Park City

by Ann Beattie

  She went downstairs and turned off the answering machine because she did not want to hear whatever vicious message he might leave. She did, though, make sure the ringer on the phone was on, so that if he—or the police, God forbid—needed to reach her, they could. The only phone call came from his mother, who had no sense of time, wanting him to install a new bathroom sink for her at what she called “your convenience.” Wait until she saw the MOM tattoo. Let the two of them discuss that.

  Was he, in fact, headed for his mother’s—and should she have warned the woman that might be the case? Or to Cavalli’s? Back to the bar? Who knew where. Who knew how this was going to end, if it ever did end. It was the longest fight she had ever been involved in, and it was exhausting her and making her feel crazy herself. She took aspirin and went back to bed.

  In the morning, when she awoke, he was lying next to her. It was not a dream, he was really there. The blue blouse was on the floor, the madras bermudas discarded amid the thongs, his eyes squeezed shut so tightly she wondered if he was only pretending to sleep. At first, barely distinguishable in the tangle of white sheets, she didn’t realize there was a large gauze bandage on his arm. It was a thick pad of gauze, wrapped entirely around his arm, and near the top were black stitches—no: there was writing. On the gauze bandage, he had written, as best he could, left-handed, because the tattoo was on his right arm, the scratchy letters SORRY. There it was: the white flag of surrender, and an added apology lest she mistake it. Propped on one elbow, she frowned as she considered it: the wobbly O like a bubble being blown from a bubble wand; the Y like a sprouting seed. It seemed to her the sweetest thing he had ever done. Though he had done so many sweet things in the time they’d been together. The four-night fight must have been worse for him than for her, because he hated to carry a grudge. “Let him golf. Forget him if you can’t forgive him,” he always said to his mother. “Buy more flowers if that’s what you want, honey,” he had said to her when the garden bloomed that spring with its strange blossoms. She stared at the bandage. It was professionally done. He must have gone to the emergency room. On the night table she saw a glass of water and a bottle of medicine. It seemed to her a real salvation: the antibiotics that would cure the wound’s infection, protecting his precious arm, that arm that had curled around her so many times, guiding her through crowds, protectively placed when he introduced her to a stranger. She stayed there, propped up, observing him, the way a person will look out a window and study the land after a storm, everything seeming greener, lighter, suddenly distinct. The familiar landscape was all there: from chin stubble to chest hair, from navel to knee, it was Henry, slumbering after the great storm. Henry, simply, no scrollwork needed to establish his importance, because when she saw him small hearts and flowers invisibly surrounded him always, an embellished border around the valentine of affection that was her love. What couple does not occasionally fight?

  PARK CITY

  For a week, possibly a week and a half, I’m stringing along to Utah with my half sister, Janet, more or less looking after Janet’s boyfriend’s daughter, Lyric (fourteen), who is in turn looking after Janet’s child, my niece, Nell (three): Nell the Bell, Nell from Hell, Bad Smell Nell. Nell is the youngest child—in fact, there are only two others I’ve seen, so far—in the building. Unfortunately, one is a pudgy girl of about ten, who will not reveal her own name and who is obviously jealous that Nell is pretty, petite, and doted upon. She has taken to making up nasty names for Nell. Fortunately, the ten-year-old has in-line skates, so she’s gone a lot. We usually only encounter her in the morning, and then again in the evening, when she hangs around eating ice-cream cones with her father, who has a Clint Eastwood squint and therefore the look of someone who wouldn’t enjoy hearing anything negative about his child’s behavior. Where’s the mother? Where’s anyone except the run-amok girl who races through the breakfast area as if imitating Pee-wee Herman might be appreciated by real people.

  Janet and Damon are renting a unit on the second floor of the Ski Galaxy condo. Lyric and Nell and I share an oddly configured first-floor suite that is laid out like half a spider. There are five corridors leading to five bedrooms, all with their own bathrooms. The central room is a half circle with a big bay window curving around one side that contains many floor cushions silk-screened with pictures of prairie dogs, moose, elk, and—this we don’t get—gored bulls. There is a large rear-projection television flanked by deer heads. There is an orange leather sofa that we avoid. It looks like furniture recovering from a chemical peel. We’ve been here for three days. Settling in, as always, has to do with clothes strewn all over and shoes that get mysteriously separated from their mates.

  Each morning an odd spread is put out at one end of the lobby by the resident manager, a Vietnamese lady who, in addition to her caretaking duties, gives something called “deep tissue massage.” She is also a would-be chanteuse (so far, the only job she’s landed is accompanying herself singing with the Rhythm Ace at the Mexican restaurant on Friday nights those times the owner’s nephew has been too high to go on). Each morning, Nguyen (“Nikki”) Williams, widow of P.F.C. Theodore Roosevelt Williams, sets out her version of a continental breakfast, which invariably consists of hard-boiled eggs she has dyed pink; blueberry toaster tarts she arranges on the tabletop like carefully laid tiles; Waldorf salad (she told me that’s what it is) that is essentially whipped cream and miniature marshmallows amid a few flecks of fruit; and halved bagels with a choice of Kraft grape jelly or I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray. I stick to a plain bagel, myself, and always wrap an extra bagel for Nell to eat later, and then, before we go back upstairs and change into our swimsuits and ride the free bus over to the big pool at Wasatch Mountain Center, I spritz Nell’s hair in a fairly hopeless effort to untangle it before the water does another day’s damage, then put in whatever Third World–motif barrette appeals to her that day: the brown farmer with his brown cow; tiny women balancing baskets on their heads. There is also a Pocahontas barrette and there are some ridiculous butterfly barrettes we never use that Lyric has clipped to the rim of the pot containing a red amaryllis that blooms profusely on the shelf above the Jacuzzi in one of our many bathrooms. During the winter, the condo is a ski resort. Off-season, they rent to L.A. burnouts, people who are on vacation or (Nikki has confided to me, with a wink) having “trysts,” and conference attendees.

  Nell’s mother, my older half sister, Janet, is enrolled in a weeklong screenwriting course team-taught by her current love interest: a professor from Cornell who quit his job teaching film theory to experience total immersion in The Industry. For two years, he has had full custody of Lyric, after some incident that is only obliquely referred to, if at all. He and his wife went to Amsterdam when a private detective located their missing twelve-year-old, after which the wife decided to stay on and begin living the life of a man in preparation for a sex-change operation. Come to think of it, references to that trip are not so much oblique as quickly dismissed by Janet, who inevitably begins to fan her face as if smoke were coming at her when any mention of the ex lasts more than ten seconds. Lyric never mentions her mother and rarely mentions Amsterdam, except to say that it was cool to run away and pass as an eighteen-year-old, and that it was a good place to hang out and chill, which is what she prefers to do wherever she is. This means, in part, that she strikes up conversations with random men, and that she watches MTV and paints either her toenails or her fingernails daily. She alternates between being quite talkative and completely silent, and I alternate between relating to her easily and thinking she’s a Martian. Nell is a nice child, slightly precocious, entirely predictable in her demands, and, like most children, she doesn’t like her hair combed.

  Right now, Nell pulls her hair around to one side, pokes her nose in, and breathes deeply. “Stop smelling yourself, Nelly the Smelly,” Lyric says. She has picked up the malevolent ten-year-old’s way of taunting, which she gets away with because she imitates the fat girl at the same time sh
e says nasty things to her possibly new stepsister-to-be. Nell appreciates my being along on this trip, I know: it provides her with someone who will be reflexively sympathetic when she’s made fun of, and it spares her a real babysitter—the sort who phone their boyfriends constantly on their cellular phones and watch TV shows about daughters who pray for the salvation of their mothers who are addicted to body piercing, or priests who battle bulimia. The sitters all assume Nell will love pizza, but actually she’s burned out on the pizza-for-dinner routine, and she thinks the trendy ones, like Hawaiian, should be sent back to Hawaii. Recently, she crayoned a picture of a slice of pizza with golden wings, headed in the direction of a large black shape I’m sure was a volcano. Neither is she fond of pineapple pureed into “virgin” drinks, though Janet is, so at the end of her long, hard days we often sit with her at the café outside the Mexican restaurant and watch her sipping through pastel foam, lifting out cherries and pineapple wedges, which Nell does like. Lyric and I stick to Diet Coke, which is always available, especially if you’re willing to compromise for Diet Pepsi.

  There are five TVs in the five bedrooms, though one is set into the wood headboard of the king-size waterbed I often sprawl out on with Lyric, and it can’t be budged, so we watch from the foot of the bed, which has been made from largish tree trunks. Nell’s TV is on a glass-topped column that culminates in a flattened plaster cow skull, which she has had us help her wheel around to the side of the bed, close to her pillow. In our adjacent rooms, the shows war with each other: Jay Leno drives through a fast-food drive-in and orders tons of food to give the clerk ample time to notice it’s him; Catherine Deneuve, looking classy and scintillating at the same time, seduces someone in Belle de Jour. The night before, we all eventually channel surfed to CNN to get stereophonic news about the hurricane that had just started to pound the Carolina coast. The reporter looked like he was ready for liftoff, right there on the scene, holding on to a rope, or whatever it was flapping in his hand as he screamed into his microphone. People were shown nailing plywood to their windows. A roof blew off. There was much screaming on the reporter’s part about windsurfers who were out earlier who either went home or drowned, though all we could see was rain pelting the camera lens.

  So here I am, in Park City, to—as Lyric would have it—hang and chill with Janet and the gang until approximately the eighteenth of July, give or take a few L.A. minutes, or days. The day when the screenwriting course ends is ambiguously described in the brochure. As best we can make out, it may end on different days for people with different astrological signs. I’m along because even Janet burned out on the babysitters, and she also thought it would be a good idea to get my mind off my former fiancé, Hale Dowd, who didn’t so much leave me at the altar as leave to acquire altars. Altar gathering in the Southwest; I kid you not. Not that he has a religious bone in his body: it was about procuring altars (sometimes, quite easily; other times, major bribes required; occasionally, an indignant turndown when he genuinely offended the padre). Rich people in L.A. now want altars as additions to their entranceways and as frames for their wet bars. Two months ago, Hale traded his leased BMW for a Ford pickup, his taste in music mutated with no transitions from early Brian Eno to Lyle Lovett all in one trip to Tower Records, and he tried to persuade me to give up my job as a Clinique salesperson so that I could drive around with him and eat chiles verdes and help him sweet-talk priests. It wasn’t like I’d ever envisioned picket fences, and he’d had a vasectomy, so we weren’t going to be a mommy-and-daddy-and-baby family or anything like that, but I did sometimes think about growing herbs and having a dog, though when I think of it, that does seem pretty pathetic. When we broke up, Janet drove over to Silver Lake with a big bottle of Sapporo, a trowel, some rosemary in a tub and some basil in a punch-out six-pack, and a cardboard dog that looked exactly like a perky terrier, and we had some beer and planted the plants and put the dog in among them and backed up and looked, and of course it made us laugh. That night it rained, and that was it for the dog, although I can still see the little assemblage so perfectly that it wasn’t a waste of Janet’s money at all.

  Right now, 10:10 a.m., Lyric is tying the laces of her espadrilles around her shapely ankles. It doesn’t matter that we’re only going swimming: she doesn’t own a pair of crappy shoes. It’s her theory that if you have noticeable shoes, you’ll get instant respect and admiration, however else you look. I slip into my plastic flip-flops and pull a sleeveless T-shirt size XXL—I barely remember the days of buying T-shirts in my size—over my suit as Lyric teases her hair into an Ivana. She never actually swims at the pool; the most she’ll do is sit at the shallow end and dangle her feet in the water while Nell splashes around.

  Nell is plopped in the middle of the lumber bed, watching cartoons. A bear peeks into a beehive and is swarmed by bees. Scrambling to right himself, he trips over an alligator and is eaten, headfirst. I watch the cartoon to see the bear regurgitated. Nothing happens. The bees spiral and fly away: a black tornado that is really inconsequential, compared to Hurricane Bertha. The alligator gulps several times and, its sides bulging and its back looking more like it swallowed a camel, slithers into some bushes.

  “Turn that off. It’s awful,” I say.

  “She might as well learn the way of the world,” Lyric says to me.

  Nell takes this as confirmation that she can continue watching. At long last, the wet, exhausted bear reappears, stumbling out of the woods. It slams down into two enormous poles that turn out to be…dinosaur legs. This is definitely not a day in the life of Teddy Ruxpin. The dinosaur snatches up the bear. From the woods, the terrible sounds continue—I’m hearing the alligator, right?—as the bear disappears down the escalator-length throat of the dinosaur.

  “I wonder if that cute guy will be there again,” Lyric says, dotting my Clinique lipstick on her cheeks and rubbing it in. “The guy with the Euro boner,” she says, anticipating my “Which one?” question. She means the Frenchman who was walking around displaying his anatomy in little striped briefs. I saw him later in the day reading GQ, wearing those half glasses that accountants and gynecologists always peer over, and any curiosity I had about him instantly vanished.

  “He was old,” I say. “Forty-five, at least,” I say, anticipating her “How old?”

  “I don’t want the fat girl to be there,” Nell says, as the now-sopping bear makes another escape, popping out the dinosaur’s nostril.

  “She’s never there. She’s a condo rat. She stays here and stuffs her fat face all day and then Rollerblades around until her precious Daddy comes home, and then they stuff themselves with ice cream,” Lyric says to Nell. “Give it a break with the anxiety.”

  “What did she say?” Nell says to me.

  “Let’s go to the pool,” I say. “Come on, Nell. Turn off the TV. Come on, Lyric. Stop preening.”

  “I swear to God, I think I am getting this spider vein on my throat,” she says, her head turned away from the mirror.

  Nell gets off the bed with both hands on top of her head, to protect it from my attempts to comb her hair, and runs past me.

  “Your suit’s on the towel rack,” I call after her.

  “I don’t want to wear my suit,” she calls back. Every day, the same thing.

  “There are no other girls your age without a swimsuit,” I say, with as much solemnity as possible. “You’d be the only one.”

  “I’m not a girl,” she says.

  “What are you?”

  “A mermaid,” she says. I hear the toilet flush. When she returns, she has the suit on. One shoulder strap flops under her armpit. “I want shoes like hers,” Nell says.

  “These are super-chic shoes made only for people with a minimum shoe size of six,” Lyric says, standing on one foot and turning the other foot from side to side, admiringly. “Do you know how much these shoes cost?”

  “I want ones like that!” Nell says to me. She looks desperate.

  “They cost so much that when you star
t getting paid for doing chores—when your mom starts quartering you and fifty-centing you for dumping your cruddy clothes in the hamper instead of on the floor, you would have to save for approximately…”

  “Mommy can buy me shoes like that!” Nell says to me, her voice rising.

  “Talk to Mommy about it later,” I say, trying to dodge the whole issue.

  “Where’s Mommy?” Nell says, her eyes clouding with tears.

  “Mommy’s at her seminar,” I say. “You know where Mommy is. She kissed you goodbye.”

  “I was asleep,” Nell says.

  There seems no good answer to that. Also, if truth be told, I’m pretty sure it was only Damon who came into the suite this morning, to look at all three of us to make sure we were where we were supposed to be. He walks hard, and it sounded like just one set of footsteps, but it was too early to bother opening my eyes and to possibly risk a conversation. Janet, I know, is not used to rising early, and having to be in class at 9 a.m. is really a struggle for her.

  Nell chooses the Pocahontas barrette and I clip it in a clump of hopelessly frizzed curls. Her swimsuit is pink polka dots, with a ruffle bisecting her belly. She’s got her mother’s pigeon toes and squared shoulders. She looks at once robotically durable and mysteriously frail. Her father is a famous actor who has set up a trust fund for her, in addition to paying monthly child support. This, in an agreement his lawyer made with Janet’s lawyer that he would never have to see the child or otherwise participate in her upbringing, and that Janet agree not to tell his wife or to write about their relationship—which lasted all of a month and a half, including the three weeks when she didn’t know she was pregnant. We happened to see him on TV a couple of nights ago, and Nell paid less attention to him than to the bear, which I suppose was only natural, since she had no idea he was her father. He was just another guy plotting a crime.