Park City

by Ann Beattie

  Standing in the kitchen doorway, he had said to her: “Sometimes I think this is all a huge fucking joke. Sometimes I think we’re ants, and here in our anthill we scurry around, moving the dirt, building the anthill higher, eating our food, shitting it out, doing our humble chores for the fucking Queen Ant, foraging and accumulating, bringing things in, piling things up, moving the piles around, and all the while, in our little specks of ant brain, we hope a big rainstorm doesn’t come and pound the whole fucking anthill into the ground, that we don’t get washed down the hill, that we don’t drown in the flood, but what would it matter if we did? What the fuck would it matter?”

  It was so unexpected. So typical of Henry, though, who while having finally admitted, one night in Bermuda, as the sky was brightening from rose to crimson, that his obsessing about the deterioration of the ozone layer was really a way of not focusing on more immediate, personal problems that he might do something about…well: going on with this line of thought would give the mistaken impression that she had been assessing the situation, seeing in it the seeds of similar situations—Christ! Did he think she’d gone to college to scoop the insides of melons into a garbage disposal? Could he really have thought that she would appreciate such a barrage of adolescent, ridiculous despair…had he been standing in the doorway with his weight thrown on one hip, in his loafers with their mashed-down backs, and his thumb hooked through a belt loop…was this miserable sight, this person she’d for some unfathomable reason married, so stupid as to think she’d appreciate being compared to an ant as she stood scooping pulp and seeds and fiber into the sink so that his diabetes wouldn’t rage out of control…had they had what they agreed would be their last discussion of the ozone layer only to have him recast everything in terms of their pointless life inside an anthill?

  “You’re really insane,” she said.

  “I’m insane?” he said. And then he said something she didn’t get—something about the Clorox. That didn’t surprise her at all, because whenever she gave him a helpful hint he derided her or ignored it. The use of Clorox as a repellent hadn’t been her own epiphany, by the way: it was something she’d read flipping through a tabloid in the supermarket, which was where she spent half her life, half of her pointless ant life, gathering food for Henry, because maybe Henry himself was the Ant King? After all, who was standing in the doorway, the picture of casualness, while her hair had fallen from her barrette to tickle her nose as she peered down into the messy abortion of melon pulp in the sink….

  She had apparently thrown the phone book at him. She saw that she had, because his hands flew up to protect his head, and certainly the phone book had not just animated itself to join in the fracas, surely she must have thrown it, accelerating the fight, which by that time had been going on for perhaps five minutes, of screaming and accusations, suspended only for troubled sleep, to resume the next morning.

  The day after the fight he did not go to work, which did trouble her. If he had called to say he would not be at work, he would have had to do it while she slept—he didn’t mind planting ugly tulips while she slept, for all she knew he had a complete private life. He told her about deficiencies in her character as he toasted an English muffin—one only; none for her—blaming her for trying to infantilize him with her air of superiority, banging his fist on the kitchen island and sending the nondairy creamer crashing to the floor, whatever he was saying about Clorox drowned out by the crashing glass. Then, insanely, completely insanely, as the muffin lodged in the toaster and began to burn, though it would be a cold day in hell if she ever again rescued any of his food, let him forage for it himself, ant that he was…Henry began to pick up the shards of glass and throw them, claiming the bits of glass were ants, or like ants—whatever he was saying. He was saying that he was scattering the anthill. Really, he was just a bully, uncivilized and out of control, wanting to lash out at who knew what, who could know who the designated Queen Ant was that morning, in his paranoia and rage. Black smoke poured from the toaster, and again the telephone book was animated, sailing through the air, smeared with cantaloupe juice, crashing way off course into the wall. She had wanted to paint the kitchen walls green; Henry had wanted them yellow. They had compromised on peach, which was good, considering the melon juice that was now smeared on the wall, though she resolutely did not care about that, did not care if the whole toaster erupted, did not care what he did with the rest of his day, did not care if he stood forever making analogies between broken glass and anthills, because he was cynical and unbalanced, she was not, she was—he was saying again—superior. Then he kicked the phone book as if he were making a final goal and looked around crazily, as if she represented a whole team who would cheer him. Looking over his shoulder, he asked if she had ever had a kind thought about his mother in her life. It did not deserve an answer.

  The next day, he was gone when she woke up, but he was so agitated that he had left a message—a rant, really—on the answering machine. At the beginning, he taunted her by daring her to listen to the message all the way through, which she did intend to do, sitting at the kitchen counter, the air still redolent with the smell of burned bread, bits of glass scattered underfoot. “I did what the raccoon couldn’t do,” he screamed on the tape. “I turned over your fucking garbage can that the fucking garbage truck neglected to empty because they do not give a flying fuck if the whole world festers and deteriorates, if they can shorten their working day by ignoring the cans on the route. I turned it over and I was within one second, one millionth of an inch, of taking the lid and ramming it through the side window of your car….”

  At this, she got slowly off the stool and went out to the driveway, his voice fading in the background. She walked as if in a trance, but she was not really in a trance, she was just practicing being in a trance. What if he had really traumatized her, so that she had become a zombie? What if at this moment she was a zombie, looking at chicken bones, food-stained newspapers, all the detritus of their lives scattered in the street—not by the raccoon, but by the wild beast that was her husband? No: she would not let him drive her crazy. It was reasonable to be superior, and not a zombie. She could shuffle along, traumatized, and become what he would like her to become, but it was better simply to sidestep his expectations, just as she sidestepped the garbage. That night, a neighbor’s boy would stuff most of it back in the can. She would see that from the bathroom window, getting up from the closed toilet seat where she was reading a mystery, preferring to be locked in the bathroom rather than downstairs, where Henry was silently watching the long-ago resignation of Richard Nixon on TV. It was not true that all teenagers were destructive and self-absorbed. The boy picked up almost everything, including soup cans with jagged edges and soggy coffee filters, then put the lid firmly on the trash can again. He could have been Sir Lancelot, he shone so in her imagination as what a man could be. Downstairs, she heard gunshots, and for a horrifying second she was so on edge that she had rewritten history and imagined Nixon being shot, then realized that Henry must have begun shooting at the teenager! Henry having a gun. Did he have a gun? Of course he didn’t have a gun. And if he did have a gun, then she hoped he would use it on himself.

  No, she didn’t. She tried thinking that, to see how it would feel. It felt wrong. She was afraid she was beginning to forgive him. In saying she wanted him shot when she did not want him shot, she had begun to forgive him. And she might have, too, if he hadn’t glared at her so coldly before pulling off the comforter and going to sleep on the sofa. Such histrionics, when there was a guest room. He was really out of control. Maybe he was actually cracking up. She tossed in bed half the night, and when she went down in the morning he was still there, the cover over the top of his body, including his head, his bare legs sticking out, one on the sofa arm, one on the floor. It was like finding the Elephant Man in a casual moment. She stood in the doorway, so fatigued she decided to forgive him, to try to get things back on track. If nothing else, he would certainly have to go back to h
is job soon. Perhaps he hadn’t gone back yesterday. Perhaps she had assumed, incorrectly, that the hysterical message of the day before had been left from work—but how likely was that? He had probably not sat at his desk and simply raged, spitting his irrational thoughts into a telephone. He had probably called from…“Henry,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm, “were you at work yesterday when you left that ridiculous message?”

  He jumped up, tossing off the comforter with such force that she jumped back. He stood there, glowering at her, the comforter puddled around him like a collapsed parachute. His wild eyes made her think of someone who had just crashed into a dangerous jungle. He might have been wondering: Could this native be friendly? She tried to look friendlier by smiling, but the attempt to alter the expression of her mouth, she could tell, was only resulting in narrowed eyes. She could not smile. She did manage to unknot the frown that creased between her eyes. They stood there that way, gazing at each other, she barefoot in her long nightgown patterned with blue morning glories, he wearing a white sleeveless undershirt and nothing else, his knock-knees pathetic, his penis curved like a tiny fountain spout, and—she had been blocking it out because she really did not want to focus on it—on his arm, on his biceps, a terrible bruise, a terrible swelling: from doing battle with the trash can? From…God, it was a tattoo. It was a tattoo, and he saw that she saw it. Even the fountain spout seemed to recoil in dismay. Henry was standing there, staring at her with the We Are Ants expression on his face, and on his upper arm, the part of his arm she had clasped so many times as they made love, was MOM in red-inked script, and a circle inscribing it, a circle, she saw, upon closer inspection, that was not a conglomerate of ants, but swirls of small hearts and flowers, interspersed with skin puckered into scabs, an outer rim of flesh around the circle swollen and flecked with what seemed to be broken veins.

  “Hurts,” he said.

  “Hurts?” she echoed. She was becoming the zombie whose role she had tried on for size. Numb. Unblinking. Who could blink looking at such a thing?

  “I went drinking with Jim Cavalli, made a bet, guy couldn’t pay up, we went to his tattoo studio, I got to choose from the fifty-dollar possibilities.”

  “Henry,” she said, “what is this about your mother?”

  “Cavalli chose.”

  “Cavalli had your arm tattooed MOM?”

  “Cavalli wanted to beat him up. I was the one who agreed to settle on a tattoo.”

  “Cavalli…,” she said, searching her mind for a visual image of the man. The new, gawky kid from Princeton? Pink shirt, drank a lot of Dos Equis at the company picnic? Though she was not aware she’d been speaking, Henry began to respond to her sharpening mental image of Cavalli. “Went off the wagon himself because his Princeton girlfriend left him for her analyst,” Henry said.

  “So…what?” she said. “You and Cavalli went to a bar, and he told you his girlfriend had left him, you told him the human race, or you and I, how should I know? You told him we were ants, and then some guy who worked at a tattoo parlor sat down and you bet him…you bet what?”

  “That the guy on TV would miss the shot.”

  “You bet that a guy would miss a shot, he said the guy would make it, the guy missed, and you ended up with MOM in majesty on your arm?”

  “Hurts,” he said quietly.

  “Well, Jesus,” she said. “I think we should go to the doctor and see if he can treat it, because I think your arm is infected.” A headache came up inside her like rolling thunderclouds spreading across the sky. By the time she finished her sentence, electricity was crackling through her brain, a tooth-chattering wind had begun.

  It was as if her pain made her transparent. Suddenly, he looked at her as if he could see the rain clouds inside. The pain piercings sinking into her jaw like lightning. “Your name is Angelina,” he said. Her head hurt so much that she didn’t mind this simple, neutral observation at all. Indeed she was Angelina. So true. He continued: “While I admit I hated you in that moment, it did occur to me that if I hadn’t been angry, if I hadn’t been angry when I was getting the tattoo, I could have had a tattoo of my wife’s name, except that only three letters could be had for fifty dollars, because Cavalli was insisting on scrollwork. The part around the word is called scrolling. It’s generic hearts and flowers and stuff.”

  This was too much to take in. Her head was pounding.

  “They do it the way people doodle on a notepad when they’re on the telephone, I guess.” He had sunk into the sofa, pulling the comforter over himself. He looked like an ill, miserable child. He looked at her expectantly.

  “I think we should go to the doctor,” she said. She had begun to worry about the tattooist’s needles. Why would Henry have done such a thing, when everyone was so worried about AIDS? How could he have been sure the needles were clean? Needles—Jesus Christ. He had let someone take needles and scratch dye into his flesh. He had gone with some self-pitying moron named Cavalli. And yet, she was on the sofa beside him, snuggled under his good arm, the comforter around them both feeling soft and sheltering. At that moment, the last thing she was thinking about was the fight. He had become, in her mind, a victim. Someone who had received far worse punishment than he deserved. Someone who needed medical attention, understanding, forgiveness. She envisioned herself driving him to the doctor’s office—never mind that the doctor was sure to be horrified—going there, getting a prescription for antibiotics, perhaps topical creams, perhaps…perhaps the doctor would see that Henry was unbalanced and think of something to do. Though the more she thought about it, the more she disbelieved it. Unless she could walk right into the doctor’s office with him, he would probably present it as regrettable, drunken madness. She would have to go in and be a Greek chorus: No, no, he was comparing life to being in an anthill; he’s never cared if flowers are atrocious colors, he just plants them anyway, like flowers that would bloom in hell; his mother upsets him, complaining about his father; our fight began on Father’s Day, which can’t be insignificant—either it’s resentment of his own father spilling over into our life, or he’s angry that people are procreating: he sees all these things as a personal affront, whether it’s the holes in the ozone layer or clear-cutting the forest or people giving birth to a child. He’s in a state of madness and despair, I tell you. He doesn’t go to work anymore. Come to think of it, for days I haven’t seen him eat. She would have to say those things; no sitting in the waiting room reading Good Housekeeping. No information, today, about Kathie Lee’s thoughts on how to parent. Cheese dips be damned.

  The fight began again when, to her complete surprise, he refused to see the doctor. It was feeling better already, he suddenly said. He thought he had a bit of a fever, though, so he would—if she did not mind—nap for a bit.

  “You’re going to the doctor,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I am not.”

  Thus began a new day of fighting, which she had not been prepared for at all, having begun to forgive him. And, like anyone dragged into something unexpectedly, her reactions were not the best. Instead of focusing on his obviously infected arm, she found herself demanding an explanation of how, exactly, he would keep the raccoon out of the trash if he did not want to use her method. She twisted up her mouth and marched like a martinet, imitating his expression and his quick exit from the living room when the phone rang. The phone: news from the outside world. The doctor, by telepathic message having realized he should call? When she picked it up, it was Cavalli. The nerve! What did he want, she asked: to know if Henry would meet him for more drinks and then go out to a whorehouse? “No,” Cavalli said evenly. “To know if he’s coming to work.” She hung up on him. Then the fight really swung into full gear. She was emasculating him again, it appeared. Again, he threatened her car windows. Couldn’t he think of anything more original than that? Or, at the very least, admit that he wanted to hit her? “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he said. It was not until three in the afternoon that she looked out and
realized that neither of them had brought in the paper.

  That night, he ate nothing. He sat with the remote control, flipping through channels, sentence fragments and incomplete sounds no doubt echoing the chaos of his brain. Once, he ran out the front door with the still-rolled newspaper, threatening a cat digging near a bush. He could have been heard miles away. If he did become violent, no one in the neighborhood would be surprised. Yes, they’d say, that guy was really nuts. Nuts but wounded. She couldn’t get the image of his infected arm out of her mind. It was as if the pain throbbed in her own head. Of course, it was next to impossible to sleep. And when she was at last almost asleep, what did he do but tear off in the car, going who knew where, dressed—as she later found out—in the only clothes he could find downstairs: a pair of madras bermudas with a ripped zipper he’d taken from her sewing room and his flip-flops with the thongs he’d glued back together in the basement, and her blouse. The nice navy-blue blouse she’d ironed before the fight began and never taken upstairs. He had left after cramming his body into her navy-blue blouse.