Ann Beattie - Another You

“Was that the whole story?” she said.

“What part do you think I’m holding back? My wild affair with Cheryl Lanier? My true sympathy for Livan Baker, probably only a product of her troubled times, not to blame for deceiving the enemy?”

“You’re pairing the two because you want me to think it’s ludicrous you’d have an affair with Cheryl Lanier. You’re trying to put that on a par with feeling sorry for Livan Baker.”

“Sonja, I never had anything to do with Cheryl Lanier,” he said.

“Would it be the end of the world if you had?”

What a peculiar response. Was it a rhetorical question?

“Well, you tell me,” he said.

“Not the end of the world,” she said. She got up and poked a burning ember. “I have a certain interest in espousing that opinion.” She leaned the poker against the firescreen and went back to the chair, raised her feet to the seat cushion, and brought them up beside her, tucking the afghan around herself. Evie had made the afghan for Sonja’s birthday, in November, and Sonja loved it the way Linus loved his blanket.

“What do you mean?”

“For a while I was having an affair with Tony,” she said.

As she spoke, he began to try to distract himself so he wouldn’t hear what was coming; he wondered if the logs were catching fire, or whether he should have used more newspaper, or whether it might not have been a good idea to place the logs on one at a time; he tried blocking her words, though “Tony” slipped through, and also the word “affair.” He felt a physical sensation, a scrambling in his throat. She had managed to astonish him.

“Off the subject, I suppose, but so did Evie. Did you know that? That she’d slept with your father when your mother was still alive? She said she looked at the Kinsey Report when it was first published — that sneaking a look at it in those days was the same as flipping through a porn magazine now — and wondered whether women had been honest, because so many more men than women claimed to have had affairs. She and your father began their affair before she left her parents’ house in Canada, and it continued when she went to live at their house. Can you imagine Evie being so brazen? She said she’d never known how much her mother or father knew about any of it. That sometimes she thought they knew exactly what was going on. That they were looking the other way from the first and expected her to, as well. I guess I’m trying to divert your attention from what I just said. I mean this, for what it’s worth: I never wanted to break up our marriage. I know I should have found a better way to tell you, but I hate him now, Marshall. I hate myself, too, but I could sort of, you know, move aside with my own self-loathing and let you take over. I’ll understand if you hate me.”

He looked at the floor and was surprised to see how bright the colors in the rug appeared in the firelight: the large, worn Oriental they had gotten years before, in Boston, that had once had to be folded over at one end because their room had been too small. It had been like a big, colorful wave, rolling over. That first apartment came back to him in startling detail: the drop-leaf table that now sat beside Sonja’s chair, with the leaves down, formerly their kitchen table. The chrome chairs they’d found at curbside on Boylston Street with the red plastic seats were gone, but the ceramic planter, now containing a large fern, sat a few feet from the fireplace. The underside of the leaves glowed silver in the firelight, so that it seemed a magic plant, a plant you would read about in a fairy tale. Perhaps that was what McCallum needed in the hospital: not serious literature, but picture books — photography, or an illustrated book of fables. His thoughts hovered around McCallum, and he remembered with a shiver McCallum’s blood on the walls. Was it possible, because of the colors within colors, that some blood might still be on the rug, indistinguishable in the complex geometric pattern? He was looking at the rug as if he held a great magnifying glass to his eye, yet the harder he stared, the more the details appeared fuzzily out of focus. He was quite certain that he should speak, say something immediately, yet it would of course be incredibly inappropriate to ask a question about the rug — an unanswerable question under any circumstances, how would Sonja know? Sonja. Her name made him realize her presence: she was slouched deep in the chair, biting her bottom lip, her hands tightly clasped on top of the tangled afghan. The fingers of her right hand, laced through the fingers of the left, nearly covered her wedding band. He looked at his own hand. He had never worn a wedding band. Did that mean anything, he wondered, though who should know the answer if not him? He looked again at the rug, thought the phrase: Rug pulled out from under . That was certainly what had happened to McCallum, and now it had just happened to him. Imagine McCallum’s horror when he realized his own wife was intent upon killing him. Imagine the things wives could do, the power they had. Sonja had just changed everything. He smiled a halfhearted smile, certain that she was both friend and enemy, and also hoping she’d understand his thoughts had been drifting. He felt paralyzed by stupidity. What could he say?

“Did you think you were in love with Tony?” he said.

“No,” she said. “It was a game. I realize that’s terrible. I had started to think of myself as so, you know, programmatic.”

“Programmatic?” he said, though he had silently resolved not to reveal the full extent of his stupidity by echoing her words. The words he had been most tempted to echo had been “Tony” and “over.” He thought the name. It didn’t have any good connotations. He remembered Tony had waited for them outside the police station, then had stood in the entranceway to the living room with him when the place was filled with police. But wait: What if they moved? What about leaving the rug behind? What if the two of them were cut free from the ordinariness of their lives — what if they really left the scene of the crime? Who knew how many times she had slept with Tony? Sane, stable Sonja. Sonja who had had an affair with her boss, whom she now hated, thank God, and it had happened because she’d felt programmatic.

“It’s okay,” he heard himself say.

Sonja’s frown deepened. “It is?”

“I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad—” What was he glad about? Nothing he could imagine. He finished the sentence: “I’m sorry you felt the way you did. I don’t think this has been a very good year for either one of us.”

“That’s all you’re going to say?”

“It does occur to me that it was rather odd you’d imply that I’d had an affair with Cheryl, while you didn’t rush to volunteer you’d been fooling around yourself.”

“I wasn’t any more sure of the timing than you were. I almost blurted it out the morning after McCallum spent the night. That would have made for an interesting day, wouldn’t it?”

“Do you think we could talk about this tomorrow?” he said. “I’m awfully confused. I didn’t expect to hear what I just heard. If there were clues, I didn’t pick up on them. I always thought he was an odd duck, so I guess on some level nothing he’s done could really surprise me. Did you think you were in love with him?”

“You already asked me that. I didn’t think that. We’d go into houses, houses that were for sale, empty houses, ugly houses, walking around with our checklist, I don’t know. I mean, of course that was my job, but it began to seem like we were inspecting tombs, or something. Caves. Big houses with the pipes drained and no heat, and no signs of life. Or at least it wasn’t recognizable life. They were like shells left behind when reptiles molted. It was the emptiness that started to get to me.”