Ann Beattie - Love Always

“You know,” she said, “hardly anybody writes letters anymore.”

“Easier to call,” he said.

“But if you have a letter you can reread it.”

He made a mental note: Send her letters. Love letters. It would be something private between them.

“How many letters have you actually reread?”

“I can’t think of the last time I got a real letter. I guess from my mother, when I was in nursing school. I was lonesome, and I always reread those.”

Her mother had emphysema. This was not a good topic of conversation.

“Want to leave the car here and walk to the inn the guy at the desk told us about?”

“Sure,” she said.

She was relieved. She had felt as if they were two adults, playing at conversation. She suddenly remembered the letter she had written Evan — the last letter she had written. She wished that instead of their speaking on the phone he had written back. She thought she would be better able to puzzle out what he had said if she could look at it. Who was she kidding? His tone of voice had told her he was sincere. Anything could be written in a letter. The voice gave it away. What had he said: “There’s nothing I can do about that.” He was right, of course; here she was at the Birches with Andrew, in Vermont, and there was nothing he could do.

There was something she could do.

She was shocked at her thought. She had almost put him out of her mind, and for no reason, on the ride, she had started thinking about him again. It was because she had trouble extending her seat belt. She had had a similar problem on the plane, trying to clamp her seat belt shut. There had been a piece of cardboard in it; she had pulled it out, knowing the man across the aisle was watching, thinking that she was some dumb woman, too inexperienced to know how to close a seat belt. And that thing he had said to her about his father, who didn’t even live in Boston. She had really thought that was very inventive. And it was equally unusual for him to have then told her the truth. She could see his face quite distinctly. She just had, when she was resting on the bed with her eyes closed.

Some people were playing croquet on the lawn that stretched beside the parking lot. One ball cracked against another, and a teenage girl jumped up and down, clapping. The man who was playing with her gave her a look of exaggerated dismay. When Lillian looked over her shoulder, expecting to see the man going down the slight slope to try to hit his ball back up to the playing area, she did a double take: he was standing with his arms around the girl. They were kissing, his mallet thrown in the grass.

They passed a little row of shops as they walked past the green: Aubuchon Hardware, a hobby shop, a laundromat, a pizza restaurant. The laundromat had window boxes on the side, planted with petunias and marigolds. A few cars drove by. The breeze felt good. She had gotten hot in the car, and sitting for that long made her stiff; she felt like a gingerbread man, baked and then put out to cool. There was a large white church on their right, with a tall spire. Two people sat on the lawn, talking. It seemed like a very nice town: small, quiet, pretty. She didn’t think she agreed with Andrew, although he was much smarter than she was, that anything that seemed simple was really a deception. She thought that maybe you did become a different person, depending on where you lived.

They walked down the hill, and as they did, the breeze came up stronger. They walked up the flagstone steps to the front door, and Andrew held the door open for her. There was a deep-green rug in the lobby, patterned to look like it had been stenciled. The walls were white, with punched tin lights hanging every six feet or so. There was a sign, with an arrow pointing left, in front of the high front desk: Cocktails on Patio. The man behind the desk smiled as they walked by. She was sure that they looked like a married couple. When she was in college she always read wedding announcements in the paper, to figure out whether the bride or groom was getting the better deal. She looked at people’s left hands to see if there was a ring. She couldn’t think of the last time she had looked at the page of wedding announcements. Or of the last time she had been to a wedding.

The girl who seated them was all smiles. The deck was crowded. She gave them a table in the last patch of sun, asking if this was all right.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Evan. She thought that discussing him with Andrew might exorcise him. She ordered a rum and tonic. Andrew ordered scotch and water. She looked at the engagement ring. He saw her looking, and smiled. She smiled back. Church bells started ringing just at that instant. The timing was either so appropriate or inappropriate that she continued to smile. Andrew put his hand over hers.

A man, woman, and little girl sat a couple of tables away. The man had two large dots of calamine lotion on his forehead. He and the woman were drinking a bottle of wine. The little girl was swishing her fingers in the ice bucket.

“Thirty dollars a ticket?” the man said. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. You can never sit close enough to see the performers, anyway. It’s better to watch it on television.”

“It’s not on television,” the little girl said.

“It’ll be on television eventually,” he said.

“I’m going to call the baby-sitter and let her know we’re going to be awhile longer,” the woman said. As she pushed her chair back, Lillian looked at her left hand, then looked back at her own table as the cocktail waitress put the drinks down. The little white napkins blew in the breeze.

“If I have half the money for a Walkman, you’ll buy it for me the next time we go to Burlington, right?” the little girl said.

“I don’t like the idea of them,” the man said.

“But you’re wrong,” she said. “You can hear through them. You can hear everything everybody’s saying.”

“But you don’t pay attention to it,” he said.

“You don’t always pay attention.”

“But I don’t have something clamped over my ears,” he said. He put his hands over his ears. She looked at him awhile, then tried to tug them away. She couldn’t budge his arms.

“That’s not what it’s like,” she said, pulling. “Come on — that’s not fair.”

The man started to hum and tap his foot, looking off in the distance. The little girl, half amused and half angry, continued to pull his arms.

Lillian tried to think what it must be like to be a parent. She hoped that Andrew’s agent’s plan for having the two books come out simultaneously would launch him on a lucrative literary career, and that she wouldn’t have to go back to work once their first child was born.

She thought about Evan kissing her, in the cab. She reached for her drink and drank half of it.

“Did I ever tell you about the time F. Scott Fitzgerald was riding up Fifth Avenue, and it was such a sunny, perfect day — he was on his way to the Plaza — that he burst into tears because he thought he would never be that happy again?” Andrew said.

“Yes,” she said.

“You know,” Andrew said, “I think that eventually we should move to New York, when I start to be well known. I think that’s the place to be.”

“I sort of like small towns,” she said.

“I don’t want to be anonymous,” he said.

“A lot of famous writers live in small towns.”

“Well, if you’re really famous, you can do that. I think that first you have to go to New York, then move away.” He took a sip of his drink. “Nothing’s going on in small towns,” he said. “Nobody’s thinking anything new.”

“What about Main Street? Peyton Place? Our Town ?”

“It’s better when things are on the surface,” he said. “I like it better when all that excitement is out there, in the air.”