Ann Beattie - Another You

A new tape was clicked into the boom box: the sounds of the sea, Marshall guessed. The sea, with chimes intermittently ringing. Marshall watched her disappear into the house, heard a door close behind her.

“She meditates in the Mary Kay room,” Gordon said. “You know what I tell her? That she’s in there meditating for money.”

“Pretty necklace she got from Evie,” Marshall said.

“Say what?”

“Her necklace,” Marshall said. “She said it was Evie’s.”

“That what she was wearing?” Gordon said. “Yes, very nice of Evie.”

Marshall waited, hoping he’d say something else. Finally, Gordon said, “Hey. How about some colder-than-cold beers? Friend of mine is tending bar tonight down at the Green Parrot. What do you say I light these coals and we duck out while she’s meditating?”

“Sure,” Marshall said.

“That all right with you?”

“Sure,” Marshall said again. He was slightly drunk and didn’t intend to drink more once he got to the bar, but he decided he’d go along for the ride.

“Hey, I can tell you all about the buyout,” Gordon said. “I got my hopes up.”

“This might really happen, huh?”

“Might happen. Yeah, might happen. If so, I’m going to think something from living with Beth rubbed off. She’s got the most amazing good luck of anybody I ever met, let alone a pretty woman. Women don’t have much luck at all, in my personal experience. Listen to them long enough, you’ll think no one woman ever had a moment’s luck, ever.”

“Yeah,” Marshall said. As he spoke, he wondered exactly what he was agreeing with.

“Okay, we’re out of here,” Gordon said. As he passed the boom box, he turned up the volume slightly. “I know just how she likes it,” he said. “Music, at least. The rest, you go figure.”

This seemed not to require a reply.

“You mind hanging on to the back of a motorcycle?” Gordon said. “It’s not mine, it’s borrowed. I’m giving it back to the bartender. We can walk back.”

“How far is this place?”

“Across town, but town’s about as wide as the Queen Mary sideways. You know about the fish that saw the shadow of the Queen Mary ’s bottom, right?”

Searching for his keys in a fishbowl of change on the floor near the front door, Gordon forgot to expect a reply. If that’s the Queen Mary’s bottom, then God save the King , Marshall thought. If someone had asked him for the punchline of the joke — that joke, or any joke — he wouldn’t have thought of it. Amazing, the irrelevant things stored away that could be tapped into, spontaneously.

The motorcycle was a big black Harley. When Gordon turned the key in the ignition, it sounded like something large exploding; then the engine settled into a burbling, growling monotony. Instead of a helmet, Gordon pulled on a baseball cap that had been stretched over the fake leopard-skin seat. Marshall jumped on and the motorcycle took off at a forty-five-degree angle, Gordon hollering something into the wind he didn’t understand. “When I lean, don’t lean with me,” Gordon said a second time. “Sit back there like you’re Queen Elizabeth on the throne. Sure ain’t gonna be Prince Charlie, all the trouble he’s gotten himself into. Whoo-ee!”

Gordon zigzagged between two cars, turned right on a red light after a second’s hesitation. “This is Truman,” Gordon shouted. It was the same road Marshall had taken into town, but he was experiencing it differently now. He decided to let out a big breath and trust Gordon’s driving skills.

“You see that Saturday Night Live skit about Prince Charles wanting to be his lover’s Tampax?” Gordon shouted. Every third word was lost in the wind. Gordon seemed to realize this. “Prince Charles. Camilla Parker-Bowles: Tampax!” he shouted. “Saturday Night Live.”

“I did, actually,” Marshall said. He was slightly surprised that his brother remembered Prince Charles’s lover’s name. He hadn’t remembered that himself, though he did know what he was talking about: the woman gets a gift from the Prince and it turns out to be a Tampax with Charles’s head talking at the tip. Maybe everything and everybody was just fucking crazy. Maybe riding on a motorcycle with Gordon made as much sense as anything else. Wasn’t that exactly what the recondite McCallum would do, hooting with pleasure? Sonja, herself — apparently she liked a wilder time than she let on.

The motorcycle veered right onto Whitehead, steeply banked as it cornered, a few blacks on bicycles looking up as the two men roared past on the big black Harley, one clinging to the other’s shirt as if it provided a secure grip, the driver hunched over, barrelling forward in yellow aviator glasses and a backward Mets cap, shirt billowing. He slowed for a red light, then coasted through, accelerating when he passed the intersection. “Oo-ee!” Gordon hollered. “Hate to return this baby.”

The Green Parrot was on a corner several blocks up: a big bar with open shutters and a deeply overhanging roof, specks of light inside from pinball machines and the lights dangling over pool tables. The wall art, Marshall saw as he climbed off and walked limp-legged into the bar, consisted of hand-painted beer bottles and framed pictures of parrots. The rectangular bar took up almost the entire room and was worked by one bartender, who did things faster than the eye could register them. “Hey, man,” he called, in greeting to Gordon. “You got my machine fixed, I see.” He raced to their end of the bar, setting down two open bottles of Rolling Rock and pouring two shots of vodka that slowly settled after he left like water calming in the wake of a boat. Gordon nodded, tossing down the vodka. Marshall did the same, tears springing to his eyes.

“So you tell me, man,” Gordon said. “Have we got the right life down here, or do we not?”

“Seems great,” Marshall said.

“Beth upsets herself about the place, though. Says the reef is a cesspool. Everglades almost gone. Hell, she won’t go into the Audubon House because it turns out he killed birds. She’s got quite a rant against Audubon. But luck? Does that woman have luck? She got four ceiling fans off the back of a truck in trade for her spare tire. No fuckin’ way you can figure out what that’s about, right? Guy driving a Ford pickup is getting gas the same time Beth is, tells her he’ll give her four ceiling fans in exchange for her spare. She didn’t even question him, man. She is some cool customer. You know her philosophy? It’s better not to ask. Which is a hard philosophy to argue with. Jackson!” he hollered to the bartender.

Jackson raced to their end of the bar. “I had a customer you missed by ten, fifteen minutes. He was going to Paris to jam with Jim Morrison. Hope he likes playing music leaning up against tombstones — that’s what I didn’t tell him.”

“He doesn’t contradict a lot of ideas,” Gordon said to Marshall.

“Heard that, Gordo,” Jackson said, opening a cluster of beer bottles and racing with them in two different directions.

“He hears real good. But he doesn’t hear. You know?” Gordon said.

Jackson raced back. “What about the machine, man?” he said, pouring two more shots.

“It was nothing. Got it fixed in half an hour. My guy admitted it couldn’t count as repayment for his debt. Have it break down a couple more times, he might be even with me.”

“Gordon built this guy a brick courtyard,” Jackson said.

Marshall nodded appreciatively.

“Hey, this is my brother,” Gordon said.

“No shit. He’s your brother? Where you here from, bro?”

“New Hampshire,” Marshall said. The words stuck in his throat.

“Isn’t that where Jean Louise went the time she ran away?” Gordon said.