by Ann Beattie
“I know!” he said, too late. “Sorry. I was lost in thought.”
God, he’d spent an hour with the woman at Ginny and Steve’s a month or so before. They’d had a very interesting conversation about, of all things, space travel, because her late husband had been a physician to the last astronauts. He’d died of a brain tumor. Their child was a year older than Maude. The girls had been playing in the dining room, where they’d tented the table, giggling and tumbling as the adults drank a glass of wine on the back deck.
“What were you thinking about?” she said.
He saw himself as she saw him: somebody living inside his own head.
“Hey, I didn’t hear until after you left what a great tennis player you were. Would you be interested in playing doubles?”
“Maybe” she said, after a slight pause.
“What I was thinking,” he said, digging himself in deeper, “was about Lincoln. I just finished reading a biography. One of the reasons he was apparently so good at debate, the complete opposite of all the talking heads now? He took a lot of time restating his opponent’s ideas, so he seemed very reasonable and he disarmed his audience. Then when he began his own argument they were so tired of hearing the initial assertion that they considered him generous and rational, and they listened. People were often persuaded to his side.”
“Lincoln,” she said.
“Hey, would you like to come over for a drink?” he asked. “Or we could go to Rick’s. You know Rick’s?”
“Who’s he?”
“Isn’t it supposed to be charming if guys fall apart in the presence of a woman?” he said. “I realize I’m doing very badly here.”
She looked even more puzzled.
“I had a nice time talking to you at Gin and Steve’s the other night, so I thought—I mean, since we’ve run into each other—you might come by for a drink. Or we could try to round Steve up for an impromptu game of tennis on the clay courts, if you want. Instead of drinking, I mean.”
“It’s dark,” she said.
“Well, then maybe something else? We could show up together and pretend we thought we’d been invited to dinner. Are you good at keeping a straight face?”
She walked so close that if he hadn’t reached out, she’d have head-butted him. “Kiss me,” she said, closing her eyes.
It was like the improbable, final minute of a movie that demanded you view the ending as uplifting, he thought miserably, though they stood in the convenience-store parking lot, where super-bright lights glowed with an intensity rarely seen outside of interrogation rooms.
He kissed her. Would they live happily ever after, have the most unusual How-We-Got-Together story of all time? Who would have thought, as their lips touched, even when his bag containing the half-gallon of one-percent milk, a bag of granola, trash bags, and a package of batteries kept banging her back, that she’d tell Gin he needed to be on medication?
“Wow,” she said, raising her hand but dropping it before she touched her lips with her fingers. “This place is much stranger than Gin said.”
“If you don’t want to come to my house? Rick’s is a bar.”
“Thanks,” she said. “But I’m going to have to think this over.”
“You were daring me.”
“What else do you do if you’re dared?” she said. “Jesus, this is my first kiss since my husband died.”
“No hell below us, above us only sky.”
“Hell?” she echoed.
Of course she wouldn’t be on his wavelength.
Her question had been a good one, though: What else would he do, if dared? He was male. Anything, he thought, though such an answer might have been self-serving, an expedient epiphany. He did believe that if you didn’t keep on top of things, things would keep on top of you until you were smothered under the weight. That had almost happened to him in New York, but he’d slid out from underneath, made his escape. One thing he remembered about LaVerdere was the way the man stayed in motion, never mistaking talk for action. No, he’d liked that catch-and-release of hypothetical thoughts; he’d liked the way some of them flashed as they quickly disappeared back into the water, with only a cut lip or a newfound understanding of the way the world worked, never to be hooked again.
He said goodbye in what he hoped was a friendly way. She still seemed totally taken aback. That was another thing: You could usually scare yourself more than anyone else could scare you.
In his car, it seemed to him that Arly had been the person in the shadows of his thinking, not LaVerdere. RM 816.
There’d been a package delivery in his absence. Meadow in a Can, sent by Elin. It arrived so soon after she left, she must have ordered it in advance of her visit as a thank-you gift. She really was from a different generation. How bizarre to send such a thing. He quickly checked his computer—no unexpected dramas so far from the company he freelanced for in D.C.—opened a bottle, and poured a glass of wine, debating whether he should call Elin and get it over with, or delay and try to think of something more genuine he might say. It didn’t seem to be a day when much of anything he said was right. He wasn’t sure he could sound persuasively grateful. Meadow in a Can might be something Steve and Gin’s daughter, Maude, would enjoy scattering on the lawn, though a child her age probably wouldn’t grasp the concept, and the child was fastidious about her hands being clean, so maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, after all.
A photograph showing a haze of pastel flowers was spread across the label, a depiction so bad, he wasn’t sure if it was a blurred photograph or a painting by someone who’d learned the wrong lesson from the Impressionists.
He poured a second glass of wine. Compulsively checked his email again. Still no crisis at work, in spite of the fact that he’d ignored them all day. There was a brief message from Gerard, who was working as a chef, loving what he was doing, liking the Midwest, except that he’d developed a real fear of thunderstorms.
He’d heard from Rick that Arly had moved to Los Angeles, with no job to date, into a condo in Hollywood with a purported producer she’d broken up with twice years before. She was certainly not going to be growing peas on a trellis. He’d also heard that she’d auditioned for a few parts she hadn’t gotten, that she’d started getting Botox—something women in L.A. did at her age. So what had she been talking about, criticizing him for not being self-sufficient, since that had never been her goal? He’d hardly dropped off the grid, or tried to, when he’d first circled the map and looked at places within reasonable driving distance of the city. Moving there had never been synonymous with disappearing. And as for that, even Thoreau had lived in a house and walked to his beloved pond. Thinking about him in his house was one of the ways readers enjoyed looking down on Thoreau.
Ben sat down and quickly sent by attachment a report and a chart he’d created earlier, adjusting only one minor thing. Then he went outside, intending to unscrew the lid and scatter the seeds. There was no breeze to help him. The seeds looked like tiny dead insects in some confetti-like blue substance he supposed was intended to make them adhere to the ground. They smelled rubbery. He pulled out his cell, scrolled to Elin’s name, but decided against it. An old-fashioned thank-you note—she’d prefer that.
He looked at his house, which appeared so different at different times of day. In the evening—though it was past that time, darker—its flaws were almost invisible. He’d been told that after a couple of years he’d need a new roof. Steve had a client who was a roofer, so leaving aside the expense, that would probably work out. In spite of kidding Steve as mercilessly as Steve kidded him, he’d come to rely on him for advice, or at least advice of a certain kind. Steve was the Ultimate Guy: lovely wife, beautiful daughter, a big house he could always find somebody to work on. No longer did you have to do the work yourself to be an Ultimate Guy—that only made you a chump. From Ben’s lawn, you could hardly see Steve and Gin’s house. Th
at had been the point of buying a place with some acreage. Gin and her daughter liked to come over, making a game of pointing through the trees to where their house was, the kitchen, their bedrooms, Daddy’s library.
A wide-winged raptor circled above a rabbit that ran under a bush.
He accidentally knocked a clump out of the can as he fumbled for his phone to call Steve. It went immediately to voicemail. Of course: They’d been going out for dinner. Steve had mentioned that. Maude had probably already been tucked in bed now by the perky babysitter whose father had won a MacArthur. It was dark. Not the time to sow his meadow, though it seemed to have escaped the can like an evil genie. Time to go cook some pasta with Parmesan and olive oil and a shake of pepper flakes. Damn! The last of the blue stuff tipped out of the can, lighter than a hairball. He bent to separate the clump, bits of it flying around in the wind. Wind! Perfect timing. He tipped the can so the last of it would fly loose. Another spongy clot, the last one, rolled away like tumbleweed. He continued toward the house, fingering the last tiny bits out of the can to drift away.
“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, Technicolor tumbleweed to the lawn,” he said. He was out in the dark, talking to himself. Of course he didn’t believe there was going to be a meadow, but if he called Elin he could say he’d already made use of her present. How stupid was he, though? He finally got it. After his father was cremated, she’d asked if he wanted some of his ashes. No, he hadn’t. So now the concept of scattering ashes had been displaced onto Meadow in a Can, even if that had been her subconscious motive. There he stood, ironically playing his part, after all.
Sixteen
Steve called to say he’d have to put off their tennis game, but that he’d rebook the court. “Our friend Claire called. What exactly happened when you ran into her? Not that it’s any of my business,” Steve said.
“She caught me on a bad night. You know how it is, sometimes, when everything you say comes out wrong? Maybe proof of what you say about my living too much inside my head.”
“She told Gin you kissed her.”
“She asked me to kiss her.”
“Excuse me? Let me get this straight, Claire asked you to kiss her. Why would she do that?”
“I think I said something about being flustered. I couldn’t remember who she was.”
“She said you were very—however she put it—anxious. She thought maybe you were off your meds. Direct quote. Gin really doesn’t know what to think.”
Ben closed his eyes.
“You just stop responding when you don’t want to answer,” Steve said. “In a way, I’ve got to admire that.”
“Look, Steve, promise Gin I’ll never do such a thing again, if a woman asks me. Tell her she should be really afraid of me, personally. I jump out of bushes with my lips puckered. I’m a huge threat.”
“Can we stop talking about this shit? Weren’t you going to come over and help me get the TV on the wall?”
“Oh, shit. I forgot. I’ve got company coming, Steve.” At least that had been the real reason for Steve’s call, not this (as Steve rightly called it) “shit.”
“Hot date?”
“Feeling the need to live vicariously?” Ben asked.
“Tell me who it is. Is it somebody I know?”
“You’re really ridiculous, Steve. That’s no way to ask a serious question, if it is at all serious.”
“Oh, Jesus, Arly’s not back, is she?”
“No,” Ben said immediately. “It’s somebody I went to school with. And her girlfriend. They’ve been here before.”
“Two friends are visiting, so I become dog shit and you can’t help me hang my TV?”
“Right. If you want to put it that way. You know, everybody doesn’t appreciate your bluntness.”
“Yeah, I’ve sort of noticed that from my father and my old boss and my new boss and from Gin, when I’m telling her something she doesn’t want to hear, and she makes her arms go limp like she’s gonna collapse. Well, have a great evening. Don’t take any wooden nickels, as my grandfather used to say, and you already know what I advise you to do. Which is to stay away from Claire at least until she pulls herself together.”
“What else would you do if you were dared?” Had she been that deeply conventional, Claire Morris? He’d dived off a rock ledge where his father had forbidden him to swim. Almost everything Arly thought up was a dare, those times it wasn’t mere provocation. That was true, actually. He’d never realized that, but now it seemed so obvious. Then there’d been the guy in the poem, the one LaVerdere had shaken his head over: “The required curriculum of Bailey Academy, drawn up by The Powers That Be, asks us, today, to consider what is often regarded as a seminal poem of the twentieth century. ‘Do I dare to eat a peach?’” Phillip Collins had snickered. “Thank you, Mr. Collins, for your suggestion that we move on to a slightly more complex matter, ‘The Waste Land.’ Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to accept each asterisk as your personal savior, each footnote as the sound of Gabriel’s trumpet.”
Sometimes Steve could really get under his skin. It seemed almost impossible that he’d once seen Steve with no defenses, Steve when he was real: Ginny, well into her fourth month of pregnancy, had suddenly started to bleed. Ben was next door, as much as a house with significant acreage between it and the neighbor’s could be thought of as “next door,” playing solitaire—nothing could be more mundane.
It had been such a cold day. He’d finally finished a report that was overdue and relayed it to the guys in Washington. He hadn’t been sitting there jerking off, so why was he so startled when his back door swung open? Steve had raced in with Maude in his arms and thrust her forward, in a panic. Ben had assumed—to the extent that he reached any conclusion; really, he’d only reacted—that the blood on Steve’s shirt emanated from Steve’s chest. Then he’d thought, My god, no, it’s Maude. He couldn’t unscramble Steve’s hysterical words. Then, Maude wailing mightily, Steve had toppled a pitcher and knocked the photograph of Mama Cass off the wall as he’d run out, the car idling in his driveway.
How had Ben quieted the two-year-old? It might be good to know, for future reference. As the sky brightened to its seasonal, yellowish white that portended pastel colors at twilight (twilight!), Ben had tried to jolly Maude into a smile, and then, trying another approach entirely, carried her down the path that always revealed something new. He’d found himself outside, clad sensibly in his ski parka, with the afghan Elin had made him for Christmas swirled around Maude (he’d gone into the living room, rather than grabbing Maude’s little red jacket that had fallen out of Steve’s arms?). That was what he’d done: He’d unzipped his own jacket and pulled one side of it over the already-well-bundled Maude, they’d waved goodbye to Tommy Turtle, and walked the mercifully distracting path. The farther he went from the house, the worse the phone reception became.
He had no idea of what he might do besides walk and talk, and they had eventually come upon the much-discussed tree, where a squirrel eating a nut sat on a low branch, poised to run. He’d echoed Gin’s “Here we are at the Story Book Tree” as reassuringly as he could, and finally the confused child had lit up with a bright smile, as if he’d performed a miracle. He’d probably jiggled her in his arms, pulled the blanket around her in a less haphazard fashion . . . Whatever he’d done, it had distracted and soothed her.
He and LouLou took walks down that same path when she and Dale came to visit, though Dale didn’t accompany them. Dale disliked even conventional pets, like cats and dogs. Birds? She never wanted to see anything in its so-called natural habitat. She swatted away butterflies. He had neither a cat nor a dog, though he’d been enough of a good citizen to take a kitten he’d found wandering alongside the highway to the SPCA. He wouldn’t even have a rabbit going hippity-hop in the front yard anymore, he imagined—though of course you never “had” a wild animal, any more than you had a special bond with whatever raptor spread
its wings. Only in The Peaceable Kingdom did the animals coexist without bloodshed—a romanticized ideal of equality, in the same paintings that featured in the background small figures depicting the first settlers negotiating their contract with Native Americans. What a joke. Walt Disney couldn’t have done better. In a way, Hicks had been the Walt Disney of his day. When Ben bought the house, there’d been an assortment of small lawn statuary tucked here and there, in various states of decay. He’d kept only the cement turtle with its eroded hump that LouLou called Quasimodo.
LouLou’s getting back in touch had allowed him to admit he’d been a little too solitary. How flattering that she told him how much she’d cared for him. LouLou had thought about it and decided that Bailey hadn’t been the experience they’d once thought. Away from school, she’d consistently realized the place had fostered distance between them at the same time it provided opportunities for them to get together. But everything had been so contrived! Why have a required weekly event and pass it off as a “social”? LaVerdere didn’t just teach there, he was the unacknowledged force behind the place. Who else had an on-campus apartment, as well as a house? Why were The Brains, the math students, kept separate from them? And 9/11 had been handled so badly, even before the parents dive-bombed, lifting off Akemi, Darius. LaVerdere, she said, was the fox brought in to guard the henhouse—okay; an unfortunate analogy, because except for The Brains, who comprised the minority of the school, there’d been as many females as males at Bailey.
Jasper, on the phone, basically said the same thing, even though Ben never discussed LouLou’s thoughts with him. In a paper Ben could still remember, which Jasper had been asked to read aloud for a philosophy course, Jasper had written about the trees on Bailey’s campus, comparing them to equally enormous trees at the crossroads of the nearest town, where the post office was at the back of the general store and the used-car lot rarely sold anything. It was a place where people couldn’t afford to have their trees pruned, or cut down when they’d been uprooted or broken by wind. LaVerdere’s appreciation of Jasper’s addressing the class system in this way had been palpable. It was also something Jasper never forgave LaVerdere for. He still insisted that he’d conjured up what he knew LaVerdere would most like to hear. He’d deliberately created a bruise—exactly what someone like LaVerdere would get off on rubbing, its soreness attracting your attention, your attention making the sore spot sorer.
