by Ann Beattie
I had Raleigh come live with my husband and me during the second year of our marriage. It didn’t work out. My husband found his socks in the toilet; Raleigh missed my mother’s constant nagging. When I took him home, he didn’t seem sorry. There is something comforting about that house: the smell of camphor in the silver cabinet, my grandmother’s woven rugs, Daisy’s smell everywhere.
My husband wrote last week: “Do you miss wonderful me?” I wrote back saying yes. Nothing came of it.
—
Corinne and Lenny have always come to Woodbridge for visits. When my husband was here, they came once a month. Now they come almost every week. Sometimes we don’t have much to say to each other, so we talk about the old days. Corinne teases Lenny for not noticing her back in high school. Our visits are often dull, but I still look forward to their coming because they are my surrogate family. As in all families, there are secrets. There is intrigue. Suspicion. Lenny often calls me, telling me to keep his call a secret, saying that I must call Corinne at once and arrange to have lunch because she is depressed. So I call, and then I go and sit at a table and pretend not to see her until she sits down. She has aged a lot since their daughter’s death. Her name was Karen, and she died three years ago, of leukemia. After Karen died I began having lunch with Corinne, to let her talk about it away from Lenny. By the time she no longer needed to talk about it, my husband had left, and Corinne began having lunch with me to cheer me up. We have faced each other across a table for years. (Corinne, I know, tells Lenny to visit me even when she has to work on the weekend. He has come alone a few times. He gives me a few Godiva chocolates. I give him a bag of fresh peas. Sometimes he kisses me, but it goes no further than that. Corinne thinks that it does, and endures it.)
Once Corinne said that if we all lived to be fifty (she works for a state environmental-protection agency, and her expectations are modest), we should have an honesty session the way the girls did in college. Lenny asked why we had to wait until we were fifty. “Okay—what do you really think of me?” Corinne asked him. “Why, I love you. You’re my wife,” he said. She backed down; the game wasn’t going to be much fun.
Lenny’s first wife, Lucy, has twice taken the train to visit me. We sat on the grass and talked about the old days: teasing each other’s hair to new heights; photo-album pictures of the two of us, each trying to look more grotesque than the other; the first time we puffed a cigarette on a double date. I like her less as time goes by, because things she remembers about that time are true but the tone of wonder in her voice makes the past seem like a lie. And then she works the conversation around to Corinne and Lenny’s marriage. Is it unhappy? Both times she visited, she said she was going back to New York on the last train, and both times she got too drunk to go until the next day. She borrowed my nightgowns and drank my gin and played sad music on my piano. In our high school yearbook, Lucy was named best dancer.
—
I have a lover. He comes on Thursdays. He would come more frequently, but I won’t allow it. Jonathan is twenty-one and I am thirty-three, and I know that eventually he will go away. He is a musician too. He comes in the morning and we sit side by side at the piano, humming and playing Bach’s B-Flat-Minor Prelude, prolonging the time before we go to bed as long as possible. He drinks diet cola while I drink gin-and-tonic. He tells me about the young girls who are chasing him. He says he only wants me. He asks me each Thursday to marry him, and calls me on Friday to beg me to let him come again before the week is up. He sends me pears out of season and other things that he can’t afford. He shows me letters from his parents that bother him; I am usually in sympathy with his parents. I urge him to spend more time sight-reading and playing scales and arpeggios. He allowed a rich woman who had been chasing him since Christmas to buy him a tape deck for his car, and he plays nothing but rock ’n’ roll. Sometimes I cry, but not in his presence. He is disturbed enough. He isn’t sure what to do with his life, he can’t communicate with his parents, too many people want things from him. One night he called and asked if he could come over to my house if he disguised himself. “No,” I said. “How would you disguise yourself?” “Cut off my hair. Buy a suit. Put on an animal mask.” I make few demands on him, but obviously the relationship is a strain.
—
After Corinne and Lenny leave, I write a second letter to my husband, pretending that there is a chance that he did not get the other one. In this letter I give him a detailed account of the weekend, and agree with what he said long ago about Corinne’s talking too much and Lenny’s being too humble. I tell my husband that the handle on the barbecue no longer makes the grill go up and down. I tell him that the neighbors’ dog is in heat and that dogs howl all night, so I can’t sleep. I reread the letter and tear it up because these things are all jumbled together in one paragraph. It looks as if a crazy person had written the letter. I try again. In one paragraph I describe Corinne and Lenny’s visit. In another I tell him that his mother called to tell me that his sister has decided to major in anthropology. In the last paragraph I ask for advice about the car—whether it may not need a new carburetor. I read the letter and it still seems crazy. A letter like this will never make him come back. I throw it away and write him a short, funny postcard. I go outside to put the postcard in the mailbox. A large white dog whines and runs in front of me. I recognize the dog. It is the same one I saw last night, from my bedroom window; the dog was staring at my neighbors’ house. The dog runs past me again, but won’t come when I call it. I believe the neighbors once told me that the dog’s name is Pierre, and that the dog does not live in Woodbridge.
When I was a child I was punished for brushing Raleigh with the dog’s brush. He had asked me to do it. It was Easter, and he had on a blue suit, and he came into my bedroom with the dog’s brush and got down on all fours and asked for a brushing. I brushed his back. My father saw us and banged his fist against the door. “Jesus Christ, are you both crazy?” he said. Now that my husband is gone, I should bring Raleigh here to live—but what if my husband came back? I remember Raleigh’s trotting through the living room, punching his fist through the air, chanting “Ling-Ling, Ling-Ling, Ling-Ling.”
—
I play Scriabin’s Étude in C Sharp Minor. I play it badly and stop to stare at the keys. As though on cue, a car comes into the driveway. The sound of a bad muffler—my lover’s car, unmistakably. He has come a day early. I wince, and wish I had washed my hair. My husband used to wince also when that car pulled into the driveway. My lover (he was not at that time my lover) was nineteen when he first started coming, to take piano lessons. He was obviously more talented than I. For a long while I resented him. Now I resent him for his impetuousness, for showing up unexpectedly, breaking my routine, catching me when I look ugly.
“This is foolish,” I say to him. “I’m going into the city to have lunch.”
“My car is leaking oil,” he says, looking over his shoulder.
“Why have you come?” I say.
“This once-a-week stuff is ridiculous. Once you have me around a little more often you’ll get used to it.”
“I won’t have you around more often.”
“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he says. “Two, actually.”
“What are they?”
“For later. I’ll tell you when you get back. Can I stay here and wait for you?”
A maroon sweater that I gave him for his birthday is tied around his waist. He sits in front of the hearth and strikes a match on the bricks. He lights a cigarette.
“Well,” he says, “one of the surprises is that I’m going to be gone for three months. Starting in November.”
“Where are you going?”
“Europe. You know that band I’ve been playing with sometimes? One of the guys has hepatitis, and I’m going to fill in for him on synthesizer. Their agent got us a gig in Denmark.”
“What about school?”
“Enough school,” he says, sighing.
He pitches the
cigarette into the fireplace and stands up and takes off his sweater.
I no longer want to go to lunch. I am no longer sorry he came unannounced. But he hasn’t jumped up to embrace me.
“I’m going to investigate that oil leak,” he says.
Later, driving into New York, trying to think of what the second surprise might be (taking a woman with him?), I think about the time when my husband surprised me with a six-layer cake he had baked for my birthday. It was the first cake he ever made, and the layers were not completely cool when he stacked and frosted them. One side of the cake was much higher than the other. He had gone out and bought a little plastic figure of a skier, for the top of the cake. The skier held a toothpick with a piece of paper glued to it that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY. “We’re going to Switzerland!” I said, clapping my hands. He knew I had always wanted to go there. No, he explained, the skier was just a coincidence. My reaction depressed both of us. It was a coincidence, too, that a year later I was walking down the same street he was walking down and I saw that he was with a girl, holding her hand.
I’m almost in New York. Cars whiz by me on the Hutchinson River Parkway. My husband has been gone for seven months.
—
While waiting for Corinne, I examine my hands. My gardening has cut and bruised them. In a picture my father took when I was young, my hands are in very sharp focus but the piano keys are a blur of white streaked with black. I knew by the time I was twelve that I was going to be a concert pianist. My father and I both have copies of this picture, and we probably both have the same thoughts about it: it is a shame I have almost entirely given up music. When I lived in New York I had to play softly, so as not to disturb the neighbors. The music itself stopped sounding right. A day would pass without my practicing. My father blamed my husband for my losing interest. My husband listened to my father. We moved to Connecticut, where I wouldn’t be distracted. I began to practice again, but I knew that I’d lost ground—or that I would never make it as a concert pianist if I hadn’t by this time. I had Raleigh come and live with us, and I spent my days with him. My father blamed my mother for complaining to me about what a burden Raleigh was, for hinting that I take him in. My father always found excuses. I am like him. I pretended that everything was fine in my marriage, that the only problem was the girl.
—
“I think it’s insulting, I really do,” Corinne says. “It’s a refusal to admit my existence. I’ve been married to Lenny for years, and when Lucy calls him and I answer the phone, she hangs up.”
“Don’t let it get to you,” I say. “You know by now that Lucy’s not going to be civil to you.”
“And it upsets Lenny. Every time she calls to say where she’s flying off to, he gets upset. He doesn’t care where she’s going, but you know Lenny and how he is about planes—how he gets about anyone flying.”
These lunches are all the same. I discipline myself during these lunches the way I used to discipline myself about my music. I try to calm Corinne, and Corinne gets more and more upset. She only likes expensive restaurants, and she won’t eat the food.
Now Corinne eats a cherry tomato from her salad and pushes the salad plate away. “Do you think we should have another child? Am I too old now?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“I think the best way to get children is the way you got yours. Just have them drive up. He’s probably languishing in your bed right now.”
“Twenty-one isn’t exactly a child.”
“I’m so jealous I could die,” Corinne says.
“Of Jonathan?”
“Of everything. You’re three years younger than me, and you look ten years younger. Look at those thin women over there. Look at you and your music. You don’t have to kill the day by having lunch.”
Corinne takes a little gold barrette out of her hair and puts it back in. “We don’t come to your house almost every weekend to look after you,” she says. “We do it to restore ourselves. Although Lenny probably goes so he can pine over you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t sense it? You don’t think that’s true?”
“No,” I say.
“Lucy does. She told Lenny that the last time she called. He told me that she said he was making a fool of himself hanging around you so much. When Lenny hung up, he said that Lucy never did understand the notion of friendship. Of course, he always tries to pretend that Lucy is entirely crazy.”
She takes out the barrette and lets her hair fall free.
“And I’m jealous of her, going off on all her business trips, sending him postcards of sunsets on the West Coast,” Corinne says. “She ran off with a dirty little furrier to Denver this time.”
I look at my clean plate, and then at Corinne’s plate. It looks as if a wind had blown the food around her plate, or as if a midget army had marched through it. I should not have had two drinks at lunch. I excuse myself and go to a phone and call my lover. I am relieved when he answers the phone, even though I have told him never to do that. “Come into the city,” I say. “We can go to Central Park.”
“Come home,” he says. “You’re going to get caught in the rush hour.”
—
My husband sends me a geode. There is a brief note in the package. He says that before he left for Europe he sat at a table next to John Ehrlichman in a restaurant in New Mexico. The note goes on about how fat John Ehrlichman has become. My husband says that he bets my squash are still going strong in the garden. There is no return address. I stand by the mailbox, crying. From the edge of the lawn, the big white dog watches me.
—
My lover sits beside me on the piano bench. We are both naked. It is late at night, but we have lit a fire in the fireplace—five logs, a lot of heat. The lead guitarist from the band Jonathan plays with now was here for dinner. I had to fix a meatless meal. Jonathan’s friend was young and dumb—much younger, it seemed, than my lover. I don’t know why he wanted me to invite him. Jonathan has been here for four days straight. I gave in to him and called Lenny and said for them not to visit this weekend. Later Corinne called to say how jealous she was, thinking of me in my house in the country with my curly-haired lover.
I am playing Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales. Suddenly my lover breaks in with “Chopsticks.” He is impossible, and as immature as his friend. Why have I agreed to let him live in my house until he leaves for Denmark?
“Don’t,” I plead. “Be sensible.”
He is playing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” and singing.
“Stop it,” I say. He kisses my throat.
—
Another note comes from my husband, written on stationery from the Hotel Eliseo. He got drunk and was hurt in a fight; his nose wouldn’t stop bleeding, and in the end he had to have it cauterized.
In a week, my lover will leave. I am frightened at the thought that I will be here alone when he goes. Now I have gotten used to having someone around. When boards creak in the night I can ask “What is it?” and be told. When I was little, I shared a bedroom with Raleigh until I was seven. All night he’d question me about noises. “It’s the monster,” I’d say in disgust. I made him cry so many nights that my parents built on an addition to the house so I could have my own bedroom.
—
In his passport photo, my lover is smiling.
Lenny calls. He is upset because Corinne wants to have another child and he thinks they are too old. He hints that he would like me to invite them to come on Friday instead of Saturday this week. I explain that they can’t come at all—my lover leaves on Monday.
“I don’t mean to pry,” Lenny says, but he never says what he wants to pry about.
I pick up my husband’s note and take it into the bathroom and reread it. It was a street fight. He describes a church window that he saw. There is one long strand of brown hair in the bottom of the envelope. That just can’t be deliberate.
—
Lying on my back, alone
in the bedroom, I stare at the ceiling in the dark, remembering my lover’s second surprise: a jar full of lightning bugs. He let them loose in the bedroom. Tiny, blinking dots of green under the ceiling, above the bed. Giggling into his shoulder: how crazy; a room full of lightning bugs.
“They only live a day,” he whispered.
“That’s butterflies,” I said.
I always felt uncomfortable correcting him, as if I were pointing out the difference in our ages. I was sure I was right about the lightning bugs, but in the morning I was relieved when I saw that they were still alive. I found them on the curtains, against the window. I tried to recapture all of them in a jar so I could take them outdoors and set them free. I tried to remember how many points of light there had been.
WEEKEND
On Saturday morning Lenore is up before the others. She carries her baby into the living room and puts him in George’s favorite chair, which tilts because its back legs are missing, and covers him with a blanket. Then she lights a fire in the fireplace, putting fresh logs on a few embers that are still glowing from the night before. She sits down on the floor beside the chair and checks the baby, who has already gone back to sleep—a good thing because there are guests in the house. George, the man she lives with, is very hospitable and impetuous; he extends invitations whenever old friends call, urging them to come spend the weekend. Most of the callers are his former students—he used to be an English professor—and when they come it seems to make things much worse. It makes him much worse, because he falls into smoking too much and drinking and not eating, and then his ulcer bothers him. When the guests leave, when the weekend is over, she has to cook bland food: applesauce, oatmeal, puddings. And his drinking does not taper off easily anymore; in the past he would stop cold when the guests left, but lately he only tapers down from Scotch to wine, and drinks wine well into the week—a lot of wine, perhaps a whole bottle with his meal—until his stomach is much worse. He is hard to live with. Once when a former student, a woman named Ruth, visited them—a lover, she suspected—she overheard George talking to her in his study, where he had taken her to see a photograph of their house before he began repairing it. George had told Ruth that she, Lenore, stayed with him because she was simple. It hurt her badly, made her actually dizzy with surprise and shame, and since then, no matter who the guests are, she never feels quite at ease on the weekends. In the past she enjoyed some of the things she and George did with their guests, but since overhearing what he said to Ruth she feels that all their visitors have been secretly told the same thing about her. To her, though, George is usually kind. But she is sure that is the reason he has not married her, and when he recently remarked on their daughter’s intelligence (she is five years old, a girl named Maria) she found that she could no longer respond with simple pride; now she feels spite as well, feels that Maria exists as proof of her own good genes. She has begun to expect perfection of the child. She knows this is wrong, and she has tried hard not to communicate her anxiety to Maria, who is already, as her kindergarten teacher says, “untypical.”
