by Ann Beattie
The man who wanted to be a photographer had turned conversations by asking for her opinion, and then—when she gave her opinion and he acted surprised and she qualified it by saying that she did not think her opinion was universal—he would suggest that her insistence on being thought unrepresentative was really a way of asserting her superiority over others.
God, she thought, finishing the wine. No wonder I love Andrew.
It was five o’clock now, and shade had spread over the table. The few umbrellas that had been opened at the beach were collapsed and removed from the poles and wrapped tightly closed with blue twine. Two of the beachboys, on the way to the storage area, started a mock fencing match, jumping nimbly on the rocks, lunging so that one umbrella point touched another. Then one of the boys whipped a Z through the air and continued on his way. The other turned to look at a tall blond woman in a flesh-colored bikini, who wore a thin gold chain around her waist and another chain around her ankle.
Christine looked at her watch, then back at the cliffs beyond which the rowboat had disappeared. On the road above, a tour bus passed by, honking to force the cars coming toward it to stop and back up. There was a tinge of pink to the clouds that had formed near the horizon line. A paddleboat headed for the beach, and one of the boys started down the rocks to pull it in. She watched as he waded into the surf and pulled the boat forward, then held it steady.
In the shade, the ring was lavender-blue. In the sun, it had been flecked with pink, green, and white. She moved her hand slightly and could see more colors. It was like looking into the sea, to where the sun struck stones.
She looked back at the water, half expecting, now, to see the French people in the rowboat. She saw that the clouds were darker pink.
“I paid the lemon man,” Andrew said, coming up behind her. “As usual, he claimed there were whole sacks of lemons he had left against the gate, and I played the fool, the way I always do. I told him that we asked for, and received, only one sack of lemons, and that whatever happened to the others was his problem.”
Andrew sat down. He looked at her empty wineglass. Or he might have been looking beyond that, out to the water.
“Every week,” he sighed, “the same thing. He rings, and I take in a sack of lemons, and he refuses to take the money. Then he comes at the end of the week asking for money for two or three sacks of lemons—only one of which was ever put in my hands. The others never existed.” Andrew sighed again. “What do you think he would do if I said, ‘But what do you mean, Signor Zito, three sacks of lemons? I must pay you for the ten sacks of lemons we received. We have had the most wonderful lemonade. The most remarkable lemon custard. We have baked lemon-meringue pies and mixed our morning orange juice with the juice of fresh-squeezed lemons. Let me give you more money. Let me give you everything I have. Let me pay you anything you want for your wonderful lemons.’ ”
His tone of voice was cold. Frightening. He was too often upset, and sometimes it frightened her. She clamped her hand over his, and he took a deep breath and stopped talking. She looked at him, and it suddenly seemed clear that what had been charming petulance when he was younger was now a kind of craziness—a craziness he did not even think about containing. Or what if he was right, and things were not as simple as she pretended? What if the boys she spoke to every day really did desire her and wish him harm? What if the person who wrote that story had been right, and Americans really were materialistic—so materialistic that they became paranoid and thought everyone was out to cheat them?
“What’s that?” Andrew said. She had been so lost in her confusion that she started when he spoke.
“What?” she said.
“That,” he said, and pulled his hand out from under hers.
They were both looking at the opal ring.
“From one of the beachboys,” she said.
He frowned. “Are you telling me that ring isn’t real?”
She put her hand in her lap. “No,” she said. “Obviously it’s real. You don’t think one of the boys would be crazy enough about me to give me a real ring?”
“I assume I was wrong, and it’s a cheap imitation,” he said. “No. I am not so stupid that I think one of those boys gave you an expensive ring. Although I do admit the possibility that you bought yourself a ring.”
He raised a finger and summoned the waiter. He ordered tea with milk. He looked straight ahead, to the beach. It was now deserted, except for the mother and baby. The baby had stopped throwing stones and was being rocked in its mother’s arms. Christine excused herself and walked across the wooden planks to the bar at the back of the Cobalto, where the waiter was ordering tea from the bartender.
“Excuse me,” she said quietly. “Do you have a pen and a piece of paper?”
The man behind the bar produced a pencil and handed her a business card. He turned and began to pour boiling water into a teapot.
She wondered whether the man thought that a pen and a pencil were interchangeable, and whether a business card was the same as a piece of paper. Was he being perverse, or did he not understand her request very well? All right, she thought: I’ll keep it brief.
As she wrote, she reminded herself that it was a calm sea, and that the woman could not possibly be dead. “I had to leave,” she wrote. “There is no phone at the villa we are renting. I will be here tomorrow at ten, with your ring.” She signed her name, then handed the card to the bartender. “It’s very important,” she said. “A woman is going to come in, expecting to find me. A Frenchwoman. If you see someone who’s very upset—” She stopped, looking at the puzzled expression on the bartender’s face. “Very important,” she said again. “The woman had two friends. She’s very pretty. She’s been out boating.” She looked at the card she had given the bartender. He held it, without looking at what she had written. “Grazie,” she said.
“Prego,” he said. He put the card down by the cash register and then—perhaps because she was looking—did something that struck her as appropriately ironic: he put a lemon on top of the card, to weigh it down.
“Grazie,” she said again.
“Prego,” he said.
She went back to the table and sat, looking not toward the cliff beyond which the French people’s boat had disappeared, but in the other direction, toward Positano. They said little, but during the silence she decided—in the way that tourists are supposed to have epiphanies on vacations, at sunset—that there was such a thing as fate, and that she was fated to be with Andrew.
When he finished his tea, they rose together and went to the bar and paid. She did not think she was imagining that the owner nodded his head twice, and that the second nod was a little conspiratorial signal.
—
From the doors that opened onto the balcony outside their bedroom she could see more of the Mediterranean than from the Cobalto; at this vantage point, high above the Via Torricella, it was almost possible to have a bird’s-eye view. From here, the Luna pool was only a dark-blue speck. There was not one boat on the Mediterranean. She heard the warning honking of the bus drivers below and the buzzing sound the motorcycles made. The intermittent noise only made her think how quiet it was most of the time. Often, she could hear the breeze rustling the leaves of the lemon trees.
Andrew was asleep in the room, his breathing as steady as the surf rolling in to shore. He went to bed rather early now, and she often stood on the balcony for a while, before going in to read.
Years ago, when they were first together, she had worn a diamond engagement ring in a Tiffany setting, the diamond held in place by little prongs that rose up and curved against it, from a thin gold band. Now she had no idea what had become of the ring, which she had returned to him, tearfully, in Paris. When they later married, he gave her only a plain gold band. It made her feel suddenly old, to remember things she had not thought about in years—to miss them, and to want them back. She had to stop herself, because her impulse was to go into the bedroom and wake him up and ask him what had become of
the ring.
She did go in, but she did not disturb him. Instead, she walked quietly to the bed and sat on the side of it, then reached over and turned off the little bedside lamp. Then she carefully stretched out and pulled the covers over her. She began to breathe in time with his breathing, as she often did, trying to see if, by imitation, she could sink into easy sleep.
With her eyes closed, she remembered movement: the birds sailing between high cliffs, boats on the water. It was possible, standing high up, as she often did in Italy, to actually look down on the birds in their flight: small specks below, slowly swooping from place to place. The tiny boats on the sea seemed no more consequential than sunbeams, glinting on the surface of the water.
Unaccustomed to wearing jewelry, she rubbed the band of the ring on her finger as she began to fall asleep. Although it was not a conscious thought, something was wrong—something about the ring bothered her, like a grain of sand in an oyster.
In time, his breathing changed, and hers did. Calm sleep was now a missed breath—a small sound. They might have been two of the birds she so often thought of, flying separately between cliffs—birds whose movement, which might seem erratic, was always private, and so took them where they wanted to go.
WHAT WAS MINE
I don’t remember my father. I have only two photographs of him—one of two soldiers standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, their faces even paler than their caps, so that it’s difficult to make out their features; the other of my father in profile, peering down at me in my crib. In that photograph, he has no discernible expression, though he does have a rather noble Roman nose and thick hair that would have been very impressive if it hadn’t been clipped so short. On the back of the picture in profile is written, unaccountably, “Guam,” while the back of the picture of the soldiers says, “Happy with baby: 5/28/49.”
Until I was five or six I had no reason to believe that Herb was not my uncle. I might have believed it much longer if my mother had not blurted out the truth one night when I opened her bedroom door and saw Herb, naked from the waist down, crouched at the foot of the bed, holding out a bouquet of roses much the way teasing people shake a biscuit in front of a sleeping dog’s nose. They had been to a wedding earlier that day, and my mother had caught the nosegay. Herb was tipsy, but I had no sense of that then. Because I was a clumsy boy, I didn’t wonder about his occasionally knocking into a wall or stepping off a curb a bit too hard. He was not allowed to drive me anywhere, but I thought only that my mother was full of arbitrary rules she imposed on everyone: no more than one hour of TV a day; put Bosco in the glass first, then the milk.
One of the most distinct memories of my early years is of that night I opened my mother’s door and saw Herb lose his balance and fall forward on the bouquet like a thief clutching bread under his shirt.
“Ethan,” my mother said, “I don’t know what you are doing in here at a time when you are supposed to be in bed—and without the manners to knock—but I think the time has come to tell you that Herbert and I are very close, but not close in the way family members such as a brother and sister are. Herbert is not your uncle, but you must go on as if he were. Other people should not know this.”
Herb had rolled onto his side. As he listened, he began laughing. He threw the crushed bouquet free, and I caught it by taking one step forward and waiting for it to land in my outstretched hand. It was the way Herb had taught me to catch a ball, because I had a tendency to overreact and rush too far forward, too fast. By the time I had caught the bouquet, exactly what my mother said had become a blur: manners, Herbert, not family, don’t say anything.
Herb rolled off the bed, stood, and pulled on his pants. I had the clear impression that he was in worse trouble than I was. I think that what he said to me was that his affection for me was just what it always had been, even though he wasn’t actually my uncle. I know that my mother threw a pillow at him and told him not to confuse me. Then she looked at me and said, emphatically, that Herb was not a part of our family. After saying that, she became quite flustered and got up and stomped out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Herb gave the door a dismissive wave of the hand. Alone with him, I felt much better. I suppose I had thought that he might vanish—if he was not my uncle, he might suddenly disappear—so that his continued presence was very reassuring.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “The divorce rate is climbing, people are itching to change jobs every five minutes. You wait: Dwight Eisenhower is going to be reevaluated. He won’t have the same position in history that he has today.” He looked at me. He sat on the side of the bed. “I’m your mother’s boyfriend,” he said. “She doesn’t want to marry me. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going anywhere. Just keep it between us that I’m not Uncle Herb.”
—
My mother was tall and blond, the oldest child of a German family that had immigrated to America in the 1920s. Herb was dark haired, the only child of a Lebanese father and his much younger English bride, who had considered even on the eve of her wedding leaving the Church of England to convert to Catholicism and become a nun. In retrospect, I realize that my mother’s shyness about her height and her having been indoctrinated to believe that the hope of the future lay in her accomplishing great things, and Herb’s self-consciousness about his kinky hair, along with his attempt as a child to negotiate peace between his mother and father, resulted in an odd bond between Herb and my mother: she was drawn to his conciliatory nature, and he was drawn to her no-nonsense attitude. Or perhaps she was drawn to his unusual amber eyes, and he was taken in by her inadvertently sexy, self-conscious girlishness. Maybe he took great pleasure in shocking her, in playing to her secret, more sophisticated desires, and she was secretly amused and gratified that he took it as a given that she was highly competent and did not have to prove herself to him in any way whatsoever.
She worked in a bank. He worked in the automotive section at Sears, Roebuck, and on the weekend he played piano, harmonica, and sometimes tenor sax at a bar off Pennsylvania Avenue called the Merry Mariner. On Saturday nights my mother and I would sit side by side, dressed in our good clothes, in a booth upholstered in blue Naugahyde, behind which dangled nets that were nailed to the wall, studded with starfish, conch shells, sea horses, and clamshells with small painted scenes or decals inside them. I would have to turn sideways and look above my mother to see them. I had to work out a way of seeming to be looking in front of me and listening appreciatively to Uncle Herb while at the very same time rolling my eyes upward to take in those tiny depictions of sunsets, rainbows, and ships sailing through the moonlight. Uncle Herb played a slowish version of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” on the harmonica as I sipped my cherry Coke with real cherries in it: three, because the waitress liked me. He played “As Time Goes By” on the piano, singing so quietly it seemed he was humming. My mother and I always split the fisherman’s platter: four shrimp, one crab cake, and a lobster tail, or sometimes two if the owner wasn’t in the kitchen, though my mother often wrapped up the lobster tails and saved them for our Sunday dinner. She would slice them and dish them up over rice, along with the tomato-and-lettuce salad she served almost every night.
Some of Uncle Herb’s songs would go out to couples celebrating an anniversary, or to birthday boys, or to women being courted by men who preferred to let Uncle Herb sing the romantic thoughts they hesitated to speak. Once during the evening Herb would dedicate a song to my mother, always referring to her as “my own special someone” and nodding—but never looking directly—toward our booth.
My mother kept the beat to faster tunes by tapping her fingers on the shiny varnished tabletop. During the slow numbers she would slide one finger back and forth against the edge of the table, moving her hand so delicately she might have been testing the blade of a knife. Above her blond curls I would see miniature versions of what I thought must be the most exotic places on earth—so exotic that any small reference to them would quicken the heart of an
yone familiar with the mountains of Hawaii or the seas of Bora Bora. My mother smoked cigarettes, so that sometimes I would see these places through fog. When the overhead lights were turned from blue to pink as Uncle Herb played the last set, they would be transformed to the most ideal possible versions of paradise. I was hypnotized by what seemed to me their romantic clarity, as Herb sang a bemused version of “Stormy Weather,” then picked up the saxophone for “Green Eyes,” and finished, always, with a Billie Holiday song he would play very simply on the piano, without singing. Then the lights went to a dusky red and gradually brightened to a golden light that seemed as stupefying to me as the cloud rising at Los Alamos must have seemed to the observers of Trinity. It allowed people enough light to judge their sobriety, pay the bill, or decide to postpone functioning until later and vanish into the darker reaches of the bar at the back. Uncle Herb never patted me on the shoulder or tousled my cowlick. He usually sank down next to my mother—still bowing slightly to acknowledge the applause—then reached over with the same automatic motion my mother used when she withdrew a cigarette from the pack to run his thumb quickly over my knuckles, as if he were testing a keyboard. If a thunderbolt had left his fingertips, it could not have been more clear: he wanted me to be a piano player.
—
That plan had to be abandoned when I was thirteen. Or perhaps it did not really have to be abandoned, but at the time I found a convenient excuse to let go of the idea. One day, as my mother rounded a curve in the rain, the car skidded into a telephone pole. As the windshield splattered into cubes of glass, my wrist was broken and my shoulder dislocated. My mother was not hurt at all, though when she called Herb at work she became so hysterical that she had to be given an injection in the emergency room before he arrived to take us both away.
