Ann Beattie - Distortions

The girl was laughing harder. Franklin looked in back of him and saw a policeman. The girl continued to laugh, walking away.

“Wait a minute,” the cop called. “He bothering you?”

“No,” the girl said.

“Wait a minute,” the cop said to Franklin. “I’ve got a present for you, big spender.” It was a ten-dollar ticket.

“Give me a break,” Franklin said.

“If I heard you just then, I’d take you in for harassing an officer and creating a disturbance,” the cop said. “Did I hear you say anything?”

Franklin shook his head.

“Am I watching you drive away?” the cop asked.

The cop waved as Franklin drove away, shaking.

*

“Hello, sonny,” Franklin said. He was very drunk.

“Who’s this?” Franklin Junior asked.

“Your daddy,” Franklin said. Perhaps he was not as drunk as he thought; he was keeping up his end of the conversation pretty well.

“Pop?” Franklin Junior said.

“It is I,” Franklin said.

“What’s the matter with you, Pop?”

“It’s what’s the matter with your mother.”

“What is wrong with her?” Franklin Junior asked quickly.

“It must remain a rhetorical question,” Franklin said.

A muted conversation.

“Pop?”

“Yes, sonny?”

“Are you all right? Is Mom there?”

“Which question do you care most about?”

“Pop?”

“How are you doing in your new life?” Franklin asked.

“Let me speak to Mom, Pop.”

“She’s not here, sonny. You’ll have to speak to me.”

“Okay. What is it, Pop? Are you sick?”

“You didn’t anwer my question,” Franklin said.

“Three minutes. Please signal when through,” the operator said.

“Operator?” Franklin Junior said. “Pop?”

Both were gone. Franklin had dropped the phone so he could pick up a glass he had dropped.

*

Beth Fisher did not know where Franklin was, and she didn’t care. What a mess that man was! He had convinced her that they should marry because it was in the stars: they had been born on the same day of March. He mentioned that first when he introduced her to his friends. Even Franklin had not been able to see anything more in the relationship to talk about. All those wasted years! She had called her daughter-in-law, lamenting her marriage to Franklin. The girl had told her that there was nothing as exhilarating as driving a rig. It was all she could talk about. And Linny — he was so full of questions about Franklin that he wouldn’t listen to her.

Beth got a job in the lingerie department of a store and prayed that Franklin wouldn’t come back. Women came into the department all day, holding up fluffy nylon nightgowns and admiring themselves in the mirror, buying matching satin slippers, wanting to appear beautiful for their husbands. Beth thought they were silly. She believed that she was becoming a feminist. She joined N.O.W. She ate what she wanted and thought that she looked healthier when she was heavy. By December she was quite fat; she often spoke in favor of abortions to the ladies buying the frilliest nightgowns. In January she was moved to the drapery department.

She went out a few times with a salesman from the drapery department, who said that the other women were spiteful. They went to a bar and ate pizza and drank Bass ale, and after that he took her home and didn’t kiss her. The salesman thought that she should file for legal separation. He said that men could be spiteful creatures. He gave her a kitten for Christmas. “This is Hildegaard,” he said as he handed the small white kitten to her. When he wasn’t there she called the cat Snowflake.

Shortly after Christmas, Beth came home and found Franklin in the living room. He was reading a novel. A shark, more teeth than body, lunged across the cover; to the side, a man was being slugged in the face, She had time to consider the book because Franklin didn’t put it down when she came in. His shoes were by the chair. His toes had broken through the sock of the right foot; they protruded in a tiny fan.

“I’m not exactly clear on what happened between us,” he said.

She went into the kitchen and got a beer. She came back to the living room.

“I realized that there was nothing I wanted to say to you and there was nothing I wanted to hear,” she said.

Franklin nodded.

“The movie theater manager keeps calling,” Beth says. “He sees great significance in the fact that you disappeared after seeing Dirty Harry.”

“Maybe I could get the job back,” Franklin said. The kitten hopped onto the footstool and bit at Franklin’s toes.

“What have you been doing?” Franklin asked.

“Working. In a store.”

“I’ve been living off a Puerto Rican woman I picked up outside a McDonald’s. She was making plans to go to Puerto Rico. When she went to work today I left.”

“I don’t believe you,” Beth said.

Franklin looked at the shark’s teeth.

*

Franklin and Beth were snowed in. He had spent the night (the cliché would be “on the couch”; he was sprawled in the Eames chair with his feet on a pile of magazines on top of the telephone book), intending to leave in the morning, but by morning he couldn’t have opened the front door if he had wanted to. Leave like Santa Claus? He looked up the chimney, full of soot, then made a fire and sat cross-legged, trying to think — he thought this was a position people got into to meditate — when Beth came downstairs, excited and surprised by the snow. They had celery and beans for lunch. Beth wore a thin blue bathrobe that made her hips look even more enormous. He thought of the horses, the racetrack … He wanted flan, he wanted his Puerto Rican lover back, to kiss her orange lips. The orange lipstick was flavored with oranges. His Puerto Rican lover wanted to go to Florida and eat oranges. More than that, she wanted to go to Puerto Rico: her sister the nun, her brother the blacksmith, the grave of her youngest sister, the other sister a cook for wealthy people, another brother — wasn’t there another one, or was that the one who was born dead? Born with the measles. He told her that that wasn’t possible. But a doctor had been there! Then he hadn’t known what he was talking about. Those big bright lips. He tickled them with a feather once when she was asleep. He pulled it out of his pillow and brushed it across her lips and she drew them together, sat up scratching herself. She wanted to be Eric Clapton’s lover. He had never heard of Eric Clapton. She said that Eric Clapton was addicted to heroin. She agreed with Franklin that his son was addicted to drugs; otherwise he would love his parents. She wanted him to call his son. What for? For reconciliation! But there had been no fight Nothing ever came entirely apart.

He had had to hound her and hound her to be his lover. For almost a week after first seeing her he sat in his car, parked outside McDonald’s, and waited, and then he hounded her, offered his car, which was all he had with him. She refused. She was not a whore, she was a clerk. He didn’t want a whore, he wanted a clerk. This made her eyes big, like her mouth. She wore such high heels. She was as tall as he was in those shoes, and without them she was just a tiny woman. He offered his belt or shirt, if she would not take the money or the car. “Okay,” she said. “Which?” he asked, “The belt or the shirt?”, wondering where he would get a belt to keep his pants up late at night after she put him out. She had a girlfriend who walked into her apartment in the morning and beat his head with the pillow when she saw him sleeping there. What an odd person the friend was, and his lover — what a strange woman, comparing him to Eric Clapton, saying that she never had a chance in hell with Eric Clapton anyway.