by Ann Beattie
He looked, again, at Anthony Brunetti’s drawing he had seen his first night in the house. Naturally Lou would like the fact that his son could think three-dimensionally. That the boy was not put off by the material world, but saw in it shapes that could be exposed, transparent cubes wittily tipped and rectangles into which he could stare.
He remembered seeing 2001 stoned, and how utterly convincing and involving it had seemed. He wondered if there was a video store nearby, and whether he might be able to rent that movie to watch again, although he realized at the same time that in doing so, he would just be opening the floodgates for disappointment.
That word again.
He finished his letter to Marshall a bit more abruptly than he intended. He was afraid that if he went on, and allowed larger issues to intrude, he would never be able to keep Marshall focused on the facts. When a person was in distress, it was not the time for anyone else to question the order of the cosmos. He had written a firm, fond letter to Marshall, enclosing a check and telling him to have the house insulated before winter, or he would be forced to go there and hire somebody to do the job himself.
Of course he realized that Marshall had not wanted the mention of winter’s cold to suggest only the temperature of the house. He knew perfectly well what Marshall meant, but except for insisting on his own affection for Marshall, he could not imagine what incentive to go on he might offer.
He was sitting on a kitchen stool. He had pushed it across the floor so it was six feet away from the area where Fran had been drawing. She had her spot, he had his. In her spot, a few tiny gnats spiraled up from the ripe bananas. In his, there was a stain made by the bottom of the coffee mug. He gave it a moment’s thought: it was interesting that while the Brunettis liked variety among the things they collected, the kitchen plates and cups were all uniform: mugs in different colors, but exactly the same shape. Simple white plates in graduated sizes.
He was not sure which of Pia’s breasts had been removed. But of course that did not matter at all. The fact of having one breast missing was horrible, but undoubtedly something a man could never really understand, just as a woman couldn’t really know what it felt like to be kicked in the balls.
The sun was shining on the garden. Butterflies fluttered. For a split second, he allowed a Daliesque scene to shimmer outside the kitchen window, where a naked-torsoed Pia stood behind the garden, like the Virgin presiding over paradise. Just as quickly the image was gone, and he thought, for the second time that day, about LSD. About seeing 2001 stoned, about the chances he had taken, the time he had wasted during that period of his life when he often viewed the world through a drug haze.
He ground fresh coffee. As the water boiled, he thought that skills—things you could do in the world—were likely to help you, but that objects—because they could never be complex enough, and rarely beautiful enough—would almost always disappoint you. Fran was not a skier, so it was difficult to explain to her how the same ski slope could be so involving, day after day. The slope itself was fascinating: varying, even as you rode the lift to descend again. But the further fascination was in your own skill, because you could never tell when chance would intervene, when you would have to compensate for something that was happening. Only an egocentric fool would try to predict his response vis-à-vis chance and as a variable in danger. You just snapped to, even when it already seemed too late, and you found yourself operating automatically.
He turned off the water, deciding that caffeine was the last thing he needed. He even took a deep breath and left the kitchen, suspecting, as Fran did, that the room made him a little crazy. Bad vibes, he would have said in the sixties. Or no vibes at all, which was just as bad.
He, too, discovered the Fiestaware in Lou’s study. The window above Lou’s drafting table had been left open, and the wind that had begun to blow as the sky clouded over sucked the door closed. When Chap opened the door, he looked for a doorstop and found, instead, the shelf of blue dishes. Marshall’s wife had had some of those plates, though he hadn’t seen them in years. By now, they were probably all broken.
Lou’s room did have good vibrations. The posters from European museums were in good taste; the architectural drawings drew you in. He sat on Lou’s high chair and looked out the window. He could imagine being an architect. Which also made him think about Fran, and the decision she was trying to come to about what job to move on to next. When you were an adult, you could not easily try on other professions: no dressing up in a white hat as a nurse; no clomping around in firemen’s boots. It was no longer a matter of how you dressed that transported you, but the possibilities, say, awakened by music, though explaining its direct application would have made you sound like a fool.
He pushed the POWER button on Lou’s stereo, then the PLAY button for the tape inside. Whatever it was was unfamiliar. He listened for quite a while, though, liking it—liking being in the room sitting on Lou’s drafting chair, his feet dangling because they could not touch the floor—preoccupied by the motion of a wasp examining the outside window frame. It had such a delicate, frightening body, and it was so intent upon what it was doing. Though there was every chance that the wasp was only programmed. That what it was doing had nothing to do with selectivity and everything to do with survival. The wasp flew up, then landed and crawled to the top corner of the outside window frame. It was just a little too far away for him to see it clearly without his glasses. In a minute or two, during which he lowered the window a bit because the breeze was coming much stronger and there was going to be a storm, the music changed. As he was transported, the music changed once again. The tape must have been a compilation of things Lou liked. He pushed EJECT and took out the tape. He had been wrong: it was a tape by a group called Metropolis. They were so good they could play in a variety of musical styles and be utterly convincing. Fran’s favorite book by Calvino was on the floor. A book by Richard Rorty was on Lou’s drafting table, the charge receipt tucked inside. Another wasp joined the wasp crawling outside the window. The first drops of rain began to fall. He got up, closed the window all the way, and went back to the kitchen, where he stood looking out the screen door. The driveway was deeply rutted. The holes had been filled with muddy water when he and Fran arrived, from so much rain. Mosquitoes hovered outside the screen, wanting to get in. He realized his folly: he was anthropomorphizing again. They were instinctually drawn to the surface of the screen. Who knew what made them hover?
He rubbed his hand over his forehead. The conversation a couple of days before, with Mrs. Brikel, came back to him in snatches, though he remembered more what she looked like, the view from the window of the tiny restaurant, the missing letters on the shop across the street: JOH DEER. As he and Mrs. Brikel talked about things left incomplete, the fragment of the sign above her head, across the street, had riveted his attention. Mrs. Brikel’s love affair gone wrong. His insistence, in the face of no opposition from Mrs. Brikel, that he and his wife confided easily in each other.
Hadn’t she led him to a chair when the bee bit him?
But what did that have to do with sharing confidences?
He tried to conjure up Fran’s presence in the house, but it was slow in coming and vague when it seemed to be there.
“Frannie, Frannie, Frannie,” he said aloud, though he had not used her nickname in years.
(7)
He snapped a branch off a bush, threw it to the ground, and walked past the blue clapboard house where the painters had been scraping wood for what seemed like half the summer. The shutters had been removed and were stacked in the carport, the Audi backed out in the driveway. One of the men was getting a drink of water from the hose and made a motion as if to spray him as he walked by.
He waved. It was the house of the woman who sometimes sat with him in the evening, Mrs. Torius. Her name was much longer than that. She was a Greek woman with a name too long to spell and too hard to pronounce, so he called her Mrs. Torius. He had laughed about it when he found out that Spania
rds called bulls toro. Most of what he knew he had found out from television, although his mother still insisted on reading schoolbooks to him as if he were small. He was five feet ten inches, and twenty-six years old. For twenty years his mother had been thinking over whether he could have another gerbil, because he had killed the first one. He didn’t care anymore, but it was something to keep after her about.
“Get on home, Loretta,” he squealed. There were many things the Beatles ordered people to do that he liked to hear. “Don’t leave me standing here” was another, though he could never get the cadence of that one right, so he just shouted it.
“How ya doin’ today, Royce?” the mailman said.
“You’ve got the mail,” Royce said.
The mailman walked on. In the cartoons, dogs bit mailmen.
Royce, after promising he wouldn’t go out, had left a note for his mother (he had whirled the yellow crayon around and around in a circle, so she would know he was taking a walk around the neighborhood; it had cut the paper, and he was going to be in trouble for getting crayon marks on the kitchen counter, which was not where he was supposed to color). In his note, he also told her, in purple Magic Marker, that he was going to bring home a fish. He liked fish very much, but his mother would only buy fish sticks because it disgusted her to see the way he chewed and chewed so carefully to make sure there were no bones, which would kill him if he swallowed them.
“Get on home, Loretta,” he said again, to a cat crossing his path. The cat could have run away from a Dr. Seuss book. Come to think of it, he could be the man in The Cat in the Hat because he had put on a top hat for his stroll. A walk was a stroll if you went slower than you normally walk. He slowed down even more, putting the heel of one red-laced high-topper against the toe of his other shoe, and alternating feet so he moved forward one footstep at a time.
John, his second-favorite Beatle, was dead.
Royce stopped to practice the Heimlich maneuver on an imaginary victim of choking. Then he metamorphosed into Batman and the bad guy fell to the ground, knocked unconscious. He put his arms above his head, knowing full well that he wouldn’t disappear like Batman, and he didn’t. He had seen Batman three times. The first time he saw it he sat through it a second time. He made such a stink that his mother couldn’t get him to leave and gave up. The other time he had to promise all day that he would only sit through Batman one time, if she allowed him to go. She did not go inside with him, having also made him promise that he would sit alone and not say anything to anybody. His mother was crazy if she thought he always had something to say. He didn’t.
His favorite pies were cherry, apple, blueberry, peach. In the order: apple, cherry, peach…and he could not at the moment remember the other kind of pie he liked.
He poked his finger in the air to make a decimal point. Ralph Sampson got to it, though, and once his hand touched it, it became a basketball. Score one victory. Jump off the ground and fly it up there, Ralph. Easy come, easy go.
That was what his mother said when he got his footprints on something, like the bedsheets or the dining-room table, which he was forbidden to stand on. The Cat in the Hat propped up one side of the recliner chair he sat in to watch TV. The house was old and the living-room floor sloped, but he liked sitting on the most sloping part. And the book made the tilt better. He teased his mother by leaning way over the side of the chair and waving his arms, saying “Whoooooooooo” sometimes, pretending he was falling off the side of a ship. He could always make her ask why he didn’t sit elsewhere.
His plan for catching the fish was to puff up his chest and dive into the Mediterranean Sea and get one from one of the frogmen who hunted fish at night with spears. He had just seen a show about night fishing off the coast of Italy. The men put on black suits and floated in shallow water, looking for what they wanted. He intended to see what he wanted by going to the water’s edge and peering in. It was very bad to go out when he had promised to stay home, but even worse to go near water. Therefore, he would carefully peer in. At the curb, he tested: he leaned slightly forward, like an elegant, myopic British gentleman about to meet someone of importance. The night before, on television, he had seen a movie in which an Englishman with a monocle eventually reached for some princess’s hand. People in that movie had been wearing top hats. His mother had had her father’s top hat in a box on the top shelf of the closet for years. He had brought it down with his magnet-vision. He just looked at a thing and it came to him. This only happened when his mother was not at home, though.
One of the boys in his crafts class, where he made belts and pouches and might be allowed to make a pair of moccasins, wore a diaper. A few days before, the boy had unbuttoned his long pants and let them drop around his ankles while the teacher’s attention was elsewhere. Mothers always liked buttons better than zippers, because they were harder to undo.
He thought that he had been on the corner long enough. He put one toe in the water. It was dry. He looked both ways. No fish yet. He decided to swim across the stream, but in case anyone came along he wouldn’t want to appear to be swimming, because they might tell his mother. What he would do would be look left and right and then hurry across the stream with only his invisible arms swimming.
He did so, and got to the other side.
For almost an hour, Royce walked in the direction of the reservoir. He had gone there years ago with his mother—more than once, actually—but his sense of direction was bad, so it was difficult to say what kept him on course. Walking along in his chinos, with a tie-dyed shirt he had picked out himself and a top hat, he might have fooled anyone whizzing by in a car who didn’t notice the expression on his face, because this part of Vermont was still full of hippies. Where the hill dipped, instinct carried him once more down the road, where it forked to the right, and once on it, he was headed directly toward his destination. His mother and father had often walked with him there on summer nights, up until the time he began to scream because he wanted to go in the water. Though he had no memory of it, his screaming when he was two years old had brought his mother to tears, daily. She had taken tranquilizers and considered institutionalizing him. His father stopped coming, because his mother would no longer speak to him. Sometimes, for as much as a week, he and his mother would stay inside the house. In the house, she could run away from him and lock herself behind a door. Some things he did were only the things any baby would do, yet she reacted strongly to them. When he reached for her glasses, she stopped wearing them and functioned in a fog. When he was old enough to pull out her shoelaces, she did not replace them. She had a lock on one small closet that contained clothes she would wear when she took him into Boston to see doctors. Except for those clothes, she would often stay, all day, in her nightgown. Even after his teeth came through, she rubbed his gums with whiskey, hoping he might fall asleep earlier. She would smash delicate things that fascinated him before he had a chance. They drank from paper cups and ate more food than was reasonable with their fingers.
He took off one shoe and sock and left them by a tree, because the little piggy that cried “Wee-wee-wee” all the way home was also telling him it wanted to walk barefoot on the grass. When he took off the shoe, he made a mental note of where to find it again. He had left it at tree number fifty. There were exactly four thousand four hundred and ninety-six trees on this road to the reservoir.
Pale white clouds began to turn luminous, becoming the same yellowish color—something like burnt yellow—as the water in town, where the water was shallow as it fanned out to go over the waterfall. The clouds were quickly overlapping. It was as if blotting paper was soaking up all color. From second to second, more brightness faded as a stronger wind blew up. This was the sort of wind that preceded an alien landing. It could be used to advantage, Royce also knew, by criminals, who would step through broken store windows and steal whatever was to be had. In the distance, he heard sirens.
By now, he could see cars parked off the side of the road and the big green hill that
led to the water. He looked down and saw that he had cut his toe. He crossed his arms across his chest and marched bravely on. He only stopped when he felt the wind start to lift his hat. He pulled it lower on his forehead, then ran his fingers along his temples to feel the fringe of mashed-down hair.
Several sirens were wailing at the same time. He looked over his shoulder. Two men were hurrying toward their truck: no fire in the distance, no car through which a toppled tree had crashed. He looked at the front of his shirt and thought that the mottled orange and yellow looked like fire. That made him feel powerful again, and he pulled his foot out of his other sneaker and kicked it high, like a football. It landed in the grass partway up the hill. By now the clouds were dark gray against a pale gray sky, and blowing so they twisted one in front of the other. He was a little out of breath from trying to breathe in such wind. He had to duck his head to breathe easily. When he got to his shoe, he sat down for a minute, enjoying the way the raindrops fell, flicking themselves over his body. He touched his hand to the top of his hat. The rain made the same sound falling on his hat that it did when it fell on the roof. He looked at the trees fringing the flat land on which bright green grass grew, now made dusty green by blowing dirt and a lack of light. The grass was newly mowed; something in the air made him sneeze. He sneezed several times in succession, blessing himself after each explosion, yelling God’s name louder each time. His feet were cold, and he thought about going back for the abandoned shoe, but the wind was blowing across the water in the reservoir so enticingly that he was transfixed. It reminded him of what it looked like when his mother peeled Saran Wrap back from a tray of chocolate-frosted brownies.
When the next gust of wind blew the top hat from his head and sent it skipping down the darkening grass, he followed behind, hobbling a bit because of his cut toe. He put his hands over his ears. The sound the wind made, rushing through the trees—a sound like paper being crumpled—muted. The sirens’ wail continued. What do fish hear? he thought.
