Ann Beattie - Another You

“What about your husband?” Sonja said.

Jenny shrugged again, poured wine into Sonja’s glass, gesturing for her to drink. “He’s straight,” Jenny said.

“It’s none of my business. I’m sorry,” Sonja said.

“He knew I was bisexual when we got married. I got pregnant, and he really, really wanted to marry me. So we got married.”

Two waiters put their dinners down in unison, lifting the warming lids and handing them to the busboy, who held them straight in front of him like two headlights of an old roadster.

“Ladies,” the waiter said. “Anything else?”

“No thank you,” Sonja said. Sonja was glad to be able to eat, sure anything she said to Jenny would come out wrong. There was no way to pretend to any sophistication now — her silence had blown it.

“Oh, eat your dinner,” Jenny said, as the waiter moved quickly away. “See: gay or not, I’m just a Jewish mother.” Jenny picked up her knife and fork and cut a slice of veal.

“It never occurred to me. Am I really dense?” Sonja said.

“What do you mean? You mean, have I been playing footsie with some woman and you didn’t see it? That right this minute, the jewelry I’m wearing sends a signal to everyone in the gay world?”

“Isn’t there something about which ear is pierced?” Sonja said. She realized as she spoke that she was a little drunk.

“Now everybody’s ears are pincushions,” Jenny said.

Sonja looked up. Jenny was wearing small diamond studs. A gray turtleneck. A man’s watch, but many women wore men’s watches. A crepe skirt.

“Boo!” Jenny said, and Sonja jumped.

“Oh, I’m sorry. That was cruel,” Jenny said.

“Well,” Sonja said, taking a deep breath and exhaling, “I’ve been having an affair with the man I work for. We let ourselves into houses that are up for sale and chase each other — we take turns chasing each other. Sometimes we play hide-and-seek and duck into closets, or Tony will double up under the kitchen sink. He can wedge himself in places so tiny most kids wouldn’t attempt them. We always take off our clothes immediately. This only happens naked. Lately I’ve had an irresistible urge to tell Marshall.”

Jenny’s eyes widened as Sonja spoke. She had leaned her knife and fork against the edge of her plate. “A person with her own surprises,” Jenny said.

“All those bruises, and Marshall never asked. He hardly ever noticed. Once he was running his thumb up my thigh, and I winced, and he said, ‘Oh no. I hurt you.’ The bruise was already there, yellow and green, days old from a tumble I’d taken when Tony made a flying leap to catch me.”

Jenny raised an eyebrow.

“I was going to ask you if you thought I’d snapped.”

“Clearly,” Jenny said.

“Really?”

“Well, yes. Don’t you think so?”

The waiter glided to the table, poured the wine.

“Dinners like this are a lot more fun than book discussion groups,” Jenny said.

Sonja, suddenly hungry, picked up her fork and pierced slivered zucchini. She nodded.

“Do people have … I don’t know what to call it. Episodes and then they regain their equilibrium?”

“Of course.”

“You don’t seem particularly worried.”

“You seem okay. Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“No, I mean, is this what you’d say if I came to you as a patient?”

“You haven’t. You haven’t because you know you don’t need a shrink. You’re having an affair with your boss. Why tell Marshall?”

“I think because I’m angry with him. His life, the way he loves routine, his isolation. I guess I wanted him to know his isolation isolates me, too. You know, I look at Evie and I think time shouldn’t be wasted. People should act on their impulses. Is that sane, or reckless?”

“Reckless,” Jenny said, summoning the waiter. “Two glasses of chardonnay,” she said. “We’re working up to brandy.”

The waiter nodded.

Jenny shrugged. “Listen — if you need a vacation from everything, I mean it about Santa Fe. I know how upset you are about Evie being hospitalized. I mean, that’s enough to have to deal with right now. Don’t add to your problems by telling Marshall. It should go without saying that nobody in Santa Fe would misunderstand what you were doing there.”

“Thank you,” Sonja said.

“What book would we have been talking about this week if I hadn’t dropped out of the group?” Jenny said.

“Last Letters from Hav,” Sonja said. “Jan Morris wrote it.”

“ The Scarlet Letter drove me out,” Jenny said. She ate another piece of veal, lifting her eyebrows to indicate its deliciousness. She put a piece on Sonja’s plate. “Wasn’t it interesting we’d all forgotten Hester’s husband was a real presence in the book. None of us who’d read it back in high school remembered he’d gone to haunt poor Hester.”

“High school,” Sonja laughed. “What did we know about men haunting women in high school?”

Jenny looked up, perfectly serious. “What’s made Marshall withdraw from you?” she said.

“Withdraw? What makes you think that?”

Yet it was a perfectly simple question, based on the reasonable assumption that that explained part of what was happening. Sonja had to question herself when she did not have an answer. Was it possible that not only had Marshall failed to see her bruises, she had failed to notice his?

The waiter placed the glasses on the table, his lips puckered.

The chardonnay was the same bright yellow as a large bruise on the side of her leg she’d gotten in a struggle with Tony, but it was deliciously cold when she took the first sip.

Martine des Fleurs (as Alice says)—

If a comma is more familiar than a colon, then what is a dash? A running start?

I write, having recently concluded our conversation of an hour ago, to say that my plans have changed. I am terribly distressed that I must stay in New York until the end of the week. I have done my best to convince Alice to proceed to Boston and have you pick her up, but she feels that until her nausea subsides, she does not want to travel. I have offered to drive her myself and return the next day. Amelia’s doctor has been to see Alice, and she has kept her last appointment to see him, though until the last minute she was insisting that she would not go to his office. Alice has become skeptical of any doctor, including Dr. St. Vance (in absentia). The New York Dr. feels it is only fatigue, and the combination of wine with the tranquillizer that made her dizzy a second time the other night. She is finishing the course of antibiotics for her ear, but has been feeling fine in that department almost from the minute she began taking those pills. The N.Y.C. doctor is always quite worried about medicines that conflict, and in fact seems not much to like medicine at all, but I’ve known enough doctors of whom this is true not to be surprised. It did distress me a bit that he all but suggested that Alice’s having taken one calming pill after a party during which she’d ingested several glasses of champagne was not only unwise, but potentially life-threatening. I took him aside in the corridor and asked whether he seriously thought that one calmative taken two hours after drinking one or two glasses of champagne in the course of an evening was suicidal, and he looked at me as if I’d poured the champagne down her throat and then handed her a pill bottle. Then he said, “I examined her. She did not drink only two glasses of champagne.” Well, Martine, I was at her side the entire evening. Even if she had three, this would be the absolute maximum, and she was by no means drunk either at the party or afterwards. The doctor asked me, “Do social occasions make your wife nervous?” At first I thought it the oddest question, yet perhaps her indecisiveness is a response to social pressures. It has grown worse of late; I know the two of you chide me about how easy it is to pull on one of my “uniforms,” but her trouble in arriving at a decision is now much worse than when last you saw her. If I see him again, I mean to reopen the discussion, but correct me if I’m wrong here: I assume he meant to imply either that she was generally in not very good shape, or perhaps that in point of fact she was sneaking a drink in the hotel room, or something of that nature, in which case I can swear this was not so. I am probably being overly analytical here because it is a sensitive point — that she might not be doing very well, that is. Nevertheless, I am glad I did not take issue with him at the moment, and of course he is a concerned man, having come out initially on a very rainy night to a hotel to see a patient whom he’d never met before .