Ann Beattie - Love Always

“Thanks,” Nicole said, relaxing in spite of herself. She was remembering the day St. Francis ran away, the day of Les’s visit, when Lucy told her that things were complicated. She wanted to sit and have Lucy brush her hair, but she was late already. Harry Woods had the afternoon off, and if she didn’t get to his apartment in time, he would go off with one of his friends instead of waiting around to go to bed with her. If she didn’t blow it — if she let Lucy feel helpful, and if she herself enjoyed the hair-brushing — it would all work out. She was glad that she had better survival skills than her mother. That she understood how to be patient. Her mouth turned up in a smile, as if the slight tug of the brush through her hair moved her mouth as well as her neck, which was now tipped back, hair spilling over the back of the chair.

Lucy had brushed Jane’s hair — brushed it so often that their mother complained that it made it oily and that then Jane had to wash it too often. In truth, Lucy loved to brush more than Jane liked the feel of it. She had always hoped to hypnotize Jane, mesmerize her. She remembered how frustrating it was when Jane abruptly struggled to sit up and get on with other things. “Sit still,” she could remember saying, half pleading with her sister. “Let me brush your hair. Stay still.” Whispering urgently, “Stay still, Jane. Just stay still.”

THE boy wondered if, after he finished this assignment, Hildon would call him again. When he had videotaped three things for someone, he considered him a steady customer. He stood in one spot in Hildon’s office for the most part, taping Hildon as he took the pictures off the wall and stacked them in a carton. The boy’s father and mother were crazy about Country Daze . He had never read it, but he thought that Hildon was probably a very good editor. In his experience, crazy people who fixated on something accomplished a lot. If he had thought it was any of his business, he would have asked Hildon why he was leaving. For most of the summer he had taped weddings — recording drunken relatives and red-eyed brides and hovering grooms in large tents or on green rolling lawns, moving through crowds while infants had their diapers changed behind bushes and panting dogs stuck their snouts in fat ladies’ crotches. Everyone always got drunk and clowned for the camera, or made fools of themselves by accident, trying to straighten up and act proper, but managing only to lurch around like passengers on the deck of a ship in a storm. The boy insisted on two-thirds payment up front, because there had been some tense times when people didn’t like what they saw. It was as if they thought they’d hired Renoir but gotten footage from the Maysles’.

The boy would not have to edit the tape. Hildon didn’t want it edited. He let almost everything be filmed the way the boy thought best, except for telling him about the few things he wanted him to come in on close, such as the contents of his top drawer, a pan of the desk top … Though Hildon wasn’t very talkative, he had said that he loved video because it allowed people to make their own time capsule.

He stepped closer. Through the lens, he saw the clutter of the top drawer: the bright red of a Swiss Army knife, some wrinkled dollar bills, new ones, quite green, like uncurling Jack-in-the-Pulpits that pushed out of the ground in the spring. Loose change, a checkbook, some SX 70s, a wooden letter opener. Junk.

Hildon took a break from packing and stood looking out the window. The boy filmed his back until that got boring, then moved the camera to the coffee table, littered with more things: a pile of magazines, a bottle of vitamins, a stone statue of what looked like an Eskimo woman with a glass ashtray balanced on top. The boy moved in on it. For a second his hand was a blur in front of the lens, while he figured out how the ashtray was balanced. It was glued. There were matchbooks thrown on the table, a squeeze bottle of Cutter, an extension cord, and pens pointing every which way, like pick-up sticks. He moved the camera back to Hildon as he pulled the telephone out of the jack and put it in the carton with the pictures. He filmed him taking the books out of the bookcase and stacking them on the desk, then looking around for something to put them in. Through the lens, everything on the desk top took on a sameness: the brass box looked very much like the silver compass, which in turn looked very much like the paperweight. What the boy took to be a picture of Hildon’s wife was Lucy Spenser — a picture taken the summer before at a town fair. He focused on that for a while, because he was sure that it had more sentimental value than, say, the metal ruler, or the dictionary.

He photographed Hildon from the top of the stairs, holding the camera on him as he walked gingerly down, carrying the first of many cartons.

Later, when the videotape was delivered to Hildon, he looked for a long time at his back and his shoulders. Then he fast-forwarded through the long descent and ascent of the stairs. He went back to regular speed and found the sweat on his top lip of some interest. He looked at himself closely. He was definitely more handsome than Les Whitehall. He was surprised now, as he watched the pictures come off the walls and saw the pillows removed from the long sofa, how quickly the office seemed anonymous, that it seemed never to have been his at all. The letters and telegrams might have been sent to anybody; the pictures were almost generic, the maps also a quite ordinary form of decoration. The view through the window wasn’t special. You could see a blur of trees. The rooftop of another building. The metal file cabinets were ordinary, the Perrier bottle with dried flowers quite typical (somebody on the staff had put it there). Everything might have been anyone’s. Looking at the videotape, he was convinced, long before it was over, that he had never been there at all, in spite of all the things he saw himself lugging away. It was interesting that the boy had decided to hold the camera so long on Lucy’s photograph. The way a real card shark knows by instinct, by touch, what card is going to turn up, the boy had turned the camera with an unerring sense to Lucy’s pretty face. It was where Hildon would have freeze-framed it, anyway, and the boy had the same impulse.

It was cruel, of course; the cross in front of the vampire as far as Myra DeVane was concerned. But she had gotten bored with the videotape, and with Hildon’s game, long before Lucy’s image came on the screen. They were at his friends’ house, and she was drunk on champagne, lying underneath Hildon, still wearing a camisole and her socks, eyes shut, smile flickering on her lips as he made love to her. Last week with Edward, the Plaza. Today, the floor of the Hadley-Cooper’s video room.

Myra had written Hildon a letter — a frank letter, trying to get to know him. He assumed that she was flirting and took her up on it. He agreed that their interview had not scratched the surface of what was meaningful about what they did. About their profession. Why didn’t they get together, now that her piece was published, and have a drink? He didn’t hate himself for picking up her cue, or because she wasn’t his type. She was the one who happened to be there when he realized, finally, that nobody was his type: this routine was his type of routine. The woman didn’t matter. He had done this with different women at least half a dozen times when Maureen left and Lucy went to California for Jane’s funeral. He was now having a life apart from the person with whom he had shared a secret life.