by Ann Beattie
“Maybe in the daylight,” she muttered, still riffling through the drawer. He smiled; it had become a standing joke between them that everything in the house, and by extension everything, period, would come clear in the light of day.
On their third day in the house daylight had revealed one of Anthony’s jokes: a piece of rubber shaped and painted to look like a melted chocolate-covered ice-cream bar. Chap had peeked at blueprints rolled up on Lou’s drafting table. Fran had put fresh flowers throughout the house. She was reading War and Peace and listening to the Brunettis’ collection of classical CDs, though earlier in the morning she had been leafing through a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic and listening to an old Lou Reed record. The elderly woman whose picture was on the refrigerator turned out to be a neighbor who cleaned house for the Brunettis once a week. She took an instant liking to Fran, once she saw the flowers set out in vases. She said the photograph on the refrigerator had been taken by Anthony during the strawberry festival the year before. He had wanted to catch her with a beard of whipped cream, but she had licked it away too fast. Chap had seen her—Mrs. Brikel—the other time he visited, and this time he had held his breath, hoping she would not remember their meeting. From the way her eyes flickered, he had thought she was going to say something, then decided against it.
Fran said, as if she had tuned in to his thoughts: “Mrs. Brikel called and said she wants to give us half an apple pie. Wasn’t that nice of her? We’ll have to think of something to do for her before we leave.”
The Brunettis’ pictures and postcards on the refrigerator had been joined by two postcards forwarded from Fran and Chap’s: a detail of a stained-glass window at the Matisse chapel, sent by a friend of Fran’s who was traveling through France, and a picture of her niece’s new baby, propped up in her mother’s arm, eyes closed.
“Would you mind going over to Mrs. Brikel’s?” Fran said. “I said the least we could do would be to walk over and get our share of pie.”
He put the bag on the counter. “Drop all this in the sink and splatter it with water,” he said. “I’ll be back in a flash.” He had gone out the door and closed it before he thought to open it again and ask whether Mrs. Brikel lived to the left or the right.
“Right,” Fran said, pointing.
He closed the door again. Two or three mosquitoes trailed him, hovering near the center of his body as he cut across the grass. He tried to swat them away, quickening his step. A jogger went by on the road, a big black Lab keeping time with him as he ran. A car honked when it passed, for no reason. He looked after the dog, who reminded him of Romulus, and wondered briefly whether it might be nice to have a dog.
“Could you smell it baking?” Mrs. Brikel asked, opening the door. She was smiling a bright smile. Her eyes were not particularly bright, though, and the smile began to fade when he did not answer instantly.
“There’s no breeze,” he said. “Isn’t there always supposed to be a breeze in Vermont? If we had some wind, those mosquitoes couldn’t land the way they do.” He flicked one off his elbow. He entered the house quickly, smiling to make up for his lack of cheerfulness a few seconds before.
“I thought I’d bake a pie, and I would have made blueberry, but I came down this morning and saw my son had eaten every one for breakfast,” she said. “I usually don’t make apple pies except for fall, but your wife said apples were a favorite of hers.”
In the gloom of Mrs. Brikel’s back room, he saw another person: a tall boy, watching television. The shades were dropped. His feet were propped up on a footstool. Guns exploded. Then he changed the channel. Someone was singing, “What happened to the fire in your voice?” Someone laughed uproariously on a quiz show. The sound of a buzzer obliterated more gunfire.
“What’s your favorite pie?” Mrs. Brikel said. She had turned. He followed her into the kitchen. There was a wooden crucifix on the wood panel separating the windows over the sink. There were two rag rugs on the floor. A little fan circulated air. “All the screens are out being repaired,” Mrs. Brikel said. “I sure wouldn’t open the windows with these mosquitoes.”
In the kitchen, the aroma was strong. Chap could actually feel his mouth water as Mrs. Brikel cut into the pie.
“I’d give it all to you, but that it upsets him,” Mrs. Brikel said, nodding over her shoulder. Chap turned and looked. There was no one in the doorway. She was referring to the person watching television.
“I was all set to make two, but I ran out of flour,” Mrs. Brikel said. “That’s always the way: you remember to buy the little things, but you’re always running out of the big things like milk and flour.”
There were stickers of dancing dinosaurs on the window ledge. He looked at the refrigerator. Long strips of stickers hung there, taped at the top: stickers of birthday cakes and little animals holding umbrellas, pinwheels of color, multicolored star stickers.
“He knows you’re taking half the pie,” Mrs. Brikel said, tilting the dish. Half the pie slid free, landing perfectly on a plate. “That’s what he knows,” she said, talking to herself. She opened a drawer, pulled off a length of Saran Wrap, and spread it over the pie, tucking it under the plate.
“This is very kind of you, Mrs. Brikel,” he said. Without her saying anything directly, he assumed that the person in the living room was her son and that there was something wrong with him. The TV changed from muffled rifle shots to girls singing.
“I love to bake in the winter,” Mrs. Brikel said, “but come summer I don’t often think of it, except that we have to have our homemade bread. Yes we do,” she said, her voice floating off a little. He looked at the half pie. He knew he should thank her again and leave, but instead he leaned against the kitchen counter. “Mrs. Brikel,” he said, “do you remember me?”
“Do I what?” she said.
“We met, briefly. It was during the winter. Lou and I were backing out of the driveway and you and your son—or I guess it was your son, walking in front of you—were coming up the driveway…”
“In the car with Mr. Brunetti?” Mrs. Brikel said. “You were up here at the end of that big winter storm, then.”
“I was pretty surprised to find myself here,” he said. “Lou called me when Pia went in for surgery.”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Brikel said, bowing her head. “That was an awful day.”
“Not as bad for us as for Pia,” he said. He looked at the plate covered in Saran Wrap. He wanted to say something else, but wasn’t sure what.
“But now she seems to be coming along well,” Mrs. Brikel said.
“My wife doesn’t know I was here,” he said. “I was quite surprised, to tell you the truth, that Lou asked me to come. I told my wife I was visiting my cousin in New Hampshire.”
“Well, you were good to do it,” Mrs. Brikel said. She ran her hand along the counter edge. She thumbed away an imaginary spot of dirt.
“My wife doesn’t know about the trip because Lou asked me not to tell her,” he said. “It’s a funny thing, but I guess there are some things women don’t want other women to know.”
Mrs. Brikel looked slightly perplexed, then dropped her eyes. If he was going to continue, he would have to think of what to say. The TV was changing from station to station in the other room.
“Lou thought Pia wasn’t only upset to be losing a breast, but worried that with her breast gone, she’d…” He let his voice drift, then started again. “She was worried, Lou thought, that she’d lose stature in my wife’s eyes. That’s not true, of course. My wife is a very kind woman. Pia apparently worshiped Fran, and she must have thought the operation would…” He faltered. “Would distance them,” he said.
He had never tried to articulate this before. He had tried, many times, to remember exactly what Lou had said, but even a second after he heard it, it had seemed confusing and puzzling. This was the best paraphrase he could manage: that Pia had taken some crazy notion into her head, in her anxiety. To this day, Pia did not know that he knew she had had a mastecto
my. Lou had not wanted him to visit Pia, but to go to the bar with him at night and have a few drinks and shoot pool. On the way back to Fran, he had detoured to Marshall’s house in New Hampshire, taken him on errands, left him with a new jack for his car and with new washers on the faucets. He told Fran that he had spent four days there, when really he had spent only one. He had been at the Brunettis’ the other three days. Anthony had been sent to stay with a family friend. At night, Lou had ducked his head through Anthony’s bedroom door, though, before turning off the downstairs lights. Chap did not know whether Lou had any other close friends. Until Lou called, he had assumed that of course he did—but maybe they were just acquaintances. Couples in the community.
“It’s a strange reaction,” he said, pushing away from the counter. He had kept Mrs. Brikel too long, imposed on her by making her listen to a story that wasn’t even really a story. He looked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Brikel said. “I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of these matters. I think Pia’s doing much better though, now that the treatments she’s had have been successful.”
He followed Mrs. Brikel to the door. He had not intended to ask any more questions, and was surprised to hear himself asking one more.
“Do they seem happy here?” he said.
She dropped her eyes again. “Anthony loves it,” she said. “So much to do in the winter, and all. I don’t know Mr. Brunetti very well because we go to bed early around here, and he’s a late one coming home. But Pia, you mean? Pia I wouldn’t say likes it very much. Of course, she’s had a very bad year.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,” he said. “I think I’ve been upset about the past year myself, and Lou isn’t the most talkative man.”
“He isn’t,” Mrs. Brikel said.
“Where’s my pie?” a voice called from the dark front room. The TV went silent. There was a long pause, and then it started up again. Mrs. Brikel looked in her son’s direction. “Pie’s on the counter,” she said quietly to Chap, as if he had been the one who asked the question.
“Thank you for your kindness, Mrs. Brikel,” he said, holding out his hand.
She shook it and smiled slightly. “Keeps me with something to do while the Wild West is won every day,” she said. “I’d relive all the wars and hear nothing but gunfire if I didn’t play the kitchen radio and make some pies and bread.”
“I sneak cigarettes,” he said. “Fran doesn’t know it, but after lunch, at work, I light up. One cigarette a day.”
This brought a bigger, more genuine smile from Mrs. Brikel.
“Okay, then,” she said, as he started down the walkway.
He would tell Fran, if she asked, that he had done some minor repair to help Mrs. Brikel. The coffee would still be hot; he would have some coffee with the apple pie.
(3)
What if they never came back? Fran thought. She wrote the question in her notebook. It was a notebook covered with lavender cloth Chap had given her for Valentine’s Day; since then, she had been keeping some notes, making a few sketches of things she had seen or done during the day. Like a teenager, she had sketched her face with and without bangs, to see if she should let the wisps continue to grow or have them trimmed. She decided, after looking at what she had drawn, to let the hair grow; soon she would have it all one length—the stark but simple way she liked to see herself.
She thought for a moment about people who had disappeared: Judge Crater; Amelia Earhart; Mrs. Ramsey. Though it was cheating to count Mrs. Ramsey among the missing: she had died—it was just that the reader found out about her death abruptly, and so reacted with great shock.
Fran drew parentheses in her notebook. She stared at the little curving lines for a while, then made quick motions with her pen, zigzagging a connection between the curves until they looked like the vertebrae she had sketched years before in her college anatomy class. She had fallen in love with the teaching assistant in that class. The summer she was twenty they had gone to Key West together, and he had given diving instructions while she waited tables at Pier House. They lived in a room in a guest house owned by one of his former girlfriends. The only other person living there that summer was a man named Ed Jakes, who wrote poetry they thought brilliant at the time, and who introduced them to good wine. She had kept in touch with him. He had become an interior decorator. Recently, she had shown Chap Ed’s name in Architectural Digest. It meant nothing to him, of course; no one ever really shared another person’s sentimental youthful attachments. He had collected canes with carved heads, she suddenly remembered: dog faces, tropical birds in profile. One night, in the courtyard of the guest house, Ed Jakes had held one of his canes higher and higher as she leaped over. When the cane rose to a certain height, her boyfriend had walked away, disgusted. Much later, meaning to hurt her, he had said that he and the woman who owned the guest house had gone to bed during the period they stayed there. It never occurred to her to question the truth of that until another boyfriend asked why she was so sure her previous lover hadn’t just been trying to make her jealous. She had learned a lot from that boyfriend, including skepticism. If she had stayed with him, and gone to his classes in method acting, she might have become quite a different person.
Since moving into the Brunettis’ house, she had begun to think about their lives. It was only natural. All houses had their owners’ personalities. In wandering through the rooms, though, she had not sensed much of Pia’s presence. She had even decided that the collections of things on the shelves must belong to Lou—or even that Anthony might have gotten into the act by collecting miniature versions of the Empire State Building. Anthony’s room was a shrine to athletes and rock stars. Instead of finding dust, Fran had found footballs—footballs had rolled into three corners. There were weird robots that fascinated Chap (they could be altered to become rockets), and he had chuckled over the violent comic books and the collection of movies: Schwarzenegger; Ghostbusters; RoboCop. There had been so little evidence of Pia, though, that Fran had had to open the bedroom closet and run her hand along Pia’s dresses to conjure up a sense of her. She was puzzled that she could find no bottles of perfume, that the medicine cabinet shelves were almost empty, that the kitchen looked so well scrubbed, as if no one ever cooked there. Take-out menus were tucked in the phone book like bookmarks.
Chap was outside cutting the grass, seated atop Lou’s riding mower. He had on a baseball cap and the shorts he had bought in four different colors at the factory outlet they had stopped at on their way up. It was true of many men: their desire to get a bargain won out over their indifference to clothes. Fran thought about the garment bag she had brought—dresses she would probably never wear. All the restaurants allowed you to dress casually. She had removed her fingernail polish and not repainted her nails. Her hair was clipped back on top, to keep her bangs out of her eyes. She looked at Chap, heading down a line of uncut grass, fanning mosquitoes away from his face. He had covered his body with insect repellent before he went out, though his shirt was unbuttoned and he was pouring sweat, so most of it had probably washed away.
She thought of all the things she liked about Chap: his endearing smile when she came upon him and found him staring into space; his insistence that he had total recall, beginning at the age of five, which of course she could not dispute; his myopic concentration as his big fingertips moved over the tiny buttons of the calculator; the way he always pointed out a full moon; his insistence, every time, that at last he had found an honest car mechanic. When women talked about their husbands, there seemed to be no nice, comfortable gray areas of love: women either detested their mates or bragged or implied that they were great lovers, that they spent their nights joyfully enacting sexual fantasies as they jumped and toppled and fucked, like figures perpetually animated in a flip book thumbed through time and again.
As Chap turned the mower and steered down another span of grass, she decided that when he headed back she would call out to him. Sh
e opened the refrigerator door and took out the half-empty bottle of red wine they had recorked the night before. She took a sip, then poured some into a wineglass. She would hold the wineglass out to Chap and smile a sly smile. She knew that he liked being propositioned in the afternoon; he acted slightly abashed, but secretly he liked it. Aside from surprises, he preferred morning sex, and she liked sex late at night—later than they usually managed, because he fell asleep by midnight.
As she put the glass on the counter, another thought came to her. She would go upstairs and put on one of Pia’s stylish dresses, maybe even Pia’s high heels if she could find fancier ones than she had brought herself. Clip on Pia’s earrings. Make a more thorough search for the perfume.
Going up the stairs, she felt as excited as a child about to play a sophisticated trick. There were small silhouettes—a series of ten or twelve—rising up the wall as the stairs rose. She wondered if they might be family members, or whether they were just something else that had been collected.
In the bedroom, she pulled the shade, on the off chance Chap might glance up and see her undressing. She opened the closet door and flipped through: such pretty colors; such fine material. Pia sewed her own clothes, using Vogue patterns. Friends in Rome sent her fabric. Everything Pia wore was unique and in the best of taste. From the look of the closet—dress after dress—it seemed she still did not wear pants.
The perfume—several bottles—sat in a wicker container. Fran found them when she lifted the lid. She unscrewed the tops and sniffed each one. She put a drop of Graffiti on the inside of each wrist, tapped another drop on her throat. She touched her fingertip to the bottle again and placed her moist finger behind her knee. Then she screwed the top on tightly and began to take off her clothes. She dropped them on the bed, then decided that she and Chap would be using the bed, so she picked them up and draped them over a chair. It was probably Pia’s needlework on the seat: a bunch of flowers, circled by lovebirds—very beautiful.
