Park City

by Ann Beattie

  “Bag of toys,” Bea says. She has on a satin robe that reminds Robert of a fighter’s robe, stuffed between her legs as she sits on the floor.

  “And laying a finger aside of my nose…,” Matthew says. “No, I wouldn’t have done that, Bea. I would have given the finger to you.” Matthew raises his middle finger and smiles at Bea. “But I speak figuratively, of course. I will give you neither my finger nor my dog.”

  “I got the dog from the animal shelter, Matthew,” Bea says. “Why do you call him your dog?”

  Matthew stumbles off to bed, almost stepping on Penelope’s plate, calling over his shoulder, “Bea, my lovely, please make sure that our guests finish that bottle of Scotch.”

  Bea blows out the candle and they all go to bed, with a quarter inch of Scotch still in the bottle.

  “Why are they getting divorced?” Robert whispers to Penelope in bed.

  They are in a twin bed, narrower than he remembers twin beds being, lying under a brown-and-white quilt.

  “I’m not really sure,” she says. “She said that he was getting crazier.”

  “They both seem crazy.”

  “Bea told me that he gave some of their savings to a Japanese woman who lives with a man he works with, so she can open a gift shop.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  “I wish we had another cigarette.”

  “Is that all he did?” he asks. “Gave money away?”

  “He drinks a lot,” Penelope says.

  “So does she. She drinks straight from the bottle.” Before dinner Bea had tipped the bottle to her lips too quickly and the liquor ran down her chin. Matthew called her disgusting.

  “I think he’s nastier than she is,” Penelope says.

  “Move over a little,” he says. “This bed must be narrower than a twin bed.”

  “I am moved over,” she says.

  He unbends his knees, lies straight in the bed. He is too uncomfortable to sleep. His ears are still ringing from so many hours on the road.

  “Here we are in Colorado,” he says. “Tomorrow we’ll have to drive around and see it before it’s all under snow.”

  —

  The next afternoon he borrows a tablet and walks around outside, looking for something to draw. There are bare patches in the snow—patches of brown grass. Bea and Matthew’s house is modern, with a sundeck across the back and glass doors across the front. For some reason the house seems out of place; it looks Eastern. There are no other houses nearby. Very little land has been cleared; the lawn is narrow, and the woods come close. It is cold, and there is a wind in the trees. Through the woods, in front of the house, distant snow-covered mountains are visible. The air is very clear, and the colors are too bright, like a Maxfield Parrish painting. No one would believe the colors if he painted them. Instead he begins to draw some old fence posts, partially rotted away. But then he stops. Leave it to Andrew Wyeth. He dusts away a light layer of snow and sits on the hood of his car. He takes the pencil out of his pocket again and writes in the sketchbook: “We are at Bea and Matthew’s. They sit all day. Penelope sits. She seems to be waiting. This is happening in Colorado. I want to see the state, but Bea and Matthew have already seen it, and Penelope says that she cannot face one more minute in the car. The car needs new spark plugs. I will never be a painter. I am not a writer.”

  Zero wanders up behind him, and he tears off the piece of sketch paper and crumples it into a ball, throws it in the air. Zero’s eyes light up. They play ball with the piece of paper—he throws it high, and Zero waits for it and jumps. Finally the paper gets too soggy to handle. Zero walks away, then sits and scratches.

  Behind the house is a ruined birdhouse, and some strings hang from a branch, with bits of suet tied on. The strings stir in the wind. “Push me in the swing,” he remembers Penelope saying. Johnny was lying in the grass, talking to himself. Robert tried to dance with Cyril, but Cyril wouldn’t. Cyril was more stoned than any of them, but showing better sense. “Push me,” she said. She sat on the swing and he pushed. She weighed very little—hardly enough to drag the swing down. It took off fast and went high. She was laughing—not because she was having fun, but laughing at him. That’s what he thought, but he was stoned. She was just laughing. Fortunately, the swing had slowed when she jumped. She didn’t even roll down the hill. Cyril, looking at her arm, which had been cut on a rock, was almost in tears. She had landed on her side. They thought her arm was broken at first. Johnny was asleep, and he slept through the whole thing. Robert carried her into the house. Cyril, following, detoured to kick Johnny. That was the beginning of the end.

  He walks to the car and opens the door and rummages through the ashtray, looking for the joint they had started to smoke just before they found Bea and Matthew’s house. He has trouble getting it out because his fingers are numb from the cold. He finally gets it and lights it, and drags on it walking back to the tree with the birdhouse in it. He leans against the tree.

  Dan had called him the day before they left New Haven and said that Penelope would kill him. He asked Dan what he meant. “She’ll wear you down, she’ll wear you out, she’ll kill you,” Dan said.

  He feels the tree snapping and jumps away. He looks and sees that everything is okay. The tree is still there, the strings hanging down from the branch. “I’m going to jump!” Penelope had called, laughing. Now he laughs, too—not at her, but because here he is, leaning against a tree in Colorado, blown away. He tried speaking, to hear what his speech sounds like. “Blown away,” he says. He has trouble getting his mouth into position after speaking.

  In a while Matthew comes out. He stands beside the tree and they watch the sunset. The sky is pale blue, streaked with orange, which seems to be spreading through the blue sky from behind, like liquid seeping through a napkin, blood through a bandage.

  “Nice,” Matthew says.

  “Yes,” he says. He is never going to be able to talk to Matthew.

  “You know what I’m in the doghouse for?” Matthew says.

  “What?” he says. Too long a pause before answering. He spit the word out, instead of saying it.

  “Having a Japanese girlfriend,” Matthew says, and laughs.

  He does not dare risk laughing with him.

  “And I don’t even have a Japanese girlfriend,” Matthew says. “She lives with a guy I work with. I’m not interested in her. She needed money to go into business. Not a lot, but some. I loaned it to her. Bea changes facts around.”

  “Where did you go to school?” he hears himself say.

  There is a long pause, and Robert gets confused. He thinks he should be answering his own question.

  Finally: “Harvard.”

  “What class were you in?”

  “Oh,” Matthew says. “You’re stoned, huh?”

  It is too complicated to explain that he is not. He says, again, “What class?”

  “Nineteen sixty-seven,” Matthew says, laughing. “Is that your stuff or ours? She hid our stuff.”

  “In my glove compartment,” Robert says, gesturing.

  He watches Matthew walk toward his car. Sloped shoulders. Something written across the back of his jacket, being spoken by what looks like a monster blue bird. Can’t read it. In a while Matthew comes back smoking a joint, Zero trailing behind.

  “They’re inside, talking about what a pig I am,” Matthew exhales.

  “How come you don’t have any interest in this Japanese woman?”

  “I do,” Matthew says, smoking from his cupped hand. “I don’t have a chance in the world.”

  “I don’t guess it would be the same if you got another one,” he says.

  “Another what?”

  “If you went to Japan and got another one.”

  “Never mind,” Matthew says. “Never mind bothering to converse.”

  Zero sniffs the air and walks away. He lies down on the driveway, away from them, and closes his eyes.

  “I’d like some Scotch to cool my lungs,” Matthew says. “And we
don’t have any goddamn Scotch.”

  “Let’s go get some,” he says.

  “Okay,” Matthew says.

  They stay, watching the colors intensify. “It’s too cold for me,” Matthew says. He thrashes his arms across his chest, and Zero springs up, leaping excitedly, and almost topples Matthew.

  They get to Matthew’s car. Robert hears the door close. He notices that he is inside. Zero is in the backseat. It gets darker. Matthew hums. Outside the liquor store Robert fumbles out a ten-dollar bill. Matthew declines. He parks and rolls down the window. “I don’t want to walk in there in a cloud of this stuff,” he says. They wait. Waiting, Robert gets confused. He says, “What state is this?”

  “Are you kidding?” Matthew asks. Matthew shakes his head. “Colorado,” he says.

  THE BURNING HOUSE

  LEARNING TO FALL

  Ruth’s house, early morning: a bowl of apples on the kitchen table, crumbs on the checkered tablecloth. “I love you,” she says to Andrew. “Did you guess that I loved you?” “I know it,” he says. He’s annoyed that his mother is being mushy in front of me. He is eager to seem independent, and cranky because he just woke up. I’m cranky, too, even after the drive to Ruth’s in the cold. I’m drinking coffee to wake up. If someone said that he loved me at this moment, I’d never believe him; I can’t think straight so early in the morning, hate to make conversation, am angry at the long, cold winter. Andrew and I are both frowning at Ruth’s table and she—as always—is tolerating us. “More coffee?” Ruth asks me. I nod yes, and let her pour it, although I could easily get up and walk to the stove for the pot. “What about brushing your hair?” she says to Andrew. He gets up and leaves the room, comes back with her wooden brush and begins to brush his hair. “Not over the table, please,” she says. He has finished. He puts the brush on the table and looks at me. “We’re going to miss the train,” he says. “There’s plenty of time,” Ruth says. Andrew looks at the clock and sighs loudly. Ruth laughs. She rubs her finger around the top of the open honey jar and sucks it. “Come on,” I say to Andrew. “You’re right. I’d rather be early than late.” I ask Ruth: “Anything from the city?” If she did want something, she wouldn’t say—she hates to take things, because she has no money to buy things in return. Nor does she want many things around: the kitchen has only a table and four chairs. What furniture she has came with the house. “No, thanks,” she says, and turns off the radio. She says again, as we go out the door, “Thanks.” She has a hand on each of our backs as I open the door and cold floods into the house.

  —

  Once or twice a month, on Wednesdays, Andrew and I take the train from Connecticut to New York, and I walk down the streets and into stores and through museums with him, holding his little hand, which is as tight as a knot. He does not have friends his own age, but he likes me. After eight years, he trusts me.

  Today he is wearing his blue jeans with the Superman patch on the knee. If Superman launched himself from Andrew’s knee, he would be flying a foot or so off the ground. People would think that small figure in blue was a piece of trash caught by the wind, a stick blowing, something to gather their hems against.

  “I’m hungry again,” he says.

  Andrew knows that I don’t eat during the day. He says again because he has already had oatmeal at home and a pastry at the fast-food shop across from the train in Westport at ten o’clock, and now it’s only twelve—too early to eat another meal—and he knows I’m going to say: “Again?”

  Andrew. The morning before the night he was born, Ruth and I swam in Hall’s Pond. She loved it that she could float, heavy as she was, about to deliver. She loved being pregnant and wanted the child, although the man who was the father begged her to have an abortion and finally left her six months before Andrew was born. On the last day that we swam in Hall’s Pond, she was two weeks overdue. There wasn’t a sign of the pain yet, but her tension made me as dizzy as the hot sun on my head as I stood in the too-cold water.

  And that night: holding her hand, my hand finally moving up her arm, as if she were slipping away from me. “Take my hand,” she kept saying, and I would rub my thumb on her knuckles, squeeze her hand as hard as I dared, but I couldn’t stop myself from grasping her wrist, the middle of her arm, hanging on to her elbow, as if she were drowning. It was the same thing I would do with the man who became my lover, years later—but then it would be because I was sinking.

  —

  Andrew and I are walking downhill in the Guggenheim Museum, and I am thinking about Ray. Neither of us is looking at the paintings. What Andrew likes about the museum is the view, looking down into the pool of blue water speckled with money.

  I stand beside him on the curving walkway. “Don’t throw coins from up here, Andrew,” I say. “You might hurt somebody.”

  “Just a penny,” he says. He holds it up to show me. A penny: no tricks.

  “You’re not allowed. It could hit somebody in the face. You could hurt somebody, throwing it.”

  I am asking him to be careful of hurting people. When he would not be born, an impatient doctor used forceps and tugged him out, and there was slight brain damage. That and some small paralysis of his face, at the mouth.

  He pockets the penny. His parka has fallen off one shoulder. He doesn’t notice.

  “We’ll get lunch,” I say. “Take your pennies and throw them in the pool when we get down there.”

  He gets there before me. I look down and see him making his wishes. I doubt that he knows yet what to wish for. Other people are throwing money. Andrew is shy and just stands there, eyes closed and squinting, holding his pennies. He likes to do things in private. You can see the disappointment on his face that other people are in the world. He likes to run with his arms out like the wings of a plane; he likes to be in the first seat in the train compartment—to sit with only me where three seats face two seats across from them. He likes to stretch his legs. He hates cigarette smoke, and the smell of perfume. In spring, he sniffs the breeze like an old man sniffing cognac. He is in the third grade at the elementary school, and so far he has had only slight trouble keeping up. His teacher—who has become Ruth’s friend—is young and hopeful, and she doesn’t criticize Ruth for the notes she writes pretending that Andrew has been ill on the day the two of us were really in New York. Andrew makes going to the city fun, and for that—and because I know him so well, and I pity him—I almost love him.

  We go to his favorite place for hamburgers—a tiny shop on Madison Avenue with a couple of tables in the front. The only time we sat at a table was the time that Ray met us there. Andrew liked sitting at a table, but he was shy and wouldn’t say much because Ray was there. The man behind the counter knows us. I know that he recognizes us, even though he doesn’t say hello. We always order the same thing: I have black coffee (advertised as the world’s best); Andrew has a bacon cheeseburger and a glass of milk. Because Ruth has taught him to make sure he looks neat, he wipes the halo of milk off his mouth after every sip. His hands get sticky from the milk-wet napkin.

  Today it is bitter cold, and I am remembering that hot and distant summer. I have hardly been swimming in eight years—not since Arthur and I moved downstate, away from Hall’s Pond. When we were in graduate school together, Ruth and I would go there to study. She would have her big, thick Russian novels with her, and I was always afraid she would drop one into the water. Such big books, underlined, full of notes, it would have seemed more than an average tragedy if she had lost one. She never did. I lost a gold chain (a real one), and my lighter. One time my grocery list fell out of my book into the water and I saw the letters bleed and haze and disappear as it went under.

  We went there earlier in the day than other people—not that many people knew about Hall’s Pond then—so we always got to sit on the big rock. Later in the day, people would come and sit on the smaller rock, or stand around on the pier going out to the water. Some of the people swam naked. One time a golden retriever jumped onto our rock, crou
ched, and threw its head back and howled at the sky, then ran away through the woods, its feet blackening in the wet dirt by the water’s edge. Ruth was freaked out by it. She wrote a poem, and in the poem the dog came to give a warning. Not an angel, a dog. I stared at the poem, not quite understanding it. “It’s meant to be funny,” she said. When the dog ran off, Ruth had put her hands over her mouth. The next summer, when I married Arthur, she wrote a poem about the bouquet I carried. The bouquet had some closed lilies, and in the poem she said they were like candles—as big as Roman candles to her eye, as if my bunch of flowers were going to explode and shower down. I laughed at the poem. It was the wrong reaction. Now, because things have come apart between Arthur and me, it has turned out to be prophetic.

  “What’s up now?” Andrew says, laying down the cheeseburger. He always eats them the same way, and it is a way I have never seen another child eat one: he bites around the outside, eating until only the circle at the center is left.

  I look at my watch. The watch was a Christmas present from Arthur. It’s almost touching that he isn’t embarrassed to give me such impersonal presents as eggcups and digital watches. To see the time, you have to push in the tiny button on the side. As long as you hold it, the time stays lit, changes. Take away your hand and the watch turns clear red again.

  “We’re going to Bonnie’s studio. She’s printed the pictures Ruth wanted. Those pictures she took the Fourth of July—we’re finally going to see them.”

  I feel in my pocket for the check Ruth gave me to pay Bonnie. “But where are we going?” he says.

  “To Spring Street. You remember your mother’s friend with the long hair to her waist, don’t you? You know where Bonnie lives. You’ve been there before.”