. It was nothing he and Sonja would have watched on TV, he was sure of that. The jigsaw puzzle had been such a novelty, and they’d been snowed in just after getting it. But other people’s despair and ongoing confusion? It didn’t seem titillating, didn’t figure in their lives.

  He stopped outside a small building with a canopy above the entranceway, using McCallum’s shirt to cover his head as he made a mad dash for the front door.

  Inside, a man in a three-piece suit was talking to a young woman behind the counter. The counter was flanked by potted palms aglow with tiny coral lights. A woman in a long black raincoat stood peering out the window. It was as different from the motel in Buena Vista as anyone could imagine, which meant that it was exactly where he wanted to stay. When he heard a room was available he didn’t ask the price. He said, “Good,” and waited while the man went behind the counter and got a registration form and put Xs in the two places where Marshall was to sign. The man wore a silver signet ring on his third finger and, on the other wrist, a Rolex. He feigned interest in the young woman’s paperwork as Marshall filled out the form. “We have complimentary continental breakfast in the lobby or in your room between the hours of seven and nine,” the man said. “There is a hot tub in the courtyard I don’t think you’ll be using tonight, and there should be a duvet in your armoire, which also contains the television. I’ll be happy to provide you with a list of complimentary movies you might view on the VCR. Alicia will show you to your room.” He placed an index card of movie titles on the registration desk. “I believe there should be a duplicate list in your room, but you might want to glance at this now so you could take one with you.”

  He selected Betrayal, which he’d never heard of, because it starred Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley.

  “May I help with any luggage?” Alicia said.

  “No, no,” he said. “I’ve got a duffel bag in the car I can bring in. I can take the key and find the room myself.”

  “I’ll be happy to accompany you. House rules,” Alicia said.

  “We don’t want anything not up to standard when you enter the room,” the man said.

  “Of course,” Marshall said. “I’m parked right outside. I’ll get my bag.”

  “You’re checking in after turndown, so let me give you a Godiva mint also,” the man said.

  “Thank you,” Marshall said. He felt as if he were doing a kind of charade: a reenactment of Halloween, from an old-fashioned gentleman’s perspective. There he had been, knocking at the door, and here were these civilized people, offering him mints and movies.

  “Please place this inside your windshield in order to avoid parking penalties,” the man said, handing him a laminated card with the hotel’s name on it.

  “Certainly,” Marshall said. “Thank you.”

  He turned and went outside, reluctantly. It was raining harder, and McCallum’s already damp shirt was almost no protection. He quickly got the bag and locked the car, slightly embarrassed to be reentering the lobby looking like a drowned person.

  “There will be chamber music tomorrow at twelve-fifteen,” the man said. “Checkout time is one p.m., which we would be happy to extend.”

  Marshall felt the foil-wrapped mint in his pocket, jiggled it like a good-luck charm. Maybe I could live here the rest of my life, Marshall thought. To the man he said, “I’ll have a better idea in the morning.”

  “Please,” Alicia said, holding out her hand for his bag. She wore a thick silver cuff bracelet between two narrower gold bracelets. Though he was reluctant to hand a woman his bag, he extended his arm.

  “Sir,” the man said, “it would be possible to have your shirt laundered and returned by checkout time.”

  He looked at McCallum’s shirt, feeling as if he’d carried in a grease rag. “No, no,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

  “Please follow me,” Alicia said, opening a side door. The building, two tiered, stretched behind them. Just outside the overhang, two redwood tubs held palm trees with something flowering at their bases. Pansies? Purple pansies in April? The elevator was about twenty feet away; the doors opened immediately when Alicia hit the “up” button. They rode in silence to the second floor. When the doors opened, she said, “Please turn left,” then came up beside him and overtook him just outside room 44. Before the key turned in the door, he felt sure that room 44 would be as close to heaven as he could imagine. He saw it in advance, felt the carpeting beneath his feet, almost drank in the pale light from the table lamp Alicia switched on. It sat on a lacquered chest just inside the door. As she switched on two more lights, he looked at the cherry armoire, saw the large bed with its enormous bedposts and scalloped back. On a brass tray were a digital clock, a flashlight, a thick black pen, and the request form for the morning’s breakfast. He reminded himself that he was not an unsophisticated person: he had stayed in other good hotels, seen these things before. But tonight it was as if velvet were replacing sandpaper. He realized the extent of his exhaustion. It was the strain of being with McCallum, not only the days of driving, and in that large bed he could lie spread-eagled, dreaming it all away. Maybe he really would stay for the chamber music. Maybe he would extend his stay, recuperate, use this extremely nice place as the springboard for reentering the world.

  “Thank you,” Alicia said, as he slipped his billfold from his back pocket and tipped her.

  She left, telling him to call the desk if they could provide anything further. She had already lifted the duvet from the armoire and placed it at the bott
om of the bed. As she closed the door, he poked it with the heel of his hand, watched the down cover sink and slowly rise. McCallum’s shirt was draped over an arm of the chair. His bag sat on a luggage rack. Over the bed, flanked by sconces, was a framed Audubon print of a flamingo. For the first time, he felt he had truly left New Hampshire behind. Something indescribable about the room, which was at once comforting and impersonal, relaxed him. He decided to take a hot shower and stretch out on the bed, to decide then whether it seemed the right moment to call Sonja, or whether he felt more inclined to watch Betrayal. He ate the mint, rolling the foil between thumb and finger, dropping the little ball into the trash basket in the marble bathroom. On a tray he saw cotton swabs, small bottles of lotion and shampoo, a Bic shaver, a small sewing kit, a shoeshine cloth. Above those things, in the long rectangular mirror, he saw his face: haggard; showing the signs of the skipped morning shave; a small red pimple or bug bite on his temple; his sideburns, now almost completely white. It had been a while since he’d scrutinized himself in a mirror. He’d developed a way of more or less looking through mirrors, so he didn’t consciously register what he was seeing. Who would love a person who looked so ordinary? he wondered, smoothing his rain-matted hair. Not that Tony Hembley was any movie star. Not that he looked this bad every day. Not as though you have to keep looking if you’ve seen enough, he told himself.

  A thick white terrycloth robe hung from a hanger suspended from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. He removed the robe and draped it over the top of the shower door, spent a few seconds figuring out how the faucet worked while admiring the heaviness of the brass. The bath mat was rolled and placed in a deep, chrome-plated basket attached to the tile at the back wall of the shower, along with a back scrubber enclosed in plastic. Standing under the strong force of the shower, he unwrapped the soap, tossing the wrapper sideways, over his head. The soap smelled of roses and cloves, he decided after some thought; it smelled like something that might be ingested. Tempted to put the tip of his tongue to the heavy oval bar, he touched it instead with the tip of his nose, then smeared it over his cheeks and forehead before placing it in the soap dish and spreading the soap with his hands. If he had brought the razor into the shower he could have shaved, though he was glad he’d left it on the counter because he was enjoying the sybaritic shower. He washed his hair with the soap—something Sonja deeply disapproved of, saying it made his hair look like it had been struck by lightning—then massaged each shoulder as he dialled the showerhead clockwise, increasing the force of the water. What if he looked for another job? What if he went into business with Gordon, assuming Gordon wasn’t retired himself? What if he and Sonja had an adventure? What if this time they bought a more expensive house, one with a marble bathroom, the floor matte-black tile, a brass hook on the back of the door strong enough to haul Moby Dick out of the water? What if he got out of the shower transformed, combed his hair straight back in the fashionable European style, put on fresh clothes and went down to the lobby and charmed Alicia, lured her back to the room to spread herself on the bed beneath the impossibly long, swooped neck of the pink flamingo. Maybe instead of being an artistic exaggeration, the flamingo’s neck had grown like Pinocchio’s nose, responding to all the lies told beneath it, all the breathless I love yous. Cynical, cynical, he thought. McCallumesque.