Ann Beattie - What Was Mine

In college, she had intended to become an illustrator. One of the things that had drawn her to Pia Brunetti had been Pia’s love of drawing. Of course she had been very fond of Anthony and might have become the Brunettis’ friend in any case, but one day she had run into Pia at a bookstore when Pia had been staring at a book of Ingres drawings. She did not usually — in fact, ever — run into people in the art section of bookshops. And when Pia began to speak about the drawing she was looking at, running her finger through the air as if lightly shaving a layer from something that could not be seen, she had been moved, and had asked her to join her for coffee after they finished browsing. That was when she found out that Pia was a seamstress, and that she was adept at altering patterns so her creations would be entirely unique. Fran’s own career as an illustrator had gotten derailed in college as she began to study biology in order to do biological drawings. Biology itself became so much more interesting. First biology, then medicine. Then the thought of so many years in medical school (she had already met, and was almost engaged to, Chap) gave her cold feet. Somehow — she herself was not quite sure how — she had decided to teach art to children, though when she went to graduate school she had not specialized in that, after all. She had written her thesis on the use of music in early childhood development, and taken exams, the summer she married, for her teacher’s certification. She had Anthony in class her second year of teaching. By then, the tests she and Chap had undergone had revealed that it was almost certain he and she could not conceive. A more intense feeling for children — children as a category — came over her. She indulged herself and became quite attached to certain children, even fantasizing that they might be hers, though the fantasizing did not extend beyond scenarios she would imagine as she was falling asleep at night. She had a strange reaction to those late-night imaginings. Or at least she thought it must be a strange reaction: both to wish that they extended into her dreams and to luxuriate in the letdown when her eyes opened in the morning. That was where she really might have had a crystal ball: she could tell quickly — so quickly that she thought of it as intuition — if, and in what way, a child was in distress. Anthony was easy to diagnose. Telling the parents in a way that would not offend or frighten them was the only problem. She had been so good at her job that several private schools had tried to hire her away from Bailey, but she had liked her colleagues, appreciated the fact that few administrative meetings were convened unless there was a real need to bring everyone together. But in the fall of her third year of teaching she had begun to have headaches, and in the morning her eyelids were swollen. Chap finally persuaded her to go to the doctor. She had blood tests, and was diagnosed as having mono. A young person’s kissing disease, and her usual outlet of affection, except for kissing Chap, had been hugging the children at school. In fact, although she and Chap made love two or three times a week, they rarely kissed — or only afterward: little kisses she planted on his shoulder; a fond kiss smack in the center of her forehead, before he rolled out of bed. It was his idea, after she spent almost two weeks at home and seemed to enjoy it in spite of her low energy, that she take time off from teaching and indulge her love of drawing. People were too programmed in this society, he said: his salary was quite adequate to support them both. Something persuaded her that he was right. Perhaps she wanted to be flattered and cajoled by the headmaster of Bailey. In the back of her mind she also thought about putting out feelers to other schools — seeing what response she would get if she instigated something, rather than receiving surprise offers. Instead, she walked around the empty house in the day, wearing Chap’s bathrobe, which she appropriated, thinking: This is what solitude is. This is what it’s like to be childless. She enjoyed the misery this provoked, the way she enjoyed, in part, the disturbing dreams. Word got out in the community that she and Chap had inherited money — that she had quit because they now had a great amount of money and because she wanted to follow other pursuits. It was never a surprise to her that adults fantasized as quickly as children, because the converse was true: speculative children inevitably grounded themselves, after a spell, in reality. It was just too frightening to fly by the seat of their pants for too long. They would begin to paint within the borders. Read from beginning to end.

The white wicker furniture on the porch had an opalescent patina. Pink pillows — pink had always been Pia’s favorite color: slightly orangeish pinks, or electric pinks — were banked against the back of the settee. Larger pink pillows were propped against the backs of the four white chairs.

She pulled away from Chap and reached up to try to grab a mosquito that had been buzzing behind her head. He bent to scratch his leg. He and Fran were lingering on the porch because it was a sort of annex to the house. Almost at a glance, they had found that the house no longer had anything to do with their conception of how the Brunettis lived. It was still a mystery to both of them that Lou had resigned from private practice and become co-chair of the architecture department at a small-town college. The house itself, with its unevenly spaced floorboards, sinking shelves, and peeling ceiling, needed a lot of work, but Fran supposed that it was the same situation you always found with doctors: they would not treat members of their own family.

Back in the kitchen, she found that one of the cloud magnets had fallen to the floor after she rearranged them. She pressed it back and followed Chap out of the kitchen, frowning. She felt like a burglar, but one who had all the time in the world to really consider what was of interest.

Chap poked his head into Lou’s study. Fran turned on the light in the bathroom. A framed print of Monet water lilies hung on the wall beside the claw-footed tub. A vase of lavender flowers, dropping petals, sat on a shelf above the sink.

“Look at this,” Chap said.

She walked across the squeaking floorboards and went into Lou’s study. Chap was looking at a child’s drawing of cubes and pyramids seen from different angles. “The Future,” it was titled, and underneath, printed a little lopsidedly, “Anthony Brunetti.” She saw, in her own hand — that slightly calligraphic way of writing — the date: May 1, 1985.

2

Chap stood in the garden. He had tried it the day before, without spraying himself with bug repellent, and had added eight or ten bites on his quickly spotting body. Today he had sprayed himself from head to toe, intent on gathering enough basil for pesto, some arugula and Boston lettuce for salad. He had not been able to find plastic bags in the kitchen, so he had brought his emptied-out duffel bag in which he had transported his summer reading. If a color could have a smell, basil would be the essence of green. He killed a mosquito on his wrist, then turned like a paranoiac: a bee’s buzz had sounded like a tornado of mosquitoes. He did not, of course, try to kill the bee. He bent over and carefully twisted a small head of lettuce from the ground, banging the roots against the duffel bag before dropping it inside. He had been at the Brunettis’ house before, though Fran had no idea of that.

The buzzing behind his head this time was a mosquito. He turned and clapped his hands, then flicked the black body from his palm. He looked where it fell and saw that radishes had begun to sprout. He had grown them as a child: radishes and tomatoes, in a big cedar tub on his mother’s porch. He suddenly remembered his heartache — heartache! — when, on one of his infrequent visits, his father had pulled up radish after radish, to see if they had formed yet. Only swollen white worms dangled below the leaves. After his father pulled four or five, Chap reached out and put his hand on his father’s wrist. His father stopped. His father had been perplexed, as if he had been guaranteed a prize simply for reaching out and pulling, and he had gotten nothing. Chap had been named for his mother’s brother, Chaplin J. Anderson — the J. for Jerome. His uncle had been his father figure, coming every weekend until he moved to the West Coast when Chap was fifteen or sixteen. Sixteen, it must have been, because Chaplin had been teaching him to drive. He died mountain-climbing, when Chap was in his second year of college. After that, his mother was never the same. She turned to a cousin — crazy Cousin Marshall — who suddenly became, in spite of his belief in the spirit world and his railing against Ezra Pound as if the man still lived, a pillar of sanity. And now, since his mother’s death, he was saddled with Marshall, because he had been kind to his mother. He arranged to have Marshall’s road plowed in winter; sent him thermal underwear. But since Marshall’s dogs, Romulus and Remus, died, he had been increasingly sad and bitter. Would he have another dog? No. Would he take a little trip on the weekend — get away from the house with the dog bed and the sad memories? Not even if Chap sent a check for a million dollars. Didn’t his belief in the afterlife offer him some consolation? Silence on the telephone. Marshall was now eighty-one years old. He would not move out of his house but would not have it insulated because he thought all insulation was poison. Chap would barely have known Marshall if his mother had not sought him out. Now he was often vaguely worried about Marshall’s health, his depression, his naïveté, which could well get him into trouble those times he ventured into the big city of Hanover, N.H.