Ann Beattie - Picturing Will

Children meant no disrespect; they just thought that whatever they discovered, they could have. Girls usually grew out of that notion, but boys did not. Boys continued to think that the world was accessible, whether they went after what they wanted with scissors or with guns. Corky hoped that if she had a child, it would be a girl.

It is a mistake to leave a child alone in the dark, under the weight of the blanket and the heavier weight of your reassurances, when the child knows perfectly well that the monster is still in the room. As long as the shutters stay open — and they must, so the moonlight can stream in — the tree branch will be endlessly transformed into the shadow of a bat, whose wings will stir in the breeze the moment the door is pulled shut. The robe draped over the chair, straightened so that the hood no longer casts the shape of a huge arrowhead on the wall, will become a mummy intent on sucking the child’s breath away if the child should be foolish enough to close his eyes .

Telling the child that you will see him in the morning, and smiling down at him, is as unconvincing, and as little to the point, as standing on the deck of a sinking ship and applauding as the lifeboats are lowered. As if the sea didn’t churn. As if something benign presided over our destinies. As if words could palliate so real a darkness as night. The feathers shift inside the pillow and sink. The leaves of the plant curl until morning light. Sleep is like life in the city: Everyone is in danger who moves while others are still. How can we continue to tell the child, or any other skeptic, that night settles like lush, soft velvet, when it’s as insidious as the swirl of the bullfighter’s cape? The cape swishes and the bull escapes for a while, but soon enough the dagger plunges in and there is blood on the velvet, blood on the sand .

At night, the furry fox cub in the storybook sprouts fangs and gnaws the wire coiled in the boxspring. The jack-in-the-box, having popped up, continues to grow, towering until it touches the ceiling, and then ducks its head, the eyes two globes dangling from the lighting fixture, the mouth smiling or smirking, obliterated by darkness .

Things are hungry at night. This is when animals stalk their prey. When fish sleep with open eyes. When fevers rise. When a sheer drop may be just ahead, and there is black ice on the highway .

For children, the metaphor exists, not the simile, and at night they see what we see, without dreaming. How interesting to always see potential: the thing transformed, before it is even understood .

At night, the child and the adult try to puzzle out the same thing: In order to comply, does one also need to smile? If someone is gone, are you the same person? Will people still call? Wasn’t there an understanding that you belonged to each other? In the future, just once, could you have a guarantee? What will there be to say if the person returns sadder, or perhaps seeming younger or older, surprised by something, changed? What if, when you next see your lover, he has a scar on his cheek, or she has cut her beautiful curls?

He opens his eyes wide when fairy tales unfold and when myths are made to seem real, but the child’s surprise is no less intense than ours. Why did Orion die, and what was it like for Diana to be tricked? Was Diana’s brother sorry that he told her Orion’s head, above the waves, was a ball floating? Or was he happy his prank turned out just as he wanted? What a perfect myth for the late twentieth century — the story of a man who dupes a woman, and a woman with the power to turn her mistake to splendor, while poor Orion, become a swashbuckler of the sky, finds that death means only that by the simple process of transformation he has lost his life and become, instead, a work of art. An unhappy bedtime story, though one likely to be remembered by the storyteller staring out the window, observing the stars’ configuration in the sky .

Nighttime. How pleasant to think of the child, at least for a while, questioning nothing and dreaming the unimaginable. He is snug in his bed, still as a mummy. The monsters are at bay; the bull does not snort; his beloved and tattered blue blanket is clutched in his fist. The blanket is as necessary to sleep as the puffed parachute to the skydiver’s safe fall .

The way we think of the child at night — our image of him as calm and sweetly sleeping — is a necessary delusion. It’s romantic and also a little sad, like a love letter carried by hand, or being in love with a person who lives in another city. We are all vulnerable to darkness and to silence. Yet something has to be imagined. Something has to be said. In the dark room, every night, our last whispered words are always — and only—“Good night .”

Wayne and Kate tumbled on the beach. Not sex, tumbling. Wayne on his knees, holding her thighs so she couldn’t get away as Kate tried to jerk sideways, out of his grip, the sea breeze blowing her hair forward and obscuring her view every time she looked down.

In spite of the laughter and the insincere curses, it wasn’t really a game. Wayne felt that he was holding on for dear life, like a drowning person who doesn’t know his own exhaustion until he grabs hold of the rope. This wasn’t water, but sand. He wasn’t sinking, but buoyant. This wasn’t his wife, it was a thirty-two-year-old divorcée from New Jersey offering him a tumble he was eager to take. He had met her earlier that evening, when he was delivering groceries. They had flirted then, and after work he had returned for her. Now he held on to her legs because he wanted to show her how strong he was.

He held on because that allowed him more time to fantasize, and what he imagined was getting more interesting by the minute.

She lay on her stomach in the sand, head resting on her arm, and he was on top of her, his penis erect in his pants. He knew instantly this was the person he had wanted all his life to meet. She was the person fate had sent: a cocky woman with every assurance of how attractive she was, giggling mischievously at what she had caused to happen so quickly.

Instead of going to the Azure, where they would be seen, he took her into the Hyatt, where a mirrored ball that rotated on the ceiling sent flashes of light around the room and four musicians played songs from the sixties. He moved his chair in close to the table and put his hand between her legs, under her skirt. Her skin was still sandy, even after they had brushed each other off back on the beach. Wide-eyed, she ordered a gin and tonic, staying as still as possible so that the waitress wouldn’t notice Wayne’s probing fingers. A bowl of peanuts was lowered to the table. She took his free hand in hers without objecting to the location of his other hand. He was exactly —except for the scar above his eyebrow and the long, straight nose— exactly like the car mechanic she had flirted with all year back in New Jersey, who never did call, except to say that her car was ready to be picked up. Now a man who could be the mechanic’s twin was going to save her from a depressing, claustrophobic week with her mother, whose diabetes was under control, after all, and whose opinions could seem all the more ironic as they came up against Kate’s mental images of this night. She could think of them playing in the sand while her mother talked about savings bonds. She could remember the bits of revolving light mottling his face as her mother talked about Oliver North’s bravery. When her mother urged her to eat cereal in the morning, she could — hopefully — think of Wayne coming in side her. She bumped an inch closer on the blue vinyl banquette. He took his hand out of the bowl of peanuts and held out his fingers so she could lick off the salt. Before he went back to the apartment complex to leave his car and go off on what she called “an adventure” in hers, Wayne had found a cash machine back at the shopping center and had withdrawn one hundred dollars, which was burning a hole in his pocket. In fact, he felt sweaty, his fingertips tingling, his lips dry, his forehead so moist he suspected he might actually have a fever.