Ann Beattie - Love Always

“Did you see which way those arrows were pointing?” the attendant said.

“You see which way my finger is pointing?” Piggy said, holding up his middle finger.

The attendant laughed. “What do I want to fight for?” he said.

“Have a real life experience. Put it in your screenplay,” Piggy said.

“My screenplay’s about a whorehouse in a cave in prehistoric times,” the man said. “I want De Niro to play the bouncer. You think knocking your teeth down your throat would add anything?”

“I like that,” Piggy said. “A man who’s got confidence. You assume that you’d knock my teeth out. Confidence is the name of the game.”

The man gave him his change.

Piggy unfolded the piece of paper in his pocket and glanced at it.

“You going to be the new William Butler Yeats?” he said.

“Screw that,” the cashier said, as the bar rose in front of Piggy’s car. “I’m gonna be the next Robert Towne.”

Piggy made it almost all the way back to the office before it hit him that Jane was dead, and he had to turn off the street and dry his eyes in a parking lot. Through his tears he saw a neon burger with beads of light blinking around it. The lettuce that ruffled out from under the roll was blue. The bun was yellow. Piggy looked away, up at the sky. The sky was blue. He blew his nose. Thank God: the sky was blue.

THE day was perfect. Everything caught the light: the leaves of the aspen trees flickered silver and green as they blew in the breeze, birds and butterflies seemed irradiated — even the pebbles in the big circular driveway of the Birches glowed like shells underwater, and simple weeds seemed beautiful.

Andrew Steinborn and Lillian Worth were officially engaged. Her engagement ring, a small diamond in an elaborate platinum setting that had once belonged to Andrew’s grandmother, seemed larger when it caught the light.

Andrew considered this a pre-honeymoon. They were going to be married the first of September, but since Passionate Intensity was due at the end of September, he wouldn’t be able to take a real honeymoon with Lillian for a while. The room at the Birches was free, and Boston was hot. He had been able to persuade Lillian to come with him. Actually, she had been glad to come, because she was starting to get cold feet about the wedding, and she thought the trip with Andrew would solidify their relationship. She had tossed around the idea of seeing Evan again, letting Andrew go to Vermont alone. She was ashamed of herself; he was a wonderful person, enthusiastic about his work and enthusiastic about her, on his way to a successful career. It seemed strange to think of being the wife of Andrew Steinborn the famous writer. He might like to think of himself as F. Scott Fitzgerald, but she certainly did not envision herself as Zelda, who was clearly a vain, neurotic woman. She would not pull Andrew down, but would support him. On the ride up, she had read him plot summaries of Passionate Intensity programs, and when that got to be too much of a chore, she read some poems from The Complete Poems of Robert Frost , which Andrew suggested might put them in the mood for Vermont. The poems weren’t what she expected: they seemed laconic and confusing — brain teasers, almost. Perhaps that was just because anything would pale in comparison with the plots of Passionate Intensity .

It would all be much easier to take if Andrew would just admit that the show was only a soap opera. Why did he insist that it was something more — that there were subtleties and hidden complexities in the characters, and that to the intelligent viewer the show was more than entertainment. If he had been a nurse as long as she had, he wouldn’t have such an interest in fathoming the thoughts of hysterics.

Lillian wasn’t sure what the purpose of these interviews was, either. She suspected that the actors just played their parts with no more thought about their characters’ inner workings than a keypunch operator whose job it was to use a machine. But that was why he was a writer and she was not. Her job was technical, really, but it was always easy for Andrew to imagine that someone imagined something. He thought of people as existing both within and beyond themselves. He wasn’t put off by people’s complexity. He actually enjoyed it. He thought that people, without realizing it, were always in the process of figuring out themselves and others: there was a constant molting going on, and only the foolish wouldn’t want to observe the feathers and bone exposed. It did make him, as her friend Anita said, a little too serious. Intense, Lillian thought: not serious. She wished she had been quick-witted enough at the time to say that.

They were registered at the Birches as Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Steinborn. There wasn’t a phone in the room, so while she showered and changed her clothes, he went down the hall to phone Nicole Nelson. Alone in the room, she touched the wallpaper (the eagles weren’t really raised; they just looked that way) and opened the closet door. When she was alone in a hotel, she never used the closet. She threw clothes over the chair or on the spare bed. She took two dresses out of her suitcase and put them on hangers. The Bermuda shorts wouldn’t wrinkle. Nothing else really had to be hung up. She closed the closet door and sat on the bed, looking out the window. There were large shade trees that almost blocked her view of the Green Mountains. As they checked in, the man behind the desk had mentioned that the inn, a quick drive and a pleasant walk away, served cocktails outside, and that the view of the mountains was particularly good in early evening, when shadows started to spread. She wondered what it would be like to live in a town like this. She looked in the desk and found one postcard and one envelope. There was also a pen: black plastic, with the end cut on the diagonal, to be used as a letter opener. It struck her that she hardly ever wrote or received letters anymore.

Andrew came back to the room. “No answer,” he said. He had tried to call before, from the road, to confirm the next day’s appointment. Lillian could tell that he was getting worried.

“You’ll get her eventually,” she said.

“I hope so,” he said. “I’m more interested in her than the other characters. She’s really the center, you know?”

Lillian was tired of thinking of Passionate Intensity . She stretched out on the bed. He went to the window and positioned himself so he could see around the trees as well as possible to the mountains. He was tired from the drive and thought that a drink might help him unwind. He realized that Lillian was stretched out behind him. They had been in motels together before, but no place as classy as this. He felt like a child playing grown-up. There was something a little intimidating about playing Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Steinborn on such an elaborate set. F. Scott Fitzgerald had felt what he was feeling now: that so much was expected when you were in a high-class, adult world. Maybe that was why he liked Zelda so much — because she cut through all that, she insisted on remaining the child. Or the enfant terrible . He wished that Lillian would get up, come over to him. For a writer, it was strange that his imagination failed him so often when he needed it. He just wished that there was some way to connect, and not to feel awkward about it. He turned and smiled at her.

Her eyes were closed. She looked small, centered on the nubbly white bedspread. He looked back out the window, then decided to make a little noise to get her attention. He pulled open the desk drawer. Nothing much inside. He pushed it closed. When he looked at her again, she was looking at him.