Ann Beattie - Another You

When she didn’t answer, he lay rigidly in the bed, turned away from her. He faced the television, but she knew he wasn’t watching: it had become sound and images for Tony as well as for her, any meaning that was there had disappeared, the plot had vanished.

Tony’s words hung in the air. Even he wasn’t going to pretend any longer that her intuition hadn’t been working; he was still registering his own words, and they were false enough to make him grow a wooden nose. He sniffed, testing. He sniffed because he was trying to sniff back tears. Because what the hell: he hadn’t intended to lie to her, but suddenly it had seemed he had no room to maneuver. It didn’t even seem that he could move an inch forward or backward on the big bed, because the lie had paralyzed him. It really had. He couldn’t move at all. He was trying, and he couldn’t. He was immobilized, his eyes straight ahead, where Bruce Lee began spinning faster and faster, his raised leg sending masked bad guys flying.

Somehow they got out of the room. He remembered it happening in slow motion, as if Bruce Lee’s pace were the norm and they were two zombies, dragging the floor for their clothes, avoiding each other’s eyes. Every word she didn’t speak brought him closer to tears, so he kept in motion, laboriously slow motion, trying to distract himself so he wouldn’t do something horrible and unforgivable, such as falling at the feet of a woman he didn’t love, to declare, through tears, that he loved her. Though some of what he’d said to her had been true. It was true he’d let his friends slip away, or true he’d lost them in more painful ways, like fooling around with one friend’s wife and getting caught, and getting drunk and offending another friend whom he actually thought very highly of, though that particular night he’d been jealous of him, caused a scene, never managed to be forgiven. He could still patch that up. All it would take was a phone call. He’d moved once because of a lost friendship between him and a woman he’d loved, he really had loved her, and then she’d wanted to marry and have a family and he hadn’t, so she had gotten together with someone else, and a few times the three of them had eaten together, or gone to the movies, but he’d begun to loathe her fiancé, for no good reason except jealousy, and he’d ruined what might have been his friendship with the woman by begging her to come back, by saying he’d marry her, that they could have children — all of this a few days before her wedding. Mistake, mistake. And with Sonja? He had pursued her just for the hell of it. Always conscientious about her work, husband’s photograph on the desk, the day she sadly confided in him that she had had so many miscarriages she didn’t have the heart to try any longer to conceive a child. She wasn’t his type, so he thought he might see what it was like to try to fall in love with someone who wasn’t his type. To instigate games with her, act differently from the way he usually acted, which was to try to win a woman’s love through a combination of the tried and true, flowers and expensive candlelit meals, and the unexpected: a gift of two dozen windup Godzillas with shiny red hearts stuck to their chests. That had been Sonja’s valentine: twenty-four of them lined up in the top drawer of her desk, which he had completely emptied of all other contents. But all that had happened was that he liked her. He liked her, and he enjoyed her pleased surprise, her sometimes-impulsive girlishness. The truth was, he would rather be her coconspirator in shrugging off adulthood than try to express romantic love for her. He could see her as a sister, or even as someone else’s perfectly nice wife whom he was entertaining and being entertained by. When they made love, he tried to think that she was on his wavelength, that she was entertaining him, not falling in love with him. Though maybe she hadn’t been in love with him. Maybe she hadn’t. If she had, would that love disappear because of one conversation, would it disappear during a Bruce Lee movie?

He looked over his shoulder at the room and marvelled at how ordinary it was: the messy bed; the generic big-flower curtains; the TV. Then he remembered the scene inside Sonja’s house, the blood. Next he superimposed that ghastly sight on the anonymous motel room and shuddered — shuddered as much at what his own imagination could produce as at the memory of the scene of McCallum’s stabbing. Because deep inside … how to explain? It was as if something small and hard — a marble, say — seemed sometimes to begin rolling in his chest, winding down through his rib cage and giving him a small, sharp thrill as it dropped. As with a pinball game, his fingers would flip up and down his ribs, moving before he realized they were, fingertips trying to track the course of the marble, the little nervous nugget that signalled something had to happen, right away, soon, out of his control, something tickling him inside, shooting up and dropping down, his mood rising and sinking as he tried to track it. Looking at the room, he felt the marble start to form — just the smallest tingle, like the first flick that registers with the oyster when the little grain of sand embeds itself. Yes! he thought. Let’s feel something starting, let’s really be in love with Sonja, let’s run after her and shoot that marble directly into the brain, let’s have the lights light up, set off bells, keep it in play, win this game . But the tingle disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving him again aware of the emptiness inside him.

She leaned against the car, dejected, sorry for herself, preoccupied with emotions he didn’t want to know about. Her feet were crossed at the ankles, her arms wrapped around her chest. She despised him, he knew.

“Where shall I take you?” he said. His voice was ashamed, small.

“Anywhere that isn’t hell,” she said.

He thought: An actor like me deserves the melodrama . He thought: A week — not a few days, a week — in the Bahamas . And who was he kidding about taking his mother? Really: Who was he kidding?

Martine, Dearest ,

Today I was chased down Madison Avenue by a bee, who must have known that in my mind I was already standing in one of the gardens in Maine. No one else was followed by a bee — only me. It made me think that while others had the pleasure of a fluttering butterfly, say, or the pleasant sight of a small bird flying up into a tree, I alone was on Earth to be annoyed by doctors at the hospital, businessmen who are incapable of understanding conclusions arrived at through the process of using common sense and who are therefore unwilling to join in with my conclusions, and then there was that damned bee, swirling about my head, intent upon making me hunch my shoulders and run. A ludicrous sight I must have been, because who among the crowd on Madison Avenue was going to suppose me running because some tiny creature was in hot pursuit?

I intended to write you an anecdote humorously mocking my vulnerabilities, but in re-reading your recent letter about the evasive answers I have in effect made you give the boys because of my long absence, I suppose I might as well assume that you see my true character all too well. Last night I sat up late in the Algonquin lobby, talking to Ethan Bedell and to Marwell Hopkins, a former professor of ours from Yale days. Ethan had brought him intentionally, to talk to me about the situation with Alice, though they had a complicated story about why Marwell happened to be in town that was thoroughly unnecessary and utterly transparent. You would think that a man who taught psychology would be capable of coming up with something better — though come to think of it, the compounding of ludicrous fact upon impossible coincidence originated with Ethan, not with Marwell. At any rate, we three agreed that we were too much the old-fashioned fellows, stuck in our ways, rarely able to go along with the crowd politically or in any other way .