Ann Beattie - Picturing Will

Eddie didn’t know what to do. Earlier, he and Wayne had talked about his rejoining the softball team. Was that going to be in question now?

Patsy Cline was singing “You Belong to Me.”

Everyone looked at Corky. It occurred to Police Officer Pasani, as his partner read Wayne his rights, that it was a shame they had her Ativan pills, because she might be needing them. In the movies, the woman in the picture would be hiding in Corky and Wayne’s attic, even as they spoke. Pasani looked at the house. No attic — maybe a crawl space. Only in the movies would a woman who looked like Kate be in the attic.

“You going to trust what some motel clerk said, or should we take the missus in, too?” Pasani asked his partner.

Suddenly, Wayne lunged. Wayne lunged, and Pasani just stepped aside. It could have been a cartoon, the way Wayne rushed forward into thin air. From the first, Pasani had thought it would be a good idea to cuff him. This, now, was their chance. The handcuffs really did make a sound. Clink: just the way they sounded in the movies.

Will was in the bathtub, having a bath with Bugs, whom he had removed from his shirt pocket, and several thimbles from Corky’s thimble collection. Letting him have the thimbles to play with had been something of a problem. She didn’t really believe that he would make the mistake of swallowing one, yet he seemed too young to be given thimbles and too old to be told to be careful with them. He was pouring thimblefuls of water out of the thimbles. Putting Bugs across his knees and pouring tiny amounts of water on his teeth and on his carrot.

Mel had given him a radio that could be played in the bathroom without any danger. He had brought it with him to Florida. It sat on top of the closed toilet seat. A film director was being interviewed. Yes, the director said, such things had happened to him; he had tried to repress them, but eventually he knew that he had to make a film. Yes, it was upsetting, but also in some ways wonderful.

Will had gotten good at hitting the target: Bugs’s teeth. However high he raised his hand, his aim was usually still good. It was just that a thimble held only a very small amount of water, so the scooping up would have to start all over again. The bubbles were disappearing. He took the bottle and squeezed more bubble goop into the water, kicking with his feet to make suds.

Outside, as Wayne spat on the ground, Pasani looked over his shoulder and asked Corky if their cat was missing. His partner was steering Wayne toward the car.

“We don’t have a cat,” she said.

So the cat that had been found dead in the car was not theirs. It was just a hunch. You went on hunches when you found a rental car in the parking lot of a shopping mall and inside the trunk were boxes — ordinary cardboard boxes — filled with cocaine. A shopper who knew the cat was in distress called the police. Ironic: all those people sticking Garfield to their car windows with suction cups, and in this case someone had left a real cat that had died because of the car’s internal temperature. Who had that much cocaine and simply walked away from it, in a parking lot, with a cat locked in the car? The woman who left the car in the parking lot had not boarded any planes in the last twenty-four hours under her own name, but of course there were many ways to leave Florida besides flying, even if she was holding a ticket. Her mother said that she was holding a ticket. She showed them the calendar, with her daughter’s time of departure noted in pen, not in pencil: It was something her daughter had been sure about.

The old lady crying at the police station had been a pathetic sight. She had become hysterical at the thought of arranging for the cat’s cremation. A cat, as she said, that she had never met.

Corky’s bottle of pills had fallen out of Wayne’s jacket. She often wore his blue nylon jacket, now that oversized jackets were in fashion. She had thought she lost them somewhere in the house. She didn’t really know for sure that they were missing, since she hadn’t been taking them. She frowned, as if the pills had brought on this disaster.

Going away in handcuffs was a disaster. Eddie had a sudden unexpected vision of Wayne choking up on the bat to bunt. Two hands sliding forward. The ball dropping dead. It would bring in the guy from third, put Wayne out at first.

Pasani and his girlfriend had gone dancing at the same Hyatt where the desk clerk remembered Wayne and Kate. If it had been the movies, they might even have crossed paths one night in the bar, Pasani taking Jeanelle for a swing around the dance floor, wearing the Italian shoes with the thin soles she had given him for his birthday. Gigolo shoes he called them, but he secretly thought they were stylish. He would like to wear such shoes every day. He liked to dance with Jeanelle and to watch her sipping a pink drink: a strawberry daiquiri. Her lipstick on the rim was only a shade darker than the mixture inside. They might have been there the night Wayne and Kate were having a night on the town.

As Wayne walked toward the car, he thought of the door at Elliott’s house: the open door. He wondered if he would be behind bars. Whether they would believe he knew nothing. All his life, he had found that if people assumed you were guilty of one thing, it naturally followed that you were guilty of another.

Dialogue from the director’s movie was being spoken by actors, on the radio. The interviewer approved of their words. He was amazed, he said, at how well the director had captured these people. People that — if he was correct — the director had not seen since childhood. Ah, but that was a time when everything was so intense, said the director. And when the movie was being filmed — what had it been like to return to that country? It was my country and is still my country, the director said. Though people do not necessarily realize this, it is still true: You carry your country with you. Your country is stamped on you, like a birthmark; or inside your body, like a rib. A heart.

Though only the interviewer saw the gesture, the director was tapping his chest with his fingertips. It was sincere — an honest gesture, however clichéd — and it made the interviewer like him. He decided not to throw him a curve by reading him part of a bad review. To keep on with something positive. He decided to ask for a physical description of the country. The director began by speaking of the mountains.

Will looked at his hands. The skin was wrinkled on his fingertips, and his cuticles were very white, as were the moons that rose just a bit above the cuticles. His hands felt funny when they touched each other. He rubbed his fingers up and down his legs. He had been in the tub a long time. Corky was true to her word: He was big enough to bathe himself, and she wouldn’t bother him.

Out of respect to Bugs, he had wrapped him around the waterspout when he began to play with his hands, instead of letting him sink in the tub. Was there any contortionist in the world who could twist around in a complete circle, the way Bugs was twisted on the waterspout? If so, Will might see him at the circus one day.

Ah, but the blight that hit the chestnut trees, the director said. His sentence faded out. Then he wondered aloud if he was being too nostalgic: if he was talking about life as though spring were the only season, and everything of importance always happened underneath the chestnut trees.

The interviewer, who was fascinated, said nothing.

But then again, the director said, it would have been ludicrous to paint other trees to look like chestnut trees, or to have imitation chestnut trees brought in as props.

The director concluded by saying that of course that had not happened, and except for him, probably no one noticed the absence of the chestnut trees. “We are not Hollywood,” the director said. But even that he said lightly. He did not mean to indict Hollywood. He was just saying something that was to him quite apparent.