by Ann Beattie
“He took me aside and asked me straight out if you were having an affair with his wife.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Why would I make that up? He ran into me at the health food store when I was buying peanut butter. You never had anything ordinary to eat.”
“We never touched each other.”
“I told him he’d have to ask you. I was a little ticked off to be put on the spot.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said.
“I’m sorry I brought it up. But now there’s no secrets between us. It’s better that way.”
“Well, that’s for sure,” he said. Steve? He’d asked Dale that?
“Tell me one very true thing,” Ginny had said to him not long before they moved, stopping on the path. She could be a little precious in her attempts to relate meaningfully—as Arly had pointed out. Still, the question had taken him aback. He’d asked if she felt what he’d been saying was somehow inadequate. But that wasn’t what she’d meant: She wanted to know what the first thing was that had popped into his head. Leave it to Gin to think that you could backtrack to immediacy. She didn’t want him to say something disarming or provocative or to confess some dark secret. Like everybody else, she just wanted to know she was at the forefront of his thoughts. He’d been holding Maude, who’d protested their stopping by kicking his hips. “Bye-bye, Mommy,” he’d said, waving Maude’s little wrist like a ventriloquist. “Every day I’m growing up and moving farther and farther away.”
“You’re informing me that my daughter’s growing up and will leave me? That’s the one true thing you want to say?”
“When they grow up, everybody leaves everybody,” he’d said. “It’s all about leaving.”
The cars were moving fast on the West Side Highway. Once you knew how to drive in New York, your instincts never failed you. But you couldn’t hesitate, once you pulled out; you never signaled, and when you shot into the next lane, you had to keep accelerating. Steve had asked Dale that? Hadn’t he worried that Dale would tell him?
But she hadn’t. It was weird, how many things you never knew, though there were more ways to impart information every day. Maybe somebody would invent a What You Don’t Know app. LaVerdere had always said that the difficult thing was to know enough to ask the right question. Ben had found out later that this wasn’t an observation LaVerdere had originated; it had been accepted wisdom at Bailey.
The day had been warm before turning suddenly chilly. Fog hung over the Hudson River, though there was okay visibility on the highway. From somewhere inside the mottled whiteness he saw a bird flying. How he wished Dale hadn’t made her incantatory remarks about LouLou. To name a thing did indeed invoke its presence—perhaps more so, if you knew it was nowhere near. LouLou, in Amsterdam. LouLou was always on the run. She was her own, personal triathlon. How long did she stick with anything? A week? A month? A year?
A silver SUV passed, going at great speed, cutting in so sharply he had to check his reflex to brake. The car streaked out of sight like a stick of chalk coming to the edge of a blackboard (so old-school; they’d had blackboards at Bailey). They continued downtown—a word that had become, in his lifetime, synonymous with what wasn’t there. They could build all the new buildings and parks and memorials they wanted, but downtown would always be the absence of what used to exist.
He’d never touched Ginny. He wouldn’t have fathered LouLou’s child, either artificially or in the conventional way. Wherever she was tonight, someone was no doubt taking LouLou’s side at this very moment, against him, against Dale, against the world: Better to be disliked by people who didn’t know you than by people who did, he thought.
The fog was thick enough to be a special effect arranged for the appearance of the devil. There were so many devils, though—who’d get cast as the lead? LaVerdere, with his Machiavellian maneuvering. But he wasn’t the devil, just a sad approximation. A devil in a diorama, instead of a potent force in the real world. Look at the easy prey he’d settled for: a scared, middle-aged woman on the verge of becoming a widow. Then, later, LouLou. He had no better prospect than a troubled former student? The thirty-year-old married man in Boston she’d seen at Bailey could have been jailed for statutory rape if he’d been caught. And those other losers: drunken Masters of the Universe and random blowhards. What a relief when she came up with Dale. What a huge, fucking relief. They’d envisioned a future, Dale and LouLou, LouLou, LouLou, LouLou, who floated in his mind as delicately as ash, and sank in his heart as heavily as a stone, though finally her selfishness demystified her. She was no longer an enigma, she was only hard, hard and self-protective. Her spell had been broken when she’d gone too far. When she mistook him for somebody she could manipulate, knowing all along she had her fail-safe lined up. She was betting that if LaVerdere turned her down, Ben would reconsider, out of jealousy.
Which he might possibly have done, there might have been one chance in a hundred, if LaVerdere hadn’t come to his house and exposed her, making obvious her habitual pattern of jerking people around. Ginny had also miscalculated, thinking that if he adored Maude, he’d adore her, by extension. Like any California girl, she expected to be adored, even if—maybe because—adoration went nowhere. It was difficult to imagine Ginny in Dallas. The land of big hair and breast implants, as well as an omnipresent awareness that kept everyone in a time warp, shocked, shocked, at who shot J.R. The place was an urban wasteland, anchored by oil and the banking industry, malls, and of course the earlier, real-life shooting from the window of the Texas School Book Depository.
Dale’s hand lay on top of her little black bag plunked in the space between seats. No New York City gel manicure with squared-off nails. That’s not who she was. She had stubby fingers, unadorned with rings. Her nails had been chewed to the quick; her cuticles were ragged. It was a hand that someone who loved her would want to hold in order to hide it, to protect her from what she unintentionally revealed. He wasn’t that person, but as they sped downtown he felt the urge to grab her hand, to interrupt her thoughts. He could hear LouLou’s name going through her mind repeatedly, and that was painful. If he’d still been an awkward teenager he could have slid his fingers slowly over hers, but he’d scare her; she’d misunderstand if he did such a thing. She’d had enough surprises; her life had been nothing but surprises, whether they came disguised as elephants or giraffes, lions or tigers. Her mother had embodied the enemy, then revealed that enemy to be tortured, mournful, weak. As he kept his eyes on the road and forced himself not to be distracted by the fog Rothko’d over the water, as he kept pace with the traffic and drove like a maniac, he couldn’t touch her, for every obvious reason.
About the Author
Ann Beattie has published twenty-one books and lives with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry, in Maine. She is a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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