by Ann Beattie
“Did you see his poor miserable pajamas?” David whispers finally. He throws back the covers and gets up and goes back to the living room. I follow, half asleep. David sits in the chair, puts his arms on the armrests, presses his neck against the back of the chair, and moves his feet together. “Zzzz,” he says, and his head falls forward.
—
Back in bed, I lie awake, remembering a day David and I spent in the park last August. David was sitting on the swing next to me, scraping the toes of his tennis shoes in the loose dirt.
“Don’t you want to swing?” I said. We had been playing tennis. He had beaten me every game. He always beats me at everything—precision parking, three-dimensional ticktacktoe, soufflés. His soufflés rise as beautifully curved as the moon.
“I don’t know how to swing,” he said.
I tried to teach him, but he couldn’t get his legs to move right. He stood the way I told him, with the board against his behind, gave a little jump to get on, but then he couldn’t synchronize his legs. “Pump!” I called, but it didn’t mean anything. I might as well have said, “Juggle dishes.” I still find it hard to believe there’s anything I can do that he can’t do.
He got off the swing. “Why do you act like everything is a goddamn contest?” he said, and walked away.
“Because we’re always having contests and you always win!” I shouted.
I was still waiting by the swings when he showed up half an hour later.
“Do you consider it a contest when we go scuba diving?” he said.
He had me. It was stupid of me last summer to say how he always snatched the best shells, even when they were closer to me. That made him laugh. He had chased me into a corner, then laughed at me.
I lie in bed now, hating him for that. But don’t leave me, I think—don’t do what Noel’s wife did. I reach across the bed and gently take hold of a little wrinkle in his pajama top. I don’t know if I want to yank his pajamas—do something violent—or smooth them. Confused, I take my hand away and turn on the light. David rolls over, throws his arm over his face, groans. I stare at him. In a second he will lower his arm and demand an explanation. Trapped again. I get up and put on my slippers.
“I’m going to get a drink of water,” I whisper apologetically.
—
Later in the month, it happens. I’m sitting on a cushion on the floor, with newspapers spread in front of me, repotting plants. I’m just moving the purple passion plant to a larger pot when David comes in. It is late in the afternoon—late enough to be dark outside. David has been out with Beth. Before the two of them went out, Beth, confused by the sight of soil indoors, crouched down beside me to ask, “Are there ants, Mommy?” I laughed. David never approved of my laughing at her. Later, that will be something he’ll mention in court, hoping to get custody: I laugh at her. And when that doesn’t work, he’ll tell the judge what I said about his snatching all the best seashells.
David comes in, coat still buttoned, blue silk scarf still tied (a Christmas present from Noel, with many apologies for losing the white one), sits on the floor, and says that he’s decided to leave. He is speaking very reasonably and quietly. That alarms me. It crosses my mind that he’s mad. And Beth isn’t with him. He has killed her!
No, no, of course not. I’m mad. Beth is upstairs in her friend’s apartment. He ran into Beth’s friend and her mother coming into the building. He asked if Beth could stay in their apartment for a few minutes. I’m not convinced: What friend? I’m foolish to feel reassured as soon as he names one—Louisa. I feel nothing but relief. It might be more accurate to say that I feel nothing. I would have felt pain if she were dead, but David says she isn’t, so I feel nothing. I reach out and begin stroking the plant’s leaves. Soft leaves, sharp points. The plant I’m repotting is a cutting from Noel’s big plant that hangs in a silver ice bucket in his window (a wedding gift that he and Susan had never used). I helped him put it in the ice bucket. “What are you going to do with the top?” I asked. He put it on his head and danced around.
“I had an uncle who got drunk and danced with a lampshade on his head,” Noel said. “That’s an old joke, but how many people have actually seen a man dance with a lampshade on his head? My uncle did it every New Year’s Eve.”
“What the hell are you smiling about?” David says. “Are you listening to me?”
I nod and start to cry. It will be a long time before I realize that David makes me sad and Noel makes me happy.
—
Noel sympathizes with me. He tells me that David is a fool; he is better off without Susan, and I will be better off without David. Noel calls or visits me in my new apartment almost every night. Last night he suggested that I get a babysitter for tonight, so he could take me to dinner. He tries very hard to make me happy. He brings expensive wine when we eat in my apartment and offers to buy it in restaurants when we eat out. Beth prefers it when we eat in; that way, she can have both Noel and the toy that Noel inevitably brings. Her favorite toy, so far, is a handsome red tugboat pulling three barges, attached to one another by string. Noel bends over, almost doubled in half, to move them across the rug, whistling and calling orders to the imaginary crew. He does not just bring gifts to Beth and me. He has bought himself a new car, and pretends that this is for Beth and me. (“Comfortable seats?” he asks me. “That’s a nice big window back there to wave out of,” he says to Beth.) It is silly to pretend that he got the car for the three of us. And if he did, why was he too cheap to have a radio installed, when he knows I love music? Not only that but he’s bowlegged. I am ashamed of myself for thinking bad things about Noel. He tries so hard to keep us cheerful. He can’t help the odd angle of his thighs. Feeling sorry for him, I decided that a cheap dinner was good enough for tonight. I said that I wanted to go to a Chinese restaurant.
At the restaurant I eat shrimp in black bean sauce and drink a Heineken and think that I’ve never tasted anything so delicious. The waiter brings two fortune cookies. We open them; the fortunes make no sense. Noel summons the waiter for the bill. With it come more fortune cookies—four this time. They are no good either: talk of travel and money. Noel says, “What bloody rot.” He is wearing a gray vest and a white shirt. I peek around the table without his noticing and see that he’s wearing gray wool slacks. Lately it has been very important for me to be able to see everything. Whenever Noel pulls the boats out of sight, into another room, I move as quickly as Beth to watch what’s going on.
Standing behind Noel at the cash register, I see that it has started to rain—a mixture of rain and snow.
“You know how you can tell a Chinese restaurant from any other?” Noel asks, pushing open the door. “Even when it’s raining, the cats still run for the street.”
I shake my head in disgust.
Noel stretches the skin at the corners of his eyes. “Sorry for honorable joke,” he says.
We run for the car. He grabs the belt of my coat, catches me, and half lifts me with one arm, running along with me dangling at his side, giggling. Our wool coats stink. He opens my car door, runs around, and pulls his open. He’s done it again; he has made me laugh.
We start home.
We are in heavy traffic, and Noel drives very slowly, protecting his new car.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“Thirty-six,” Noel says.
“I’m twenty-seven,” I say.
“So what?” he says. He says it pleasantly.
“I just didn’t know how old you were.”
“Mentally, I’m neck and neck with Beth,” he says.
I’m soaking wet, and I want to get home to put on dry clothes. I look at him inching through traffic, and I remember the way his face looked that night he sat in the living room with David and me.
“Rain always puts you in a bad mood, doesn’t it?” he says. He turns the windshield wipers on high. Rubber squeaks against glass.
“I see myself dead in it,” I say.
“You see yourself de
ad in it?”
Noel does not read novels. He reads Moneysworth, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary. I reprimand myself; there must be fitting ironies in the Wall Street Journal.
“Are you kidding?” Noel says. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself at dinner. It was a good dinner, wasn’t it?”
“I make you nervous, don’t I?” I say.
“No. You don’t make me nervous.”
Rain splashes under the car, drums on the roof. We ride on for blocks and blocks. It is too quiet; I wish there were a radio. The rain on the roof is monotonous, the collar of my coat is wet and cold. At last we are home. Noel parks the car and comes around to my door and opens it. I get out. Noel pulls me close, squeezes me hard. When I was a little girl, I once squeezed a doll to my chest in an antique shop, and when I took it away the eyes had popped off. An unpleasant memory. With my arms around Noel, I feel the cold rain hitting my hands and wrists.
A man running down the sidewalk with a small dog in his arms and a big black umbrella over him calls, “Your lights are on!”
—
It is almost a year later—Christmas—and we are visiting Noel’s crazy sister, Juliette. After going with Noel for so long, I am considered one of the family. Juliette phones before every occasion, saying, “You’re one of the family. Of course you don’t need an invitation.” I should appreciate it, but she’s always drunk when she calls, and usually she starts to cry and says she wishes Christmas and Thanksgiving didn’t exist. Jeanette, his other sister, is very nice, but she lives in Colorado. Juliette lives in New Jersey. Here we are in Bayonne, New Jersey, coming in through the front door—Noel holding Beth, me carrying a pumpkin pie. I tried to sniff the pie aroma on the way from Noel’s apartment to his sister’s house, but it had no smell. Or else I’m getting another cold. I sucked chewable vitamin C tablets in the car, and now I smell of oranges. Noel’s mother is in the living room, crocheting. Better, at least, than David’s mother, who was always discoursing about Andrew Wyeth. I remember with satisfaction that the last time I saw her I said, “It’s a simple fact that Edward Hopper was better.”
Juliette: long, whitish-blond hair tucked in back of her pink ears, spike-heel shoes that she orders from Frederick’s of Hollywood, dresses that show her cleavage. Noel and I are silently wondering if her husband will be here. At Thanksgiving he showed up just as we were starting dinner, with a black-haired woman who wore a dress with a plunging neckline. Juliette’s breasts faced the black-haired woman’s breasts across the table (tablecloth crocheted by Noel’s mother). Noel doesn’t like me to criticize Juliette. He thinks positively. His other sister is a musician. She has a husband and a weimaraner and two rare birds that live in a birdcage built by her husband. They have a lot of money and they ski. They have adopted a Korean boy. Once, they showed us a film of the Korean boy learning to ski. Wham, wham, wham—every few seconds he was groveling in the snow again.
Juliette is such a liberal that she gives us not only the same bedroom but a bedroom with only a single bed in it. Beth sleeps on the couch.
Wedged beside Noel that night, I say, “This is ridiculous.”
“She means to be nice,” he says. “Where else would we sleep?”
“She could let us have her double bed and she could sleep in here. After all, he’s not coming back, Noel.”
“Shh.”
“Wouldn’t that have been better?”
“What do you care?” Noel says. “You’re nuts about me, right?” He slides up against me and hugs my back.
“I don’t know how people talk anymore,” he says. “I don’t know any of the current lingo. What expression do people use for ‘nuts about’?”
“I don’t know.”
“I just did it again! I said ‘lingo.’ ”
“So what? Who do you want to sound like?”
“The way I talk sounds dated—like an old person.”
“Why are you always worried about being old?”
He snuggles closer. “You didn’t answer before when I said you were nuts about me. That doesn’t mean that you don’t like me, does it?”
“No.”
“You’re big on the one-word answers.”
“I’m big on going to sleep.”
“ ‘Big on.’ See? There must be some expression to replace that now.”
—
I sit in the car, waiting for Beth to come out of the building where the ballet school is. She has been taking lessons, but they haven’t helped. She still slouches forward and sticks out her neck when she walks. Noel suggests that this might be analyzed psychologically; she sticks her neck out, you see, not only literally but…Noel thinks that Beth is waiting to get it. Beth feels guilty because her mother and father have just been divorced. She thinks that she played some part in it and therefore she deserves to get it. It is worth fifty dollars a month for ballet lessons to disprove Noel’s theory. If it will only work.
—
I spend the day in the park, thinking over Noel’s suggestion that I move in with him. We would have more money….We are together so much anyway….Or he could move in with me, if those big windows in my place are really so important. I always meet reasonable men.
“But I don’t love you,” I said to Noel. “Don’t you want to live with somebody who loves you?”
“Nobody has ever loved me and nobody ever will,” Noel said. “What have I got to lose?”
I am in the park to think about what I have to lose. Nothing. So why don’t I leave the park, call him at work, say that I have decided it is a very sensible plan?
A chubby little boy wanders by, wearing a short jacket and pants that are slipping down. He is holding a yellow boat. He looks so damned pleased with everything that I think about accosting him and asking, “Should I move in with Noel? Why am I reluctant to do it?” The young have such wisdom—some of the best and worst thinkers have thought so: Wordsworth, the followers of the Guru Maharaj Ji…“Do the meditations, or I will beat you with a stick,” the guru tells his followers. Tell me the answer, kid, or I will take away your boat.
I sink down onto a bench. Next, Noel will ask me to marry him. He is trying to trap me. Worse, he is not trying to trap me but only wants me to move in so we can save money. He doesn’t care about me. Since no one has ever loved him, he can’t love anybody. Is that even true?
I find a phone booth and stand in front of it, waiting for a woman with a shopping bag to get out. She mouths something I don’t understand. She has lips like a fish; they are painted bright orange. I do not have any lipstick on. I have on a raincoat, pulled over my nightgown, and sandals and Noel’s socks.
“Noel,” I say on the phone when I reach him, “were you serious when you said that no one ever loved you?”
“Jesus, it was embarrassing enough just to admit it,” he says. “Do you have to question me about it?”
“I have to know.”
“Well, I’ve told you about every woman I ever slept with. Which one do you suspect might have loved me?”
I have ruined his day. I hang up, rest my head against the phone. “Me,” I mumble. “I do.” I reach in the raincoat pocket. A Kleenex, two pennies, and a pink rubber spider put there by Beth to scare me. No more dimes. I push open the door. A young woman is standing there waiting for me. “Do you have a few moments?” she says.
“Why?”
“Do you have a moment? What do you think of this?” she says. It is a small stick with the texture of salami. In her other hand she holds a clipboard and a pen.
“I don’t have time,” I say, and walk away. I stop and turn. “What is that, anyway?” I ask.
“Do you have a moment?” she asks.
“No. I just wanted to know what that thing was.”
“A dog treat.”
She is coming after me, clipboard outstretched.
“I don’t have time,” I say, and quickly walk away.
Something hits my back. “Take the time to stick it up your ass,” she says.
I run for a block before I stop and lean on the park wall to rest. If Noel had been there, she wouldn’t have done it. My protector. If I had a dime, I could call back and say, “Oh, Noel, I’ll live with you always if you’ll stay with me so people won’t throw dog treats at me.”
I finger the plastic spider. Maybe Beth put it there to cheer me up. Once, she put a picture of a young, beautiful girl in a bikini on my bedroom wall. I misunderstood, seeing the woman as all that I was not. Beth just thought it was a pretty picture. She didn’t understand why I was so upset.
“Mommy’s just upset because when you put things on the wall with Scotch tape, the Scotch tape leaves a mark when you remove it,” Noel told her.
Noel is wonderful. I reach in my pocket, hoping a dime will suddenly appear.
—
Noel and I go to visit his friends Charles and Sol, in Vermont. Noel has taken time off from work; it is a vacation to celebrate our decision to live together. Now, on the third evening there, we are all crowded around the hearth—Noel and Beth and I, Charles and Sol and the women they live with, Lark and Margaret. We are smoking and listening to Sol’s stereo. The hearth is a big one. It was laid by Sol, made out of slate he took from the side of a hill and bricks he found dumped by the side of the road. There is a mantel that was made by Charles from a section of an old carousel he picked up when a local amusement park closed down; a gargoyle’s head protrudes from one side. Car keys have been draped over the beast’s eyebrows. On top of the mantel there is an L. L. Bean catalog, Margaret’s hat, roaches and a roach clip, a can of peaches, and an incense burner that holds a small cone in a puddle of lavender ashes.
Noel used to work with Charles in the city. Charles quit when he heard about a big house in Vermont that needed to be fixed up. He was told that he could live in it for a hundred dollars a month, except in January and February, when skiers rented it. The skiers turned out to be nice people who didn’t want to see anyone displaced. They suggested that the four stay on in the house, and they did, sleeping in a side room that Charles and Sol fixed up. Just now, the rest of the house is empty; it has been raining a lot, ruining the skiing.
