by Ann Beattie
That Saturday he bought a bag of Tate’s chocolate-chip cookies (opting for gluten-free just to be safe), a bottle of Perrier (bringing wine was such a cliché), and Winky Walrus, a bug-eyed toy with exceedingly long eyelashes he’d gotten from the pharmacy. It ran on four AAA batteries. He opened a small flap and clicked them into Winky’s gray plastic ass, watched with interest as it crawled and batted its black plastic lashes. He replaced it in the box.
Since college, he’d slept with Rita, Callie, Irina (that had been a mistake), Catherine, Doreen, Gina, Alissa, Lonni, Kathy (the real estate agent Kathy; there’d also been Kathy2), Deirdre, and Kendra. Lonni he’d been pretty crazy about, but she’d decamped for Hawaii. He’d been fascinated by Deirdre’s inverted nipples—an actress working as a waitress—but her shrink advised her to drop him, and after a few dates she had. Who’d want to be with anybody who’d do that? He’d never returned to the pretentious Les Quatre Cornichons, where he’d gone with Steve the night he met her, when she waited on their table. Damn! That had been the other time he’d met the tire salesman, Ed, from the antique show. Ed and the guy’s redheaded wife. Steve had liked Deidre, though she hadn’t taken Steve seriously. “Your friend the comedian,” she’d later called him, “and his really nice wife.”
On the way to Rhinebeck, Tory (he’d mistakenly left her off the list) came to mind. She’d gone to his house to have sex on the second date, her LeSportsac a Trojan Horse of condom packets. He’d hurt her feelings by laughing when she unzipped the bag. Later, she’d called a girlfriend to pick her up in the middle of the night—she hadn’t even asked him to give her a ride, though of course he would have. The sex had been good; they hadn’t had a fight, afterward they’d watched Colbert, he’d found a bag of mint Milanos. How was he supposed to know she had diabetes? He’d forgotten to include her on his list because he felt guilty, he supposed. Well, at least he didn’t have to write a response paper about any of that. And when you got to a certain age, it wasn’t that you couldn’t say what was funny, it was that if you had to explain, you were with the wrong person.
He’d been drawn to Tory the minute he met her. She was what Elin would have called “plucky,” which made him think, for some reason, of a duck, which in turn made her a bit amusing to him, though she never knew why. Once they’d discussed his perceptions about trusting your instincts about what you were doing, taking a break from driving south at a service area, where they’d used the bathrooms and bought Starbucks. For half an hour, Tory had sat across from him on a picnic bench outside and insisted, with barely contained anger, that he wasn’t like other men. (Should that have been what he aspired to?) He was too verbal, too inquisitive, as interested in words, which plenty of women would find intimidating (she did not) as he was in sex, and as for that, the vibes he gave off were relentless. Okay: He’d been honest; he didn’t think he was interested in marriage.
“Is that it? You can have whatever you want, so with hookups and one-night stands, you’re never going to get serious? Even if you’ve convinced yourself, which I’m not so sure of, what’s wrong with being realistic? Let’s just talk about a long-term relationship—we don’t have to cover the scary shit, like marriage. You’ve got two modes: on and off. Mostly you prefer on, but sometimes, even in the middle of a conversation, you flip the switch and the person you’re talking to goes dark. If that’s out of your control, if you don’t recognize what I’m talking about, you should—what’s the euphemism—‘get help.’ And also, also, if you think I’m discussing this anymore when we get back on the highway, Ben? Keep your fingers off the radio dial, with your supernatural ability to find spooky songs that speak to the sexual subtext of whatever you’re talking about. You send out pheromones like skunk spray.”
The chai latte he’d bought her had certainly not soothed her like mother’s milk. He was happy to have ordered two double espressos. (“I’m sorry. There’s no such thing as four shots in a Tall.”)
Dale had once asked him, after saying it was none of her business, if he knew how many women he’d slept with.
“You go first,” he’d said.
“It’s embarrassing,” she’d replied. “Two men and three women.”
“Going back to the beginning?”
“Yeah. Just like the Bible,” she’d replied.
He’d thought for a minute, then told her maybe ten. Corrected that to a dozen. In his mental list just now, he’d failed to count. He resisted being a glorified accountant. That was all he was, even if he could write programs. Sex with Arly had begun in college, so it hadn’t counted, even though he’d been hooked on her for years. Up to a point, he’d had sex with few women, but then it became like running downhill. It became whatever number it became. He’d thought he’d always remember the number of Arly’s hotel room, but he’d forgotten. It didn’t come back. Of course, neither did she. (He was as fast-thinking as Colbert, he decided—just as good with a quick comeback, even if, like LaVerdere, his ideal audience was himself.) Guys were disgusting if they kept lists, even mentally. Putting down names in code, or drawing four parallel lines, with the fifth fallen female the line on the diagonal . . . that was the worst, smarmy, like cutting yourself in a pattern, instead of just slashing. His father had shown him marks scratched with a paper clip inside his desk drawer: the number of times he’d had sex with Elin. There: proof positive the guy was a pig.
It was slightly embarrassing, but he’d been trying ever since he remembered her name to remember anything about Kathy2 except that she was the woman whose earrings weighed down her earlobes, dark-haired, anxious. Kendra—cool Kendra—had made an unusual request. She’d have sex with him only if he kept saying, “You’re not Kendra, You’re not Kendra.” He had to say it that way; he couldn’t say, “You’re not her.”
He listened to what turned out to be Dave Brubeck on the radio. Jazz wasn’t his thing, though it had been his father’s favorite music. He thought, as the piece progressed, that it sounded like the soundtrack that accompanied the downing of a shot elephant, one that tried over and over to rise but was damned by its injuries and its weight.
Her house was huge. If he turned in to the driveway, he’d block in the Lexus she’d parked outside the garage door, though there were three carports. Joanne. He’d almost forgotten Joanne. They’d smoked a joint and gone skinny-dipping in the pool behind an empty house, though when they dived in the motion detector went off, and a cop car had arrived in minutes; fortunately, the cop and his partner had been amused by the freaked-out naked woman, and totally believed Ben’s story.
He parked at the curb. Even the concrete was embedded with something that sparkled. He’d soon be crossing an invisible line of demarcation. It would be like your best birthday party, though you could only know that in retrospect, or—grimmer—a news image on TV you’d never shake, which also brought in a whole new way of living.
He picked up his gift bags and walked toward the door. What would it be like to have your husband leave you for a guy? It probably happened all the time, though that wouldn’t make it any easier. People were audited by the IRS all the time, too. If the guy hadn’t left his wife, well, the lovely lady he was about to see wouldn’t have been at the salon crying on her sister’s shoulder, and he wouldn’t be taking his long walk up the path. He’d tucked a condom in his wallet, pushing it behind a small, faded photograph of himself as a child, his chubby face jammed against his father’s cheek in the photo booth. (“Carry this. It will make girls love you if they see it,” Elin had told him years before, removing the little square from the album and handing it to him like a sacred wafer.)
Elin and LaVerdere. It boggled the mind. What business was it of his? What was he doing approaching a near-stranger’s house with some toy her kid could bang on its head and break, with not even a bottle of wine for fortification? Only a jerk would bring bottled water. She’d think he was an alcoholic.
“Hi,” she said, already opening the door,
her son in her arms.
“Hi,” he said.
There was an initial awkward moment. Then he stepped forward and hugged her—not that easy to get close, with the baby welded to her—the boy in his blue onesie turning away with whiplash force, burying his face in his mother’s neck. The child also had hiccoughs.
“This is Lacey,” she said, gesturing into the huge living room, where a young girl in particularly large Doc Martens sat, wearing a bright-purple sweater and bulging camouflage shorts over tights. “Lacey’s babysitting tonight, while Mommy makes dinner, which Mommy really appreciates. They’re going to watch a movie about dolphins.”
“Nice, Kayla,” he said. Dinner. What kind of a jerk was he, not to bring wine?
“My mother informs me I can’t take any calls when I’m providing child care? So I’m just asking. In case you want to text me, or something?”
“Oh, I don’t have any policy about turning off your phone. Tell your mother I said it was fine.”
“It’s not like I’m going to be chatting up some nonexistent boyfriend while Henry’s sinking in the bathtub.”
“Well, I hope not! But you don’t have to bathe him. He’ll be fine. You two have your pizza and—”
“She is so great!” Lacey exploded. “My mom told me I’d like to babysit here. I mean, provide child care.”
“Her mother is my acupuncturist,” Kayla said to Ben.
“Ah,” he said.
With no protest, the hiccuping Henry was peeled from his mother’s chest as Lacey asked, “Want to walk, Big Boy, or want a carry?”
The child started off, taking rubbery-kneed goose steps across the enormous Oriental rug that looked like a reef improbably crushed under a microscope lens. Lacey trailed him as he stopped and started, stopped and continued into the depths of the house.
“It was thoughtful of you to get a sitter,” he said.
“It saves my sanity. What’s left of it.”
“I had no idea you’d live in a house like this, to tell you the truth.”
“It looks like a court jester’s hat on Google Earth,” she said. “My lawyer pointed that out.”
He followed her into the kitchen. Granite counters on the kitchen island. The floor was so shiny, he could have brought ice skates. A ceramic pink pig sat atop the refrigerator. “From a friend in San Francisco,” she said, noticing him eyeing it. “I think there’s vodka and scotch. There’s wine. I hope you don’t drink beer.”
“Why do you hope that?”
“Because I don’t have any.”
“I’m not a beer drinker. Maybe a glass of red?”
“Cabernet?”
“Sounds good. Want me to open it?” He remembered the cork that had sunk into the bottle of wine he’d opened in the middle of the afternoon, as soon as LouLou and Dale had driven off, after their most recent intense visit, filled with their intense desires—the way a slight dusting of cork had repulsed him as it floated on the surface of the wine in his glass. What was LouLou thinking, considering having LaVerdere’s child? Didn’t she understand the way the man mind-fucked people? Did she not believe in genetic heritability?
“It’s easier if I do it. Nobody can ever figure this out,” Kayla said. She lifted an enormous wine opener from a stainless-steel stand. Her biceps were well defined, her arms lissome (lissome!), her hands delicate, her long, polished fingernails squared. The house was overheated. He could understand why she wore a sleeveless silk blouse with her jeans. With a sound like a chainsaw starting up, she extracted the cork. She sniffed it and handed it to him. Who was she? Who had she been married to? Such moments of speculative detachment were never good, because they implied an underlying reservation, like questions posed when you already had the answer.
(“Ladies and gentlemen, there may be no real debate at all about certain matters, but to assert power, an issue must be invented. How, then, do we best fabricate a debate that is not instantly recognized as specious? By admitting to our own ostensible confusion, our unwillingness to accept what our society would term foregone conclusions.”—LaVerdere)
Her refrigerator gleamed in the absence of photographs: other people’s Christmas cards; dogs with red eyes; oldsters in their impeccable suits and timeless dresses—the food smudge the result of an indifferent observer’s sticky fingers. Those pictures were clamped with magnets to Steve and Ginny’s refrigerator. You inevitably knocked some bride to the floor, reaching in for ice.
“Great kitchen,” he said. His kitchen, hardly updated, had been a good bargaining point. As had the lack of insulation, which had been easy enough to get blown into the attic. His real estate agent Zippy’s brother—maybe his brother, Doo-Dah—no, the guy’s name had been Peter or Paul, one of the Apostles—he’d never seen the guy again—but he’d insulated houses. Old people would put up with drafty houses, but no one younger would. He pulled out a stool.
“If it wouldn’t seem too controlling, I think we might be more comfortable in the other room,” she said.
He hopped down. The wineglass looked like a goldfish bowl atop a stem. If Dale had filled this one, it would have drained the bottle.
“So you probably know more about me than I realize, because you and my sister talk, right? But I mean, what do you know?”
“Very little,” he said. “Last time I talked to Amy was with you. Amy was one of the first people I met after I moved in.”
“She said she was surprised when you went back to her shop. She thought maybe she’d said something that offended you.”
“I’m used to that. That wouldn’t be a factor.”
“Ooh. Did I hit a nerve?”
“Just being honest,” he said.
“You know my husband left me, right?”
“Yes. That came up when we were talking before. You said that it was another man.”
“It’s somebody famous. I’m under a gag order.”
“No kidding.”
“Only because I want the best settlement I can get.”
“Then I shouldn’t ask who it is.”
“No,” she said, sipping wine. “Umm. Do you like it? What are those?” She pointed to the bags he’d carried into the living room and put at his feet. He could hear footsteps on the second floor.
“Oh!” he said. “I’ve been carrying them around like my lapdog, or something. I must be more nervous than I realized. It’s a toy for Henry and a bottle of Perrier.”
“You brought Henry water?”
“No. I brought us water.”
“I was kidding.”
She slipped out of her high-heeled, pointed-toed mules. One lay on its side. The shoes had red soles. Living in a house heated to this temperature, you could easily pretend winter was summer.
“Do you know who my father is?” she asked.
“No.”
“He invented the operating tables that are used in almost every hospital in America.”
“Really? So is he a designer, or—”
“An engineer.”
“Interesting. What’s his name?”
“Craig,” she said. “Amy’s my half-sister. We have the same mom. Daddy’s generous with both of us. Amy’s got a thing, though, about not taking any more money than she needs. To me, that’s just silly. She could close the shop and go to people’s houses to cut their hair, you know? Have her own schedule.” Her eyes were an unusual gray-blue that reminded him slightly, only slightly, of Tory’s.
“I don’t like to snack before dinner,” she said. “It raises your blood sugar so you eat too much. But help yourself to cashews.”
“Wine’s perfect,” he said, raising his glass. In his whole life, had he ever offered a sincere toast?
“So how long have you been out of the city, Ben?”
“Five years. Something like that.”
“What did you do? I mean,
what’s your job?”
Hadn’t he asked something similar, years ago, and been put down by LaVerdere? Elin, too, had told him that it was best to ask that question indirectly. There seemed no point in trying to describe his attempts to draw up a better financial plan for Steve’s father’s organization, though the work he’d put into that had taken more time than his real job.
“I was a sort of glorified accountant. The company I was working for split off from the parent company, and I ended up getting an offer from the competition. They’ve moved to D.C. I mostly design new software programs for them and provide them with charts and graphics. Makes it easy to work from home.” Tory had worked for the same company before they relocated to D.C. and had sometimes given him a ride to Washington. During the time Arly had lived with him, she’d been jealous of their infrequent road trips. He missed them now more than he missed either woman. Tory had rented a house one town north, though her goal had always been to move to the Northeast Kingdom. By now, there was every chance she’d done that. She’d vanished from social media. When he’d asked a mutual friend at the company if she’d done a complete disappearing act, the response had been, “Sorry. She asked me not to talk about it.” Did that mean not talk to him, or not tell anyone? That, he hadn’t asked.
“Your area’s changing fast. Rhinebeck, too. We came here because it was quiet and we liked the house. Well, I was so young—I would have liked a yurt, if that’s what he’d decided we should move into. I was way too young to be living with anybody, really. And I don’t think he liked it here. Randy preferred the West Coast. I thought eventually we’d move there, but I kept quiet because he always had to be the one who had all the good ideas. I was pregnant when he told me who he was in love with, but I had an abortion.”
“Difficult,” he said. In his experience, there’d been a time when women rushed to tell you about their abortions, but in recent years, no one mentioned them. They’d gone back to being secrets.
