by Ann Beattie
She swooped down and hugged him. “Forgive and forget” she said, instead of hello. She was on her way to an evening mani-pedi with her friend Sharon. Before he even had time to ask if she wanted a drink, the other woman came into the bar. Arly pulled the jacket out of her bag, put it on, and bent a second time to say goodbye—this time by tongueing the top of his ear. As usually happened, Sharon stayed at a distance and held up a hand to bestow a silent farewell. (“Nixon” was his nickname for her, behind her back.) If she’d greeted him in the first place, he’d been looking elsewhere.
He was glad they left, because he couldn’t stand hearing any more about Sharon’s upcoming wedding, which, as one of four bridesmaids, Arly was obsessing about. He had no idea why women thought that their bridesmaids’ dresses had to be a style they could use for other occasions.
He ordered another drink, unable to get the image of his father out of his mind. He’d tried not to register his father’s thinness the last time he’d visited from Cornell; it was fine to see him in bed, with covers piled on top, but when he’d had to help him to the bathroom and he’d felt his father’s ribs, far worse than Darius’s, he’d felt faint. Apparently, he was so light that Elin could move him with little trouble, though when the chemo concluded and he could gradually eat again, Elin had been so happy to tell Ben that he’d begun to put on weight. Hiking? Wouldn’t that be a bit too much of a challenge? His father preferred to sit on the screened porch at his summer place as he aimed his binoculars at the birds at the feeder. Where would he have hiked?
“Noanet Peak Trail in Noanet Woodlands,” his sister told him days later, pronouncing each word distinctly. Elin had told Brenda she had not been able to disabuse him of the notion he must go hiking. Unless he could reach the top, which he’d take as a sign (His father was superstitious?), his decision was not to continue with the next round of chemo. He had a bad cough. Tears ran from his eyes from eyedrops he had to apply three times a day. She’d begged him not to even talk about such foolishness, but there was a warm spell, and it seemed true that with the new medicine, he was getting some of his energy back. He’d become convinced that because he’d had the vision in a dream (yes; okay, everybody was nuts), he’d received a message. Elin was distraught. His doctor told him to rest.
Sometime in the night, that same night, another night, who knew what night, Elin had gone to check on him before daybreak. His bed was empty. She knew what he’d gone to do. She rushed to her car to follow him, though she worried that maybe it wasn’t her decision to make. If she took away hope, that would depress him so much that he’d have no reason to go on. He feared more treatment, more nausea, and the horrible weightless feeling he couldn’t find the words to describe. He’d actually walked around wearing ankle straps filled with sand that she’d bought the year before as a way to develop her calves, after seeing the weights on TV. Elin hesitated. As she sat in the driver’s seat, classical music came on the radio. Of course he wouldn’t make it, but if he realized that and turned back, Elin thought, that might be the end of his terrible idea.
It was as if the music hypnotized her. She blamed herself, she certainly did, for sitting passively while her husband might be in the process of killing himself, but she just didn’t go anywhere—nor would she have known where to go. She never started the car. She sat there crying for what seemed like an hour, maybe it had been an hour, or only half an hour, or maybe the worst twenty minutes of her life, and by the time the sun came up she decided that she, too, could think symbolically: that any moment she’d see him. His car would appear. He’d apologize for his foolishness, they’d return to the house hand in hand. No, she never thought any of that. She was making it up after the fact, she knew she was, she was rationalizing. The truth was, she didn’t know what she would have done if she’d been the one to receive such a diagnosis. Not strike out on a hike, that was for sure, because she’d become agoraphobic; during his illness, it had gotten more difficult to drive anywhere.
Brenda told Ben that Elin had wept, insisting on her own inadequacy. Their father hadn’t died on the hike, though he hadn’t made it far. Whoever was with him had summoned help when he’d doubled over, choking, blood running from his nostrils. He’d been unable to take another step. When Elin next heard, he was in the ER. She didn’t go there, either. Because by then, she thought that the hike hadn’t been about living, it had been about provoking his death, and how humbled, how embarrassed he must be that all he’d done was further sicken himself. She didn’t have the courage to see him. Or to drive. So she’d taken a cab—she’d done that the next day before he was discharged, after speaking to a psychiatrist he was to continue seeing twice a week. What time had he left the house? How had he crept out without her hearing? Where was this park? Angels had lifted him out the window, he’d replied facetiously. Who’d gone with him—or had he gone alone and lied about having a companion?
Someone, a neighbor, had come to stay with them at night when he returned. Elin was afraid to be left alone with him. The cough quickly worsened. So many doctors were being consulted. And then he had a heart attack. The medics stabilized him in the ambulance. They were preparing to do a procedure, one they put on hold after consulting with the senior surgeon. The pneumonia had set in fast. She saw no reason to tell his children about his folly and didn’t want to risk diminishing him in their eyes, with his crazy talk of birds and mountains to conquer, as a young, exhausted-looking resident deliberately avoided making eye contact with the doctor standing beside him at the foot of the bed.
After work a few days following his conversation with Brenda, Ben gave the revised, short form of his father’s suicide—what he now described as his father’s deliberately exhausting himself—to Gerard, the photographer’s talented assistant. He and Gerard had worked together for almost a year. They went to bars entirely different from the ones where he met up with Arly. He told Gerard that he had trouble feeling the same way about Arly, because she’d opened the whole can of worms. Gerard thought that maybe if they left the city they could get their relationship back on track. Ben didn’t think that was likely. There was no use now in trying to think whether he wanted to know about his father’s bizarre, debilitating journey, because he knew.
“Look at it this way. At least you were in Ithaca when he had surgery. At least you didn’t have to observe everything, blow-by-blow. My old man’s looking better by the minute,” Gerard said. He lived with his father in West New York, New Jersey. His own constant personal debate was whether to continue living there, remaining closeted, or to move in with his boyfriend, a doorman on the Upper East Side who appeared in porn films, and break his father’s heart.
“Maybe the chemo did something to his brain,” Gerard said. His usual drink was either white wine or a margarita, if he felt like splurging. Ben had bought them both a round of Patrón Silver margaritas. “I feel like there’s this shit coming down—you know what I mean? Downtown’s nothing but rubble. All day we see people whose egos are bouncing around like Ping-Pong balls, then we get out of work and they’re weaving all over the streets in their fucking limos. You know, Ben, this place could sop up your tears with a sponge. Maybe some distance is needed. Maybe we’ve got to put it on the line, you know? What would Barack Obama say? Wouldn’t he say that if we’re not rallying the people, we should at least quit our jobs and do something more meaningful?”
“You think Obama would want us to be unemployed?” Ben asked. The salt was gone from the rim of his glass. The tiny chunk that had fallen on top of the bar looked like cocaine. Another pleasure of the rich. Outside the restaurant, a black stretch limo waited. A rumor started in the bar that the Olsen twins were in a private room in the back. Ben overheard a guy whispering this to the greeter, a super-pretty woman who stood next to a greeter-in-training, who was even prettier. Both women looked confused when anyone walked in for a reservation. A reservation? In their restaurant? Was this April Fool’s Day, or something? Had they called or b
ooked on OpenTable, or what? Next, whomever stood in front of them would be asked whether they were actually there to eat. Only with lengthy tapping of the keyboard, as the couple huddled together on the other side of the high-topped barricade, did the greeters’ concerned frowns sometimes diminish. The few times that happened, both lifted the menus—it seemed as if there were at least three pleather menus to be piled atop one another per person—as if they were made of lead.
Gerard noticed him looking. “You’re not going to get laid by either one of them,” he said. “The short one’s going home to paint sparkle stuff on her fingernails like her friend, and her friend’s gonna shave her legs and do some shots. Or maybe she’ll do the shots first and nick her shin. All these new razors, they never improve. What do you say the two of us, we go in tomorrow and quit?”
“Gerard, you can’t quit. You’re as talented as he is. Your old man will die, and you can go live with what’s-his-name.”
“It’s a made-up name,” Gerard said. “You don’t have to remember it.”
“Tell me again what it is.”
“I’ve told you ten times. You don’t want to remember.”
“Give me one more chance.”
“Duncan,” Gerard said. “But his real name’s Gunther.”
They both cracked up. Gerard almost choked on an ice cube. It jumped out of his mouth and flew across somebody’s lap and shattered on the tile floor. The startled look on the woman’s face wiped the grins off their faces. When Gerard started laughing again, it was contagious.
Ben ordered another round, including a cosmo for the startled woman. It went without saying that Ben didn’t mind if she thought of it as a flirtation. Gerard, of course, was completely indifferent. After a “thank you” and one sip, she got off her bar stool and went to a table, where a man who’d just entered the restaurant converged with her. The bartender put her drink on a tray that a waitress carried to her table. She was seated. She didn’t look in their direction. In a movie, that wouldn’t have happened, Ben thought. At Bailey, even The Brains wouldn’t have snubbed him that way. He’d started to become aware of women’s sideways glances, expressing interest. The drink had been meant as an apology—didn’t she get that? Or were no apologies accepted in the presence of her boyfriend?
He quit before Gerard did. He quit the next day, when Gerard was merely late for work.
Eleven
Before Ben was in any position to repay Brenda the money he’d borrowed while the old man’s will was in probate, he’d taken a job in the financial district that was less exciting but paid more. The great perk of the job was that his boss was letting him live in his brother’s never-occupied pied-à-terre on Hudson Street. As he’d realized at Cornell, he had an aptitude for coding, though he couldn’t have predicted that he’d end up focusing on legacy software; all you really needed was to keep up your own interest, to be able to sit staring at your screen for hours as you tweaked decade-old algorithms, and to be amused that you were writing a language no one used anymore—one your company would also eventually give up on. Though he liked his boss, and enjoyed the bento-box lunches he often treated him to on Fridays, he’d been honest about saying when he took the job that he was considering going to NYU Law School. He’d announced his intentions to Elin. Then, on the verge of taking the LSATs, he’d gotten an unexpected phone call that had resulted in a detour: a trip to the Museum of Natural History, and a sort of proposition, more an apology, no, not an apology, a paraphrase of a book that apparently argued for negative experiences being ultimately more helpful than positive ones.
Arly stood in the lobby, holding two tickets. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her hair was in a chaste bun, though, as she fingered her thread-thin necklace, which caught light like a mirror.
Amid schoolchildren and crowds of adults, they’d lingered by the dioramas, later linked fingers when looking at the dinosaur skeleton, like people sharing a moment of awe at the Grand Canyon. Well, in a way it was, it was just the Grand Canyon of Tyrannosaurus Rex. The next surprise, which he could take or leave, absolutely his call, involved more tickets. (“I don’t know your social. If you want to, I mean only if you want, we can pick up your ticket at LaGuardia.”) That evening he and Arly flew to Miami.
It was just for the weekend. One last time he’d decided to have with her, since he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had sex. He’d been to Florida once, Destin, Florida, where his father’s favorite cousin lived. His mother had gotten the flu and couldn’t go, so his father had taken him instead, leaving Brenda at home in tears. He’d tasted crab for the first time with his cousin, who told him about his time working on fishing boats and told him never to parachute-jump. That was why he had fused vertebra that meant he’d have to walk with a cane the rest of his life. But Ben knew enough now to know that Miami had changed from whatever it would have been in those years, transformed by the money tornado that had whirled it closer to god, so that it became Miami. As they were leaving MIA in a cab (How did she suddenly have money?), she put her hand on his knee, and he looked at her fingers and thought crabs, and then he thought about reading T. S. Eliot at Bailey, though the only poem LaVerdere really liked was “The Waste Land.” Probably nobody dredged that up to read anymore.
Stretch Humvees passed them by, two in just a few minutes. Arly was scrolling through her phone, stopping to read a review of a Cuban restaurant that had been reviewed the week before in the Times, so it was probably not even worth trying to get in. No yellowfin carpaccio with macerated lingonberries in their future, as she’d put it. After five minutes on the highway, coming in in a cab, Arly said they should find a way to move there, because New York was too expensive and not enough fun—and that opinion was just based on the weather, and the vibes she picked up, looking out the window.
Ben, who’d insisted on paying for something, had been in the driveway, waiting for change from the cabdriver, when Arly walked off to check into the hotel. When Ben walked across the lobby, up to the desk, the guy behind the counter was complimenting her on her dangly earrings (a paired moon and sun). He’d already upgraded her to a junior suite. The desk guy’s flirtation resolved itself in a nasty stare when Ben appeared. She loved situations like that, moments of others’ optimistic misunderstanding, because they provided an immediate reshuffling of power.
After they went to the room and she undressed him and they had sex on the floor, knocking out the barrette so that her hair fell in familiar waves around her face, he stood, then fell on the bed in exhaustion. The last thing he knew, he’d been looking at dinosaur skeletons on a cold day in New York City. Eventually, he got up to take a shower. She followed him into the bathroom and didn’t look at him as he tested the water and stepped in. Through the frosted glass of the shower enclosure, he could hardly see her; he swiped a streak on the thick glass—some of the problem was steam—and saw her as if looking through a Lichtenstein brushstroke from the other side of the mural. She wondered aloud if she should get into the shower with him, but instead peed—did any other woman pee that way, with one leg crossed over the other?—then gave herself a whore’s bath from an Evian bottle that stood with two glasses on a small tray beside the sink, pouring water into her hand, then splashing it into her armpits and crotch, wiping herself dry on a white towel thicker than his camel’s hair coat—his Christmas gift from Elin. She dried him off when he stepped out, and after that knelt on an irregular pink island of bath rug and took his penis in her mouth. Whatever was going on was going on.
They went to a different restaurant from the one she’d heard about, a longer walk from the hotel than it appeared on the map, where Jaguars and more Humvees clustered outside. The valets wore camouflage jumpsuits. Inside, the bartender was famous for serving mojitos with a dusting of gold leaf that Ben thought looked repulsively like pollen. The gold leaf supply, he observed, was kept locked in a safe under the bar. They had two drinks that cost as much as an entrée in a classy N
ew York restaurant because they had no reservation and had to wait. The faint flecks of gold above her top lip were much more intriguing than cappuccino foam, so maybe it was true, what Bea had thought, what Arly thought now: Money was sexy. He told Arly they should order food at the bar; clearly, they’d never get served. “We’ll get a table,” she said. “I gave her two twenties.”
“Have you come into an inheritance, or something?”
“Not exactly. Only into good luck,” she replied. Long afterward, he’d find out the good luck had a name, worked at Deutsche Bank, and paid for sex.
In the garden of their Deco hotel the next afternoon, after they’d had sex in the room, he asked her what she thought had gone wrong between them, and she brought her thumbnail close to one nostril and looked at him with Bambi eyes, sniffing. Her face was more expressive when she thought he was dumb than when she was having an orgasm. He considered her pantomime—had she used a lot more than he realized, was that it? They sat in the garden, drinking the last of a bottle of Cristal she’d shoplifted the night before from what should have been a locked case in a liquor store where nobody spoke English. She’d pointed out the dangling padlock with as much joy as a lepidopterist seeing a rare butterfly on a leaf.
When he came back to their room the next night, carrying an expensive little pizza whose topping smelled more like ammonia than mozzarella, to find her in bed with the bartender from the previous night and another guy, he didn’t panic. He was relieved—okay; that wasn’t his first emotion, but he felt that a burden had been lifted, soon enough—because otherwise their relationship would have gone on and on. The bartender jumped from the bed, his erection a bright-pink magic wand, and locked himself in the bathroom. The other guy went right on, like a jackhammer.
