A Wonderful Stroke of Luck

by Ann Beattie

  At night, bored, he read books about famous gardeners and tried to imagine being one of them, but he realized how demanding and how relentless the work was. Devoting his life to physical labor began to seem daunting. With few variables, it was easy to know what to expect, and when you knew the way things would go, who could help but wish them gone? He talked it over on the phone with Jasper, and invited him, at Elin’s urging, to visit on the weekend. Jasper said he’d like to come, but at the last minute he canceled, claiming allergies (drugs). He’d gotten quite glib with his lies, Ben realized—later vindicating everything Ben thought by confessing that he’d met a girl in Harvard Square and gotten stoned with her. She’d invited him that same weekend to her brother’s house on the Vineyard. For a brief period of time (brief only in retrospect) what seemed most important was getting laid.

  Eight

  Ben met a girl he liked at the hardware store during the summer. Since she’d flirted with him, he assumed she might be easy. It was equally possible that she was a little crazy: insisting on stroking her mascara wand over his eyelashes, then laughing; dropping black plastic flies in his lap during a movie, so that when the lights came up, he jumped out of his seat. The warm-up to sex was making sex a joke. Next, he had sex with someone named Bea, who had a tanned, muscular body from working as a lifeguard at the country club pool. They struck up a conversation and it turned out that she also loved documentary photography. Did he know the work of Bob Adelman? Adelman, who did those amazing civil-rights-era photographs? She gave him a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. He first learned from her about Margaret Bourke-White, who’d been at Cornell, but Bea thought only because it was where Bourke-White’s first husband had studied.

  The evening of the day they met, after fooling around by touching each other’s wrists and quickly interweaving their fingers and squeezing, they had sex in the women’s changing room after hours (Bea was trustworthy; the pool manager had given her the key). They had sex the second time inside one of the outdoor showers, with him cradling Bea’s ass as she faced him, thighs bracketing his waist. They were sheltered by a tall bamboo curtain missing a couple of pieces, suspended from a rod in a tree, and later, as the moldy-smelling steam dispersed, they shared a joint outside the shower, making a game of exhaling smoke in the area where the steam had dissipated.

  Instead of listening to her advice (she thought he shouldn’t worry about what to major in; he could just make money because he decided to), he had sex with her on top of beach towels sharp with the smell of Clorox, a smell that seemed to Ben to permeate the whole world. The towels were stacked in a cart ready to be rolled to the front counter the next morning. Then, because he hadn’t found a way to tell her he had other plans, he left without saying goodbye to board a bus so he could crash with LouLou in Somerville. LouLou had started calling him late at night, saying she missed him, putting down their classmates at Bailey, people he knew she’d really liked. She’d decided that Aqua had been exhausting and that Hailey was a drama queen. LouLou was in the process of breaking up with her married lover, who was trying to reconcile with his wife, though LouLou still had the keys to his secret apartment. Ben stayed for a week. How could he? What would he have done or said if the boyfriend had appeared, since men never believed that other men who were with their girlfriends were just friends? But his luck held, and he never once encountered the man, who still existed for him as a slightly blurry photo-booth picture cheek to cheek with LouLou, and a box of condoms inside the medicine cabinet. True, that made the guy seem a little more real, though he felt better when he thought of him as a figment of LouLou’s imagination, so he did. He’d never doubted that LouLou had a lot of sex with some jerk who cheated on his wife, who was said to be an up-tight, Catholic New Englander who worked at Harvard University Press, but he’d never imagined LouLou and the man having a real life. The sparseness of their apartment underscored, even by Ben’s low standards, how much the relationship was about the bed, since there was nowhere to sit except the two uncomfortable Goodwill chairs pulled up to a scratched kitchen table. “Champagne and pizza,” LouLou had said, opening the refrigerator door to prove it. She was essentially telling the truth, though the pizza was stacked in boxes in the freezer, and the Champagne was something called prosecco.

  The bed had no headboard. It had been pushed against the wall so people could sit on it sideways and lean against the wall with the boarded-up window as they talked. The nicest thing in the apartment was the neighbor’s beagle, Mrs. Robinson, called simply “Robinson.” There was a water bowl for the dog, a soup bowl (he found a stack of those in the cabinet, but no plates). LouLou told him her lover had removed them from his grandmother’s place when she died. Someone else in the family had taken every plate, and every bit of flatware, but somehow the tower of mismatched bowls remained, so he’d put them in a box and carried them out. He’d meant to take the rug, too, but the door had closed and locked behind him. He’d considered that his message that his work was finished. The message from his wife that the marriage was finished had been more than a little cryptic. Every piece of furniture had been loaded out while he was at work. When he returned, nothing remained except her symbolic goodbye: her diaphragm on the side of the sink, so mangled that he mistook it, at a distance, for a dreamcatcher.

  Nelson Goodhart was the lover’s name. Why not think of the man by his name? Maybe in part because such a name was hard to believe. Nelson and his wife had recently gotten back together and were in counseling, and LouLou at least acted as if she didn’t care what they decided about their marriage, since she was going to California. LouLou liked her summer job at an outdoor-clothing store. She’d traded in her feminine boots for clunky lace-ups she’d bought at a big employee discount. She’d also had her beautiful hair cut and wore it in an asymmetrical bob that she called her “flapper look.” Good luck to anybody who still thought it was the 1920s.

  Seeing LouLou, though, he realized how much he missed talking intensely, how important it was that another person shared his frame of reference about so much, in part because they’d experienced so many things together. Yet she still surprised him with what she knew that he didn’t. Binnie had had an abortion. She’d been wrong, she’d been stupid to accept Binnie’s lie; Hailey had confessed that she’d gone with her to the clinic, so Hailey had been a liar, as well as self-dramatizing.

  LouLou’s clothes were strewn around, though she’d been one of the neater people at Bailey. Her bra dangled from a drawer pull in the kitchen (“What do you do when you wash your underwear?”), and her shoes were jumbled in the corner near the never-used, upside-down recycling bin with a lamp on top. She was reading a book by Ronald Firbank—even the name was slightly silly—that made her laugh. LaVerdere had put her on to him. Ben picked up the book and read a page or two, but found nothing funny, though he realized that if he’d been the one to whom the book had been recommended, he might have felt differently.

  When he left, she didn’t come outside with him to say goodbye. She feared the two women who lived in the downstairs apartment, who always wanted to talk to her about investing in the stock market. He’d encountered one of them, or thought he had, though their conversation had been about the problem with the pipes clanging every time the upstairs shower was turned on.

  He went south again, as he’d agreed he would (“Of course you’re still my friend, I just didn’t know how to say goodbye,” he’d told her, quite honestly, on the phone), to hike part of the Appalachian Trail with Bea after her summer lifeguard job concluded. “A lifeguard?” LouLou had said to him. “Isn’t that maybe a little too symbolic?” It was August, and to Bea’s parents’ dismay, she hadn’t responded to Yale. (She was later admitted by an administrative waiver.) She dumped him in Lexington, Virginia (“I’m sorry. I just didn’t know how to say goodbye”), after flirting successfully with a VMI cadet they met along the trail and deciding to continue the rest of the way with him. The guy had won her over with pro
tein bars and loose talk about Kierkegaard and the importance of making a leap of faith. Where she went from there, before New Haven, before the psychologist, he didn’t know. In Lexington, splitting a pizza just before she ditched him (“Why not order large, if it’s only a dollar’s difference?”), she’d said he was selfish and immature, as she slid more than her share of the pie’s melted cheese in her own direction, though none of her accusations had been persuasive. He should have agreed that they’d both forget about school and live off the land and make documentaries about rural musicians. What rural musicians remained undiscovered? Who’d buy the movie camera?

  After their split-up he set out to visit Darius in Washington, getting a ride as far as Charlottesville from a friend of the VMI cadet on his way to visit his mother in Sperryville, who informed Ben that he’d been fucked over by someone who’d never been worthy of him. Ben had worried that the guy might be gay, but what he said had only been his honest opinion. At the little brick train station below Main Street, Ben boarded a train to D.C. It seemed sad to him that the guy had waited with him and waved as Ben boarded the train. Why were some people so awful and others so sad? Anyone kind made him feel sad.

  He lasted in D.C. only a night, sleeping in a filthy Foggy Bottom apartment where the still-thin, smooth-faced Darius—who never mentioned religion, though there were theology books scattered around, including some wedged in the wooden napkin holder—and his roommate played solitaire, separately, late into the night, ignoring the shiny black, nearly Ping-Pong-ball-size roaches skittering across the floor as they shared a coke-laced joint Ben declined a hit of, followed by a red wine chaser he was happy to join in on. It became clear that the roommate was a trust fund kid whose great-grandfather had patented something Ben could make no sense of, which had been used, before it got into wider distribution, to reinforce the Alaskan pipeline. Gee, maybe he could buy me a movie camera, he found himself thinking, though neither of them cared what he did, let alone had anything invested in Bea’s idea that he become a filmmaker. His father, though, most certainly cared what he did; nothing would do but that Ben enroll in college, with his major already decided upon. Elin, who had a bloodhound’s ability to sniff him down, never failed to attempt neutral, friendly calls, barely disguising the pressure she was under from his father to get answers.

  Ben joined in as Darius and his roommate threw darts at a bull’s-eye enlargement of George W.’s smug face that hung on the back of the apartment door—such a nonentity; such an establishment puppet, incapable of even holding a book right-side-up for a photo op—where the cracked wood above El Shrub’s left ear let in light from the super-bright bulb in a metal cage dangling in the hallway.

  They dumped freezer-burned ravioli out of a bag for dinner. Darius had plunked down a half-empty fifth of cheap vodka on the table, which he poured over ice the same indifferent way Elin overwatered houseplants. Darius and his friend exchanged in-jokes without giving Ben any context, wildly amusing each other, sloshing more vodka into their glasses than his after they’d finished the bottle of wine. Basically, they let him know he wasn’t part of their world, whatever world that might be, and in some ways their bond was so convincing that he felt like he’d invented his friendship with Darius, and even that Bailey itself had been a different place than he remembered. The name of the school never came up.

  He slept on a mattress you inflated with a pump that Darius told him, proudly, they’d found in the corridor when they’d moved in. Dog or cat hair had hardened against it. It looked like eczema. He tried not to closely examine the sheet Darius pulled out of a closet, with a note in an envelope pinned to it, from Mrs. Beltz, telling him it was “for the Thanksgiving table.” That was so stupid that they’d all laughed, agreeing that the tablecloth was more useful as a sheet. The top covers were Ben’s own clothes: his shirt, his jacket. The bed was, to use the roommate’s favorite word, gross, but he was tired and felt stupid and uptight for being shocked at the way Darius was living. It made him suspect that Darius was doing more drugs than he wanted to admit.

  The sleeping arrangements made LouLou’s seem palatial. He closed his eyes without wanting to think about what might be skittering around and sharing his space, three inches below, on the floor. In the bedroom, Darius and the roommate had a pillow fight, or some muffled encounter with thumping that made the floorboards squeak. What was so funny? What could be so fucking funny? Drifting off to sleep—or trying to, while the broken ceiling fan hummed without rotating in the kitchen, he remembered how really anguished Darius had been when his parents were the first ones to arrive at Bailey after 9/11. They’d insisted on taking him to Mount Kisco, where they had a summer house. Darius hadn’t wanted to go. LaVerdere had stepped in, trying to appease the Beltzes, saying that Darius would be safe at Bailey and that it would be better for everyone if he stayed. As the car pulled away, the back window had rolled down, Darius’s head leaning out like a dog’s, the sound he made equally as high-pitched. Ben had been up early, heading off to the trails to go jogging. He’d had to check his own response to run after the car.

  The pillow fight in the bedroom went on and on. In the morning when he woke up, both of them were gone, though he hadn’t heard either one leaving. He played with the notion that he was a character in a novel. He’d imagined all of it: his being excluded, Darius’s anger, Darius’s bizarre opinions. On his late-night walk with the roommate to get beer when the vodka disappeared, the guy had joked that he might toss Ben down the Exorcist steps as they passed Prospect Street.

  There were empty beer bottles on the counter in the morning, so he must have remembered correctly that the two of them had gone out to get beer. He left everything on the floor and got out as fast as he could. He would have showered, but there was only tepid water. He was glad to go. At Bailey, on 9/11, he’d experienced claustrophobia for the first time, in spite of the fact that he was free to move wherever he wanted. It had all seemed like an impossible game of chess, though, because there’d been no good move to make. Was there anywhere his presence was truly wanted? The odd thing was that when you were in school, your presence was demanded. When you left, it was up to you to find out where you fit in, if you belonged anywhere at all, or if you could convince people you belonged when you didn’t.

  Ben never rode the Crescent again, though he liked its name; he’d rarely smoked a joint since that night, when the roommate had puked, and they’d all taken aspirin before going to sleep in anticipation of being awakened by headaches. Now, if he drank too much, Ben took B vitamins, washed down with Excedrin PM and a tall glass of water, waiting fifteen minutes to be sure to piss before even trying to sleep. Were you getting old when you had an automatic remedy for hangovers?

  He had, though, to his surprise, delayed any decision about college and spent the next year in Washington. Sitting on a bench in DuPont Circle, he’d been approached by an old man who turned out to be Ms. Delacroix’s husband, the judge. He must look bad, he realized, when the two of them were seated in a hotel dining room, having breakfast. “I never worry about any student who’s graduated from Bailey Academy,” the judge said. “Anything you like, son,” he added, as the waiter approached. Ben ate eggs Benedict (a favorite of Elin’s) and drank cup after cup of coffee. The judge ate scrambled eggs with a double order of sausage. When breakfast ended, the judge made a phone call and Ben was introduced to a man not much older than he, a graduate of American University, who needed someone to answer calls at an apartment complex and to send and receive packages for the residents. “You can write plays in your spare time, and have them staged at the Kennedy Center,” the judge said.

  “I don’t write,” Ben replied. (Even LouLou had stopped writing after 9/11.)

  “Well, you’ll be so bored, you will. Or you’ll study the clarinet. Or maybe you’ll enroll in a night-school program, over there at Georgetown, did you say it was? See how college agrees with you. I don’t worry about a Bailey boy,” he repeated. “You mi
ght end up a judge.”

  He did not. He lived in an apartment on Tunlaw Road, where he quickly learned how to answer three incoming calls simultaneously and also picked up extra money doing errands he wasn’t required to do. Henry, one of the residents, taught him to drive. In the man’s car, he practiced at night in the parking lot, or sometimes they bumped through the grounds of American University, and eventually they drove around circles and parallel-parked on Connecticut Avenue. He borrowed Henry’s car to take his road test and got his license on the first try. His father had been such a prick, not to teach him to drive. “I specialize in being everyone’s perfect father,” Henry joked. But in May Henry was transferred to Oklahoma, and when the job got too boring and the heat settled in, Ben began to think about his father’s place. He’d almost gotten in touch with LaVerdere to tell him what an odd thing he was doing, though he never had. There was every chance that LaVerdere would have been disappointed in him. Why should he feel defensive? Why was it necessary to explain himself? On the phone, he and LouLou—it seemed she was halfway across the world, in Berkeley, California—agreed that underlying so much of their education had been the implicit demand that they not only have knowledge, but that they understand themselves. Their teachers got to posture, to hide behind the façade of Bailey in order to give the impression that they understood themselves, LouLou said.