Ann Beattie - Another You

I don’t ever want to have any secrets from you. I want you to see my secrets as clearly as the things you see looking in a mirror. My secrets surround us. I have a secret for you. It’s that there’s a way we can be so close, you can be me and I can be you. I’m going to be your secret .

Love, Livan

“That’s only the most recent,” McCallum said.

“She’s written you other things along these lines? You don’t know what she’s talking about? Can’t you take this to a shrink at student health, or to the police?”

“How is that going to help me?”

“If nothing else, you could go on record that she’s, you know, unbalanced. It’s unwanted attentions, or something. To tell you the truth, I already called a friend of Sonja’s at student health a few days ago. We’ll go there tomorrow and get her advice, get this put down on the record somewhere.”

“ ‘The record’?” McCallum said. “What is ‘the record’? Is it like ‘the Force’?”

“Maybe you should take a shower and go to bed. You look awful. You can borrow a clean shirt tomorrow. Try to …”

“Look the part,” McCallum finished. “Look like somebody who isn’t a rapist and a sadist. What do you think we’re going to do? Have somebody in some position of authority write down what — a complaint, or a — maybe it’s a misgiving. Maybe you and I are experiencing misgivings about the mental state of a student at the college. And we’re going off to have the grown-ups tell us what to do.”

“I sure as hell don’t know what to do.”

“No, I don’t either,” McCallum said. He sat in a kitchen chair, ducking his head into his hands, looking up again. “You don’t think our going to student health would fan the fire? If they get in touch with her, she’s going to tell the same lies to them she’s told everybody else.”

“She’s already been there. She’s already talked to somebody, but then she freaked out and didn’t go back.” As he spoke, he began to wonder whether Livan hadn’t gone back because her story hadn’t been believed. How could Cheryl be sure, and why had he been sure, that the counsellor’s words were what had been reported? Maybe she had picked up on Livan’s deceit; maybe that was the reason Livan hadn’t returned to press her point. Maybe someone had seen through her, called her bluff. This thought made him slightly optimistic, but it wasn’t anything to tell McCallum. It was best — wasn’t it best? — to speak to student health, let them contact the dean, get this thing out in the open. Since McCallum had done nothing but kiss her, what could be the harm? At worst, he’d be reprimanded, but if Livan spread the rumor and she was believed …

“You know that scene when Redford and Newman are high up on the cliff, and Newman wants them to jump? And Redford has to say he doesn’t know how to swim? Butch Cassidy . I loved that movie: an all-time great buddy film. So tomorrow we’re going off like two characters in a buddy film. Come spring, everything will be fine again, we’ll be splashing in the old swimming hole, right? Safe. Doesn’t sound right, does it? I don’t know if that’s really going to happen. Listen to me: I must think this is a movie, not my life. I must think we’re both just a couple of characters.”

“Well?” Sonja said, looking up from the bed, where she sat, still fully clothed. Marshall, who had finally followed her into the bedroom, was momentarily startled: for a second it seemed she had read his mind, that she wanted him to sort through the possibilities that had been going through his head and give her a definitive answer about how and where this would end. Instead of answering, he sat beside her. It was ludicrous, the amount of time and thought that had gone into these students’ problems. Anyone who’d spent any time in the profession knew that being a teacher had more than a little in common with being a doctor, and that you needed to keep professional distance. So is that what he’d tried to do — keep professional distance — in the car, outside the big house in Dover?

What else could he have done? He was offering comfort.

Kissing Cheryl Lanier?

Never again.

Truly?

“I don’t know,” Marshall said. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“You must be surprised he came to the house.”

“I’m astonished. We don’t—” He almost said We don’t like each other , but instead said, “We don’t know the first thing about each other. How I got dragged into this, I’m not quite sure.”

“Happens,” Sonja said.

She had begun to pull off her clothes, tossing them piece by piece to the bedside chair, missing with the sweater, scoring a hit with the pants. He stood and undressed also, tossing his shirt in the hamper, draping his pants over the doorknob, stripping down to his underwear, which he did not remove. Then he edged close to her in the bed, thankful that he had a kind, sane wife, half wondering what McCallum had said to her but too tired to ask. If he thought about McCallum, down the hall, about his having to get up and deal with the old McCallum or even the new surprisingly forthcoming McCallum, it would create such anxiety he might not be able to sleep, and as much as he didn’t know, didn’t know, didn’t know, he was tired, tired.

Dearest ,

My indebtedness to you is vast, eclipsed only by my affection. Hiding from my responsibilities, conducting myself as if I am entitled to bow to every inclination — because that is what it is: inclination, not a true sense of duty — I have stayed gone too long, choosing to convince myself that the urgency of Alice’s present situation supersedes all else. And yet when you did not respond to my letter, but only folded a piece of paper to contain the pictures of the children — my wonderful, so well cared for children who have nevertheless become orphans to their parents, though they are so central to your life, Martine, I do not know what I can ever do to repay you for your diligence, your charity toward us all, though I see us some days as mere pretenders, pretenders to living a proper life, simple cowards in the face of adversity, when actually we are moving in a circle of the damned. Oh, I do so hate to admit to such self-loathing, to such cynicism and such cowardice, yet you are my conscience and whether I confess or not, I could not hide from you .

Let me be blunt and say I despise her for her weakness, for her ability to deceive me, whether it be about a secretly ingested drug or what she makes seem a random fascination with a man in a hotel corridor, whom I know she has met before — a man she has probably been with, as the two of them go about enacting a charade for my benefit. But tell me this: which came first? My highly cultivated ability for self-deception, or Alice’s ability to see that whenever something goes wrong, she can play on my guilt? It is my superiority, my damnable feeling of superiority, that affects me so deeply I try every way to hide it from others, including my own wife. Here I am now, at her side — or I would be, if the doctors would allow it, though they feel, at present, she must be separated from me — here I am in limbo, trusting another person to keep things on course, conveniently forgetting that although one child is dead, other children remain, and that they need their parents as well as your superb care .

Yet they seem gone from me. To be honest, limbo is preferable to the pain of attempting to re-connect with them, which of course I must soon bring myself to do, as the disappearance of two parents must be quite traumatic, however much they adore you .

This morning, I stood with the snapshots by the window in my hotel, the strong sun giving their faces a Bela Lugosi glow, distracted by the beauty of the trees, the beauty — in my self-pitying mood, I saw it as the beauty of ordinary people walking to and fro, doing and thinking ordinary things, or even thinking terrible, unknowable things, yet nevertheless walking, moving, making progress, while I stood, as if two snapshots weighed so heavily in my hands they might as well have been enormous barbells that allowed me to hold them and raise them once and lower my arms again, yet after that rooted me to the floor so I could not move .