by Ann Beattie
His dog, Batman, had been abandoned outside the bookstore café. He’d started hanging around near the back door, tucking his too-long tail down low if you approached, as if you meant to kick him or worse. Not a good feeling, when the dog did his skittish, scared dance. The barista started giving him food. The dog had been calmed down and won over by a few scones. But the situation was dire (Mimi the barista was never optimistic). The dog had been taken to the crowded animal shelter, which could no longer be depended on not to euthanize animals. At Mimi’s urging, Ben had gone to get him “just for a while.” “I know you’re right for each other, I know it, I’m totally sure,” she’d said. She was kindhearted, an animal lover. Still—and he might agree with her—she’d felt he hadn’t put enough thought into the dog’s name. All those superheroes were already dismissed, in Mimi’s opinion; they didn’t need to be further trivialized by people naming their dogs after them. Who had all those comic-book heroes and TV superheroes been that had lingered through his youth? A lot of them were people who’d died young, like Christopher Reeve, entirely mortal except for his embarrassingly bad body suit. In the early days, their costumes had been stretched over their unconditioned bodies. They’d had no alternative to speaking bad dialogue with a straight face. An earlier Superman, George Reeves, his father’s Superman, had killed himself. Maybe that was (thank you, LaVerdere) the hamartia: put on a costume that bad, and you’re dead.
He and Mimi had fooled around. They’d had sex twice, though once it had just been at work, after hours, on the chaise Ned stretched out on if he had a migraine. To make up for that hurried moment, the other time they’d stayed at a hotel, and room service had delivered dinner and wine. He’d still been in the phase when he wanted to please her when she’d decided to call it quits. She’d been too young, but she was legal. In their late-night conversations, mostly over the phone, he was never sure if she was asking him to decode the world or code it. He’d told her a little about Cornell and nothing about Bailey.
He checked his phone for messages while he toed the dog’s fur. Dogs were great, the way they farted and looked up, so confused. In their sleep they ran like Mercury (at the bidding of Zeus, so that analogy worked out flatteringly). Doggie dreams: their squeaked-out ecstasy as they ran through fields. Meadows. Memories of long-ago meadows.
What kind of people dumped a dog? Ben and Batman at first had had an uneasy relationship before they’d bonded. Rawhide bones were the dog’s caduceus. But he was also a humble fellow, he wasn’t just about his magic. The dog liked tuna fish. A lot. A sleek coat soon replaced the colorless undercoat Ben combed out, using a brush down back and belly. Batman slept beside Ben’s bed. So, to his way of thinking, Ben had morphed into a typical, middle-class guy with a few friends—maybe he was more like his father than he realized. He retained a love for tennis. (Not so, golf; that had been Steve’s thing. He played, but his long-ago lie to Steve about having injured his foot, in the months before they moved, turned out to be prophetic. Some days he had to stop playing with the manager of the new, huge grocery store mid-game.) At least he’d figured out early on that the quality of life meant more than slavishly following the money.
He’d rummaged around before trash day and retrieved The Man’s beret. It was fine, unstained by anything that had been tossed on top of it, hardly wrinkled. After a brief steaming as the kettle whistled, followed by a night drying on the kitchen counter, he’d taken it to work. “Cool!” Mimi said. “Totally! Thanks, Ben!” Like all girls wearing berets, she looked jaunty and flirty.
One briefly glimpsed piece of paper tucked into his notebook, lit to become a torch poked under the logs, had been from Hailey (they’d made out a few times at Bailey): a nasty note, asking how he felt about being The Boy Who Left Girls. Prescient, as he’d now become The Man Who Left Women, those times they didn’t walk first. Hailey was one of the few classmates he’d seen in recent years. Instead of the eye patch, she now had an artificial eye. She’d married a scientist who worked at MIT, but the marriage hadn’t worked out. She’d told Ben that a lot of the girls at Bailey had expected that eventually he’d marry LouLou.
He’d been startled, but he said nothing. He’d come to see LouLou so differently. She’d been self-involved, sometimes manic, always high-maintenance. She’d certainly taken up a lot of space. What amazed him most, though, was how withholding she could be even when she was telling the wildest stories, making the most extravagant plans.
He and Hailey had been walking through the Met when she started talking about the past. They’d wandered into the Egyptian rooms, where the mummies’ silence was so profound, it had seemed oddly conducive to talking. When she told him what the girls had thought, he’d assumed she was flirting. He’d put his arm around her to give her shoulder a light squeeze. She’d stiffened and looked away, about as happy as someone getting a flu shot. That had been that. He had certainly withheld from her the information that LouLou had left Dale for another woman, moving to Amsterdam to live with her new love on a houseboat. Baby—what baby? Dale—who’s Dale?
There was no one else after Mimi made it clear she preferred men her own age who had what she called “sensitivity” (one had a MOM tattoo, the other a yin/yang symbol on his thick neck; those were the sensitive jerks she considered superior to him). At Amy’s salon, Mimi had heard from Amy, or Kayla had been there, that—this was the way she put it, when she told him—he’d brought Kayla’s son a tacky present, then flirted with the babysitter. The babysitter? If you were a single man in a small town, you didn’t escape being talked about in ridiculous ways, because every woman you didn’t want to sleep with found it easier to think they had good reason to reject you—unless, of course, you were gay.
He sometimes saw women for coffee, including those he got together with from OkCupid, but of course he couldn’t meet them where he worked—that would have seemed too public, as well as making Mimi think he was pathetic. They did sometimes go to Rick’s (under new ownership, as Rick’s Parkinson’s progressed), and afterward, those times he’d talked about it to Daphne, asking her if coffee killed brain cells, if that was why he had no interest in talking to any of the women for more than three minutes, he’d endured Daphne’s kidding about his inflated sense of himself. She only half listened; all she really wanted to know were the ages of the various women. He wished he could still shoot the shit with Rick, but Rick had only been able to speak in a whisper after his last setback.
Every now and then he browsed the internet, looking at eBay (Daphne had gotten him addicted) and other sites for old postcards of his town and the area nearby, which continued to fill up with summer people, or couples who wanted weekend places. Wealthy people who bought up farmland, then paved the dirt roads leading to the houses. If Dennis Tito—god! He remembered the guy’s name; he remembered because the famous dictator had had the same last name . . . if Dennis Tito were still alive, now an even richer old man, he might be the next person to show up in town. There was already a performance artist and an Italian who was a prince in his country, who’d opened a shop that specialized in Tuscan olive oil. Once or twice (meaning at least a dozen times) he’d shaken a few drops on Batman’s dry food. Daugherty’s Dairy was for sale for $2.2 million. The Time Warner guy’s place had already changed hands; bought, renovated (including an infinity pool), but never moved into. It was fitted out with Corinthian columns and a wraparound porch—nice touch—back on the market, with a higher asking price. An area of the front lawn had been made into an ice skating rink, though it became an empty frame when winter ended.
When the newest supermarket opened across the town line, he and Mimi had wandered through at midnight, happy to have the store to themselves to laugh at somebody’s idea of what people who weren’t stoned wanted late at night. Every now and then he got some communication from a realtor asking if he wanted to sell his property. At first, these postcards featured postage-stamp-size photos of houses, red lines slashed through them on th
e diagonal, saying SOLD. Soon, the photographs tended not to be of the house itself. They’d show the pool, or the rolling lawn, an idealized depiction of rosebushes in bloom or lambs cavorting on Thalo green grass, the realtor’s picture a godlike cameo on the upper right.
Twenty-five
He felt bad for Dale, whose relationship with her new girlfriend had lasted only a few months (he’d gotten a picture of them on Valentine’s Day, right after they’d first met, huddled in matching bomber jackets, sitting on the side of an outdoor fountain that sent up a jet of pink-tinted water, wearing pink socks patterned with red hearts, pant legs raised). Dale had given up the lease on her Upper West Side two-bedroom to move in with the woman in Washington Heights. She’d no sooner relocated than the girlfriend had had a change of heart. Dale decamped to a friend’s fold-out before finding an Airbnb above a coffee shop, with an air mattress and a bamboo curtain in what had been the dining alcove. Dale had sent a selfie of her stunned face against the bamboo backdrop, one hand holding up a little glass vase with green bamboo sprouting delicately from it, as part of a group email telling her friends where she was.
He’d emailed her a day or so before to see if she’d like to go with him to an evening at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden—a fund-raiser to benefit a physical-rehab center that worked with Darius Beltz’s daughter. Every spring Ben bought tickets, though he’d never gone.
“Thanks. Let me think about it. Not that I wouldn’t love to see you, but it might feel strange, being together without LouLou. It might make me sad, or seeing me might bring you down.”
“Offer stands,” he wrote back. “I invited you because I’d love to see you.”
He really hoped Dale had moved on with her life in spite of losing someone she cared about, followed by a disappointing experience with her second book. When he contacted her, she’d written back that she had a new email address, since she’d soon be changing jobs. What exactly had her job been? He’d never been clear on that. Everything had always been about LouLou. Maybe Dale regretted having given notice (she’d sounded nervous when she said, “changing jobs”). That was another downside to having LouLou around; she had a way of spreading discontent. He hoped the change Dale was making would be an improvement. She was the real thing—a person who’d been through a rough time but had emerged okay.
The next day she’d texted MEET U THERE! Of course she wasn’t the kind of person who’d expect to be picked up. Of course no woman in New York would expect such a thing. Elin had told him to walk on the outside when he was walking on a sidewalk alongside a woman. Which side should you be on when you were on a path in the woods? Outside, in case deer (which Ginny would have found an annoyance) streaked by? Inside, to protect your companion from low-hanging branches? Elin had insisted that he hold open a door for anyone if he reached the door first, male or female. He had no way of knowing whether his own mother would have gotten around to giving him so much instruction, though he doubted it. His father’s long-ago talks with him about sex had been restricted to anatomy lessons, the two of them huddling in a corner, his father pointing at drawings in a medical book with a finger that touched the very edge of the page to turn it. He still sometimes had to shake those illustrations out of his mind when he saw a woman undress. Now that Daphne was engaged, who would that be?
He told Dale he’d pick her up. He lied, saying that he had an errand that would put him in her neighborhood anyway. The longer he stayed out of the city, the less attraction it held. That was either defensive, or the simple truth. How could you tell, or why would you bother to distinguish, whether a somatic reaction meant you yearned for New York or feared being there? Weren’t yearning and fear pretty indistinguishable? A question worthy of LaVerdere.
His suit fit, and he wore it with a shirt he’d bought at Daphne’s for ten bucks. At the last minute he folded a tie (an Alexander Julian eighties monstrosity that reminded him, weirdly, of the insane rug at Bailey) in his pocket. There was no dress code—of course not, if they already had your money. Dale hadn’t asked whether the occasion was formal. She wore only black, like so many New Yorkers. Daphne would have liked to go to such an event. She missed life in the city, and she wasn’t intimidated by crowds (“Energizing”). Elin, because of her love of flowers, would of course have loved being at such an event, but she’d married and moved to Chicago.
As he got near Dale’s apartment, he started looking for numbers, reassured that they were going up instead of down. It was clear that you were an ex–New Yorker when you forgot to ask the name of the cross street.
Then he saw Dale, outside the building, as she’d insisted she’d be, looking for his car. When he pulled to the curb and she jumped in, she leaned over to give him a hug. A nose ring. A metallic substance protruding from her nostril brushed his cheek. She wore black pants with an extreme crease and a black leather jacket. The shirt underneath was also black, with a few splashes of color meant to look like bullet holes. He had to admit the color contrast brought more attention to her eyes. He was gratified by how relieved he felt to see her. Her low black boots must have been brand new.
“LouLou, LouLou, LouLou, LouLou,” she said. “There. Now it’s over. We don’t have to mention her again. Ever.”
“I wasn’t even thinking of her,” he said. “You look great, Dale. I’m glad you decided to come.”
“Somebody picks me up and takes me to a party? Sure.”
“Things are good?”
“Good enough,” she said. “You?”
“I’m fine. Putting in too many hours at the bookstore, but business keeps picking up, and my former company’s crashing and burning, so I guess I got out just in time.”
“Didn’t you own stock?” she asked.
“Good memory. I did, but I ditched it at Christmas, which turns out to have been a good move.” (In one of their infrequent phone calls, Steve had quickly assessed the situation and told him to sell his stock immediately.) “My significant other is my dog, by the way. Great dog. Named for one of our most important American heroes.”
“Woody Guthrie?”
“Nope. Think: Lives in a cave. Wears a cape.”
“Some guy you picked up at a sex club?” she deadpanned.
While they were idling at the light, a quick drug deal took place between the car to his right and a guy on a moped: a real sleight of hand, with the bicyclist seeming only to fumble his helmet. A cop car pulled up alongside him at the next red light. A young cop looked out his side window, then looked straight ahead. Whatever had caught the cop’s eye, it hadn’t been Ben. The light was a quick one. It turned green.
“I’ve been over the flu for a month now, or three weeks, anyway. I lost seven pounds when I was hospitalized. Dehydrated.”
“That’s awful. Did you get your flu shot?”
“Everybody asks that. Didn’t you hear that they got it wrong this year?”
“I did know that, I guess.” Mimi had the flu. He’d taken a lot of teasing because he’d been too afraid to go near her, so he’d ordered her a gift basket of food from Amazon Prime. They’d had to hire a temp and had been lucky someone’s high-school-dropout son was willing to step in. The only difficult thing had been telling the kid that as good as he was, he’d have to be laid off when Mimi recovered. This, he’d been delegated to do by Ned. Ben had felt so bad, he’d hired the kid to move some rocks and to paint his bedroom—tasks he’d also done perfectly. Hanging out with him, he’d learned about vampire movies, Australian music, string theory (apparently, it was running into trouble), and unheralded Swiss chess masters. The kid had beaten him every game. When his time at the café ended, he’d taken a bus to Indiana to be with his girlfriend. For some reason, the kid’s father barely spoke to Ben, and the mother stopped coming in entirely.
“I hadn’t been in the hospital since I was ten,” she said. “Nobody could visit. I mean, maybe if I had immediate family and they put on a mask—but
in my case, who’d want immediate family?”
“That must have been unpleasant.”
“It isn’t working,” she said.
“What isn’t?”
“The LouLou exorcism. Maybe you’ve got to do it, too.”
“Really, Dale, I’m not sitting here thinking about her.”
Some idiot threw a skateboard into traffic and rode for a while, causing a taxi driver to almost swerve into a bag lady crossing mid-block. He leaned on his horn.
“I’m really trying to move on,” she said. “So far, that consists of having found a new agent, and giving notice at my job. I’ve met a few people, but who can you expect to meet in bars except drunks, right? Have you met anybody?”
“No. But I’ve had a few too many coffees lately. Maybe drinks would help.”
“You miss that woman who moved, right? Your neighbor?”
“I do. I miss all three of them. He and I talk, from time to time.” Two calls—one, an unexpected, booze-fueled, late-night Christmas Eve conversation about people’s desires, displaced onto Santa, and Steve’s dislike of symbolic occasions, in general, along with a second phone call about the stock market—weren’t exactly “time to time,” he supposed. “In any case, they’re in Texas now.”
“That’s rad,” she said. “I’ve got to say, they didn’t strike me as Texans.”
“He shoots armadillos in his yard.”
