Ann Beattie - Another You

“It’s true,” she said. “Two things are true: you’re out of control, and your house makes me uncomfortable.” She slumped against a wall in the hallway. Tony leaned against the opposite wall.

She had already begun to walk ahead of him, trailing her fingertips along the wall. Somebody else’s house. The anonymity of houses. “What if it was a sort of warning? McCallum’s wife flipping out like that, coming to do something awful to him.”

“Are you really being so nonsensical as to say that the McCallums’ family drama was enacted on your stage as a comment on our actions?”

“If you’re making fun of me, how can I tell you what’s bothering me?”

“You’ve told me what’s bothering you, and the only response is to dismiss such insane misgivings.”

“Don’t try to turn this around so the problem is mine, Tony. Yes, I’m upset. I was trying to tell you what was bothering me, and you stopped me.”

“I won’t do it again,” he said, taking her hand. “Listen: I don’t know what the two of us are doing standing around in the Ahlgrens’ house with their fucking deco curtains and their fucking marbleized custom paint job streaked up and down the hallways and their Directoire chairs, except that I suppose I felt a little funny about having you two in my house, I assumed you’d feel that way too, you apparently did feel that way, I just — I shouldn’t have intruded.”

“Did you go to the senior prom?” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Did you, Tony?”

“No, I did not, in part because I arrived in the U.S. midway through what you call senior year and didn’t know anyone well enough to ask, though I lost my virginity at fourteen, if that’s relevant to our conversation. Also, I was shy around girls. My mother didn’t know what was going on, fortunately. She wanted nothing but to be back in Essex, herself. Some party dance that meant she’d have to rent me a tuxedo and buy me slip-on shoes? My mother wouldn’t have wanted to hear about nonsense like that.”

“I can be a big girl and go home tomorrow if they’ll let me, unplug the phone if that’s what we need to do, close the shades. How long can they drive by?”

He let the question hang in the air. He was thinking that he had been unfair to her, snapping at her because she was expressing her misgivings over their affair—“affair” was probably too misleading a way to think of their involvement — the sexualization of their admittedly juvenile, existential angst (what she’d called it from the first) that had led them, a few weeks before, to start having sex in empty houses. It had been a good game, a rather thrilling game, until the impersonality began to seem less thrilling and recently they had begun to retreat to his house. Gradually, even when she was gone, things in his private world had begun to seem slightly altered, to take on some of Sonja’s personality, absorb her essence, an essence he would be the first to admit he did not fully understand, so that discovering more and more things about her, trying to intuit her feelings, to anticipate her reactions, was like having the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle spread on the rug with no idea what the final picture was to be. Then one night she had suddenly been there with her husband, and like cigarette smoke clinging to fabric, Marshall’s own essence had permeated the house. The scent had made Marshall seem at once all too real and also vaporous, like a ghost who might have been there in spirit, observing all along.

“What are you thinking?” Sonja said. “That if somebody hadn’t gotten stabbed in my house, the two of us could be off today playing the game? Or are you not very interested? Did spending time with Marshall sour you on the idea? It’s hard not to see me as a middle-aged woman with her middle-aged husband, dealing with other people’s pedantic problems, isn’t it?”

“You’re making it out to be shabby,” Tony said.

She looked at the firm set of Tony’s jaw, his eyes straight ahead, peering out the back window to the lawn’s winter-dry grass, grown long and wind tossed like straw thatching, a sifting of snow drifted near trees, piles of sodden packing boxes sagging forlornly. The former occupants must have thrown their extra boxes onto the lawn. She had only been home twenty minutes, half an hour, before McCallum had come to the door; just long enough to shower, after her romp with Tony in the fake Tudor, the one that had just gone on their list as an exclusive, and then the knock had come on the door and, startled, she had looked through the peephole to see a person announcing that he was Marshall’s friend from Benson, that it was very important, he must talk immediately to Marshall, who had just called him. Called from where? She had been surprised, but relieved, to return home and not find Marshall there, but where had Marshall been, and under what circumstances had he befriended such a disconsolate man? After having been chased through rooms of gold wall-to-wall carpeting, with the streetlights outside casting just enough light to transform their nude figures into Modigliani shadows, she had returned home to shower immediately, to consider heating some food for herself, though she’d thought it would be better just to sleep, and to eat in the morning … who had this person been, who suddenly spoke to a convex glass eye as if he were appealing directly to God?

“I think we’re both under too much pressure,” Tony said. “I would suggest that the solution might lie in our being in bed. Elsewhere. After lunch and something to drink.”

He picked up their coats from the sofa in the living room and held hers by the tips of its shoulders. Looking over her shoulder at him, she thought about the way Evie had handled her wet wash, years ago, when she still lived in her townhouse, lifting it from the washtub and holding it delicately pinched until she could transport the dripping clothing into the dryer. Tony was holding the coat — her dry coat — for her to back into. He slung his own coat over his shoulder and switched off the lamp and opened the front door, turning to lock it behind them.

She sat in the car like a patient, or at least like a patient passenger, replaying scenes from two nights ago. It had all been strange and unexpected, perplexing but manageable. And then, the next morning, after she had dressed and brushed her hair and sprayed perfume underneath her hair, so she could feel the downy hair underneath tingling, she had bent over the bed, intending to tell Marshall that she thought she loved someone else. She had shivered, slightly, with an almost irresistible impulse to speak, in spite of Evie’s having urged her to remain silent, but just as quickly the desire had passed. He had looked at her fondly and the desire had passed. They had both left their house, with McCallum still sleeping, and his wife had come after him and tried to kill him.

She was so lost in her thoughts, it took her some while to realize Tony had been speaking to her. “That new motel. How do I go?” He was asking her for directions, but as he asked the question she remembered the brief blip of a nursery rhyme: how does your garden grow? She could remember the singsong rhyme, but not the words, except that the poem ended with the words “all in a row.” Everything neat. All lined up. She imagined old-fashioned flowers drawn by some illustrator’s pen in the pages of a children’s book: a pop-up book, the moving boxes she had just seen in the backyard metamorphosed into a cardboard flip-up garden, hollyhocks and peonies, roses and delphiniums springing to life. Which would certainly be a beautiful sight on such an overcast winter day. Which would be wonderfully magical, no less astonishing because it was not real.

Today’s sky was evenly gray, cloudless, so flat in color it provided little incentive to remember the sun. Missing its warmth, she superimposed an imaginary sun on the blank screen of sky as Tony drove: her pretty projection, her analogue to the recently invented pop-up book, the red dots floating in front of her as she rubbed her aching, closed eyes, a burst of rosy suns: her nonsense world. With her eyes closed, it was a nonsense world — virtual reality as observed by the not so virtuous. Eyes open, the suns became the spots of blood on her walls. She turned and looked at Tony, whose face was frozen in concentration: the attempt to remember not a sunny day, but what turn to make; activating the windshield wipers to clear the gritty mist of rain and road dirt that splashed in front of them.