by Ann Beattie
Though he assumed he’d run into Darius again, he never did, and he realized that he’d disliked his roommate so much, he didn’t call. Even stranger, when Henry left for Oklahoma they had a beer together at a bar on Wisconsin Avenue but never talked again. The judge, also, seemed like a figment of his imagination: an old, male Tinkerbell whose magic wand had arranged for, well, the status quo. LouLou was right when she said he needed to get serious.
He thought he might go to Cornell in September, which he told Elin on the phone. When she expressed excitement and went to get his father, he hung up. He’d been offered a scholarship, if he could get it reinstated. If not, that would be soon enough to speak to his father.
Talking to his sister, Brenda, was even worse than talking to his father: It didn’t matter so much about undergraduate school, she said; he’d have to go to graduate school. Personally, Brenda had never imagined he had the temperament to do anything in the arts, since he liked instant gratification. That one had really stumped him, until he realized how long they’d lived apart, how little she knew him. Also, he hadn’t said anything about what he might major in. What genie had he let out of the bottle? She regretted that he hadn’t majored in math at Bailey. Some artists, Brenda said grudgingly, who were obsessed, might have lived to create, but who thought effort guaranteed success?
The judge died. Ben didn’t know that until LouLou found out when she was talking to Binnie, who’d called to tell her she’d gotten engaged. “Thank god there were some real people at Bailey,” was what LouLou had to say about that. She’d moved with her roommate to Oakland, which was more real than Berkeley. In May 2003, he flew to California to visit her.
She lived four flights up, with a Ph.D. student just as wired as she’d described: The woman didn’t even stand to say hello. She twisted and sucked the ends of her hair as she worked on her computer. She was wearing striped pants and looked like a convict, he thought. Maybe an old-fashioned ball and chain kept her anchored to the chair. She dispelled that illusion when she carried her Mac into the bedroom to let them have the living room. “Unless you’d rather use the bedroom,” she said, then blushed and hurried off before receiving an answer. LouLou laughed; he felt awkward, as if they’d both been rude, when she’d tried to be considerate.
LouLou handed him a beer from a refrigerator that stood in the passageway from the living room to the tiny kitchen, and they immediately started talking. The subject was the cover of Entertainment Weekly, on which the Dixie Chicks had appeared naked. Natalie Maines was LouLou’s hero for what she’d said about George W. Bush. D.C. had been so oppressive, Ben said, with the young Bush bureaucrats everywhere. LouLou called them “Gregor Samsa cockroaches.” The only problem, she explained, was that everyone else had to wake up, too.
Nine
After he graduated from Cornell in 2007, he crashed at his former classmate Arly’s East Village apartment, servicing her twice a night and working as a poorly paid photographer’s assistant by day. He wasn’t thrilled when he learned that Brenda planned to visit. She’d be in New York on business, but she set aside time to see him on the weekend. Of course he couldn’t invite her to the small one-bedroom walk-up, but he didn’t really know where to go with his sister. Also, though Arly clearly cared nothing for his friends or family, he’d be in trouble if he excluded her. A walk? A simple walk somewhere?
He decided on the obvious: Central Park. Once there, Arly immediately ran into one of her grandmother’s friends and stopped to talk. She’d been surprised to hear that the man had moved from Rye to New York. The two warmly embraced. Ben and Brenda waited on a bench—it didn’t seem like the sort of conversation they could easily enter into, since she and the man had such a long shared history. While they were sitting side by side, a squirrel fell from the tree—how often did that happen?—and landed in between him and Brenda. They gasped as it scrambled away.
“Fucking filth!” his sister exclaimed, jumping up and brushing her jeans as if the rodent’s hair had been instantly ejected, like porcupine quills. (Ben silently corrected himself: The porcupine has no way to send its quills out of its body; it is the animal’s flapping its tail that embeds the quills.)
Arly and the man, Michael, had rushed over when Brenda screamed, but by then everything was okay—or Ben thought it was. No time to turn it into a joke, or a family story—in fact, in their family, there were no family stories. Anything bordering on nostalgia was sneered at.
Arly and Michael’s conversation resumed, out of earshot, until Michael came up and shook their hands before tipping his hat brim and taking his leave. Michael had had two oranges in his jacket pockets, one of which he’d given to Arly, and he’d insisted on giving the other to Ben and Brenda to share. They’d gotten not only the orange, but a lecture on Christopher Columbus, who’d ostensibly planted the first orange tree in the New World (“New World”—wasn’t that a phrase out of F. Scott Fitzgerald?), though initially oranges and lemons hadn’t been valued. That had come later, Michael had informed them, using the same condescending intonation an adult who knew nothing about children would use when reading a fairy tale. Oranges had initially been imported from Sicily. Old people were so proud of their knowledge, but their information so often only created a twisting path. Whatever old people said was news brought from a vanished land.
The day was intermittently sunny as they walked past Strawberry Fields. Of course one of them—in this case, he—mentioned John Lennon. His sister uttered an irrelevant slur about “the great Yoko Ono,” ironizing “great” with a roll of her eyes. Arly took exception. She was like a cigarette ash, her grudges tiny, glowing embers waiting to flare, though she addressed the subject only when they’d crossed the park and stopped to have coffee. She felt he and his sister were “a unit.” They’d been rude, or borderline rude (he’d argued the point), to an elderly gentleman. “He didn’t want to talk to us,” his sister said dismissively. “We thanked him for the fruit.”
“Are things that happened in the past ruled out as a possible topic of conversation?” Arly asked. “You knew—the way your brother knows everything—that oranges were imported from Italy?”
Arly had dropped out of Cornell without graduating. Her job at Macy’s put her in a foul mood. Some days she just didn’t show up for work.
Brenda looked at Ben. She said, “I assume she’s kidding?”
“Arly—sorry if we didn’t seem sociable enough. The gods got even by dropping a flying rat on Brenda’s lap, okay?”
“Please listen,” Arly said. “Anything you want to say, you can say directly to me, Brenda. There are various interpretations people have when reacting to something that has just happened.”
“Especially true if the other person’s intent on bullying,” his sister replied.
In the coffee shop, Arly smiled falsely at the waitress as she put down an espresso and placed coffees in front of Ben and Brenda. The waitress also smiled, sliding the container of sugar to the center of the table.
Brenda considered her coffee mug for some time, then moved it aside. “Is my presence disturbing you lovebirds? Is there some problem with my being here, Ben? Arly?”
“Oh, we wouldn’t want to talk about the past,” Arly said. “Let’s talk about the present. That’s the time period in which your brother lives, so let’s not talk about anything that isn’t happening right this minute.”
Ben cleared his throat. He said, “You’re taking this too far.”
“You might apologize,” Brenda said. “You’re sort of ruining our afternoon.”
“I happen to believe it’s better to talk openly. I don’t apologize, but I do regret being a bit hypersensitive. In the world I grew up in, you should include older people, make them feel comfortable and valued.”
“The day of good etiquette,” Brenda said. “Think of all we can learn.”
“I doubt it,” Arly said. “Whatever happens in your family, you’ll do
whatever it takes to remain an insular little group, even if you don’t approve of one another. And ‘approve’ means ‘silence.’ Nobody would ever want to say anything real. You haven’t talked about one thing that’s important to you, Brenda. I know you withdrew after your mother’s death and that you have as little to do with Elin as possible, and that you’re gay, even if you don’t say so.”
“Wow,” Brenda said. “Ben, really. An amazing choice you’ve made here.”
“Why are you doing this?” Ben asked Arly.
“Oh, I’m insecure because I’m two years older than you and flunked out of Cornell—don’t you think?”
A little boy in his overalls, bib and forearms streaked with ketchup, had caught the flash in Ben’s eye. He squeezed his fingers toward his palm, a kid’s wave. Ben’s raised hand acknowledged it. The boy shyly turned away.
“How would you know anything about my relationship with Elin, Arly?” Brenda asked.
“Because unlike you, and before I gave up, I tried to have a relationship with Elin. Just by telephone—I wouldn’t want to transgress and actually interact with someone in your hermetically sealed family. And Ben, don’t get upset, because it wasn’t about you. I tried to talk to her woman-to-woman about how she felt, whether she might like to have a more substantial relationship with someone who cared enough to relate to her and who was important in her stepson’s life.”
“Really? What did she say?” This was the first time he’d heard this.
Brenda took a sip of coffee. The way she pursed her lips reminded him of their mother. Her hands, with their long fingers, were their mother’s hands.
“Sadly, she just couldn’t do it. She obviously doesn’t feel she can trust anybody. It’s why he married her, don’t you think? Your mother was lovely—I’m assuming she was, because that’s what I’ve always been told—but after she died, apparently second-best was someone who’d keep her mouth shut.”
“Did it ever occur to you that she might have thought she was dealing with a nutcase?” Brenda asked, surprising him by defending their stepmother.
“She certainly wasn’t going to admit that he killed himself,” Arly replied.
Ah: She’d just been warming up. His sister was looking at him. He could feel his face’s rigidity, any expression absent in proportion to how much pain he felt.
New cups of coffee and espresso were put down by the waitress, though no one had summoned her. “Refills are free,” the waitress said, as she walked away.
“I read the autopsy results. If you read between the lines, it’s pretty clear ‘pneumonia’ is listed as a technical cause of death.”
“How did you see our father’s autopsy results?” Brenda asked, her hands clasped tightly. If a madman had locked his sister in a windowless cell that she might talk her way out of, she could not have decided on a more judicious tone of voice.
Well, Ben thought, Arly would have done it because she had little sense of personal privacy, whether it was leaving the bathroom door open when she was on the toilet, or reading someone’s mail. She’d confessed to ripping up a parking ticket he’d gotten when she’d preceded him back to the car, because it would have spoiled their afternoon. To throwing out a summons for jury duty because “They send those things out like coupons.”
Elin had told him how his father had died. So what was the truth? Was Elin deluded? Arly malevolent? Did one preclude the possibility of the other, as LaVerdere had been so fond of asking?
Outside the restaurant, Arly said she was sorry for them: Hansel and Gretel, no match for the evil witch. When Arly extended her hand before leaving, Brenda shook it. It was the same way you’d deal with an insane person who did something improper as you left the asylum. Then Arly turned and left. She did have a beautiful ass. He stood with Brenda, who, he knew, needed to return to Grand Central.
“Was she serious?” Brenda asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Please don’t take it personally. She was completely paranoid about that Michael guy. She’s opened my mail. I thought it was harmless. It wasn’t like she hid it after she opened it.”
“She’s poison,” Brenda said.
“I’m so sorry. We’ll find out. Nothing she said was really about us. It was all about her.”
“You knew I was gay?”
“Sure.”
“It never crossed your fucking mind.”
“No,” he said. “It didn’t.”
A cabbie ducked his head to see whether they wanted a ride. All those split-second decisions everyone was always making in the city: Were that man and woman drunk? On speed? Had he just told the funniest joke imaginable, or was his friend having a heart attack? Then the cab was pulling away, and of course the driver would no more remember them than the waitress would think about her miserable customers one minute after she got off work. Was he going to go back to the apartment, to Arly? Would she be gloating? Furious? Had she accomplished what she’d set out to do, packed her bags, and gone off to crash with a friend? He’d lived with her for long enough that he knew if he returned, so would their routine. They’d go to midnight movies, set roach traps around the apartment in places they stupidly thought weren’t noticeable, they’d spend more money than they should on wine, have arguments neither was willing to concede. They’d try to be healthy and jog on weekends, on Sunday morning they’d listen to Lou Reed sing his spookily seductive “Sunday Morning” as they ate muffins drizzled with honey, get mugged on Essex street (Arly), see a cat run over by a truck in front of the Strand (Ben), buy stolen down pillows (Arly) from a vendor on Houston Street. He’d rent a car and begin looking at property upstate, whose potential purchase would underscore his inability to keep on keepin’ on. Whatever its advantages, it would also announce the end of something, and if that thing wasn’t youth, it was nevertheless related to age, related to a world you’d renounced, extending its never-dormant tendrils to pull you back.
Metaphor. It was insidious. You had to ignore that way of thinking, the same way you had to understand that your dreams contained straw men rather than real omens, the way you were obliged to admit your neurotic fears lacked legitimacy. Strangely, to admit you lacked intuition, that you realized symbolic stories were inert, that you had no special abilities, no second senses to go on, meant that you had achieved a sense of power.
He was determined not to go into the drawer where he kept his birth certificate, which he’d needed to show on so many occasions, and the letter Hailey had sent when she was drunk or stoned, and the coroner’s report. What good sense Elin had, not to befriend Arly. Arly was the oven, if he and Brenda were Hansel and Gretel. She was not merely the witch.
Ten
Had he thought that, because he’d done the exact opposite of what he intended and opened the death certificate and seen that “complications of pneumonia” was listed as the cause of death and called Brenda and told her, and apologized again, that Brenda wouldn’t call Elin?
He was sitting in a bar he liked, Redz, off Avenue A. Bars were a lot better than his so-called home and also provided a soundtrack. Any minute, Arly would come through the door, but until she did, he could brood about the whole miserable situation. The same night, after she’d dropped the bomb, after his worst fight with Arly ever, she’d insisted he go to the psychic. Why bother, since she’d found all this out, he’d said. In a rage, he’d told her he didn’t know how charlatans worked, how some psychic had discovered things about his past. (God, the woman even knew he’d been a chess player.) Maybe she’d gotten access to the coroner’s report, for all he knew. Who knew or cared how people who preyed on others sneakily got their information, then described their visions and bizarre notions to gullible, desperate people.
The surprise was that Brenda had succeeded where Arly had failed: After some hesitation, Elin gave his sister information he and she didn’t have. It later emerged that Arly’s precious psychic had describe
d a vision she had while grasping Arly’s hand (not so unusual that somebody would flirt with Arly, though the psychic had probably learned her gestures from reading the cartoons). Her “vision” was of a man, sick, climbing a mountain, trying to arrive at the top. Arly had never seen his father, so how could she know who the “tall, frail, bald-headed man wearing a stocking cap” was? The man, according to the psychic, was either Arly’s relative or related to someone close to her. Someone she knew very well who was unable to make crucial decisions, who was blocked because he was under the influence of the person—a man who wouldn’t come into focus—who was climbing the mountain with him. Might the bald man need to make a decision between life and death? There were other problems, more mundane problems of living in the world, but in addition to that, the man felt pain, either in his lungs (by then, Arly had been reading from notes she’d jotted down in a little notebook) or in his stomach. As she spoke, Ben’s stomach also began to ache, but not as much as his head. Had his father’s problem been in his stomach? He’d been in his last year at Cornell when his father was operated on. Had that been the site of the surgery?
Ben wasn’t in a good mood. Earlier (on his second drink), he’d decided he’d never have the talent, let alone the luck, to run the business his boss had. He was doomed to be someone who answered the phone. There was another much more talented assistant where he worked, who’d been there for years. He set up the lighting and took test shots. Ben made the appointments and cleaned up at the end of the day, filing, confirming appointments, calling FedEx. He was nothing but a glorified janitor whose job was to damp-mop terra-cotta floors.
Arly came into Redz with her red leather bag slung over her shoulder. She could seriously hurt anyone she swung it at, she liked to say. The thing was loaded with essential Arly paraphernalia: a Swiss Army knife; a large Hershey bar; a cosmetic bag with enough products inside it to transform the faces of every woman in the bar and on the block, and probably in the neighborhood. She carried extra tights, a light jacket, flip-flops, a black scarf. Once, helping her look for her missing keys, he’d upended the bag. Out had come a bag of marbles, a can of Mace, and a tube of KY jelly.
