Ann Beattie - Love Always

The music came up, sudden and loud enough to explain, by itself, why Stephanie, at that moment, collapsed in the bathroom.

“You must know, darling,” Gerald said to the unconscious body on the other side of the door, “that Cora and I believe in you. We believe that you will go on to be a great dancer. Darling, you must know that … we are your real family.”

More music. Lillian looked at Andrew.

“Why doesn’t the person who writes the dialogue write the novel?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but you should never look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“This isn’t a gift horse — this is an albatross.”

Andrew looked shocked. Then his face lit up. “What a brilliant way of putting it,” he said. He put his arms around her and kissed her. “There’s no one like you,” he said. “When my agent sells Buzz and I get the money for this novelization, we’re going to have the most splendid wedding in the world.”

He put on the next cassette. Apparently, his agent had not sent four consecutive programs, but an assortment. In this one, some doctor was kissing Cora’s toes and nuzzling her ankle. They were in an office at the hospital, and suddenly a nurse walked in. That would never happen that way. In real hospitals, what was going on was always so shocking that everyone knew enough not to open doors. It simply wasn’t done, without knocking. Jane Austen’s characters would have been perfectly comfortable in Mass. General. Lillian said this.

“You mean so much to me,” Andrew said. “I worship that strange, wonderful mind. I missed you so much when we were apart. A writer’s life is so lonely, and to have found a soulmate …”

When Anita and Howley came home, they were still watching.

“Another goddamn plodding movie about some guy that’s obsessed,” Howley said. “He’s driving around, listening to crap on the radio, and thinking about this woman, and outside the car there are magnificent, snow-covered mountains, and he’s so out of it, he’s just whizzing by, going to meet this woman for two seconds just to have a look at her … I paid good money to see that?”

Howley stood in front of Lillian, blocking her view. “What the hell is this?” Howley said.

“Passionate Intensity ,” Andrew said.

“What in the hell is happening in this world?” Howley said. “This thing looks like a soap opera.”

“It is a soap opera, Howley,” Anita said.

“It’s like General Hospital ,” Andrew said.

“Yeah?” Howley said, kicking the footstool away from the chair and sitting on it. “Famous people do cameos?”

“Is this the show that had Elizabeth Taylor?” Anita said, sitting on the floor, next to Howley.

“I don’t know,” Andrew said.

“That was General Hospital . I don’t think she was on two of them,” Lillian said.

“Make us drinks, baby,” Howley said. “I’d do it just to seem liberated, but it breaks my heart to put as much ice in a glass as you like. You’d better make them.”

“None for me, thanks,” Andrew said. “It’s not true that all writers have a problem with alcohol.”

“I’ll have one,” Lillian said.

“Now how do you figure in this?” Howley said.

“I’m going to get inside their minds,” Andrew said. “I’m going to add dimension to what’s going on. I’ll be enlarging those characters, subtly telling the public what they are and what they aren’t.”

“I can tell you what they aren’t,” Howley said. “They’re not real. There’s not a guy on this show that would spit crossing the street.”

“Make drinks and don’t put ice in them; that’s fine with me,” Anita said, hugging his leg.

“That’s Stephanie Sykes,” Andrew said, when Nicole came on the screen. “Look at that face. They picked her because she’s got depth.”

Howley turned from the screen and looked at Andrew. Lillian looked at Anita.

“Come on,” Anita said to Lillian. “Help me pour whiskey in glasses.”

Lillian got up. All the tumbling and talking on the screen was making her exhausted. She wanted to bolt down a whiskey or two before she had to get up and go home.

In the kitchen, Lillian and Anita heard the bloodhounds, wailing in the backyard. They let them in, and they tore into the living room. They ran to Howley, and he reached down and stroked their ears. The dogs joined the crowd, mesmerized by people crying on Passionate Intensity .

NICOLE answered the phone, so she was the first to get the news of Jane’s marriage. One week after Nicole flew East, Jane had married the twenty-four-year-old would-be tennis pro. Piggy Proctor had given her away. They were married in a friend’s backyard. She could not remember the names of the friends, because they were Piggy’s friends, not hers. In attendance were Piggy, Piggy’s wife, and Piggy’s mother, who was visiting for the week.

Nicole tried to sound cold, but she had to fight back tears. “Why wasn’t I there?” she said.

“It was sudden,” Jane said. “It was just something that we had to do, and it seemed silly to make a big production of it and have you fly back—”

“See how you like it when I do this to you,” Nicole said.

“I didn’t do it to you ,” Jane said.

“Yeah. You were just feeling up and thought you’d marry that guy.”

“We’re all going to be happy together. Even Piggy loves him.”

“No way,” Nicole said. “Piggy gets it together when he has to get it together.”

“You know how much I love you,” Jane said. “Don’t sulk.”

“You’re my mother, not my director,” Nicole said.

Lucy was standing in the kitchen doorway. Nicole handed her the phone. A few minutes later Nicole was slumped in a chair on the side lawn. She was painting her toenails.

“Tell me about it,” Nicole said. “Tell me about how great it is that I have a twenty-four-year-old stepfather. That would make him ten when I was born. I’m supposed to call him Daddy? His balls hadn’t dropped when I was born.”

“Nobody said you have to call him Daddy,” Lucy said. She was upset, but she didn’t think it would be a good idea to make Nicole any more upset than she already was. Lucy was remembering Jane’s first marriage, and how she had immediately taken a deep breath and tried to keep their mother calm by pretending that everything was fine. Jane had married the first rich man who proposed. He had saved her from a dreary life as a model, living in a shared studio apartment with another girl, who was studying languages. Jane had become a cliché: the beautiful, intelligent, aspiring New York girl who lives with her expansive ideas in one room, with a full-length mink in the closet and a purebred kitten for company. Lucy had been to the apartment. Jane’s desk was also her makeup table and her bureau drawer. She slept on a thin mattress, folding it so that it would fit partially under the desk and sleeping with her shoulders and head in the kneehole tunnel so that her roommate wouldn’t trip over her if she went to the bathroom during the night. The desk drawer was filled with piles of pastel underwear, boxes of cosmetics, love letters tied neatly together with ribbon. The same drawer held her checkbook, her diaphragm, and four boxes of Joy which had been given to her in exchange for twenty subway tokens by a photographer’s assistant who had been given the perfume by a client. Lucy had been with Jane when she made the exchange. Later, when Lucy lived in New York, too, she understood these trades: the cumulative effect of the desperation — all the things dreamed of and coveted — resulted in an atmosphere in which lesser things meant nothing. Small things were small things: to be shoplifted, given away, swapped for other small things. The two-carat diamond Jane was offered at the end of her first year in the city was no small thing, and she promptly agreed to get married. Her former roommate recited love poems in French, Italian, and Turkish. The Beatles, piped through her mother’s sound system, sang “The Long and Winding Road.” Under her wedding dress, Jane wore a garter she had been given by a man she picked up hitchhiking on the Cape the previous fall, with “Obladi, Oblada” spelled out in rhinestones. She sprayed on the Joy the way woodsmen apply Deep Woods Off. The shoes were Eighth Street pink satin, with three-inch heels. She held tight to Lucy’s hand when she walked out of the bedroom and started down the corridor to the living room of what was by then only their mother’s house. A man played “Here Comes the Bride” on a pump organ that had been brought in for the day. The best man, the groom’s brother, was a retired jockey from Columbus. Jane and Lucy exchanged looks during the ceremony. Lucy had forgotten what those secret looks meant. Her personal secret had been that she did not know what was happening. Why hold herself accountable when her own sister was happy to have everything go up in dust, particularly white dust, inhaled through one nostril? Years later, in nightmares, that organ music still came back to her. Even at the time, it sounded like what would be played in a B movie when someone was drowning. And then Jane’s husband had drowned.