Ann Beattie - Another You

Affectionately ,

M .

“THERE WAS A COUPLE I was showing houses to last winter who’d adopted two children,” Sonja said to Jenny Oughton. “They let both kids rename the dog. Don’t laugh — it’s true. The wife explained to me that when they adopted the first child, they wanted to give him the same name they’d given the dog. The dog’s name was Jonathan. The husband changed the dog’s name to Sparks, because he said when it ran across the floor, sparks flew from under the dog’s toenails. Then when the kid was five, the father told his son about renaming the dog, and the kid went ballistic, pleading with them to restore the dog’s name. The parents disagreed with each other — I think he wanted to let the dog have its initial name back, but she thought it was a terrible idea — anyway, it happened, and the dog became Jonathan again, nicknamed J. Then they adopted a little girl, and eventually Jonathan told her about the naming of the dog, and she thought she should also name it. By then the dog was ten years old. She named the dog Cinderella. And the father said okay. He accused his wife of having a lower estimation of girl children than boy children because she wanted to overrule the little girl. Through all of this, there had apparently only been minor confusion, with the dog responding to its new name pretty quickly. Maybe because it was old, or maybe it had a will of its own, I don’t know, but the dog wouldn’t respond to Cinderella and stopped eating its food. They decided she’d have to think up another name, because the dog had simply rejected Cinderella. She cried and took it out on the dog, going wherever the dog was and saying, ‘You should be Cinderella, you’re Cinderella.’ Everybody else called the dog Jonathan, or J. And then the dog died. It developed asthma, and none of the medicine did any good. The wife said she thought the dog just knew it was leaving time. The kids were heartbroken, and on the headstone was every name the dog had ever had. The wife adamantly refused to get another dog. They could have cats, gerbils — she even let the boy have a snake. They had turtles and goldfish. They could call any of them anything they wanted, so there were a million names. She told me this whole story while the housing inspector was explaining to her husband why it would be so costly to switch from electric baseboard heat to oil. The housing inspector had brought his dog — this silly Pekinese or whatever the thing was, with a bow on top of its head. Anyway: at the end of her story — I was trying to show her through the house but she wasn’t paying attention — her husband appeared at our side, and do you know what he said? ‘We have had a slightly fuller life than my wife is suggesting.’ I’ll never forget that: the housing inspector, with his little dog in his arms, and the husband’s barely disguised fury at his wife. I had the feeling she’d told the story a lot of times before, and that she’d tell it again. I just happened to be the one that day, showing them through a reduced-priced colonial.”

Jenny Oughton turned into Trevi’s parking lot, shaking her head. In the summer there was valet parking, but the rest of the year no one was there to park cars; the valet parking sign had been covered with black plastic. The owner, Vincent, had sunk the parking sign, on an enormous pole, into concrete the second time the sign had been stolen. “Some hippie asshole wants it pointing at his toilet, I don’t know,” Vincent had told Sonja the last time she’d eaten there.

Having dinner at Trevi had been Sonja’s idea; Jenny had offered to cook, but Sonja felt better about eating at a restaurant and not putting Jenny to any trouble. Walking from the parking lot to the restaurant, Sonja said to Jenny, “I probably shouldn’t have told you that story. It’s probably more of the same, for you. Or it was, before you switched from people to research.”

“That was particularly good,” Jenny said. “I assure you.”

Vincent was not behind the reservation desk. A young blond woman in an off-the-shoulder black dress greeted them, showing them to a table beside a window, as Sonja had requested. Though it was too dark to look out on the water, you could still sense that it was there, see it, almost, beyond the spotlights that tinged the frozen ground an eerie blue. In summer, it was lovely to walk in the gardens after dinner. This was the restaurant she and Marshall had come to on their last anniversary. Now she was here with a friend, with the ulterior motive of telling Jenny about her affair and finding out whether Jenny thought she might be … what was the euphemism for “cracking up”? Or was that the euphemism? So how had she gotten off the point so soon, telling the story about the strange family? Sonja wondered. Her best guess would have been that while she knew Jenny liked her, she sometimes felt she needed to establish with other women that she was a real presence, as if her being there, and talking casually, weren’t enough. That was what made her an intermittent raconteur. Tony, unlike her, was always self-assured, which allowed him to be quite direct, in business as well as in personal relationships. Once you’d gotten involved with Tony, though, he seemed so authoritative that you forgot to question him, and then he was actually able to act the way he felt most comfortable, operating not by direct lies, but through lies of omission. “Let me tell you some things I would be concerned about if I were buying this property,” Tony would say to prospective buyers, adding a winning hey-we’re-in-this-together smile, putting himself and the client on one side of the fence and the seller on the other. Then he would discuss the house’s more obvious superficial defects, which would deflect attention from potentially complex problems. With young couples who were obviously workaholics, he would stress the availability of interesting things in the community, mentioning scuba-diving classes they would love at the community pool, lying about “the best class I ever took in my life” (tango lessons given by an imaginary local Argentinean couple), suggesting that an exciting life could come with acquisition of the property, deliberately missing the point about their boring lives. Ah, Tony. “You see through me,” he’d said to her early on, cueing her that she should, making a preemptive strike in case she had and had some reservations. The attention would be deflected from Tony onto the other person — what an intelligent person, he implied, who saw through him. And then you were hooked and you began to talk about your life.

Sonja suggested the Cakebread Cellars chardonnay when the waiter came to the table. “We could also order by the glass,” she said. This was the P.S. everyone added after suggesting a bottle, made guilty by other people’s health-conscious abstemiousness. But Jenny didn’t let her down.

“A bottle of Cakebread,” Jenny said. “Great.”

The waiter returned and put wineglasses in front of them. The busboy stood still until the waiter moved away, then poured water from a silver pitcher tied with a linen napkin into the tall, thin water glasses.

“We’ve all missed you since you left the book discussion group,” Sonja said. “Not only do I miss you, but I always feel slightly guilty that while we’re sitting around talking, you’re still in the lab.” She took a sip of water. “Not that we weren’t all happy your project got funded.”

“But I’ve been overdoing it.” Jenny sighed. “I finally realized that part of it was a retreat from my ex-husband. I knew if I was home, he’d be phoning me. We finally had a long talk, and I told him things had to change. I made him understand that from my perspective, it was over.”

The waiter showed Jenny the wine bottle, although Sonja had ordered. When Jenny pointed to Sonja, the waiter turned the bottle toward her.