Ann Beattie - The State We're In

“When’s this happening? You think they might need extras?”

“Oh, I remember when you did want to be an actress, and then when you sang and played guitar with your brother and you two harmonized with those sweet voices, and his singing was almost as high as yours. He became a tenor, which amazes me. He loves to sing again, did I tell you that? They’ve formed a band with some sarcastic name. Last week he called in the middle of the afternoon to apologize to me for all the trouble he’d caused. I know they make them do that.”

“They can’t make them.”

“Then they said they’d double their meds and give them no ice cream, or something. I don’t know. It’s not that pleasant to get calls like that in the middle of the afternoon. I was having a quiet moment, and suddenly there was your brother’s voice, all choked up. He went into the whole thing about the skirmish last year when he got back to my car and it had been booted. I had to live through that again, his punching the policeman. What a traumatic day.”

“I love you and I’m happy to hear from you, but I’m naked and greasy with suntan lotion, so can I call back?”

“Don’t bother. But you do know there’s a storm coming? Maybe they’ll be checking in to make a horror movie, or one of those vampire things that I’m not supposed to call ‘horror movies.’ Larry’s daughter has written a script for one of those at UCLA. He wanted me to read it, as though I could differentiate one from another. You’re not going to do anything stupid, like break up Hughes’s relationship with Elizabeth, are you? It kills me that I have to know you’re at a motel with a friend’s daughter’s boyfriend.”

“Anorexic bitch,” Moira said.

“I’m not going to respond to that,” her mother said. “You remember that if Hughes cheats on her with you, he’ll cheat on you with someone else. But I really only called to say I love you no matter what you do and because of the strange coincidence of the Polanski thing. Well, it’s a small world. Not that he can move around it freely. Anyway, Daddy sends love. He’s doing great today. He loves the new afternoon attendant. They go to a park and listen to birdcalls together. Your father has two pairs of binoculars that would allow anyone living here to see into Buckingham Palace. Love you. Bye.”

“Bye,” she said.

There was a knock on the door. Hughes had, as usual, forgotten his key? (Real keys! So cool.) She wrapped the towel around her and said, “Yes?” at the door.

“I have free drink coupons for a new bar that opened a few nights ago. We would like you to have them,” Kunal said.

“Thank you, Kunal. Can you just push them under the door? No. I guess you can’t. Can I get them from you when I get out of the shower? I was just—”

“Extremely sorry,” Kunal said. “Hughes said to please give them to you. He said he loses everything.”

She opened the door a crack and reached out. Two pieces of paper were put in her hand. “Thanks so much,” she said, to Kunal’s embarrassed, trailed off “Sorry to interrupt.”

In the distance she could hear the wind rustling the trees. It was great they didn’t need air-conditioning. She heard faint music she knew was not Kunal’s, so maybe it was wind chimes. The towel was nice, thick enough, neither limp nor stiff. She’d brought her own favorite soap with her. Kunal had liked it so much, she’d given him the other bar (lemon verbena and sage). Every day, they left a note for Kunal saying simply, “Thank you,” and a ten-dollar bill. They’d found a vase of ivy near the book on the night table, with one white daisy plunked in the center of the real glass vase. Now, there were free drink coupons.

She stepped into the shower. Her mother was right about Hughes cheating. But what if they had a few good years? Or what if the cheating was somehow, miraculously, kept secret? What if she cheated? That wouldn’t be impossible, would it? As she began to smell like an herb garden, she thought: Elizabeth, with your smell of roses, just find someone else. You’d never lighten up enough to have a drink at a bar, even if it was free, would you? You could just disappear, Elizabeth, like a strand of hair going down the drain. After every shower, she herself had to dab up any hair that might have fallen with a crumpled Kleenex. It was gross, but Hughes thought finding hair in the drain was grosser. When she turned the water off, she realized she’d forgotten to wind the towel around her hair and it was damp. How preoccupied with that woman am I? she wondered. Then she stepped out onto the bath rug that even Hughes agreed was totally clean and began to towel off, first blotting her stomach, then gathering the towel together to rub it over her pubic hair. She had the legs of a young girl, athletic and unmarred. She’d inherited them from her mother, though her mother had also been responsible for her not very pretty mouth. She resisted looking in the mirror.

“Hughes!” she called, as she walked across the parking lot toward the pool. He was underwater, clutching his knees. Bubbles rose to the surface. Yes, there were wind chimes on the lower branch of the tree at the far side of the pool. She hadn’t noticed them before.

“What a beauty!” he said when he surfaced, shaking his head; tilting it, really, to get water out of his ears. “How do I deserve such a beautiful woman and free drink tickets besides?”

“I thought you didn’t approve of my drinking.”

“Free?” he said.

They laughed. They laughed when they watched Jon Stewart, often. When they watched old Fawlty Towers . He thought Louis C.K. was a riot. She laughed, a little meanly, when he reached into food she’d prepared in her apartment and brought out an infinitesimally thin strand not of hair but the stem of some herb, a bit of oregano, something like that. On a scale of one to one hundred, she thought she loved him more than eighty.

“It’s not going to storm. It blew over,” he said, climbing one-handed up the ladder. “This situation with Bezos and the Washington Post is an interesting one. He wasn’t so high and mighty he didn’t get in touch with Bob Woodward right away for advice. He — Bezos, I mean — has got a skunk works team in New York now, called WPNYC, which is a great idea. I think he’s going to turn it around.”

“Skunk works?” she said. The wind chimes were tinkling in the breeze. She was not so sure the storm had passed over.

“How about a little fooling around, followed by a brief nap, then drinks?” he said.

“How much do you love me, on a scale of one to one hundred?” she said.

Oh god, whatever had made her ask that? What, what, what.

He tucked in his chin. Water streamed down his body, which was a good body. He worked out. His business partner had turned out to be a genius, but an out-of-shape one, so Hughes had become the front man. One of Hughes’s first moves had been to hire his old school buddy from Maine, who was a dynamite deal finalizer, though lately he’d been complaining about all the commuting from Maine to California.

Moira, looking at Hughes, thought: Would he have said exactly the same thing to Elizabeth, would he have called her beautiful, if he’d brought her to the Nevada Sunset?

“One hundred,” he said, after too much delay. “But if we could please put relationship talk on hold? I’m not in the mood today, Moira, I’m really not.”

To change the subject, she said, “My mother called. She sends you her best. She said that of all things, she found out some movie is going to be filmed at this motel. Not today, I wouldn’t guess. Except for the Norwegians, nobody seems to be checking in regardless of the price, which is odd.”

“You don’t think this place is just a bit obscure?”