Ann Beattie - Secrets & Surprises

Most houses that look small outside are a little larger inside. This one was not. He found rum to drink and walked around the house sipping it. He went from the kitchen back to the living room to the bedroom adjoining it and went in. It was her room. There was no bedspread, and the bed was made with white sheets. He sat on it, realizing how tired he was, then got up and smoothed out the wrinkles. The room was almost empty. There was a wicker chair in front of a big antique mirror, an ugly high white-painted dresser. He walked out and into Bobby’s room. There was a pile of clothes on the floor. On his dresser was a letter. It was addressed to someone named Robert Winter. It could have been anybody. Robert Winter lived in Pennsylvania. Who would Bobby know in Pennsylvania? He looked in the bathroom (Jean Naté on the glass shelf above the sink, a sand dollar, a tube of toothpaste, coiled like a snake), then walked exactly three steps and went back to the kitchen, where he put down his drink because he didn’t want it, and stepped down one step into the living room. He hoped that Bobby would come home first. Then she would be cordial if Bobby was glad to see him. If she came first, there was little chance of her being friendly. On a table by the sofa was a pile of pictures. Most of them were of Bobby, in uniform, playing baseball. There was one of her father hugging Bobby, in the snow, outside his big house in Massachusetts. Probably they had gone there for Christmas. There was one of Joanna in a long yellow skirt and a white blouse, and she was standing stiffly, as she always did in photographs. She looked as if she was going out for a big evening. Who was she going with? Robert Winter?

“Starley,” he had said, years ago in New York, “Joanna is pregnant and she won’t marry me.”

“I wouldn’t marry you either,” he said.

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“Because I’m a man.”

“Christ — what are you joking about? This is serious. She’s going to have a baby, and she won’t get married.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’re sorry she won’t marry me, or what?”

“What’s the cross-examination?” he said. “I’m sorry about everything.”

They were walking past the reservoir, where he and Joanna had run the week before.

“Give her time, she’ll change her mind.”

He took big steps when he walked. Donald took big steps with him.

“What do you want to get married for, anyway?” he said.

Four months later Starley was married to Alice.

He sat quietly with his hands in his lap until he heard her car in the drive — the VW she insisted on driving, even though he had patiently explained each time he saw her how unsafe a car it was. He fidgeted, not knowing whether to get up and open the door, or just sit there. Either way, he would probably frighten her. While he sat thinking, he lost the opportunity to move. She opened the door a crack, put her head around the corner, and her eyes met his.

“Oh God,” she sighed. “I wondered why the door was hanging open.”

Her hair was pulled back in a rubber band. She was carrying a tennis racket. She had on white shorts and a black T-shirt. She wiped her hair out of her face.

“Okay,” she said. “What are you doing here? I assume it got too cold for you up north.”

“It did,” he said. “It really did.”

“Where’s Deena?” she said.

“Is that her name? The woman with the four-year-old daughter?”

“She didn’t have her with her, did she? Am I crazy or something?”

“No, she … she told me. She said she had a daughter. I didn’t know her name.”

“Deena,” she said. “Now, what are you doing here?”

She sat in a wicker chair. He thought, If I can still be so attracted to her, I can’t love Susan. If I had reached Susan on the phone, what would I have said?

“Who’s Robert Wilson?” he said.

“I don’t know. Who?”

“Isn’t that his name?” He got up and went to Bobby’s room. He came back. “I mean Robert Winter,” he said.

“A friend of his who moved to Pennsylvania,” she said. “Did you count the silverware to make sure it was all there too?”

“Joanna,” he said. He locked his fingers together. “Do you remember Starley?”

She sighed, obviously exasperated. They had all been constant companions in New York; the three of them — later the four of them — had gone dancing together at night.

“He died,” he said. “He was run over by a truck.”

Her mouth came open. She slowly pulled the rubber band out of her hair and rubbed it into a ball between her fingers. “Starley’s dead?” she said. “I just got a letter from Starley.”

“No you didn’t. What would he write you a letter for?”

“He wrote me.” She shrugged.

“What did he write you?”

“Stay here,” she said. She crossed the room, stepped up, turned into her bedroom.

“What is it?” he said, following her.

The letter was about a picture that Starley could get her a print of from the National Gallery of Art. She must have written to ask him if he could get it. At the end of the letter he had written: “P.S. Why don’t you let bygones be bygones and marry him, Joanna? He shacks up with one dreary woman after another, the latest of which dumped him because her fifteen-year-old son wouldn’t do his math homework as long as she had him around.”

“Imagine thinking that after all this time I’m going to marry you,” she said. “When I knew you I was eighteen years old, and I thought that you were hot stuff. I thought New York was a big, impressive place. I was eighteen years old.”

Past her, outside the window, was a bush with bright-green leaves and lavender flowers that looked very bright in the half-light.

“That’s pretty,” he said, pointing over her shoulder. “What kind of bush is that?”

“Hibiscus,” she said. “But look — what are you doing here?”

He was sitting by her on the bed. Her skin was cool, on top of her arm where his arm touched hers. The bed linen was cool, too, because the window had been open and the bush outside had shaded it from the sun. It was summer in Florida, and winter back north. He was holding her hand. Years ago he had held her hand when she was eighteen. He rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. He picked up the letter with the other hand and dropped it to the floor.

“Starley’s dead,” he said. “A truck hit him. It was an accident.”

He was surprised to be saying out loud what he had been thinking for days. In the apartment she had shared with the three other girls in New York they had gotten used to whispering, in the bedroom, behind the closed door (a sign that her roommates were to stay in the living room or, preferably, go out). They had whispered, she had whispered that she loved him.

He ran his hand along the sheet, then rested it on top of her leg. As he tried to clear his mind he heard the hum of the highway, the faint static that had made it difficult to talk when he made the phone call earlier. He was talking to himself, but she was answering him.

“Wait,” he said, his voice no louder than the sound his hand made stroking the sheet. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Wait.”

“Wait for what?” she whispered.

There had been very few times in their lives when they lived apart, and now, for almost three years, Margaret and Elena had shared the cottage in the Adirondacks. In all that time, things had gone smoothly. The only time in their lives things had not gone well was the time before the sisters moved to the cottage. Elena and Tom, the man Elena had been living with, had broken up, and Tom had begun to date Margaret. But Tom and Margaret had not dated long, and now it had become an episode the sisters rarely mentioned. Each understood that the other had once loved him.