by Ann Beattie
Ben sat in the lobby, flipping through a newspaper, then asked directions to the News Café from the Asian woman behind the front desk. She must have been asked that as every third question. He walked there from the hotel, though the heat made the walk unenjoyable. There were cars everywhere. Everything seemed to be happening in slightly speeded-up time, like the sex in the bedroom. The speed with which the bartender had shot out of bed suggested he’d played football before spending his life pollinating mojitos. The notion of the world speeding past Ben, everything too frenetic, had begun the second he opened the door. Now, in a reaction so delayed he doubted there could be any connection, he felt his penis begin to stir. At the café, he ordered only an iced tea. If they’d sold aspirin, he could have used a couple of those, too.
The woman sitting across from a man at the next table had a little dog in her lap who kept staring at him, panting. More interesting things to look at inside the hotel rooms, doggie, he thought. He reached out and squiggled the top of its head. The woman, in an accent he couldn’t at first place (Russian), told him the name of the breed, which he hadn’t asked and didn’t recognize. Was he on vacation? Yes, he replied, from New York. Where were they from? Pompano Beach. The woman lowered the dog to the sidewalk. It retreated under the table. A tall black man with a bandanna around his forehead that was wider than his Speedo streaked by on a skateboard. Yeah, right—they should live in Miami. It really was more Arly’s kind of place. She could dance all night wherever she was, but by midnight he was always exhausted. Once he’d found a bottle of Jack Daniel’s he hadn’t known was in the apartment, on the top shelf of the closet, but he’d never found drugs.
“Have you been to the beach?” the woman asked. The man said nothing. He wore wraparound sunglasses, so that his eyes were invisible. He’d taken out his phone and was making a call. Ben caught sight of several bracelets on his wrist. He turned slightly away from them. The woman seemed on the verge of saying something, and Ben didn’t want to talk to her. He didn’t even want to notice as much as he did: that her high heel rested in a puddle of her dog’s urine, her other leg safely crossed over her knee. In the bathroom, when Arly had risen, her knees had been so pink, they’d both thought dye from the rug had rubbed off on them.
The Russian woman looked down when she caught the smell. “FrouFrou, bad!” she said. “Very bad!” Ben turned away again, trying to indicate lack of interest—if he might not have looked as indifferent as he hoped back in the hotel room, at least he could be unfazed about some dog taking a piss. The woman stood in a puddle of piss; where were all the famous Vogue photographers when you needed them? She began jerking the dog forward on its shiny purple leash.
“The dog is a pig,” the man said, when she got to the sidewalk.
At this point, he didn’t realize they were trying to pick him up. Not that the dog could have been made to pee on cue, but whatever it took, both were waiting for a way to warp whatever happened into an invitation. He got it the second the woman returned, when she told him they kept a condo in Miami Beach and asked if he’d like to go there: “Drinks are free.” Maybe she thought he’d ordered iced tea because he didn’t have much money.
“No, sorry, my wife’s waiting at the hotel,” he said. Even the lie scared him—the mere possibility.
The woman was at least forty-five, tall, pretty, her hair dyed the color of Mercurochrome. Her husband—he had quite a collection of bangles on his arm—older. Ben had never slept with anyone older. In a way, it might be the perfect ending to his big Saturday night in Miami. If he’d been fucked up, he might have considered it (yeah, he was a little angry, but worse than that, everything that was happening now made him feel like he was bogged down; it all seemed lugubrious, there was no middle ground between speed and near-narcolepsy now that everything had stopped happening so fast), but the woman stank of perfume.
“Hear about the new trend of putting gold dust in drinks?” he said, testing to see how she’d react if he started talking to her husband.
“True also in Japan. They’ve been putting it on pastry for years. Like shaved chocolate,” the man added. Ben pulled his chair over to their table. “What do you drink?” the man asked, his eyes not at all visible through his sunglass lenses, signaling the waitress, then miscalculating, running the toe of his shoe up Ben’s ankle.
After that awkward moment, Ben spent the night walking, sitting somewhere, if he could find anywhere to sit, every now and then testing himself. He thought about whether there could be any way to go back to the hotel, but that seemed impossible. It was as futile as trying to strike one wet match after another. Not one thought lit up. At dawn, he decided to leave the things he’d brought in the room (so did she; he never saw them again). He counted his cash, then called a cab to the airport. She’d bought round-trip tickets, but he couldn’t imagine being on the next day’s flight with her. Paying whatever fine they demanded for leaving early might actually cost him less than spending money for a night on his own at a hotel.
In the men’s room at the airport, someone made it clear he had drugs. Drugs: Well, that was another possibility. Instead, he bought a fresh-squeezed orange juice that tasted, oddly, like a lump of coal. He drank it slowly as he stood in the long security line, wondering if he’d have been able to fuck the Russian woman while her husband watched. Not likely the guy wouldn’t expect to be included, since he’d toed him.
The junior suite had looked like a tornado had blown through: clothes tangled with towels, bathrobes in a heap, pillows tossed like huge hopscotch stones on the floor, shoes knocked over, drinks spilled, one woman on TV mounting another, whose skirt was bunched at her waist, the soundtrack so loud you’d have thought someone would have knocked on the door or called the front desk.
He closed his eyes and tried to remember exactly what the room had looked like, but, disconcertingly, what popped up in his mind was the room where the Honor Society met at Bailey Academy—how truly absurd; from another lifetime—where the disorder was artful, like the rug, pre-fab disorder meant to reassure with repeated patterns. Not that anybody ever figured out why Binnie and her mother always made a mess of the chairs they dragged into a corner.
Tessie and Binnie. My goodness, he thought, Tessie and Binnie.
Before he boarded the plane, he called the hotel switchboard and asked to speak to the front desk. “I’m in room four-oh-four,” he said. “I know this is going to sound strange, but I opened the window and a tornado came through. Can you send someone up from housekeeping?”
“Sir? Did you say a tornado?” the male voice asked. It was sort of heartbreaking that people didn’t realize the things that betrayed them: The voice sounded young, unguarded, truly surprised.
“Yeah, it broke the windows. Really, you’ve got to send somebody up. It’s a mess,” he said.
“Four-oh-four,” he heard the person say, in a muffled voice.
“Hello?” another voice said. “There’s a problem in your suite, sir? Are you calling from within the hotel?”
“Four-oh-four,” he repeated emphatically, letting his voice veer out of control before disconnecting.
In the seat next to his was a large man wearing a black eye patch. He was reminded of Hailey. All the way to New York, the man read copies of French cooking magazines, studying each page intently and, with shaking hands, folding over almost every corner, then becoming transfixed again, as he fingered nonpareils out of an oversize box sitting upright between his legs, enjoying his candy masturbation.
It had been a major miscalculation to fly to Miami on Friday. He was going to have to do some fancy talking to explain his absence to his boss. Maybe he could arrange to get mugged. Maybe he could mug himself. He was pretty good at that, he thought. When the plane landed, he called his boss from the airport. A woman on her knees, struggling to make her son face her so she could zip his jacket, looked at him, red-faced, as the child shrieked and twisted away. Maybe he
should take off after the kid (the boy was now running at full speed; the mother was scrambling up) and just not return, he thought. He and the child could be on the lam together. Oh, sure. They could morph into animated figures in a cartoon. Maybe if the Road Runner raced in, they could all jump up and down chaotically, moving toward the edge of a cliff. Or the escape could be the beginning of a movie that would either be satirical or sentimental, you’d never be able to tell. Something a French director would make.
His boss was on the line. “Yes?” he was saying, wearily, as Ben stood with the phone to his ear near baggage claim. Of course, he had no baggage. He’d just found it necessary to make the call before he even exited the airport, apparently. “I’m really sorry. I won’t lie to you,” he said. He could feel his hand shaking. “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I’ll work this weekend. It won’t happen again.”
“‘It’ being what?”
A long pause. “Okay, you’re right. More Arly shit. It was Arly. We flew to Miami. I’m going to have everything you need completed by Sunday night. I’ll give it to you Sunday night.”
“I see. Should I drop by the apartment? Would that be convenient? My brother’s apartment, which is fucking huge for a pîed-à-terre, let me tell you that, so I consider it a really nice apartment. One you won’t be living in anymore.”
“I apologize. I sincerely apologize.”
“It sounds like the fucking world is ending. Where are you?”
“LaGuardia.”
“Stupid question. You went to Miami, where might you be? Oh, you might still be fucking your girlfriend or sipping a drink served in a pineapple, while I’m here busting my ass. Sure—why wouldn’t you be at LaGuardia? But get this, Ben: You can live at LaGuardia. But you know what you can’t do? You can’t live in my brother’s nice, big apartment for peanuts anymore. And you can’t come to work. Well, apparently you blew off your job, so you already made that decision for me. I thought, Well, maybe the guy’s really nervous about the LSAT, maybe he flipped out. Maybe he’s . . . it doesn’t matter what I thought. It only matters what you thought. And you thought, No apartment! No job! And certainly no obligation.”
His boss hung up on him.
He thought for some time. Then he called Benson Whitacre. The guy’s mother had bought him a condo in Kips Bay, even if it wasn’t a very nice one, and asked if he could stay with him for a couple of nights, trying not to sound desperate. He was exhausted. He no longer had anywhere to live. How was he going to get his clothes back? He fell asleep in the cab.
Benson buzzed him in. He had dinner waiting: take-out chicken and a container of mashed potatoes he must have bought for himself, unless he also ran out for food. He should explain himself to Benson, but as soon as he started, Benson held up both hands. “Don’t want to hear it. I’m your friend, whatever’s happened. Let’s have dinner. You can tell me later.”
It brought tears to Ben’s eyes. Benson had called twice in the past year, and both times he’d put him off. No time even for coffee. They ate in silence. He was surprised at how hungry he was.
Later, it would be Benson who’d help him pick up his things, piled in boxes in the lobby of the building on Hudson Street, but he didn’t know that then. As they were finishing the meal, he started telling Benson about the spontaneous trip, losing his job, his frustration at Elin for always insisting he become a lawyer, how stupid he’d been in his previous job not to take on more responsibility, how demeaning it had felt to sweep the floor at the end of the day.
“Listen,” Benson interrupted. “I can be a reference for you. Or maybe you can get your job back, I don’t know. If you can’t after your breakdown—”
“What?” he said. “A breakdown? I’m not really up for being mind-fucked, Benson.”
“Well,” Benson said. “Whatever you’d like to call it. But the thing is, you’ll get another job. Obviously you will. But the thing is, inconvenient as this is right now, somebody’s coming over in fifteen or twenty minutes, and if you could get lost until, oh, about midnight, so I can have as much fun with my girlfriend as you apparently had with yours? Okay, just kidding. Ben, I don’t have a spare key. But get out of here and come back later. Since you’re not in the middle of a breakdown, that shouldn’t be difficult.”
It was the first time he’d seen Benson smile. A faint smile, but a smile nonetheless. He nodded, put his napkin on the table, found the bathroom, pissed, and left.
Then, to his surprise, he picked up someone when he stopped and asked her if he could help as she consulted a map. What profession he might devote his life to disappeared from his mind. He imagined not so much that the girl might be his future, only that if he was slightly worse off, he could think that. They walked across town and went to a bar in Chelsea, where, going in, Ben heard “Lawyers in Love” blasting over the sound system.
A gym rat sat on a bar stool. He’d cut his sweatshirt sleeves so you could see his arms, every muscle defined. He still wore his sweatband and leather sneakers without socks. Two younger guys were flirting, sipping a drink the color of pond scum through thin straws. The place had a slightly gay vibe, though he hadn’t known that before he’d gone in with the girl he’d just met. It was humiliating, but Benson had given him a fifty. He had money in the bank, some money, but he didn’t know where his cash card was. He feared he might not have as much as he thought in his account, which was certainly not a worry of lawyers. But really: He wanted that? He wanted to practice law? Hooked up with somebody like the pretty, pointless woman who sat on the bar stool next to him? He’d conjured up the taste of a mojito, though he’d forgotten the name of the drink and confused it with a margarita. He looked past her, out the big windows of the bar. Chelsea, it seemed, was no longer Chelsea. And then, the tip of his tongue rubbing the inside of his cheek, trying to taste mint when there was only the residual sourness of the Guinness, he thought about doing the Five Easy Pieces he and LouLou hadn’t done that night they’d been headed to Vermont.
LouLou. The way she’d told him, so matter-of-factly, that she’d made a mistake, that the guy wasn’t even playing that night because he’d been hired for a private party. How fucked up was that? In fact, how fucked up was Bailey Academy, and Binnie, who everybody pretended spoke the same perfect English they did, somebody they’d conveniently assumed wanted to be there doing what she was doing at her mother’s side, her not-so-bright, religious mother. Binnie Mouse, with her plates of cookies and brownies, lemon bars and cupcakes, homemade fudge and date bars and bunches of seedless grapes, slices of banana dipped in chocolate and frozen, Hershey’s Kisses with their fragile paper wicks protruding, and Tessie’s famous pecan pie, apple pie, or custard. Custard: There was an onomatopoetic word.
He was hungry. When he went back to Benson’s, he’d see what was on the kitchen shelf, the one kitchen shelf, bolted to the wall, because the cabinets had been taken out by the landlord for refinishing and had never been brought back, as Benson had complained.
He excused himself and went to the men’s room, then exited through the kitchen, where he scared some dark-skinned man who no doubt didn’t have a green card almost to death as he swept by—yeah; he did that—and from the alleyway he exited onto Eighth Avenue. What was being stuck with the bill for somebody else’s Guinness to her? She’d been looking for a tailor’s shop! What the hell, he still had a place to crash for another, what, three or four days, before he had to move on.
Outside Benson’s building, he chatted with an elderly lady preparing to take her poodle for a walk, who asked him if he could see what was wrong with the clip on the leash (nothing; she had no strength in her fingers). He scanned the row of mailboxes behind where she stood, as if one might belong to him. She used her key to open the front door, when he patted his pockets and said to the woman that he’d eventually find his keys in one of his many pockets, but would she please . . . In the elevator he started to cry, wanting the girl in the bar,
wanting—fuck!—wanting a dog, wanting the poodle, though he hadn’t been so crazy he’d wanted the sixty-year-old woman. As the elevator doors opened, a man who was waiting glanced at him and stepped back, making a split-second decision not to get on, sounding like Mr. Magoo, muttering that he’d forgotten something. Well, everybody was forgetting everything, weren’t they? They couldn’t thumb open a hook, or get into a building, or find their tailor to slightly adjust their hem, or to move a button a fraction of an inch. The man’s expression said it all; he must look more disheveled than he thought. Four-oh-four popped into his mind. Hungry and messed up, his eyes so red he could feel the color, the draught’s tinny aftertaste constricting his throat. It was making him cough.
Lifting his fingers to wipe away spittle, he glanced at his Swatch. It was not quite ten p.m. Well, the joke was on him. Or the joke was on Benson. Or on the naked woman at Benson’s. Or the woman back at the bar, the one he’d met coincidentally, because such things could happen when you stopped to talk to a stranger. She couldn’t be deluding herself any longer that he was taking the longest piss in history. It got confusing, but the joke was definitely on somebody.
Twelve
A few months later, with a letter of recommendation from his former employer (“Ben, I hope I don’t insult you, I ask only out of concern. Have you noticed that when life’s going well, you seem to feel a compulsion to shake things up? I’ve been thinking, Ben. Would it be an incentive to stay if we switched you to a more time-sensitive program?”), as well as Benson’s letter of recommendation, flawlessly typed on company stationery by his secretary (who was transitioning from male to female)—this, even though he’d told Benson he’d just be sending the letter by attachment—Ben had landed an entry-level position at a place where his job was to write code helpful for running the numbers for companies considering expansion and, basically, to test and to extend other coders’ work. This, he told himself, was not as boring as law school. The paycheck, not star pay, but certainly adequate, allowed him to get a second credit card, leather shoes that fit almost as well as his running shoes, and to have a box of Teuscher truffles sent to Elin for her birthday. Twice, probably three times, he’d met Gerard for lunch at the cheap, delicious noodle place near where they used to work, but Gerard had decamped as soon as his father fell and had to go into a nursing home. Gunther had broken up with Gerard the same day he heard the news. Ben was only surprised that Gerard had been surprised. Gerard went into a slump, depressed that their former employer wouldn’t write him a letter of recommendation because he said Gerard always got to work late and had a negative attitude. As far as he was concerned, his negative attitude was primarily directed toward the photographer’s ex-wife, an out-of-work model for whom he could never do enough; the boss had made Gerard the fall guy, urging him to tell her that he wasn’t there when he was, silently sanctioning Gerard’s hanging up on her when she called in a state. As Gerard said, it wasn’t exactly the studio of Richard Avedon. Though Gerard talked about going back to school, he left abruptly for Kansas City with a guy he met at a club one weekend—an older man who promised him he’d buy him the best steak dinner he’d ever had in his life. Ben had gotten Gerard’s scared, maudlin farewell call from Newark Airport just about the time he went full-time and was given a larger desk crammed into a slightly larger office with a mysterious smell of mothballs that nobody could figure out until the desk broke and, for no reason anyone could comprehend, mothballs were found piled like Pez inside the hollow wooden legs. Gerard’s call, with all its background noise, had come in just as a call beeped on another line, minutes after he’d already had to tell his initial caller, Elin, he’d need to call her back.
