by Ann Beattie
“Hey, Richard,” Ned said, not managing to disguise his surprise.
“I don’t smell cigarette smoke, do I?” Richard said.
“It’s coming from below,” I said, closing the window.
“We weren’t talking about you,” Ned said. His voice was both kind and wary.
“I didn’t say you were,” Richard said. He looked at me. “May I be included?”
“I was telling him about Harry,” I said. “The story about the pearls.” More and more, it seemed, we were relying on stories.
“I never liked him,” Richard said. He waved a hand toward Ned. “Open that a crack, will you? It’s too hot in here.”
“You already know the story,” I said to Richard, anxious to include him. “You tell Ned the punch line.”
Richard looked at Ned. “She ate them,” he said. “When he wasn’t looking she ate as many as she could.”
“I didn’t want them to fit anymore if she tried to put them over her head,” I said. “I wanted her to know something had happened.”
Richard shook his head, but fondly: a little gesture he gave to indicate that I was interchangeable with some gifted, troublesome child he never had.
“One time, when I was on vacation with Sander, I picked up a trick in Puerto Rico,” Ned said. “We were going at it at this big estate where the guy’s employer lived, and suddenly the guy, the employer, hears something and starts up the stairs. So I ran into the closet—”
“He played football in college,” Richard said.
I smiled, but I had already heard this story. Ned had told it at a party one night long ago, when he was drunk. It was one of the stories he liked best, because he appeared a little wild in it and a little cagey, and because somebody got his comeuppance. His stories were not all that different from those stories boys had often confided in me back in my college days—stories about dates and sexual conquests, told with ellipses to spare my delicate feelings.
“So I grabbed whatever was hanging behind me—just grabbed down a wad of clothes—and as the guy comes into the room, I throw open the door and spring,” Ned was saying. “Buck naked, I start out running, and here’s my bad luck: I slam right into him and knock him out. Like it’s a cartoon or something. I know he’s out cold, but I’m too terrified to think straight, so I keep on running. Turns out what I’ve grabbed is a white pleated shirt and a thing like a—what do you call those jackets the Japanese wear? Comes halfway down my thighs, thank God.”
“These are the things he thanks God for,” Richard said to me.
Ned got up, growing more animated. “It’s all like a cartoon. There’s a dog in the yard that sets out after me, but the thing is on a chain. He reaches the end of the chain and just rises up in the air, baring his teeth, but he can’t go anywhere. So I stand right there, inches in front of the dog, and put on the shirt and tie the jacket around me, and then I stroll over to the gate and slip the latch, and about a quarter of a mile later I’m outside some hotel. I go in and go to the men’s room to clean up, and that’s the first time I realize I’ve got a broken nose.”
Although I had heard the story before, this was the first mention of Ned’s broken nose. For a few seconds he seemed to lose steam, as if he himself were tired of the story, but then he started up again, revitalized.
“And here’s the rest of my good luck: I come out and the guy on the desk is a fag. I tell him I’ve run into a problem and will he please call my boyfriend at the hotel where we’re staying, because I don’t even have a coin to use the pay phone. So he looks up the number of the hotel, and he dials it and hands me the phone. They connect me with Sander, who is sound asleep, but he snaps to right away, screaming, ‘Another night on the town with a prettyboy? Suddenly the bars close and Ned realizes his wallet’s back at the hotel? And do you think I’m going to come get you, just because you and some pickup don’t have money to pay the bill?’ ”
Eyes wide, Ned turned first to me, then to Richard, playing to a full house. “While he was ranting, I had time to think. I said, ‘Wait a minute, Sander. You mean they didn’t get anything? You mean I left my wallet at the hotel?’ ” Ned sank into his chair. “Can you believe it? I’d actually left my fuckin’ wallet in our room, so all I had to do was pretend to Sander that I’d gotten mugged—sons of bitches made me strip and ran off with my pants. Then I told him that the guy at the hotel gave me the kimono to put on.” He clicked his fingers. “That’s what they’re called: ‘kimonos.’ ”
“He didn’t ask why a kimono?” Richard said wearily. He ran his hand over the stubble of his beard. His feet were tucked beside him on the sofa.
“Sure. And I tell him it’s because there’s a Japanese restaurant in the hotel, and if you want to wear kimonos and sit on the floor Japanese style, they let you. And the bellboy thought they’d never miss a kimono.”
“He believed you?” Richard said.
“Sander? He grew up in L.A. and spent the rest of his life in New York. He knew you had to believe everything. He drives me back to the hotel saying how great it is that the scum that jumped me didn’t get any money. The sun’s coming up, and we’re riding along in the rental car, and he’s holding my hand.” Ned locked his thumbs together. “Sander and I are like that again.”
In the silence, the room seemed to shrink around us. Sander died in 1985.
“I’m starting to feel cold,” Richard said. “It comes up my body like somebody’s rubbing ice up my spine.”
I got up and sat beside him, half hugging him, half massaging his back.
“There’s that damn baby again,” Richard said. “If that’s their first baby, I’ll bet they never have another one.”
Ned and I exchanged looks. The only sound, except for an intermittent hiss of steam from the radiator, was the humming of the refrigerator.
“What happened to your paws, Rac?” Richard said to me.
I looked at my hands, thumbs pressing into the muscles below his shoulders. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I’d forgotten to put on the lotion and the gloves before going to sleep. I was also reflexively doing something I’d trained myself not to do years ago. My insurance contract said I couldn’t use my hands that way: no cutting with a knife, no washing dishes, no making the bed, no polishing the furniture. But I kept pressing my thumbs in Richard’s back, rubbing them back and forth. Even after Ned dropped the heavy blanket over Richard’s trembling shoulders, I kept pressing some resistance to his hopeless dilemma deep into the bony ladder of Richard’s spine.
“It’s crazy to hate a baby for crying,” Richard said, “but I really hate that baby.”
Ned spread a blanket over Richard’s lap, then tucked it around his legs. He sat on the floor and bent one arm around Richard’s blanketed shins. “Richard,” he said quietly, “there’s no baby. We’ve gone through the building floor by floor, to humor you. That noise you get in your ears when your blood pressure starts to drop must sound to you like a baby crying.”
“Okay,” Richard said, shivering harder. “There’s no baby. Thank you for telling me. You promised you’d always tell me the truth.”
Ned looked up. “Truth? From the guy who just told the Puerto Rico story?”
“Or maybe you’re hearing something in the pipes, Richard,” I said. “Sometimes the radiators make noise.”
Richard nodded hard, in agreement. But he didn’t quite hear me. That was what Ned and I had found out about people who were dying: their minds always raced past whatever was being said, and still the pain went faster, leapfrogging ahead.
—
Two days later, Richard was admitted to the hospital with a high fever, and went into a coma from which he never awoke. His brother flew to Boston that night, to be with him. His godson, Jerry, came, too, getting there in time to go with us in the cab. The experimental treatment hadn’t worked. Of course, we still had no way of knowing—we’ll never know—whether Richard had been given the polysyllabic medicine we’d come to call “the real stuff,” or w
hether he’d been part of the control group. We didn’t know whether the priest from Hartford was getting the real stuff, either, though it was rumored among us that his flushed face was a good sign. And what about the young veterinarian who always had something optimistic to say when we ran into each other in the transfusion room? Like Clark Kent, with his secret “S” beneath his shirt, the vet wore a T-shirt with a photograph reproduced on the front, a snapshot of him hugging his Border collie on the day the dog took a blue ribbon. He told me he wore it every Friday for good luck, as he sat in oncology getting the I.V. drip that sometimes gave him the strength to go to a restaurant with a friend that night.
Ned and I, exhausted from another all-nighter, took the presence of Richard’s brother and godson as an excuse to leave the hospital and go get a cup of coffee. I felt light-headed, though, and asked Ned to wait for me in the lobby while I went to the bathroom. I thought some cold water on my face might revive me.
There were two teenage girls in the bathroom. As they talked, it turned out they were sisters and had just visited their mother, who was in the oncology ward down the hall. Their boyfriends were coming to pick them up, and there was a sense of excitement in the air as one sister teased her hair into a sort of plume, and the other took off her torn stockings and threw them away, then rolled her knee-length skirt up to make it a micromini. “Come on, Mare,” her sister, standing at the mirror, said, though she was taking her time fixing her own hair. Mare reached into her cosmetic bag and took out a little box. She opened it and began to quickly streak a brush over the rectangle of color inside. Then, to my amazement, she began to swirl the brush over both knees, to make them blush. As I washed and dried my face, a fog of hair spray filtered down. The girl at the mirror fanned the air, put the hair spray back in her purse, then picked up a tube of lipstick, opened it, and parted her lips. As Mare straightened up after one last swipe at her knees, she knocked her sister’s arm, so that the lipstick shot slightly above her top lip.
“Jesus! You feeb!” the girl said shrilly. “Look what you made me do.”
“Meet you at the car,” her sister said, grabbing the lipstick and tossing it into her makeup bag. She dropped the bag in her purse and almost skipped out, calling back, “Soap and water’s good for that!”
“What a bitch,” I said, more to myself than to the girl who remained.
“Our mother’s dying, and she doesn’t care,” the girl said. Tears began to well up in her eyes.
“Let me help you get it off,” I said, feeling more light-headed than I had when I’d come in. I felt as if I were sleepwalking.
The girl faced me, mascara smudged in half-moons beneath her eyes, her nose bright red, one side of her lip more pointed than the other. From the look in her eyes, I was just a person who happened to be in the room. The way I had happened to be in the room in New York the day Richard came out of the bathroom, one shirtsleeve rolled up, frowning, saying, “What do you think this rash is on my arm?”
“I’m all right,” the girl said, wiping her eyes. “It’s not your problem.”
“I’d say she does care,” I said. “People get very anxious in hospitals. I came in to throw some water on my face because I was feeling a little faint.”
“Do you feel better now?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“We’re not the ones who are dying,” she said.
It was a disembodied voice that came from some faraway, perplexing place, and it disturbed me so deeply that I needed to hold her for a moment—which I did, tapping my forehead lightly against hers and slipping my fingers through hers to give her a squeeze before I walked out the door.
Ned had gone outside and was leaning against a lamppost. He pointed the glowing tip of his cigarette to the right, asking silently if I wanted to go to the coffee shop down the block. I nodded, and we fell into step.
“I don’t think this is a walk we’re going to be taking too many more times,” he said. “The doctor stopped to talk, on his way out. He’s run out of anything optimistic to say. He also took a cigarette out of my fingers and crushed it under his heel, told me I shouldn’t smoke. I’m not crazy about doctors, but there’s still something about that one that I like. Hard to imagine I’d ever warm up to a guy with tassels on his shoes.”
It was freezing cold. At the coffee shop, hot air from the electric heater over the door smacked us in the face as we headed for our familiar seats at the counter. Just the fact that it wasn’t the hospital made it somehow pleasant, though it was only a block and a half away. Some of the doctors and nurses went there, and of course people like us—patients’ friends and relatives. Ned nodded when the waitress asked if we both wanted coffee.
“Winter in Boston,” Ned said. “Never knew there was anything worse than winter where I grew up, but I think this is worse.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Kearney, Nebraska. Right down Route Eighty, about halfway between Lincoln and the Wyoming border.”
“What was it like, growing up in Nebraska?”
“I screwed boys,” he said.
It was either the first thing that popped into his head, or he was trying to make me laugh.
“You know what the first thing fags always ask each other is, don’t you?” he said.
I shook my head no, braced for a joke.
“It’s gotten so the second thing is ‘Have you been tested?’ But the first thing is still always ‘When did you know?’ ”
“Okay,” I said. “Second question.”
“No,” he said, looking straight at me. “It can’t happen to me.”
“Be serious,” I said. “That’s not a serious answer.”
He cupped his hand over mine. “How the hell do you think I got out of Kearney, Nebraska?” he said. “Yeah, I had a football scholarship, but I had to hitchhike to California—never been to another state but Wyoming—hitched with whatever I had in a laundry bag. And if a truck driver put a hand on my knee, you don’t think I knew that was a small price to pay for a ride? Because luck was with me. I always knew that. Just the way luck shaped those pretty hands of yours. Luck’s always been with me, and luck’s with you. It’s as good as anything else we have to hang on to.”
He lifted his hand from mine, and yes, there it was: the perfect hand, with smooth skin, tapered fingers, and nails curved and shining under the gloss of a French manicure. There was a small, dark smudge across one knuckle. I licked the middle finger of the other hand to see if I could gently rub it away, that smudge of mascara that must have passed from the hand of the girl in the bathroom to my hand when our fingers interwove as we awkwardly embraced. The girl I had been watching, all the time Ned and I sat talking. She was there in the coffee shop with us—I’d seen them come in, the two sisters and their boyfriends—her hair neatly combed, her eyes sparkling, her makeup perfectly stroked on. Though her sister tried to get their attention, both boys hung on her every word.
GOING HOME WITH UCCELLO
Three weeks into the trip to Italy she’d given up wearing anything but comfortable shoes and clothes. The brassiere had been replaced by Teddy’s mistakenly shrunken undershirt; her linen pants were left in the hotel room—where, draped over a chair, they would probably continue to wrinkle on their own—and she wore, instead, her sweatpants. Running shoes instead of hiking boots. Teddy’s navy-blue pullover, unadorned. Of course, anyone would take her for a tourist: not even simple earrings or a bright scarf. They wouldn’t have to hear her speak to know she was American.
Teddy was English. She enjoyed making fun of him, saying that he represented his culture by carrying his umbrella everywhere. Men were lucky: their shoes always fit comfortably. He had on black-and-white bucks with pink rubber soles. He was wearing his jeans, and a cashmere sweater his sister had given him for Christmas. Men were lucky: dark circles under their eyes were sexy. Unkempt hair made them look casual, not disheveled. She had it in for Teddy a little, though she hated to admit it. (She usually pretended even
to herself that she had it in for all men.) She wished so many feminists hadn’t become shrill. Or clownish, like Camille Paglia. She also wished she had a job, and that she could decide whether or not to move to London and live with Teddy and his son, Nigel.
As a little child, the boy had bitten her. Buying him sweets was really the only way to keep him on your side. That and coming to his rescue, explaining homework assignments he didn’t understand, or being able to sort out what the teacher probably told the class to bring to school, in spite of the cryptic abbreviations Nigel had written down: “Be—wax.” Could the teacher possibly have wanted beeswax from everyone? No, it was beads and some special thread, waxed thread, Nigel suddenly remembered, for Thursday’s crafts class. But why did Nigel have to tell her these things late at night? Why not earlier, when she could send his father out to get them? Amazingly, she had been able to provide the beads, because she’d kept a broken necklace in an envelope in her makeup bag for years. The bracelet Nigel finally made went that weekend to Mum, in Kensington. So Mum was now wearing a beaded bracelet fashioned from a broken necklace she had swiped from an ex-lover’s apartment in New York City. On the night table, she’d found a cigarette stubbed out in an ashtray that usually served only as a dish under a plant, and under the unsteady ashtray a necklace of tiny green beads. She had pocketed the necklace and turned the ashtray upside down so her ex-lover might notice that she had noticed it.
What a way to think about people: ex-this, ex-that. Maybe she thought of him as her ex-lover because it was a way of putting a big X through him, the way Zorro had slashed his Z through the air on TV. A bit of implicit violence there—but if she ever parted from Teddy, she couldn’t imagine feeling any way but sorrowful. Teddy, who had insisted her friend Moira see an acupuncturist and who had driven her fifty miles each way every Monday for months, until she died. “Maybe I should have taken her to somebody who practiced voodoo,” he had said. It had taken her a while to register what he meant, and then to realized that he was serious: half angry at life’s cruelty, and half self-deprecating.
