Ann Beattie - Love Always

He kissed her passionately. “Never leave me,” he said.

“No. All right,” she said, putting her hands on his shoulders and trying to push him back. She was getting flustered. “I’ll call you tonight.”

“You’re the most beautiful girl in the world,” he said, kissing her across the forehead.

“Shee-it,” the vending-machine man said, slamming the door shut.

Andrew loved that.

Finally she got on the plane. About an hour into the flight, the man sitting across the aisle from her struck up a conversation. When he referred to Andrew, he called him “your husband.” She didn’t correct him. He didn’t seem to be flirting, but she was prepared. She had never found anyone on a plane attractive and wondered who all those stewardesses found to marry. It said something about planes that she never desired anyone when she was a passenger, but the thought had crossed her mind quite a few times in the hospital.

The man said his father was picking him up at the airport. He all but insisted that since where she was going was right on their route, she must come with them. His father: what could be the harm? As they waited for the luggage, he looked around for his father. “Maybe he parked out front,” he said. Their bags finally came out, and she followed him to the door. He didn’t seem to know what to do when he didn’t see his father’s car. “I’ll call him,” he said, “but you go ahead. Sorry it didn’t work out.” By this time she felt some loyalty to him. Where was his father? She stood by his bags while he went inside and phoned. He came back shaking his head. “He forgot. He just plain forgot,” he said.

The man’s name was Evan. He asked if she would like to share a cab. They waited in line for a cab. It was hot, and the heat was visible, waving up from the asphalt. They finally got a cab. Her back stuck to the seat the minute she leaned against it. They talked about Andrew’s comic novel. Evan smiled politely but he didn’t really seem amused. Perhaps, like any joke, it was better in the telling — or reading — than in paraphrase. She didn’t tell stories well. Andrew was a great storyteller, and being with him, she realized that her speech was never very exciting, that she didn’t say witty things, that her stories lacked punch lines. Evan had seemed interested in talking to her on the plane — it was just when she began telling him about the book that he began to lose interest. When the cab pulled up in front of Lillian’s apartment building, he offered to carry her suitcase, but she told him that she could manage with no trouble. He gave her his card. “Call if you have time for coffee or a drink,” he said. She felt awkward suddenly, and wondered if he did too. Walking up the front steps, she thought of her friend Anita’s “Isn’t She Lovely” test. The categories were often changed to protect the innocent. Sometimes Anita would just hum the first bars of the Stevie Wonder song and Lillian would find herself making up categories and scoring everyone from the man in the car next to theirs to the elevator operator. Anita didn’t change the pronoun when the test applied to men. One of the first judgments made was that they fit the category. Evan got a 9 for looks, a 2 for economically feasible (he was a carpenter) and a 10 for chutzpa (he kissed her before she got out of the cab, then sat back, smiling, and let her carry the suitcase, as she said she would).

The truth was, she liked him. She thought about him, looked at his card quite a few times, and on Sunday she called. She told him, then, that it wasn’t what he thought: the man at the airport hadn’t been her husband, although she was committed to him. He told her the situation wasn’t what she thought: he had been attracted to her, and so sure she wouldn’t share a cab with him that he had made up the story about his father. His father lived in Arizona. They agreed to see each other on Wednesday. The next morning she did the cowardly thing and wrote him a note saying that she had made a mistake to call him. Much to her surprise, he didn’t respond. More than a week later, when Andrew was due in Boston, she got drunk during the afternoon and called Evan. “What do you want me to do?” he said. “If that’s the way you want it, there’s nothing I can say.” She was embarrassed, and they hung up. But that only fascinated her more: there was never, ever, a time when Andrew didn’t have something to say. When they were having good conversations, he would run out of the room and come back with the recorder, to help him with dialogue later. He wanted them to be very close, so whenever they had a disagreement, he would later say out loud what he intuited that she felt. It was scary; he would become her — when he spoke from what he thought to be her mind, even his face took on her likeness. It made her hate every thought she had, rational or irrational. She did know that he loved her madly. She had said that they would live together. So she tried to forget about Evan and what he might do. Anita called Evan “cocky” for what he had done; she didn’t believe that his response had been sincere, and she told Lillian to stay posted.

Then Andrew drove to Boston. There was much celebration because they had gotten the apartment and could move into it in August. Meanwhile, he would stay with her. The first night he was there, he picked up the phone and whoever it was hung up. It happened again the next morning. The next time the phone rang, Lillian picked it up. It was a literary agent; Andrew had given her Lillian’s number so that she could call if she was willing to take him on. One of the deciding factors — in fact, she was so sure of Andrew that she had already made the commitment, although she did not tell him this — was that she felt he would be the perfect man to write the novelization of Passionate Intensity . She was proud of herself for sounding so enthusiastic on the phone when she reached Andrew, for pointing out that the novelization would be published around the same time his real novel came out. She said that she was surprised that he had never heard of Nicole Nelson (one of the agents she worked with had filled her in about who she was). The next day, she Federal Expressed to him cassettes of four shows and a photocopy of the People magazine interview with the cast, plus a bio sheet on everyone. Lillian called Anita, and they arranged to go to her boyfriend Howley’s house in Cambridge, while he and Anita were seeing a movie at Coolidge Corner, to watch the shows on Howley’s Betamax.

“It’s real,” Andrew said. “You know what I mean? It’s almost primitive. Like tom-toms beaten before the kill. It’s just prolonged, made dramatic. So much happens. I see why this has captured people’s attention.”

“I’ve never heard of anybody who watches it,” Lillian said.

“It’s like General Hospital .”

“I’ve heard of plenty of people who watch General Hospital . I’ve never heard anybody talk about this show.”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Lillian said. “I think you should take the money and run.”

He looked at her. “It isn’t a question of that,” he said. “It’s a way to stimulate my own thinking.”

“About what? Abused children and promiscuous doctors? Don’t you think everybody thinks the same things about those clichés?”

“Lillian — there are many layers to everything. Subtleties.”

On the TV, Stephanie Sykes was locked in a bathroom, drinking from a flask. She was crying and disheveled, her eyes owllike with sadness. She heard a noise and raised the top of the toilet tank and dropped the flask in.

“Stephanie?” Gerald said. “Your mother has called from the hospital. She can’t take you to the rehearsal today, but when she gets home at midnight, she wants to go over your part with you. Stephanie — your real mother is going to be in the audience on Saturday. There is no way that … that Cora can stop it. Your real mother is in a prison hospital now, darling. And the patients who are well enough are going to come to the performance. Do you … what shall I say to Cora?”