Ann Beattie - The State We're In

“That’s good,” I said. “Any day’s good when you get someone to buy a book of poetry who wouldn’t ordinarily do it.”

“You thought I’d identify with the guy in the hammock,” he said. “And I guess I do, to be honest.”

“Most people who are being honest feel that way at least some of the time, in my experience.”

“I appreciate your asking me to move in,” he said.

I smiled. When he left, when the car had safely backed out of the driveway, I’d clip the leash on Yancey and walk her back to the field, then unclip it and let her loose to sniff out the day’s still dazzling possibilities. She looked a little kinky in her black booties. And her lovely coat could use a brushing, I saw. No day failed to contain the unexpected. Which I suspect Yancey thought, too, especially because she didn’t quite understand why she couldn’t make a wild dash like a thunderbolt from door to field, why she panted, why she failed to catch anything, why she’d been skunked, in fact.

Startled starlings flew up out of the high grass, their black whorl a little tornado that did not touch down and therefore did no damage. They disappeared like a momentary perception above Yancey’s head, fanning out and flying west. Or like the clotted words crammed into a cartoon bubble. Like one of Ginger’s finger-paintings from so, so long ago, brought home for inspection and praise.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I think people would sympathize with me if the roles were reversed and I was a woman whose job required her to travel. Have you thought about it that way? In this time when women have still not gotten the opportunities and respect they should, whereas men — I stand here as a case in point — are criticized for doing what women aspire to do. You’d like me to stay home and help you plan a birthday party for Joshua, which I can do by phone, by sending you e-mail, by doing anything that might represent my share of the work, but you won’t give me a break. It’s as though I want to go on every business trip. As though the last flight wasn’t a nightmare. I had a headache for two days afterwards. Do you have any idea at all where my black Nikes are? Not the Pumas that are mostly black, but the Nikes?”

“I’m sure if we still had your assistant, she could find them.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? She miscarried and she’s suffering a major depression. She’s called off her marriage. She should be here, to locate my shoes? Are you suggesting I’m a monster? What if my wife might know where my favorite shoes are? Even if it’s a trivial thing to know.”

“LuAnne called and said she’d kept down both dinner last night and lunch. She can’t wait to get back here. If you ask me, which nobody ever does, that soccer player wasn’t worthy of her and this is all for the best.”

“I wonder how other couples talk to each other,” he said. “I really do wonder that. But there’s no way to find out. You can’t believe what you see in the movies or on TV or in books, least of all the so-called reality shows. Maybe Roz Chast has some idea. That’s about the only person I can think of.”

“I saw a shoe on the back stairs. I have no idea where the other one is. Women don’t misplace their shoes.”

“Back stairs. Just a minute.”

She sat on the bed — king-size, at his insistence; separate reading lights, two night tables with identical spherical digital clocks whose alarms chirped a birdcall. She had to set hers at the highest volume; years ago, when she first came to Maine, she’d trained herself to sleep through the sounds of birds and crickets. Now the sputtering, muffler-missing motorcycles that constantly passed by posed a different sort of challenge: how to resist stringing razor wire across the road.

“Thank you. They were on the back stairs. One shoe was on top of the other.”

“Women don’t stack their shoes,” she said. “You have a way of turning discussions to the differences between men and women. I don’t really think about that all the time, but I find I always have to talk about it. Going back to your earlier point, Hughes would do anything possible to keep you, and if you said you were sick of so much flying…”

“Hughes and the Genius aren’t on the case the way I am, I agree. Why don’t you call Hughes and say just that? I wouldn’t stop you. I would, however, be angry if it backfired, and he sent me to California more often.”

“You can have dinner at Perbacco,” she said. “That almost makes it worth it.”

He looked at his phone. “Text from LuAnne,” he said. “She’s going to bed.”

“It’s not even four o’clock.”

“What would you have me do? Text her and tell her to walk around the block and slap her cheeks a few times?”

“Yeah. And communicate all of that with the smiley symbol and lots of exclamation points,” she said. “I never wanted a king-size bed. The maid hates putting on the sheets. She spends half of her four hours here being exasperated with the bed. Even when she gets the contour sheet on, she keeps staring at it like it’s a field of smoldering embers.

“Remember the time you forgot your driver’s license and you missed the flight?” she said. “For about a year I was convinced you’d done it on purpose, to come home when I least expected it, to see what I was doing.”

“Excuse me? Wouldn’t that have required excessive effort, and might that not indicate some paranoia on your part?”

“Remember what I was doing?”

“I was really upset. I thought I’d lost both my AmEx and my driver’s license, and I knew I could grab my passport, but I guess, well, I guess I was feeling paranoid, like someone might have slipped the two most important cards out of—”

“Are you stalling for time because you don’t remember what I was doing?”

“Jesus! I remember what you were doing. You’d put some grease all over your hair and were sitting stark naked on the front porch wearing nothing but a shower cap, except that you’d dragged out some huge scarf to cover yourself with if anybody walked by, though I don’t know how you could be so sure you’d see them, and you were having a cigarette, the last year you smoked cigarettes.”

“I was looking at Vogue and drinking a virgin margarita.”

“Why do you bring this up?”

“Because what I do is so innocuous. I spend my time thinking about a party at Water Country. I can’t even plan our son’s birthday by myself. I don’t know how to be in the world. How can you stand me?”

“I chose you out of all the world.”

“And you keep me by shining that sincere smile on me and constantly implying that men and women are just different, and by managing to convince everybody you’re such a good guy because you made your ex-girlfriend from years ago your assistant, even after she had an affair behind your back with Hughes the second she met him, and furthermore I agree with you. She’s a very capable, nice person.”

“A one-night stand is not an ‘ex-girlfriend.’ And if we might possibly discuss something else, even though LuAnne is your favorite subject. There’s a book, a novel, by that writer who wrote that story you love about Bruns. I heard about it on NPR. In the novel, the character’s wife is crazed with the desire to have a child and hops a plane when she knows she’ll be fertile and goes to where he and a bunch of friends are gathering because an old friend unexpectedly died—”

“I still can’t believe that we had that crazy time together and went off to that house you’d rented in Marin because you probably thought you’d take some other girl there — and we found that croquet set in the garage and set it up and played a game naked when it got dark.”