Ann Beattie - Distortions

Back in the house, she closes her eyes again. He’s drawn the curtains, and the room is a little less bright. She’s very tried. The dog whines outside the door, wanting David. David takes his trumpet off the night table and puts it in the case. He must be practicing again.

David leaves, saying that he’s going downstairs to clean up. He hears some noise: cups and saucers? and much later, ringing. She’s calling David, but there’s no answer. David is calling her at the foot of the stairs.

“What?”

“Someone on the phone for you.”

She goes downstairs to answer the phone. She sits at a chair by the table. The table is clear. Everything has been cleared away.

“Hello?”

The voice is soft. She can hardly hear. It’s the old man’s sister. She’s tired of the old man and his sister, tired of work. She had already dismissed the old man from her mind, like last week’s dreams, but now the old man’s sister has called. His sister is upset. She’s talking about the snow. Apparently she’s snowed in, the snow is deeper than her boots, she’s been trying to reach her husband to tell him. The planes from Florida won’t land. No planes are landing. The old lady is thanking her for taking care of her brother. Why is she whispering?

“I come every day. I have my umbrella and my high boots so I can do my duty. I always try to bring him things that will please him so he won’t think I only do it because I have to. My niece has to get away. He’s so demanding. He wants her attention all day and night.”

She’s still half asleep, squinting against the glare, straining to hear. His sister is at the phone outside his bedroom in the hallway. The plane is still in Florida; it hasn’t left because it can’t land. His sister is asking if there’s any way she can come back.

As she talks, the runway is buried deeper in snow. They’re trying to clear it, but the snow is heavy, the planes can’t land. The planes from Greece won’t land. Now no one is on the beach in Greece, or at home in the United States; they’re up in the air, up above the snow. She’s sitting in a chair by the table. The table is clear. What was on the table when she came in? David has cleaned the room.

“You’re so lucky,” the woman whispers. “You can come and go. You don’t know what it’s like to be caught.”

What an amazing life David has had: born in the Sierras, completely unexpected, his mother in labor only two hours, two and a half months premature, weighing four pounds even. Not much larger than two trout in a pan, his father was fond of saying, staring at his extended flat palm. Given up for dead in India at age ten, he then gained weight, his heart beat normally again, the fever vanished overnight. Married at sixteen — an elopement — in Reno, Nevada, to a thirty-year-old ballerina. But these are facts, and the trivia is more interesting: he can find a mosquito in a room even when it’s not humming, go straight to its hiding place and catch it. Once he lifted his car by the back bumper — not in a moment of terror, nothing pinned under it, just to see … and he did it! He has memorized pages of Fitzgerald’s notebooks: descriptions of pretty girls, F’s thoughts on poetry, things F. will write etc. But he has read no F. novels! A lot of men cook, but David has published a cookbook that was translated into Japanese. The dedication is to the doctor who pronounced him doomed in India. David once played the oboe on a Scott Silver record, and before that time he had only played the violin. He practiced for a couple of days, and bleup bleuuuu buhloo. His wife, Sheila, is interesting too. There aren’t many forty-five-year-old ballerinas who are still with it. She still flies from the floor like a bouncer on a trampoline. She proposed to her husband on impulse, in a place called The Silver Slipper Café in Reno, telling him that he might spend years looking and she might spend years looking, and that they could end all the looking, what the hell. He insisted that they wait twenty-four hours, secretly suspecting that she was drunk. She was a little insulted, and the wait just gave her more time to look, but when he realized that she was and had been sober he took her to The Wedding Chapel by the Pool. After a brief ceremony, witnessed by a drunken fat woman and a weeping thin woman with a Doberman held on a leash that wrapped around her legs, Sheila and David exited the chapel swinging their arms and smiling. Sheila did a dance that ended with her diving into the pool and splashing another couple on their way into the chapel. So graceful! He didn’t know until then that she danced. They became servants for rich people on Long Island, and after five years — timed perfectly because Sheila was pregnant — the daughter of the rich people died, leaving a lot of money to her secret love, David. They left Long Island and went to Vermont, where they opened a restaurant. David wrote his cookbook and Sheila danced through their basement with paper flowers in her hair, followed by young children who looked like they were limping. The restaurant was a success, sushi being then very hard to find in that part of Vermont. He told the patrons about F’s ideas. Her class gave after-dinner performances, throwing their paper flowers to the customers at the end of the show. They made rhubarb wine. He sewed his own shirts, from material shipped to him from Hong Kong. She shaved her eyebrows and penciled thin arcs above her blue-gray eyes when it was outré . They had lawn furniture in their house, covered by fur rugs of nonendangered species during the winter. It was suspected that they were serious dopers. Not so. They drank the rhubarb wine, lounged on the fur, and tried to contend with their baby, Wally. At first it wasn’t bad — a small, pinkish, naked thing that lay on its back on a fur rug and played with wine-bottle corks laced together on a string by David. Wally liked the way they smelled. His mother’s pirouettes, the regular creaking of the floor, lulled him to sleep. He learned to speak at an early age, calling the mess he made in his pants “poopy”—which he also called the puppy. They meant to think of a name for the puppy, but nothing seemed appropriate. Wally was named for a male nurse who took care of Sheila after the baby’s birth. “Not really!” the nurse kept saying. Apparently it is untrue that babies are often named for doctors and nurses. The male nurse was extremely flattered and gave Sheila two bed baths a day when other women went to the showers. When Wally was a year old he got a strange look in his eye; he looked pissed off, to tell the truth. He and the puppy would be lying on their backs side by side, and Wally would straighten up and look very pissed off. Heredity? His mother was a bit cynical, but should this influence a one-year-old? Did he somehow sense that Sheila pounded her calves at night, telling them not to bulge? Did he sense an air of dissatisfaction in the house? They took him to a young doctor whom they felt they could speak frankly to, about vibrations … that the baby might be picking up bad vibrations. The doctor was shocked. They found an older man who was indifferent to the idea of vibrations, and stuck with him. David liked the way the doctor shrugged when he asked if bad vibrations could be getting to Wally. The first doctor had said, “You don’t beat this child, do you?”

When he was two, Wally began to wander off. A free spirit, Sheila felt. David thought he would fall off a cliff or drown. He was more practical; after all, he hadn’t proposed to her in The Silver Slipper Café. “You hold my love against me!” Sheila said, aghast. Wally took the aghast facial expression from his mother and combined it with a very distressed downturned mouth and ran away. You might also say that his eyes were very large and he pouted. It is a little difficult to describe his expression, but it was strange, and Sheila thought so too, although she didn’t say that to David. When he was three, Wally jumped off a table and broke his leg. While he was laid up, he colored to pass the time. Wally’s doctor paid a house call — amazing things happened to these amazing people — and pronounced Wally “just fine.”