Ann Beattie - The State We're In

They began snapping pictures with their cell phones. Elvis made his way across the universe in seconds. He went (OMG!) to girls in boarding school and to Blake’s half brother in Austin; he appeared in selfies with Ted, who tousled his own longish hair and did a pretty credible job of imitating Elvis’s expression before relaying it to his basketball coach. The kids mugged and held their fingers up behind Elvis’s head. They grouped some duplicate busts together and took turns crouching behind them, intruding their own faces into the lineup for the photograph. They thought all the Elvises were awesome. What did it mean? Genevieve wanted to know. Genevieve was pictured kissing him on his pink plaster lips. She ran home and got her mother, who was at first really perturbed to know she’d crept out of bed and broken into the house again, but by the time Mr. DuPenn got there, damp from the shower, his wife was walking around the tables with me, mon dieu —ing. “You put all these back the way they were,” her husband said to Ted, trying to sound stern.

“What do you think they’re all doing here, was he some big Elvis fan or something, I guess?” Ted said.

“I don’t think they’d be here otherwise,” I said.

“Oh no, this is wrong of us to be here,” Marie DuPenn said. “We must go!”

“Come on, enough of this nonsense. It’s after midnight,” my husband said.

Blake wouldn’t budge. She said it was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen, even better than the first field of fireflies she ever saw. She stroked one Elvis’s brow, her fingers lingering on his dark brown curls.

“That guy got really fat out in Vegas,” Ted said to me. “They had to like sew him into his costumes like trussing a turkey, and I think he popped out one time. Yeah.” My husband asserted again that we had to get moving. Already, there were responses to the photos: a smiley face icon made out of a colon and close parenthesis; OMG LOL; xxURnutsxxbandsupercul!:)huuuunh?

Nobody had to walk more than a few blocks home. The kids left by the front door, Blake grudgingly, Ted with a lot of bravado. As he tried to close the front door tightly, the top hinge came out of the doorjamb, and Ted said, “Bummer!”

My husband doubled back to inspect the problem. “Oh, hell, now I feel like it’s my responsibility to fix the door,” my husband said. “Is everybody satisfied now? You’re going to be my assistant tomorrow, Ted, and we’ll get that room padlocked again while we’re at it.”

“Yo, world, the King is back!” Ted hollered, hardly worried about what he’d done, pumping his fist in the air. “Long live the King!”

“Shut up, Ted, you are so rude!” Blake said, kicking some pebbles aside.

“Hey, we could sell them on eBay and make enough money to go see an Elvis impostor in Vegas!” Ted said. He was quite keyed up. “All the food’s free in the casinos. One of them just kicked out Ben Affleck for like forever, because he was memorizing the cards played, or something. He won hundreds of thousands of dollars. I read about it in the doctor’s office.”

“I’m surrounded by morons,” Blake whispered harshly, seeming to be speaking to the moon. She looked over her shoulder at us, then picked up her pace and jogged toward home, head averted, hands clasped in loose fists in front of her.

I was just glad they were basically good kids. And I was glad, too, that there hadn’t been a refrigerator full of decapitated heads. It was so harmless — someone’s collection of Elvis lamps. Who wasn’t eccentric? This was really a modest collection, considering some of the things people amassed: Nazi helmets; pictures of freaks; old dental instruments.

“Mr. Duncan, that guy was gay!” Ted said.

“Well, what if he was?” my husband said.

“Gay!” Ted repeated. “Blake didn’t even get it that he was gay!”

My husband looked at Ted. I could almost hear him thinking, though I couldn’t read his mind. Finally, he said, “It certainly was something to see.”

“I’ve got to take really good photographs with my Nikon, Mr. Duncan,” Ted said. “Also, we didn’t search the cellar. Do you think there might have been real bodies down there?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my husband said. He turned to me, gesturing toward the Magerdons’ side yard. Andrea Magerdon was getting chemo in New York. We’d heard she was doing fine, but she wouldn’t be back until August. “Look at how well that trumpet vine’s growing,” he said. “Mine can’t even find the post.”

The following morning, though my husband left Ted two messages, he went back to the house alone to make the repairs, pretending to be more put out than he was. I walked partway with him, carrying a plastic gallon jug of water. The trumpet vine had been doing okay on its own, but the least I could do was pour some water on it, since the Magerdons obviously couldn’t. A month earlier I’d thought of watering what remained of their garden, but the water had been turned off.

Who should my husband run into, of course (I saw this from afar, and was glad I hadn’t accompanied him), but Barbara Gillicut, just starting up the walkway. “Hey, ho!” he called. “Barbara, please, a word.”

He told me later that she had not been at all amused. Clients were coming in fifteen minutes, and what were they going to see but a busted front door? He assured her that it wasn’t really damaged, and that he could fix it in five minutes. He gave her the usual talk about how kids will be kids, but these were actually pretty good kids. She disputed this, but he did discourage her from phoning Ted’s parents. “Ted and Genevieve and Blake!” he said to her. “What do you bet they all end up successful or famous or both, and we look back on this as their little misadventure, which is absolutely nothing compared to all the kids burning down buildings and beating up street people and torturing rabbits. Barbara, please!”

He fixed the door. He was gone before the people arrived. When my husband returned to the house, he told me that Barbara Gillicut had said that she’d only recently undone the lock herself. Usually she asked people to remove memorabilia when she was showing a house, but the “antique collection” had been so unusual, she thought it sort of broke the ice.

Elvis, an antique? His cars, certainly. But Elvis? With those dreamy eyes and his polite Southern manners? Elvis, who cared so kindly for his mother, Gladys, who did the right thing and joined the Army and went to Germany, where he met the little girl who’d become his bride, with her tower of black hair and her eyes outlined like Gene Simmons’s, a tiny baby in a pink blanket soon to appear in her arms?

“That Barbara Gillicut is really a battle-ax,” my husband said. “Her husband cheats at golf, too. She’s got those hippo hips and he’s as thin as my putter. No wonder he’s always sitting around the clubhouse drinking vodka tonics. I wouldn’t want to be married to her.” He put the screwdriver on the hall table. It always took him weeks to return anything to the basement after he’d made a repair or rehung a picture. And damned if I’d do it. Those things were his responsibility, as much as the kitchen was mine.

“Should I have taken it up with Ted when he said Elvis was gay?” he asked.

“Ted? Last night? He wasn’t saying Elvis was gay. No one thinks Elvis was gay, even though old ladies loved him. Liberace was gay. Though I guess they’ve never even heard of Liberace, unless some of them watched that Michael Douglas movie. He was saying that the owner was gay. Jon Enders.”

My husband considered the screwdriver. He scratched his earlobe. “Well, then, should I have said something about that, even if I misunderstood?”

“What would you have said?”