Ann Beattie - Another You

“Yes?” McCallum said.

Yes, instead of hello?

“McCallum,” Marshall said. As he spoke, he was struck, for the first time, that while everyone called McCallum by his last name, they almost all called each other by their first names. “McCallum,” he repeated, as if by repeating the name, he could build up steam. “It’s Marshall. I’m at a phone booth outside a convenience store.”

Why had he felt that was a necessary detail?

“Hello, Marshall. What can I do for you?”

Marshall detected a tenuous tone to McCallum’s voice. Perhaps because of the mention of where he was calling from, or the Coke can clattering across the parking lot, sent rolling by a sudden gust of wind. “I’m on my way somewhere, and I have to talk to you first,” Marshall said.

“Isn’t that true of all of us,” McCallum said. “All of us, on our way somewhere.”

There was a long pause, as though McCallum thought he had answered the implied question. Though even McCallum seemed wearied by his oddities tonight; you could hear the fatigue in his voice. He could also hear, above the racket of the Coke can that never stopped rolling, a squeal of brakes in the distance and, from people coming out of the store carrying a boom box, the escalating volume of Whitney Houston, singing about what she would always do. Sometimes the ordinariness of the world he inhabited made him yearn for more excitement. Except that, like McCallum, he was fatigued; maybe that was why people stayed where they were, doing what they were doing: because few people had the doctor’s energy.

“The reason for your call, Marshall?”

Hadn’t he told him?

“I need to see you about something.”

“Tomorrow? Bright and early?”

Very sarcastic, that “Bright and early.” As if being up early, on a bright day, were inherently ridiculous.

“I’d prefer to see you now,” Marshall said.

“Well, the thing of it is, Marshall, we’re sitting around rather stunned, at the moment, because a blue ring has appeared in the little pee jar, which seems to have confirmed that Susan is pregnant. In fact, she was just naming the blue ring when you phoned. I believe she has selected the name of a distant relative, Gemma, off in the kitchen, doing a sort of dance with the pee jar — a sort of twist, if you remember the twist. ‘Let’s twist again, like we did last summer,’ ” McCallum said. “That twist.”

“Do you know a girl named Livan Baker?” Marshall said.

A missed beat on McCallum’s end. “Baker. Yes, slightly.”

“She’s your research assistant, right?”

“Do I want to be dead?” McCallum said. “Is this a phone call asking whether I wouldn’t rather be dead?”

“What?” Marshall said.

“Do I know, and would I rather?” McCallum said. “I do — slightly, as I so circumspectly stated — and would I? I might rather. Yes. Because when I think about it, the weather is dreary, and our jobs don’t mean much in the long run, and Susan and I already have a child who poses considerable problems, and now she is overhearing me to say — on this night when she has farmed out the beloved boy to the Luftquists, so we can have a glass of champagne and celebrate, all cautionary warnings about alcohol consumption aside for this last fling, while doing the twist on the new kitchen linoleum — she is overhearing me to criticize the direction my life has just taken, on top of which you call with this disturbing question, wanting to probe something I do not want probed, whether or not Elavil may now mitigate my downward mood swings.”

Marshall found McCallum’s response so bizarre, so discomfiting, that he said the first thing that occurred to him: “Do you find it impossible to talk like a normal human being?”

Something crashed to the floor in McCallum’s house, the noise overlaying the slammed car door to Marshall’s right, a tall blond woman in a scarf looking murderous as she stalked into the store, a red handbag clutched in her hand like a brick. Was there ever truly a time when Marshall and Gordon and their father, bicycling through the streets, had rung the bells on their bikes to warn people of their approach, to ward off danger? Bicycling — it seemed like pushing hoops down cobblestone streets.

Following the crash, McCallum had said, “Signing off. God bless,” and hung up. So: it had been the wrong thing — certainly the wrong moment, probably even the wrong thing — to try to talk to McCallum directly. Maybe he should take that as a signal against calling Sonja, also. Maybe it was best he simply proceed to Cheryl’s apartment, talk to Livan, get at least the preliminary things over with. She won’t eat , he remembered Cheryl saying with McCallumesque resignation in her voice.

Knowing it was wishful thinking, he went into the store and picked up a bag of Oreos, a six-pack of Cokes. In front of him, the blond woman was checking out, the clerk placing a bottle of Pepto-Bismol and Soap Opera Digest in a plastic bag and pushing the bag toward her. He refilled his coffee cup and handed the clerk a ten, from which he received change arranged as if by a mad origami master, so it was impossible to grasp the money the clerk placed every which way in his palm all at once: dollar bills pointing left and right, coins on the man’s fingertips, more scattered on top of wildly splayed dollars. He pocketed it, losing several pieces of change on the counter as he disturbed the balancing act. It was the clerk’s routine, meant to be troublesome. If a manager had been there, Marshall might have complained, but the only other person who seemed to be in a position of authority was mopping up a broken bottle of Gatorade, the swamp-green liquid trickling away in rivulets amid shards of glass.

He drove to Cheryl Lanier’s, pulling into the safety lane once to turn on the overhead light and recheck the directions scribbled on the envelope. For the first time, he also examined the front of the envelope and found that it was a letter addressed to both of them, from his brother. He opened it. The letter had been typed. It read:

Chers Bro and So:

Thank you very much for passing on the book on Kissinger. Beth is reading it and says that the man was an unconscionable monster. You know me — I don’t read the paper, so thought Nixon and Checkers were still together shitting in the White House. Beth says K. was in no way spiritual. She’s read some of the stuff aloud to me, and what I say is — that man needed to drink a few beers and lighten up. Cross your fingers that Watanabe-san decides to buy the dive shop. Hope he doesn’t think you have to put on a tank and go fifty feet down to muff dive. Ha! Can’t wait to see you in the Conch Republic .

Love, Gordon

“Won’t eat,” Marshall had written on the envelope’s other side, and underneath that, a list of roads, left turns and right turns noted, plus a doodled star and some crosshatching.

He found the roads, but not the star. The night sky was empty of stars, though there was a blur of moon he looked at, wishing it could be the sun in Key West, where Gordon and Beth lived. As he walked toward the apartment building, which was as anonymous and dreary as he’d remembered from the night he dropped Cheryl off, he wondered what other objects were now broken at McCallum’s. Here he was, going up a flight of stairs carrying a package of cookies, his thumb looped into a six-pack of Cokes, about to try, absurdly, to atone for some other adult’s mistake, some other adult’s pathology — whatever it had been that McCallum so mercilessly displayed in Revere. He was glad he’d made the call in one respect: it had convinced him that McCallum almost certainly had done what the girl accused him of doing, and he was slightly dismayed at himself that for a few minutes he’d tried to give such an unpleasant person the benefit of the doubt. But what was his scenario now? To sympathize with the victim, to pretend that Oreos could do some good? Maybe part of the reason he was doing this was pride: a sort of preening for Cheryl Lanier. And if that was so, did that make him much different from McCallum — leaving aside the fact that kinky sex had never interested him, but even if it did, would he ever do such a thing to Cheryl?