Ann Beattie - Another You

“Nah. Seattle.”

“She get that tattoo lasered off okay?”

“Nah, now she’s decided she likes it.”

“We going diving or what?” Gordon said.

“My ear’s still no good,” Jackson said. He pivoted to take a drink order, dunking glasses in soapy water, then clear water, putting them upside down on a towel to drain, reaching for drier glasses to squirt drink mix into, while scooping in ice cubes left-handed. “Gin tonic, vodka tonic, liiiiime for everyone,” Jackson said, opening two bottles of beer, grabbing them by their necks, palming slices of lime onto the rims, setting all four drinks in front of two people standing and two sitting.

“Is Beth going to mind if we’re not there when she’s through meditating?” Marshall said.

“Beth? No way. Beth’ll start ’em all over again, let the burned-out coals be dust to dust. She knows I’ll be home eventually.”

“So you really like it here?” Marshall said. “You think you’d retire here even if you sold the business?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gordon said. “Is that gonna happen? Am I gonna sell that man the business? Hank’s not even sure he wants to be bought out. I expect if he saw it in writing, he’d change his tune. But retire here? I don’t know. I’ve heard Maui is pretty nice. For all that, I’ve heard Costa Rica can be beautiful.”

“Really?” Marshall said. “You’d think about those places?”

“Yeah, why not?” Gordon drummed his thumb on the counter-top.

“Guy down there’s a friend of the boss,” Jackson said, picking up their empty shot glasses, indicating with a roll of his eyes he couldn’t refill them again.

“His wife is gonna leave him,” Gordon said as they left. “Came to the wife or the motorcycle, I think I know which he’d miss most, though.”

“His wife, who went to Seattle?”

“That was the girlfriend,” Gordon said. “She got a viper tattooed on her butt. So I hear, anyway.” Gordon coughed a long, dry cough. His face was red, and there was a scar above his left eyebrow, pink and puckered. Off the motorcycle, Gordon looked suddenly smaller. He had gotten quite thin. Marshall felt protective; he was glad Beth would be feeding Gordon dinner.

“You remember that night Mom told us she was dying?” Marshall said.

“Shit, man, I knew you were going to mention that. Sitting in the bar, it came to me that that is exactly what you were going to ask about. I’ve gotten psychic since I’ve been with Beth.” He kicked a stone, stepping far to the left to do it. “What about it?” he said.

“Did you know that was what she was going to talk about that night? It just occurred to me that you might have known what was coming.”

“Well, Evie had told me she was sick, but it was the first time I’d gotten it from the horse’s mouth.” Gordon turned slightly to look at two girls passing by, both in short shorts and tropical shirts tied at the waist. “Jail bait,” he said. As they got to the corner of a more crowded street, Gordon said, “This is Duval. The main drag. We take you sightseeing when you were here before?”

“Yeah,” Marshall said. “We ate on Duval one night. At an outdoor place.”

“Claire,” Gordon said. “Closed. Became something else.”

“Good jukebox,” Marshall said. He looked at Gordon. “How did you do that to your eye?” Marshall said.

“Hit the fucking reef,” Gordon said. “She’s putting vitamin E on it. Healing it pretty damn fast.” Gordon pointed to something ahead of them. “This street we’re walking up. Faustos is on it. I’m always trying to get her to go out on the highway to shop, but now she’s a townie, she feels she’s got to be loyal to local establishments. Watch: she’ll say whatever vegetable she’s cooked came from Faustos.”

“I swear I won’t keep talking about this, but lately I’ve been thinking about that night, and some things are very distinct, but other things are blurry.”

Gordon looked at him with mild interest. Not because of the night, Marshall guessed, but because he was so intent on discussing it.

“Our father — he was outside? In a storm?”

“Overcome with grief,” Gordon said. “Didn’t you ever see Wuthering Heights on the tube? One of those old movies like Rebecca or whatever, trees blowing, clouds streaming over the moon. Cliffs. Stuff like that. The big house lit by lightning.”

“What was going on?” Marshall said.

“You think I know?” Gordon said. “He didn’t want her to tell us. He thought we shouldn’t have to hear it, or something. She had cancer. People didn’t use the word in those days. Look, she was crazier instead of better after what they did to her in the hospital. My opinion is that he’d rather she’d faded away, but she decided to pull out all the stops. Those two were going to have their show, and so they did. She’d started drinking again, you know. She did not stop drinking the day she got home from the hospital. Quite the opposite.”

“What do you think was wrong?” Marshall said.

“Oh, Marshall, forgive me, but why would you look for some one thing to be wrong? The two of them could blink in unison, and suddenly they were actors in a soap opera, and to tell you the truth, I think they got off on it. They understood each other. They got off on the pain. Forget the fact that real things might happen to other people that might be painful; all they could think about was themselves. There was a summer night on the back porch that I remember.…”

“You understood so much more than I ever did,” Marshall said. “Just those few extra years you had on me — they gave you a perspective I never could have had.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” Gordon said. “I might have been around to observe some unfortunate stuff. I might have known some things they would just as soon I didn’t know anything about. But don’t assume that gave me any advantage. Whatever I saw, whatever I knew, the only way to keep the peace was to shut up about it. So what good did it do that I had their number? They closed down, and I was expected to do the same.”

“Because the marriage was bad, you mean?”

“Because the marriage was bad,” Gordon echoed. “Yeah. That’s a good way to put it. When I think about them, that certainly comes to mind: that their marriage was bad.”

“But what are you remembering?” Marshall said. “You saw them fighting, but you weren’t supposed to let on? They were fighting on the back porch?”

Gordon looked at Marshall. “What do you want, Marsh? You want me to fill in details? Tell you about every tragedy, major or minor? Look: he married somebody who was nothing like him, didn’t he? Not that Evie was much more like him, but he wasn’t afraid of her. All I remember about that particular night when he went out into the storm was that Evie thought she was having a heart attack and Mom was drunk, going into one of her religious fits, and the two of us were sitting there as their captive audience. I mean, give me a fucking break. You were so scared I thought you were gonna have the fucking heart attack. That place was a fucking zoo sometimes.”

“Do you think he married Evie so we’d have a mother?” Marshall said.

“I think that sounded as good as anything else he could come up with. Do I think that? No, not really. I never knew him to do anything except for himself. I think he was boffing her long before Mom died. I mean, think about it. All that running around at night. It used to wake you up. You were the lightest sleeper in the world. You’d wake up and get afraid and wake me up. I still never sleep through a night, man. Beth was feeding me pills with a name I can’t pronounce — Tryp-something — that worked pretty well, and then they got yanked off the market. I’m not complaining, I’m just telling you: I do not sleep through a fucking night, no matter how tired I am.” Gordon looked at Marshall. “So now you know everything I know.”