Ann Beattie - Secrets & Surprises

That night Starley and Alice met him for drinks at My Blue Heaven. They were late, so at the time Donald was to meet them, he crossed the street and went into the bar. He had almost finished his gin-and-tonic when they came in. He was sucking on the wedge of lime, and liking its greenness. The booths were padded in blue plastic, and there were silver-flecked blue Formica tabletops. Up near the ceiling were tiny twinkling blue lights. On the wall in back of the bar was a big cutout of Rita Hay worth, in a striped bathing suit; it had been stuck on a piece of board lettered “The One That Got Away,” which had formerly held the huge plastic fish that was now hanging at the other end of the bar, its snout pointed up the skirt of Marilyn Monroe, who was pouting and pushing her full white skirt down as if, unexpectedly, a wind storm had just started up between her knees. There was, next to this, an anatomically correct baby-boy doll, painted Day-Glo blue.

“None of this would have happened if you had gone to the beach for your vacation,” Alice said to Donald.

“I wanted to be with her. Her kid was in school. Everything was going fine until the little bastard flunked plane geometry.”

“Get him a calculator,” Alice said.

“Plane geometry isn’t the sort of course that a calculator would help in,” Starley said.

“Give me a light, Dickie,” Alice said.

He lit her cigarette.

“I don’t think this place is as funny as I used to,” Alice said. Nobody said anything.

“I’m in a bad mood, and I apologize for it,” Alice said. “All week I’ve been trying to give up smoking by smoking these cigarettes that are made of lettuce.”

“Why don’t you call Marilyn and see if she won’t come have a drink with us?” Starley said.

“I don’t know.”

“Why do we have to be here if he’s going to have a drink with her, Dickie? I’d feel awkward. I already feel sick to my stomach.”

“Then put that thing out.”

“I can’t. I need to smoke in social situations.”

Years before, in New York, Starley had told Donald that his only misgiving about marrying Alice was her chain-smoking. The smoke made him cough. At the wedding reception there had been little silver trays with pastel-colored Nat Sherman cigarettes.

They sat looking at the tabletop. The waiter was avoiding them. The waiter had apple-pink puckered cheeks like Howdy Doody.

“Do you think you would do us a favor?” Alice said. “Dickie and I haven’t been out to dinner in so long that I can’t remember it, and the sitter could only come for an hour tonight. Do you think you could go stay with Anita?”

“Alice!” Starley said. “He doesn’t want to be our baby-sitter.”

“That’s okay, Starley,” Donald said. “It doesn’t matter where I brood. You go out and have dinner. I’ll go over to your place and watch Anita.”

“Thank you,” Alice said.

Starley rolled his eyes dramatically. He stood up, and then Alice bumped out of the booth. She looked heavier. Her skirt was wrinkled. Mascara had smudged under one eye. The summer before, he and Starley had picked up a whore after a day of fishing on Chesapeake Bay, and while he went at it with her, Donald had sat drunkenly on the floor across the room, casting his line into her hair. There was a little plastic worm attached to the fishing pole, and once he missed and she reached down and pushed the thing off of her breast, saying, “Ugh! Make him stop!” “She says she wants you to stop, Starley,” Donald said. Then the whore started giggling, and Starley frowned at him. “She says she wants you to quit it,” he said. He was drunk. He was naked. Earlier (this was in a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge) he had put his underpants on his head and marched around saying he was Ponce de Leon (Florida was on his mind; his son was on his mind). They played tag. The whore was easy to catch because she didn’t want to play tag in the first place, so she never really tried to get away. When she bumped into a table and nicked her shin, she refused to play anymore. They all sat around drinking gin-and-tonics. She flipped a coin to see who got her first. Whoever got “tails” got her. Much later the three of them stood, in towels, on the tiny balcony outside their room. In the parking lot a family was unloading their station wagon. There was a windblown mother, and a husband not quite as tall as she was who carried an infant in a baby seat, and a little girl, about five, who sat on the gravel and made demands as her father removed suitcases. The little girl started crying, and her mother fumbled her up in her arms, and they all marched into the Howard Johnson’s and disappeared.

Donald held the door of the bar open for Alice and Starley. He shook hands with Starley and kissed Alice on the cheek, and then he walked to Starley’s to baby-sit Anita, thinking all the way of the whore’s legs — kissing her scraped shin to make it well.

An hour later Donald was going out to eat chicken with a kid who had never liked him, his relationship with Marilyn over, the fan belt in Alice’s car squealing. Nothing he had ever done had made his own son like him. Joshua hated him, failed his course to get even with him, no kid ever liked him. He even had trouble making friends with other kids when he was a kid. Starley had been his first close friend. He drove, in the rush hour, brooding, wanting to put the silent Anita out of the car and go back to My Blue Heaven and make the waiter wait on him until he had had all the drinks he wanted.

Two summers before, the whore in the Howard Johnson’s had asked: “Were you guys in Vietnam?”

“No,” Starley said. “We’re too old.”

“Do we act like we were in Vietnam?” Donald asked her.

“How old are you?” she asked Starley.

He made her guess. She guessed wrong, by almost ten years.

“Thirty-five,” he said.

“You’re his age?” she said.

Donald nodded.

They were eating crabs. The crabs came in a black bucket, and the waitress rolled out thick paper on the table and gave them a pile of napkins, but no plates. The whore was having crab cakes, which were very expensive. As they drank beer she drank a Coke. She sipped it through a straw, like a little girl.

“How old are you?” Donald asked her.

“Twenty-three,” she said. She looked twenty-seven or-eight.

“Are you married?” she asked Donald.

“No,” he said.

“Are you?” she asked Starley.

He squinched up his face and waved his hand from side to side — a gesture that meant “so-so.”

“Do you have kids?” she asked him.

“One kid.”

“I’ve got a friend who’s a Vietnamese woman,” she said, “and she told me about soldiers who came into the village who pushed her down and one of them fucked her while the other one held the rifle underneath his friend, touching her asshole.”

She finished her Coke, sucking in mostly air. Donald thought that maybe she was twenty-three. It was just that she had sweated and not washed her face, and the make-up had caked on her cheeks.

“If you two want to do it again after dinner, you’ll have to pay me more,” she said. She looked into her empty Coke glass. “I guess it would have been only fair to tell you that before I let you take me to dinner.” She put her finger in the glass and brought out a piece of ice and sucked it. “I just didn’t think of it,” she said. “I honestly didn’t think of it.”

When it happened, Donald had just recently begun to feel happy — happy for the first time in months. (Marilyn never called; when he called her, she wouldn’t see him. Not any of the four times he called.) It was the first of November — the same day he had half a cord of wood delivered, which was stacked in what used to be a closet in the living room (door now removed). A fire was burning. Getting close to midnight, alone (but there had been someone earlier), having a cup of coffee that would keep him awake, but what the hell — the next day was Saturday — the phone rang. He crossed the room and picked up the phone and heard the voice of a stranger telling him, in a flat voice, that his friend Starley was dead.