Ann Beattie - Secrets & Surprises

“What’s your topic?” he said, striking a match and putting it to the newspaper. She had told him in the letter what it was.

“Ah, beautiful,” Tom said. “Look at it go.” He sat beside her and smiled at the flames. “Are you going to take a walk with me later? I want to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Max has talked me into going to the West Coast. I want to talk you into going with us.”

“You come to visit once a year, and this time you want me to move to the West Coast with you.”

“I don’t have the nerve to visit you more than once a year. I treated you like hell.”

“That just occurred to you.”

“It didn’t just occur to me. My shrink said to tell you.”

“Your shrink said to tell me.”

“You sound like my shrink,” Tom said. “I say something, and he repeats it.”

By the time they went for a walk, several records had been played and they had all eaten cheese and crackers, and then Margaret and Max had wandered out of the room again, back to the plant room to get stoned. Elena and Tom sat drinking the last two cans of beer. She admitted defeat — she told him all the problems she had with writing, the problem she had concentrating. He confessed that he had no intention of going away with Max, but that he thought if he told her that, she might come back.

“I’m nuts. I admit I’m nuts,” Tom said.

He was beginning to seem more familiar to her. Underneath the black coat had been a plaid shirt she remembered. The shoes were the same black motorcycle boots, polished.

Tom stood and pulled her up with one hand. Then, weaving, he headed for the chair to get his coat. Elena went to the closet for hers. The temperature gauge outside the door read thirty-four degrees. There was a full moon.

“Rousseau,” Tom said, looking at the moon. “I think that gypsy’s sleeping just to flip out the wolf.”

He buried their clasped hands in the pocket of his coat. He didn’t let go as he unbuttoned his coat and turned sideways to urinate on the leaves. Elena stared at him with amazement. When he finished, he buttoned his coat with one hand.

“Hang on!” Max called, running with Margaret down the field to the edge of the woods. Elena saw that Margaret had put on the white poncho their grandmother had sent her as an early Christmas present. Max and Margaret were laughing, close enough now to see their breath, running so fast that they passed Tom and Elena and stumbled toward the woods.

“I’ve got the tape!” Max called back, holding a cassette.

“He has a tape he borrowed from a hunter friend,” Tom said.

“Recording of-a dying rabbit!” Max called to Elena. “Once I get this thing going, we can hide and see if a fox comes.”

Max put the machine down and clicked the cassette into place, and was hurrying them into the woods and whispering for them to be quiet, although his loud whisper was the only noise. Max crouched next to Margaret, with his arm around her. Tom took Elena’s hand and plunged it into his pocket again. Elena was spellbound by the noise from the cassette player: it was a rabbit in pain, shrieking louder and louder.

“You see a fox?” Max whispered.

Soon an owl landed in a small peach tree in the middle of the field. It sat there, silhouetted by the moon, making no noise. Max pointed excitedly, cupped his hands over his eyes (though there was no reason for it) to look at the owl, which sat, not moving. The screeching on the cassette player reached a crescendo and stopped abruptly. The owl stayed in the tree.

“Well,” Max said. “We got an owl. Don’t anybody move. Maybe there’s something else out there.”

They sat in silence. Elena’s hand was sweaty in Tom’s pocket. She got up and said, “I’m going to finish my walk.” Tom rose with her and followed her out of the woods. When they had gone about a hundred feet they heard, again, the sounds of the dying rabbit.

“Is he serious?” Elena said.

“I guess so,” Tom said.

They were walking toward the moon, and toward the end of the field. There was a road to the left that went to the pump house. She was thinking about going there, sitting on one of the crates inside, and telling him she would come back to him. Imagining it, Elena felt suddenly elated. Just as quickly, her mood changed. He was the one who had broken off their relationship. Then he had begun to date her sister.

“Let’s go to the pump house,” Tom said.

“No,” Elena said. “Let’s go back to the house and get warm.”

Their indecision had been a joke between them when they lived together; it got so bad that they could not decide which movie to see, which restaurant to eat at, whom to invite over for an evening. Tom’s solution had been to flip a coin, but even after the flip, he’d say, “Of course, we could still do the other. Would you rather do that?”

They talked for hours that night before they went to bed. They were squeezed into a chair he had hauled in front of the fireplace, both sitting on one hip to fit in.

“How could you think you’re not on my mind when I write you a letter a week?” Tom said, kissing her hair.

“You only come once a year.”

“When have you invited me?”

“I don’t know.”

“You never have. I’ve asked you to visit me.”

“You asked Margaret, too.”

“I did when I thought that you wouldn’t come under any other circumstances.”

“Does Max like Margaret?”

“I guess so. Max is a real charmer. Max likes women. I don’t know many of his women friends. I just know he likes them, period.” Tom lit a cigarette. He threw the match in the fireplace. “And anyway, you’re not Margaret’s keeper.”

“The lease on the house goes until June,” Elena said.

“They can find somebody. And if they don’t, we can pay for it until then.”

“You’re being so matter-of-fact. It’s a little strange, don’t you agree? I don’t know. Let me think about it.”

“We’ll flip a coin.”

“Be serious,” Elena said.

Tom stood and got a nickel out of his pocket. He tossed it, turned the coin upside down on the back of his hand. “Heads. You come back,” he said.

“How do I know it was heads?”

“Okay, I’ll flip again. If it’s heads, you agree to believe that I was honest about the flip.”

He flipped the coin again. “Heads,” he said. “You believe me.”

He came back to the chair.

Elena laughed. “What have you been doing the last three years?”

“I put it all in my letters.”

“You never told me about the women you were seeing.”

“I was seeing women. Tall women. Short women. What do you want to know?”

He took out his pocket watch and opened it. Two o’clock. Margaret and Max had been asleep for about an hour. The front of the gold watch was embossed with a hunting scene: a hunter taking aim on a deer leaping toward the woods. He pushed the watch back into his pants pocket.

“I think you want to stay here out of some crazy responsibility to Margaret,” he said, “and there’s no reason for it. Margaret wrote me.”

“What did she write you?”

“That things weren’t going well out here, and neither of you would admit it. And, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t lying about the coin, either. It came up heads both times.”

“Does Max like her?”

“We just discussed that.”

“But does he?”

“Max charms, and screws, every woman who has a pretty face. Look: I asked her in a letter what she’d do if you went back with me, and she said she’d stay on with her job at the hospital until the lease ran out.”

The fire was dying out. The side of Elena’s body that was not turned toward Tom was cold.

“Come on,” he said and pulled her out of the chair. Walking down the hallway to the bedroom, he stopped and turned her toward the mirror. “You know what you’re looking at?” he said.