by Ann Beattie
“What do you want to talk about now, brilliant?” Mary said to John Joel.
“Pissball,” John Joel said.
“Maybe if this is the way things are going I should get a polyester leisure suit and be an asshole,” John said. “I feel, when I am with my loving family, that everybody is conspiring to beat me down.”
Mary sighed. John Joel reached for the last pork ball.
“No one is going to see where Louise went,” John said. He was not asking a question, just stating a fact.
“So what could I do?” Mary said.
“No one cares,” John said.
“So?” Mary said. “What about you?”
“I care,” he said, “but I have to pay the bill. I don’t work all week—that unusual pastime of mine—for nothing. I am here to pay the bill. One book I remember very well from college has a character in it who behaves well. A novel by Ernest Hemingway, which I’m sure you’ll never read. The Sun Also Rises. A woman runs away with some other man, but the hero pays the bills. That’s what I do: I work, and I pay the bill. I also care about where my wife is. Not as much as I would have cared years ago, but enough so that I will summon the waiter and go out and try futilely to find her. Don’t let me interrupt your meal. If I do find her, I can stand outside with her while she screams until you’re done.”
The Muzak was playing a medley of songs from Oklahoma. It was all high-pitched and too fast.
“In French, it’s Le Soleil se lève aussi. I read it my freshman year at Princeton. That was considered very avant-garde then—to go to the Cape in the summer and take novels written in French. You saw L’étranger all over the Cape. You know who was President? Eisenhower. And all these rich kids were wandering around Provincetown reading L’étranger. I was not as rich as my classmates, but still rich enough. The real wealth came when my father died, and his attorney could finally make the investments he wanted to make. I don’t think he even embezzles money.”
“Like the suntan lotion,” John Joel said.
“What?” John said.
“Whatever word you just said.”
“Soleil,” John said. He took a drink of beer, then a sip of tea. His appetite was coming back, and that was inconvenient, because he should be running after Louise. Would be running after her. Any second. “So that’s what you have to say about my fine story. That soleil is both a suntan lotion and a word in the title of a novel by Ernest Hemingway.”
“That’s the thing about Angela’s father,” Mary said. “When you do say something, it’s never intelligent enough. If you don’t have a graph, or Newsweek, right at the table, what you’re saying doesn’t mean anything.”
“Mary,” John said. “Mary, Mary. Is this actually a defense of your brother?”
“She’s right,” Mary said. “You are sarcastic.”
“What do you say?” John said to John Joel. “A defense of your old daddy? Mary defends John Joel, John Joel leaps to Daddy’s defense, and like the three bears, they march off to find Mommy.”
“Go ahead and put us down,” Mary said.
“What?” he said.
“No matter what I say now, you’ll just send it back to me. If I open my mouth, you’ll say something nasty.”
“It’s because it’s all too much for me. Do you know how much your crack on the phone about Superman hurt? Don’t you think I might already realize that my existence is a little silly? Do you think I had visions of working at an ad agency dancing in my head like sugarplums? Everybody I work with, with maybe the exception of Nick, is stoned on Valium all day. I think of preposterous ways to sell preposterous products. And I think back to college all the time, Princeton didn’t just come to mind tonight. I thought I was going to be a bright boy. Well… I am that. You don’t want to go to Princeton. I don’t know.”
He stopped talking because Mary was staring at him, and as he looked at her looking at him, he thought: What if Angela really sleeps with people? What if she does? What if I’m not the only one keeping quiet? At any rate—whether it was the way he looked, or what he had said, she felt sorry for him. She even did a very grown-up thing: She changed the subject. “I haven’t finished the book,” she said, “but that’s what Vanity Fair is like. Things just fall into place.”
When they left the restaurant, Louise was outside. He was surprised. He imagined that he would have to go on a wild goose chase to find her, that she would be deliberately hiding from him, to frighten him and punish him. There she was, on the hood of the car, reading a magazine. The car was parked in front of a drugstore, and she had gone into the drugstore—who knew what she was thinking?—and she had bought a magazine. There was something sad and childish about Louise, sitting on her old Chevy, locked out because she hadn’t brought her keys, her long, tanned, bare legs hanging down, sandals on her feet, legs parted enough that you could see up her skirt. It wasn’t even a self-consciously casual pose; she had really gotten involved in the magazine and forgotten to keep her knees together.
“Apologize” was all she said.
He apologized. He was so relieved to see her, so happy that it was not going to be a night of crazy driving around and calling people she might be with, that he simply apologized. John Joel hung back and didn’t look at her. Mary looked at her and looked away. He got behind the wheel and unlocked the car on their side. Mary and John Joel got in the back seat. Louise leaned into the car. “Take them home,” she said. “When you’ve done that, come back for me. I’m going into the drugstore for a milkshake. That’s what I want—a chocolate milkshake. I’ll be outside when you get back.”
Driving home, he no longer felt relieved. He put the radio on and heard two people discussing a recipe for bleu cheeseburgers. When the woman gave the direction “add two tablespoons Worcestershire sauce,” the announcer said, “Worcestershire sauce.” He echoed everything she said, and when he did, the woman said “Uh-huh” and continued. At the end, the man said, “Doesn’t that sound good?” and the woman said, “Oh, it is.” The man thanked her. She said he was welcome. Another voice broke in, apologized for interrupting, then started again, saying that tomorrow there would be more suggestions for summer barbecues. “You know,” the announcer said, “a lot of people out there don’t like bleu cheese. I think these can be made just as well with your favorite cheese—cheddar or jack or whatever.” A song from Saturday Night Fever came on. He had gone to that movie with Nina, and when John Travolta gave away the first-prize trophy he and his date had won to the couple who should have won the dance contest, Nina had leaned over and whispered: “That’s you.” It was a little irritating that she pretended he had such good impulses, that his guilt was so great. She asked him, when they first met, if he was a Catholic. She kept up the joke, too: Late one night, after he had made love to her, before he went back to Rye, she had come into the bathroom when he was showering, pushed back the shower curtain a few inches and said: “I will hear your confession.” Cold air had come into the shower and something about the tone of her voice and the rush of air had actually frightened him; he had never been in a confessional, but he sympathized for the first time with people who had. It was easy to make her stop teasing, though. All he had to do was reach out and touch her fingertips. He took very hot showers—so hot she wouldn’t get in with him unless he agreed to let her regulate the water—and that night, one of the first nights he was with her, he could remember the steam escaping, how quickly she became foggy, her smile through the fog, their fingers touching. He had had to stare to see her, and only partly because of the steam. For a second he had thought she was unreal, that she had always been an apparition. He knew that he had to look at her, and keep looking. If he had not reached out to touch her, it might have gone on forever. Nina’s smile, through the steam. The smile that was worth suffering a blast of cold for.
“You ran a stop sign,” John Joel said.
“Leave him alone,” Mary said.
John said nothing. He slowed down. He looked in the rear-view mirror and
saw John Joel, pressed against one side of the back seat, and Mary, all the way to the other side. He wondered if they might really hate each other, if when they were adults they would live on different coasts and exchange Christmas cards. What was it like, so early in your life, not to love someone you were supposed to love?
He thought: I’m not John Travolta. I’m Father Frank Junior, in a disco for the first time, caught up in it and put off by it. At first, he had been uneasy with her friends—all young, a lot of them spacey, one or two more heavily into drugs than he could be comfortable with. He had accused her of liking him because he was safe and sane, a father-figure. “That’s a lot of easy bullshit,” she said. “But I like it that you think you’re sane.”
He pulled into the driveway—imagine her thinking, even for a second, that there would be columns at the base of his driveway—and the car sideswiped bushes weighted down by the rain the day before. Big white flowers brushed against the side of the car. He turned off the ignition and got out and stretched. He looked at the sky. It was still light, but the moon was already out. By the car was John Joel’s tree, the tree where the robin had built its nest. He wished that he had something to concentrate on other than what was coming: that he could be holding the delicate piece of egg, blue like no other blue, and that he could feel its lightness and fragility. The blue egg, in the little dish in Nina’s apartment.
On the way back to pick up Louise, he stopped at a phone. He asked the operator to charge the call to his home phone. “Is there anyone there to verify?” she said. “No,” he said, without any hesitation. A butterfly—late in the day for a butterfly—hovered by the phone for a minute. He looked again at the moon, more visible now that the sky was a little darker. He shook his head at the absurdity of what he was doing: standing at a phone on a country road, as though no one was at home, no one was waiting, as though Nina would pick up the phone in her apartment on Columbus Avenue and suddenly his heart would stop pounding and he would feel the breeze that was blowing. The butterfly flew away. The phone rang ten times, and then he hung up and went back to the car. He sat there for a minute before starting it. Then he put the radio on. The same song from Saturday Night Fever was playing, as though the last twenty minutes—half hour?—had never happened. Things just fall into place. If Mary knew that, from reading the book or from what she knew of life, she could not deserve to flunk any course, let alone English. Of course, if that was what she thought, then there wasn’t much point in her trying to organize her life or in any of the things he had believed about getting ahead, the necessity of getting ahead, when he was her age. Maybe a few years older. He got out of the car and got the operator again, and billed another call to his home phone. He called Nick. Nick picked it up on the first ring. “Goddamn Metcalf,” Nick said. “Called me twice today with the same joke. I keep telling him that I don’t like jokes. He tries to joke with me about not liking jokes. Metcalf.”
“What was Metcalf’s joke?”
“Same old joke,” Nick said. “Jesus Christ. What’s up with you?”
“I tried to call Nina and couldn’t get her. I just wanted to talk to somebody.”
“You should have been around today. The whole city left town. I went with Laurie to the Metropolitan and we sprawled in the grass in Central Park. Nice. Going to Hopper’s tonight. The bad news is that my wife called to say that Martin has to have his tonsils out. I told her to find a more progressive doctor—they don’t yank tonsils the way they used to.” Nick sighed. “I went over there early in the morning and talked to Martin. I asked him if he wanted to come along with us, but he didn’t. He was going roller-skating. A fever almost a hundred, and she lets him go roller-skating.” Nick sighed.
“I’d tell you what I’m in the middle of, but I don’t know myself. I’ll have a good story for you Monday morning. Want to meet me at the Brasserie early for coffee?”
“Sure. Eight?”
“Eight.”
“Nina all right?”
“I guess so. There wasn’t any answer.”
“I almost didn’t answer it. I thought it was Metcalf again. How he stays sober as a judge Monday through Friday, I’ll never know.”
“Valium. That’s not really sober.”
“He doesn’t take that much. Beats me.”
“What was his joke?”
“You know the joke. I’m sure you know it. Stop me, so I don’t have to tell the whole thing: What’s the difference between a Polish woman and a bowling ball?”
“What?” John said.
“Come on. You’ve heard it.”
“I haven’t heard it.”
“Why would anybody laugh at a sexist Polish joke anyway?”
“Okay. Forget it. See you Monday morning.”
“The other thing Metcalf does—Metcalf doesn’t call you on the weekends, does he?”
“No. He doesn’t bother me at work, either.”
“He’s afraid of you. He’s not afraid of me, and he calls me. You know how he starts conversations: ‘Hey, gork—’ Not even hello.”
“Gork?”
“I don’t know. His twin brother’s a neurosurgeon, and he gets these medical acronyms from him. It’s something insulting. I think his brother’s being a famous neurosurgeon fucked him up royal. I was out at his house in Sneden’s Landing last summer when his brother was there, and Metcalf was running around chasing his brother with a bread knife, saying he was going to do a vasectomy.”
When they hung up, John tried Nina again. No answer. He got in the car and drove, fast, to the drugstore. Before he got there, he could see that the lights were out. He pulled into one of the empty places in front of the drugstore and looked around, without getting out of the car. It was getting darker. In half an hour, on the ride home, it would be dark. He didn’t see her. If she had meant to run off, why wouldn’t she have done it when she left the restaurant? He got out of the car and peered into the dark drugstore. He stood with his back to the door, looking to the left and right. A man on a motorcycle pulled into the next space, turned off the ignition and kicked the kickstand down. He had on a helmet, gold and silver flecked, and mirrored sunglasses you could see out of, but not into. “Have change for a quarter?” he asked.
John reached in his pocket. He sorted through a palmful of change, and gave the man two dimes and a nickel.
“Thanks,” the man said. “I was going to buy a Hershey bar, but the drugstore’s closed. Suck-ass motherfucking town.” He walked around the corner.
“Louise!” John hollered. “If you’re here, this is your chance for a ride.”
The man jerked his head around the corner. “What’d you say?” he said.
“I came to pick up my wife,” John said. “You said it about this motherfucking town.” He looked at the motorcycle rider, who looked half interested, half put off. “What’s the difference between a bowling ball and a Polish woman?” John said to him.
The motorcycle rider didn’t miss a beat. “If you were really hungry, you could eat a bowling ball,” he said. He smiled. He was missing a bottom tooth. “Good joke,” the motorcycle rider said, and walked around the side of the drugstore.
John followed him around the corner. The man came to a stop in back of Louise, who was talking on the phone. The man put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and bounced on his toes, as Louise talked on the telephone. The phone booth was against the side of the drugstore. Louise had her hand cupped over the receiver. She was standing with her feet crossed at the ankles, talking quietly. She looked up and saw him.
“I guess you didn’t hear me,” he said, coming up next to her.
“See you tomorrow,” Louise said. “The hero has returned.” Her eyes were red. Her hair was pushed behind her ears, and she looked about twelve years old. Her face was freckled from the sun. She hung up and walked past John without speaking, on her way to the car.
“What was that, a conference call to Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller?”
“Very funny. F
eminists as a class are very funny. We all know that.”
“I apologized,” he said. “But you had to get the upper hand, didn’t you?”
“I don’t want to argue,” she said. “What I’d like to do is take a drive out to the water. If you don’t want to do that, I’ll drop you at home.”
He thought about it. It would be nice to see the moon over the water, particularly if she didn’t want to argue.
“All right.”
“In fact, I’d like to drive, unless you would consider that getting the upper hand.”
“You want to drive?”
She nodded yes. He thought about it. When they got to the car, he opened the door on the driver’s side and closed it when she sat down. As he moved away, the headache hit. When he got to the other side of the car, he was glad to sit down.
“I’m sick,” he said. “I’ve got a headache. Let’s just go sit by the water.”
“That was where I was going.”
The air changed when they went around the next bend. He reached out and turned off the radio; in his pain, he had been conscious of, and not conscious of, the way to stop the quiet rumble of the man’s voice. Leaning forward to turn off the radio sent a jab of pain through the top of his head. He rubbed it. He closed his eyes and kept rubbing.
“You know what I’d like?” she said. “Even if you hate me. Hate all of us. I’d like to go to Nantucket before the summer is over.”
“I thought you didn’t like it there.”
“I’ve been having dreams about it. There were things I did like. I’d like it if we could rent a boat.”
“You made me sell the boat,” he said.
“You did nothing but complain and worry all summer. And all winter, whenever anybody mentioned the boat, you’d roll your eyes and talk about how many problems it had and how much it cost. Remember on Christmas Eve when you started going through July and August’s checks, and adding up the cost of keeping up the boat?”
“Christmas makes me nervous. I was acting funny because it was Christmas Eve.”
“That’s a lie,” she said. “When you don’t want to talk straight, you don’t talk straight.”
