Ann Beattie - Distortions

David comes in, coat still buttoned, blue silk scarf still tied (a Christmas present from Noel, with many apologies for losing the white one), sits on the floor, and says that he’s decided to leave. He is speaking very reasonably and quietly. That alarms me. It crosses my mind that he’s mad. And Beth isn’t with him. He has killed her!

No, no, of course not. I’m mad. Beth is upstairs in her friend’s apartment. He ran into Beth’s friend and her mother coming into the building. He asked if Beth could stay in their apartment for a few minutes. I’m not convinced: What friend? I’m foolish to feel reassured as soon as he names one — Louisa. I feel nothing but relief. It might be more accurate to say that I feel nothing. I would have felt pain if she were dead, but David says she isn’t, so I feel nothing. I reach out and begin stroking the plant’s leaves. Soft leaves, sharp points. The plant I’m repotting is a cutting from Noel’s big plant that hangs in a silver ice bucket in his window (a wedding gift that he and Susan had never used). I helped him put it in the ice bucket. “What are you going to do with the top?” I asked. He put it on his head and danced around.

“I had an uncle who got drunk and danced with a lampshade on his head,” Noel said. “That’s an old joke, but how many people have actually seen a man dance with a lampshade on his head? My uncle did it every New Year’s Eve.”

“What the hell are you smiling about?” David says. “Are you listening to me?”

I nod and start to cry. It will be a long time before I realize that David makes me sad and Noel makes me happy.

Noel sympathizes with me. He tells me that David is a fool; he is better off without Susan, and I will be better off without David. Noel calls or visits me in my new apartment almost every night. Last night he suggested that I get a babysitter for tonight, so he could take me to dinner. He tries very hard to make me happy. He brings expensive wine when we eat in my apartment and offers to buy it in restaurants when we eat out. Beth prefers it when we eat in; that way, she can have both Noel and the toy that Noel inevitably brings. Her favorite toy, so far, is a handsome red tugboat pulling three barges, attached to one another by string. Noel bends over, almost doubled in half, to move them across the rug, whistling and calling orders to the imaginary crew. He does not just bring gifts to Beth and me. He has bought himself a new car, and pretends that this is for Beth and me. (“Comfortable seats?” he asks me. “That’s a nice big window back there to wave out of,” he says to Beth.) It is silly to pretend that he got the car for the three of us. And if he did, why was he too cheap to have a radio installed, when he knows I love music? Not only that but he’s bowlegged. I am ashamed of myself for thinking bad things about Noel. He tries so hard to keep us cheerful. He can’t help the odd angle of his thighs. Feeling sorry for him, I decided that a cheap dinner was good enough for tonight. I said that I wanted to go to a Chinese restaurant.

At the restaurant I eat shrimp in black bean sauce and drink a Heineken’s and think that I’ve never tasted anything so delicious. The waiter brings two fortune cookies. We open them; the fortunes make no sense. Noel summons the waiter for the bill. With it come more fortune cookies — four this time. They are no good, either: talk of travel and money. Noel says, “What bloody rot.” He is wearing a gray vest and a white shirt. I peek around the table without his noticing and see that he’s wearing gray wool slacks. Lately it has been very important for me to be able to see everything. Whenever Noel pulls the boats out of sight, into another room, I move as quickly as Beth to watch what’s going on.

Standing behind Noel at the cash register, I see that it has started to rain — a mixture of rain and snow.

“You know how you can tell a Chinese restaurant from any other?” Noel asks, pushing open the door. “Even when it’s raining, the cats still run for the street.”

I shake my head in disgust.

Noel stretches the skin at the corners of his eyes. “Sorry for honorable joke,” he says.

We run for the car. He grabs the belt of my coat, catches me, and half lifts me with one arm, running along with me dangling at his side, giggling. Our wool coats stink. He opens my car door, runs around, and pulls his open. He’s done it again; he has made me laugh.

We start home.

We are in heavy traffic, and Noel drives very slowly, protecting his new car.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“Thirty-six,” Noel says.

“I’m twenty-seven,” I say.

“So what?” he says. He says it pleasantly.

“I just didn’t know how old you were.”

“Mentally, I’m neck and neck with Beth,” he says.

I’m soaking wet, and I want to get home to put on dry clothes. I look at him inching through traffic, and I remember the way his face looked that night he sat in the living room with David and me.

“Rain always puts you in a bad mood, doesn’t it?” he says. He turns the windshield wipers on high. Rubber squeaks against glass.

“I see myself dead in it,” I say.

“You see yourself dead in it?”

Noel does not read novels. He reads Moneysworth , the Wall Street Journal, Commentary . I reprimand myself; there must be fitting ironies in the Wall Street Journal .

“Are you kidding?” Noel says. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself at dinner. It was a good dinner, wasn’t it?”

“I make you nervous, don’t I?” I say.

“No. You don’t make me nervous.”

Rain splashes under the car, drums on the roof. We ride on for blocks and blocks. It is too quiet; I wish there were a radio. The rain on the roof is monotonous, the collar of my coat is wet and cold. At last we are home. Noel parks the car and comes around to my door and opens it. I get out. Noel pulls me close, squeezes me hard. When I was a little girl, I once squeezed a doll to my chest in an antique shop, and when I took it away the eyes had popped off. An unpleasant memory. With my arms around Noel, I feel the cold rain hitting my hands and wrists.

A man running down the sidewalk with a small dog in his arms and a big black umbrella over him calls, “Your lights are on!”

It is almost a year later — Christmas — and we are visiting Noel’s crazy sister, Juliette. After going with Noel for so long, I am considered one of the family. Juliette phones before every occasion, saying, “You’re one of the family. Of course you don’t need an invitation.” I should appreciate it, but she’s always drunk when she calls, and usually she starts to cry and says she wishes Christmas and Thanksgiving didn’t exist. Jeanette, his other sister, is very nice, but she lives in Colorado. Juliette lives in New Jersey. Here we are in Bayonne, New Jersey, coming in through the front door — Noel holding Beth, me carrying a pumpkin pie. I tried to sniff the pie aroma on the way from Noel’s apartment to his sister’s house, but it had no smell. Or else I’m getting another cold. I sucked chewable vitamin C tablets in the car, and now I smell of oranges. Noel’s mother is in the living room, crocheting. Better, at least, than David’s mother, who was always discoursing about Andrew Wyeth. I remember with satisfaction that the last time I saw her I said, “It’s a simple fact that Edward Hopper was better.”

Juliette: long, whitish-blond hair tucked in back of her pink ears, spike-heel shoes that she orders from Frederick’s of Hollywood, dresses that show her cleavage. Noel and I are silently wondering if her husband will be here. At Thanksgiving he showed up just as we were starting dinner, with a black-haired woman who wore a dress with a plunging neckline. Juliette’s breasts faced the black-haired woman’s breasts across the table (tablecloth crocheted by Noel’s mother). Noel doesn’t like me to criticize Juliette. He thinks positively. His other sister is a musician. She has a husband and a weimaraner and two rare birds that live in a birdcage built by her husband. They have a lot of money and they ski. They have adopted a Korean boy. Once, they showed us a film of the Korean boy learning to ski. Wham, wham, wham — every few seconds he was groveling in the snow again.