by Ann Beattie
The man who’d gone into the store earlier now came out, hopped into the passenger seat, and the car drove away, its exhaust fumes so dark the rising cloud turned almost green as it hung in the air. Lee got in the car. The door slammed shut. Music played loudly as the ignition turned over: Prince. Lee put the wagon in gear and drove past, without a look in their direction. Gone—back on the road. The taillights quickly disappeared. For a wavery second, Ben remembered his mother running, trying to track the disappearance of a shooting star. But maybe he really only remembered his mother on the ground, hurt.
“We have to hitch,” he said. It had begun to get dark. She was looking down. He thought about extending his hand, but didn’t. Something bad had happened between them. He didn’t know what. He supposed he’d now become a coward in her eyes.
“We’re not riding with some stranger,” she said. “I’m calling Binnie.”
“What?” Binnie popped into his mind as a character in a Dickens novel. She was in her apron, leaving the Sunday social, carrying a pile of half-eaten food on a tray. The thought of food made his stomach clench.
“I’ll pay her to pick us up.”
“What are you talking about?” he said, as Binnie settled back into reality.
LouLou turned away—she had Phillip Collins’s phone! She’d borrowed Collins’s phone with the skull decal! He could hear her talking quietly as she walked farther away. She was calling the caterer’s daughter? How would she even have the number? He stared at her dark mane of hair, glossy and thick. He walked up behind her and lightly wrapped his hands around a clump of it. She spun around, frightened. He was going to pull her hair out of her head, was that it? He was that angry? Because she’d told him not to be manipulated by Lee? He could hear a high-pitched voice on the other end of the phone that was recognizably Binnie’s. “LouLou, tell me where you’re at!”
LouLou raised her hand and grasped his, still wrapped around her hair.
“Give me the phone,” he said, surprised to see tears rolling down her cheeks. “I can explain better than you.”
Four
The night of the first biweekly Film Society meeting, Ms. Delacroix asked LaVerdere to reconsider and to select something less disturbing. He grumbled about “prior censorship” to Ben when she walked away. They were outside Cavendish, the building where the math students took classes. It was a standing joke that the spire on top represented their pointy heads. Two guys Ben didn’t know hurried by, each muttering, “Mr. LaVerdere,” not greeting Ben at all. LaVerdere raised a hand but otherwise paid no attention to the pair, who’d begun giggling, for some reason, once they’d walked past. Ms. Delacroix’s ideas were not a productive way to consider art, he said through clenched teeth. Should certain art not be looked at, if people were judged to be in some particular mood, or might the argument be made that being disturbed provided the optimal moment to accept art’s challenge, since the best art wasn’t inert? “Guernica, hmm?” LaVerdere said. There was no representative person, no inevitable approach to anything (except in Ben’s father’s mind), blah blah blah. Ben knew these thoughts well. He agreed with them. Sophie’s Choice had been listed on the schedule, and another faculty member who would go unnamed (Ha, LaVerdere mouthed, moving his lips silently as he and Ben resumed walking) had said that it was inappropriate to bring up world events that had caused great suffering so early in the school year, when “positive examples of man’s humaneness” had not been screened. “He isn’t a stupid man. Why would he take that position? And what’s Helen Delacroix doing, swanning after Ha?”
“What do you mean, ‘swanning’?”
Another math major hurried toward Cavendish. He didn’t make eye contact.
“Following him like a bitch in heat. If you quote me, I’m denying it.”
Ben would tell only LouLou. She’d never repeat it.
“Because of history? The U.S.’s retaliation against Japan during the Second World War?”
LaVerdere paused. “I wouldn’t have thought of that,” he said. “You might be right. We can’t overlook the obvious. In any case, I think I’ve figured out a plan. We won’t screen just this movie, we’ll offer it at the same time as Gandhi.”
“Really? You wouldn’t want to consider The Sound of Music?”
LaVerdere smiled. “It might be interesting to observe Ha—Dr. Ha—sitting through that, but no. No, I think Ben Kingsley as the estimable Mahatma Gandhi is our fellow. You did know that Gandhi wasn’t always a man of peace, or however others conveniently categorize him? He was to be a barrister. He went to law school in England. He’d have been working at his job just like the rest of us, but do you know what happened? I suppose you couldn’t, if you didn’t know he’d studied law. Forgive me for asking a question you obviously couldn’t answer. The day I take pride in that will be the day I quit my job. Whether I sometimes think my own unstated answers are superior to the ones I elicit, we won’t discuss.”
LaVerdere continued: “The thing was, Gandhi couldn’t bring himself to cross-examine witnesses. It’s sort of perfect, isn’t it? When you consider that about Gandhiji—as I understand he’s called in India; I’m not being a twit here—it seems more than anecdotal that his personal belief system resulted in his being unable to do something that—had he met the challenge—would probably have robbed us of experiencing the teachings of one of the great men of the past century. And then, of course, we have Sophie, who had to decide something profound, when it was a terrible decision to ask any human being to make. Ever seen the movie? It’s been around for a while.”
Ben shook his head. “Meryl Streep?”
Twit hung in the air.
“She won the 1983 Academy Award. When people haven’t read the book or seen the movie, they assume it takes place at a concentration camp, but Styron was cleverer. It takes place years later, at a boardinghouse where Sophie’s lover is a Jewish man. Life’s ironies, hmm? Ben Kingsley also got an Academy Award for Gandhi. Until I ordered the film, I hadn’t realized both awards had been conferred in the same year. Please don’t tell Dr. Ha that I confided in you. I know you won’t.”
“Of course not,” Ben said.
“As long as we’re buddy-buddy? I heard that you and LouLou hit the road. The Powers That Be are still considering how to respond to that, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
“Shit,” Ben said.
“My thought? Since my job is vaguely defined, which is an advantage to those same Powers That Be, so that I am never exactly not working, to state a double negative? There are real risks associated with what you did. Everyone has his horror story. Mine’s that a childhood friend was picked up where he’d been hitching on I-95 and forced at knifepoint to drive the car up to Canada, while the guy who’d been driving sat in the passenger seat and sang along with Little Richard tapes for five hours until they had to stop for gas and my friend got away. Funny now, but in the moment? I’ve been known to put out my thumb, but I know better.”
“Maybe you’re overthinking the movie pairing, if I can say that,” Ben said.
“You’re being educated to speak your mind. Develop your point.”
“They might think”—what might they think?—“that you’re sort of pandering, maybe, by giving them the choice of watching some saintly person, like an antidote, or something, to the other movie? Everybody’s going to say they want to watch Sophie’s Choice, even if they don’t.”
“Is that your concern? I assure you Gandhi isn’t a mindless celebration of a saint. Would Kingsleyji star in a movie like that?”
“Maybe you should run them sequentially.”
“Then Helen would complain that I was keeping everyone up too late.”
“What do you care what she says?”
They stopped to look at a fire hydrant painted to look like Princess Leia. The spigots were like coiled braids and the eyes were eerily perfect. It crossed Ben’s mind that Jasper
might have had something to do with the alteration.
LaVerdere said: “If a dog wanted to take a piss, it might hesitate because it would be passing judgment on one of our iconic cultural artifacts.”
“Do these things just pop into your mind?” Ben said. “Is irony the way you make sense of everything?”
“What an interesting question,” LaVerdere said. “I suspect I depend on people’s being interested or amused—disarming them, I mean, rather than having to talk about things of more substance.”
“You’re not kidding?”
“No. You asked a serious question. I bore myself,” LaVerdere said. “That’s why I read books, listen to music, travel when I can, watch movies, and largely avoid people. A teaching job allows you to make a retreat that seems public at the same time it’s actually private. Not to say that my deeply valued students aren’t people, but of course there’s a built-in power imbalance that allows me to have the last word. You won’t hitch again, is that correct?” LaVerdere said, stopping dead. “Though since LouLou was out there in the middle of the night, I’m glad that at least someone capable was with her.”
A kind word! How often did LaVerdere say anything that verged on being complimentary? His strategy was usually to pretend that everyone was in the muck together, with understatement and irony the only escape ramps. Ben felt almost fond of LaVerdere. His father would have punished him if he’d found out what he and LouLou had done, and he couldn’t imagine what his father would think if he heard how LaVerdere regarded Ms. Delacroix.
“We were going to hear music in Vermont,” he said.
This was followed by a long silence. Ben had run into LaVerdere when he was leaving the library. They’d fallen into step and now Ben was simply walking to be with LaVerdere, hoping he wouldn’t be asked where he was headed. He saw a white balloon deflating in a tree, then a paper cup on the sidewalk—such an offense at Bailey, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the groundskeeper dusted it for fingerprints when he found it.
“I considered becoming a composer,” LaVerdere said. Sometimes, his remarks came from left field, but as Hailey had pointed out, at the end of any exchange, everything LaVerdere said, as well as in what order he delivered the information, made perfect sense. “I have a friend, a fellow named Maw—last name, Maw; it sounds like a character in Dickens, doesn’t it?—who’s finishing an opera based on Sophie’s Choice. It’s to be performed next year in London at the Royal Opera House. I’ve been invited to the premiere.”
“So you’ll go?”
LaVerdere considered. “Probably not,” he said. “Maybe some regrettable feeling of envy.”
“You should do it,” Ben said, though he was surprised he blurted it out. They stood in front of the building where LaVerdere lived on the second floor. Ben had never seen an opera. Or London, in spite of his nickname.
“Good evening,” LaVerdere said, slightly retracting his chin.
“Evening,” Ben replied. At Bailey, you might or might not shake hands when you met, but you never shook hands when you parted.
Five
The response paper Ben had written for LaVerdere had been stupid, and he doubted he’d even turn it in. Each term, you were excused from writing two weekly papers without having to give a reason. Jasper always made it a point to skip the first two papers, to get LaVerdere’s attention, before he got onboard and wrote all the others. Jasper knew how to make people pay attention to him when he wanted that, and, an even greater skill, how to drop off their radar when that benefited him more. LouLou wasn’t the only one who ran away; this early in the school year, Jasper had already spent a night in a motel with a girl he’d gone to kindergarten with, after he’d run into her in a health food store. Jasper had never been as happy at Bailey as Ben had, and Ben still vacillated about Bailey, though, as his father would say, he’d “voted with his feet.” Should he have stayed with his old man and Elin and gone to the local high school, where he’d have had much more free time, even if he’d felt Elin would smother him and really wanted him gone (okay; he hadn’t felt she wanted him out of the house until LouLou explained it as Elin’s real motivation for being so hyperattentive)? Years later, he’d think the obvious: Even if his mother hadn’t died, his father wouldn’t have been a very good father.
That morning, three days after stupidly going along with LouLou on her road trip, he still felt humiliated, which didn’t have so much to do with getting caught as with feeling he’d somehow failed her. It had called his attention to the fact that he didn’t yet have a driver’s license, though if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to drive, because no student at Bailey was allowed to keep a car. That was why they were preoccupied with cars, whether it was Dr. Ha’s amazing machine or AB’s (LaVerdere’s nickname for Ms. Alwyn-Black) white Toyota with the driver’s side and the passenger side deeply dented, as if the car were a well-squeezed tube of toothpaste.
Jasper had asked Ben how, exactly, he thought he’d failed LouLou, and all he’d been able to say was that he’d bought a pack of cigarettes out of cowardice, and that they’d never even made it to Vermont. He’d said nothing about the musician’s not even playing that night, though when he’d given a quick description of who the man was, Jasper had said, “Sounds like a loser. What’s with her, thinking every older guy’s hot?” Even that had made him feel better, though he had to discount a lot of what Jasper said because Jasper was too much on his side. “Maybe LouLou failed you—did you ever think about that?” Jasper had said, pressing the point.
When the wall phone rang in his room, he’d picked up the receiver hoping it was LouLou, and if it was, that the awkwardness between them was over. Not only was the caller not LouLou, it was the worst person it could possibly be, his father. Which meant that word of the road trip must have reached him. His father rarely called except on Friday evenings, when he got off on pretending Ben was going to be having an exciting weekend. It was not good news that his father was on the phone.
His father asked how his studies were going, whether the Film Society had met yet, what his “flamboyant” teacher was up to. Could his father possibly not know?
He told his father about LaVerdere’s cleverness in screening two movies simultaneously to make an end-run around another teacher’s objection to showing depressing movies, which was a continuation—he suddenly realized, even though he was still half asleep—of LaVerdere’s fixation on “The Lady, or the Tiger?” That, he didn’t say. It would give his father an excuse to ruminate about his “liberal education” and how he wanted Ben to concentrate on “something real” in college. His father rarely mentioned Elin, so Ben didn’t, either, though he was aware that there was a pattern of his stepmother calling exactly one day later, sometimes to the hour. His father said that it already felt like September was “whizzing by.” The way his father talked always made it seem like the old man had to dig in his heels while various tornadoes whirled through. When they said goodbye, Ben felt almost as relieved as if LouLou had called.
As he headed toward the bathroom (empty, not a good sign; he was running late), the night before came back to him. They’d ordered pizza. They’d had some bourbon mixed with Pepsi, then the last of the brandy Phillip Collins’s brother had mailed to him wrapped in a pair of ugly pajamas for his birthday. It hadn’t been long before Darius, who could hardly tolerate food, let alone alcohol, began puking out the window, the sound as likely to bring someone running as a pulled fire alarm. The vomit had been nothing but a slush of pizza and booze puked down into the rhododendrons.
How was it, he wondered, that he and LouLou could talk half the night. He talked about things that worried him, while she pretended that she had everything figured out, under control. If she didn’t—every instinct told him that was true—why did he feel so relieved to be with an impostor? Was she more a habit (as Jasper thought)? Did Ben rely on her as much as Darius relied on LouLou’s “boyfriend” (she was the one who always
jokingly identified the man as her boyfriend), who dropped off cheap vodka—some guy’s attempt to seduce her with a present she cast off to her friends as quickly as the Dalai Lama renounced worldly possessions?
He was going to be late for the Sunday social, held much earlier than usual because of a cello concert that evening. He dressed and picked up his backpack. Impossible to zip because of the things sticking out of it. He slung it over one shoulder so he’d be aware if anything dropped out, closed his door, and hurried across campus. He arrived after the bell rang, slipped quickly into an empty chair, and was overwhelmed with misery about where he was, as sure about how the next hour would go as if he’d been stopped in a time warp, LaVerdere, yet again, standing in front of them. When he lowered his backpack, half the contents spilled onto the floor: books; a half-empty bottle of lemonade; a scarf; notebooks; a softball that rolled up the aisle and stopped just behind Akemi Hayashi-Myers’s heel. LaVerdere watched the ball but said nothing. He loved that. He loved those moments when he withheld any remark at all, and let you know that he knew he was doing it. Akemi began to nervously twist the ends of her hair, as she realized his focus was on her.
Ben looked down. There were carpets everywhere at Bailey. The only wood floors were in the bathrooms. The pattern of this rug was truly crazy, the complex pattern becoming ever more complicated before resolving itself into familiarity as it repeated, spreading out like something in a horror film. He concluded, in LaVerdere mode, that the rug expressed the regularity of irregularity, that it might have been manufactured to express an inherent paradox.
Being sick of LaVerdere was like being sick of the hands of a clock. Of course they studied him to see what his mood was, while trying to appear uninterested. Uninterested and disinterested were words that expressed two different emotions. As Ben would later think of their fascination with LaVerdere, they were simply too young to be disinterested; they couldn’t possibly think of personal advantage when they’d really accomplished nothing.
