Ann Beattie - Love Always

Edward made them tabouli burgers for lunch. He had brought these, frozen, in a cooler that said It’s Miller Time! from Los Angeles.

Over lunch, he gave Nicole pointers on how to be popular. “First of all, if you’re lucky enough to be an object to people, you can’t go wrong. They just care about what you look like — they don’t want to hear what you have to say, and they don’t not want to hear what you have to say. So with them, you’re just talking to amuse yourself. I find that two things are very useful when you want to put yourself across. The first one is to know about a dozen pieces of misinformation, and then to know what the correct information is. Take this for an example: Most people think that Humphrey Bogart said, ‘Drop the gun, Louis.’ What did he really say?”

Nicole frowned. “Lauren Bacall was married to him, wasn’t she?” she said.

“What did he say?” Lucy said.

“He said, ‘Not so fast, Louis.’ ” Edward looked at Lucy. “Now here’s what you do to make an impression. You work the conversation around to Humphrey Bogart, and when somebody comes out with a famous line — everybody loves to do their Bogart routine, so you’re usually in luck — you mention that he didn’t say that at all, but that it’s always misquoted. Say it casually, so you don’t seem like a snot. Tell them the right line. And this part is crucial: if they ask you where you found something out, never tell them. Make them think that you always knew it. You have to be nice about that, too, or they’ll think you’re a snot. Obviously, you can go wrong with this routine, so you’ve got to be careful.”

“Do you do this stuff?” Nicole asked.

“If I have to. To tell you the truth, it works better for women than for men. But the other thing I’m going to tell you will work for anybody. Everybody talks about the weather, right? And if they don’t, it’s the easiest thing in the world to make them talk about it. So what you do is you really know something about the weather. Say you’re with a bunch of people and a wind blows up. Or there’s no wind at all — you can still use it. You get the subject around to the wind, and then you mention the Worcester tornado of 1953. You lead up to it, actually, by not naming it so officially, so that people think you memorized some arcane information. You say, ‘This reminds me of that tornado in Massachusetts,” and of course somebody’ll ask what you’re talking about. Tell them the one that happened in the early fifties. That’s the trick. You let them draw you out, so that you become progressively more specific. Then whatever you say will have a real impact. Then you move in for the kill: you tell them the thing cut through Rutland, Barre, and Worcester and killed more than sixty people. You don’t want to have too many facts. You don’t want to tell them how many were injured. Also, you don’t want to mention the weather more than once in one night. It can also make people very nervous.”

“I don’t know,” Nicole said. “Last year I had to memorize all these Shakespearean sonnets that didn’t make any sense. The guy had some good ideas, but he was always going off … it was like the teacher expected you to remember what some guy said when he’d tied a couple on. Now you want me to memorize things about tornadoes?”

“Forget education,” Edward said. “The difference between what I’m telling you and education is that this stuff will help you. Memorize it, then get loose, make it seem natural that you know about disasters.”

“Maybe being smart would distract me. I don’t want to be frustrated when I get roles and be like Kate and some of those people who think their characters never know enough, and they should be so intelligent and everything.”

“Hey, you’re playing the game,” Edward said. “You’ve got to know some things to talk about so you can stay on top. You’ve got to figure out a way to stay on top, whether you’re a phony or a real person.”

Well, Lucy thought, maybe this was, after all, just a strange version of summer camp she was running in the backyard, where the big kids gave the little kids pointers about proper behavior in deep water.

AT eight o’clock on the Fourth of July, Hildon and Maureen, Lucy and Nicole, Noonan and his newly acquired lover Peter, pulled into the Birches to pick up Edward. They were going to drive into town and have a drink on the patio outside the inn, then walk down the hill to see the fireworks. Peter’s car was a repainted, refurbished Checker cab. It was silver, with a black roof. The jump seats were upholstered with leopardskin; there was a black bear rug on the back floor. It was the sort of car any cop would give his eyeteeth to stop.

Peter specialized in in utero surgery: According to Noonan, he made vasts amounts of money, which he also invested wisely. He had bought into Coleco pre-Cabbage Patch and sold pre-Adam. Currently, he had been buying stock in a company that produced herbal vinegar. He felt that the vinegar market was always expanding.

Maureen was wearing a white T-shirt, patterned with red stars, and navy-blue culottes.

Hildon had opened a bottle of Dom Pérignon, and was pouring it, badly, into plastic cups.

Even with the windows open, marijuana smoke lingered in the air; it was enough to give anyone a contact high.

Noonan was singing “Yankee Doodle.”

Nicole said, “I’m glad that there’s some life in this town.”

Peter was turning around one of the rotaries. It was filled with petunias and marigolds. Life in this town? Obviously, Nicole meant that they were lively, inside the car: they were passing the Ben Franklin, the church, and other cars, with couples in the front and babies in back. Some days Lucy felt as embarrassed not to have a baby in this town as she had felt in high school when everybody else had a little ladybug pin on the collar of her blouse. It was as though the rest of the world paid attention to detail, lived by it, and she was the outsider, not bonded to anyone by any discernible symbol. A bee that had buzzed in one window flew out the other. Everyone ducked. That was why she had thought about ladybugs and Ladybug blouses. Not because she felt like an outsider, but because the bee flying through the car …

“I just filled it two seconds ago,” Hildon laughed. He clapped his hand over her knee. It steadied her, and that felt absolutely wonderful. In the three seconds that he had his hand clapped over her knee, Maureen had looked at Hildon, while Hildon was looking at Lucy’s legs. Then Maureen had caught Lucy’s eye. Lucy had been looking at her.

In the front seat, Peter said, “For instance: basil repels mosquitoes. So when you add basil to vinegar …”

“I’m so glad I changed my life,” Noonan said, massaging Peter’s neck.

“I’m going to be a millionaire,” Hildon said, drinking the last of the champagne straight from the bottle.

“I don’t even believe what people on the East Coast are like,” Nicole said.

Before Nicole came, Jane had told Lucy that in preparation for her trip, Nicole was reading Main Street . While she had been reading the Enquirer , Nicole had been reading Sinclair Lewis.

Already, firecrackers were exploding, Peter parked in a crosswalk, across from the inn.

“Just think,” Edward said. “Next year at this time, little girls will be taking their Nicole Nelson doll to the fireworks. They’ll be combing her hair and losing her little shoes and crying. Their baby sisters and brothers will be teething on her head. They’ll save their allowance to buy a poodle for Nicole to walk on a leash. They’ll all want to grow up, shrink, and be plastic.”