Ann Beattie - Distortions

They were at the police station for a long time. There were reporters. Then they took them to the hospital. What for? They were all dead. The police didn’t ask them to look at the bodies. They just drove them around. It was chaos. At ten o’clock the police called the lifeguard’s house. His roommate answered. He went to the police station to pick up the lifeguard and drive him home.

*

David believed it was happening, but he thought it would turn out all right. He was usually negative in his thinking, and after that day he was more negative than ever, but at the time he kept thinking that it was going to turn out okay. He held Randy’s hand. Toby held Randy’s arm, and when David realized that they were pulling him, he let go … let her have him. He wanted to run up, be certain that they were his children, but stupidly he kept thinking Randy is my child , and he held onto Randy and didn’t move. He fainted, and imagined, while he was passed out, that he was scrambling along the ground, a crab, an ant, moving very fast, whatever he was. He tried to figure out if he was being pursued, or if he was pursuing something, but it never came clear. When he regained consciousness he saw lines in the sand, made by his fingers, he supposed. He thought of his mother pouring the boiling water over the ants, then the long wait until the next pot boiled and she poured that. He counted: Penelope, Andrew.

Someone — it turned out to be a policeman — was slapping his face. It hurt to have sand slapped into your face. He saw the policeman as a shaky, pale figure, because he had just opened his eyes. The policeman, slapping him, had made his eyes open. Everything vibrated. He literally saw stars — or spots of some kind, bright spots, interspersed with the sunset that glowed palely in the distance.

*

Toby was staring at the naked body of Duncan Collins, and the young boy’s body was beautiful, smooth and golden. She was transfixed by him, stretched in the sand, his back gleaming wet. Then she saw the lifeguard — she blocked out the pile of bodies, the actual heap of them, looking only long enough to think that they were like a picture in Life of a Nazi concentration camp, thinking that this was some such remote tragedy, they were not her children. She did move forward, but it was to take the lifeguard’s hand. She closed her eyes and pressed his hand hard, imagined that they were holding each other, that the breeze blowing through her hair made her beautiful, that the lifeguard was pressing her hand, that the pressure she felt was the lifeguard … she opened her eyes and saw, giddily, that it was the lifeguard. She was conscious of her breathing. It was hard because she was exerting so much energy squeezing the lifeguard’s hand, but she didn’t realize it and thought she was breathing shallowly, that she wasn’t getting enough air. Air, breeze, the cool sand. The erotic fantasy she was having about the lifeguard lasted about two minutes, but she remembered them so vividly. The rest was a blur and stayed a blur, but the sedatives that she would later take, the psychiatrist, none of it shook those minutes out of her head. They were more real than anything, and they stayed that way.

*

In his senior year at Dartmouth, the lifeguard broke up with Laura and got back together with his old girlfriend, Michelle. She said that he seemed more … human. She came every weekend from Manchester, where she worked, and stayed with him in his apartment. He got drunk and introspected once or twice a week instead of once a year. She didn’t drink, or at least she didn’t get drunk, but she didn’t say anything about his drinking, and she listened to him tell the story of what happened on the twenty-second of July over and over and over. She gave him a Mickey Mouse night light, and Mickey glowed and smiled through the night. He drank tequila and orange juice. Tequila. Mexico. Maybe he should get out of New Hampshire, go to … Mexico. What for? What’s in Mexico? Sometimes he felt panicky, as though he had to get away. Michelle talked about her work at the clinic. They were sick people, physically sick. As opposed to me, he thought, they are sick. That made him feel hopeful.

It took him longer than it had in the past to do the mathematics problems, because he found himself tracing over numbers. His eights were one black circle on top of another. Michelle told him not to drink so much, and he gave it up, quit entirely. Some people couldn’t give up alcohol that way, but he gave it up and wouldn’t go back to it. He told Michelle these things earnestly, the way a convict would talk to the parole board. He thought of himself as a convict. The police station had scared him to death.

In the spring, Michelle picked flowers and put them in a vase on the dresser. They opened the window and slept with the fresh air, two blankets over them and a quilt, wanting to hurry the spring into summer. The Warners, although he was no longer in touch with them, were also anxious for the summer. When it was June and Randy was out of school, they were going to Europe. The lifeguard had no plans for the summer. He wondered what would happen between Michelle and him. Mickey Mouse glowed and smiled.

David and Toby Warner usually stayed awake for some time after they went to bed. There was no night light in their room. They preferred the uninterrupted darkness. They stared into it. Randy Warner, who had just celebrated his seventh birthday, slept easily. He took his dump truck to bed with him. Toby hated to see the thing, hated to see anything she associated with the previous summer, but she was very solicitous of Randy, and she didn’t say anything. Sometimes when David was asleep and Toby was not, she would look at his blank face and know that he was dreaming sunsets. She half hated him for it and half admired him. David usually studied Toby in the early morning, when she slept deeply. It was the lifeguard, he knew, but the lifeguard wasn’t a threat to him any more — he only felt slightly dismayed. In June, when they left for Europe, Randy did not take his dump truck along. He took, instead, a Captain Magic slate. He liked to write on it and draw pictures, then zip up the top part and watch it all disappear.

Ann Beattie lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry.