Ann Beattie - Another You

“You’ve read all those things,” Marshall said. “About your early life and how you form relationships later on, I mean.”

“I form relationships to get laid and to have one woman who doesn’t hate me, who isn’t after me night and day to marry her because I already have,” Gordon said. “How’s that for the confessional mode?”

“I’m not saying that anything that happened to us makes us unique,” Marshall said.

“I fucking think you are unique,” Gordon said. “How about two Coronas?”

Marshall got up, limping slightly on the first few steps because his left leg had gone dead sitting in the chair. Gordon probably did have the right approach to life: stretch out beneath the sky, don’t cause yourself any unnecessary problems in Paradise, have a cold beer and a brief nap. He and Hank nodded silently as Marshall passed him, heading into the office to get beers out of the refrigerator. He stepped carefully through the clutter, looking briefly at a calendar that had not yet been changed from January. A bare-chested woman holding a pink heart-shaped lollipop between her enormous breasts smiled down at him from the wall to the left of the refrigerator. On a bulletin board to the other side hung a photograph of Mr. Watanabe, Gordon, Hank, and six women in sparkling evening gowns with plunging necklines. They were in a nightclub somewhere, clustered around a small round table. Mr. Watanabe’s eyes, on closer inspection, looked like pinwheels. Gordon’s eyes … it frightened him to look at Gordon’s eyes. With a hand curled halfway around one of the blond women’s jewel-studded breasts, the other arm dangled at his side as if it were a useless appendage. Looking at the arm, you would be certain the limb had no feeling — that you were looking at a handicapped person’s flaccidly dangling arm. The more he looked, the more he realized Gordon was just very drunk; he seemed to be propped up in the chair, more like a mannequin than a real person, except that his eyes told you he was human. They weren’t just empty, they were dead. They were eyes that had died.

He shuddered as he pulled open the refrigerator door. A blast of cold air hit him, causing him to double up as he reached quickly in, taking two beers from several dozen bottles crowded onto the top shelf. He shut the door quickly and looked around for an opener. He saw one on the wall, under the calendar, and opened both bottles, letting the bottle caps fall to the floor amid ant traps, crumpled paper, and many other bottle caps. He carried them out, looking down so as not to meet Hank’s eyes again. It was as if he’d seen something shameful in the room, or as if he’d partaken in something shameful — a thought he didn’t want to come any closer to articulating.

A breeze had blown up outside, disturbing the surface of the water. From the roof, the sound of a staple gun punctured the silence. Gordon reached up for the beer without changing his position in the chair, and Marshall’s heart missed a beat, he was so delighted to see Gordon’s right arm move. My God , he thought: I must have convinced myself something was really wrong with Gordon’s arm . He stood there as if he’d awakened from a bad dream, grateful to be back in the world, silently embarrassed he’d been elsewhere. He handed down the beer, fascinated at Gordon’s hand as it gripped the long neck of the Corona. Elbow bent, he moved his hand to his mouth and swigged from the bottle. It was ordinary — the most quintessentially ordinary thing Marshall could imagine — but the motion seemed beautiful, inherently fascinating, and beyond that a relief. It was a huge relief. Gordon was not the Gordon of the photograph; that had been a sudden flash that produced a deceptive photograph.

The rooftop reggae devolved eerily into Jim Morrison, singing “Wishful Sinful.” For a minute, amid hammering, he listened. A stronger station had overtaken Bob Marley. It was Morrison in the lead, Marley second, darting in for a fuzzy word, a sung phrase, Altiss loudly rooting for Marley until a Skil saw overwhelmed both words and music When it resumed, Marley had triumphed, though Marshall’s thoughts were no longer on the music. Hearing Jim Morrison had reminded him of Gordon’s friend the bartender. He was replaying going into the Green Parrot, watching the ambidextrous bartender perform, frantically keeping up with drink orders while washing glasses and holding simultaneous conversations. It seemed that in Key West everyone was either completely wired or very laid back. How amusing, then, that high-energy Gordon was pretending to sleepwalk, turning over the possibility of leaving his wife, travelling in his mind to places like Hawaii while he sat sprawled in a butterfly chair near the water’s edge, picking under a fingernail with one of the toothpicks he always carried in his shirt pocket. What a shirt , Marshall thought, appreciating the bizarre colors — a shirt that reminded him of a tequila sunrise, pinks settling into orange, a watery concoction of electric color that blurred more the harder you tried to focus.

“Man, with my eyes closed, I can tell you’re lost in thought,” Gordon said. He hunched his shoulders and sat up, raising the yellow aviator glasses, rubbing his arm over his eyes, pushing the glasses back on the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “You understand I don’t have any special knowledge about what never got said when we were kids, right? But you want my opinion anyway. Okay: my opinion is that if he ever loved our mother, he stopped loving her pretty fast. He felt bad when he knew she was going to die, but that’s something else. And Evie — as I’ve said, looking back, I think Evie was always his squeeze on the side. Guy needed to get laid, is my guess. Our mother seemed like a ghost long before she got sick and died. I don’t remember her in any season but winter. That Bible she carried around. Always so unhappy. I know what he felt like: if something doesn’t work out, next time you go to the opposite extreme.” Gordon rolled his head to the side, looked up at Marshall, standing with his back to the water, holding a bottle of beer from which he had not yet sipped. “Are all these questions because your marriage to Sonja is breaking up? I mean this quite sincerely: I’ve been through this stuff before. At the moment it seems like the end of the world, but it won’t be. Whatever happens, I don’t think you’re going to get any answers about the present by raking through the past. By thinking about the previous woman, yes — but you’ve only been married one time.”

“I don’t care about what I’m doing for a living. I don’t — with the exception of a madman who’s no longer my friend, I don’t have any friends except you. Sonja and I had a bad year, but I should have seen it was going badly. I should have cared, and I didn’t. I’m shutting down.”

Gordon shook his head. “You make it sound like you’re a dangerous nuclear reactor, man. Who do you know who loves what he does, loves his wife, loves every fucking thing in the world? Things will work out. You’ve got to think forward, not back.”

Marshall nodded.

“I should also mention that you find yourself in a slightly strange place, bro. Boats bobbing out there on the water, people on their rented pink motor scooters. It seems easy. People talk like it’s easy. There’s flowers and sunshine. It’s like an illustration in a fucking children’s book. The Conch Republic’s not necessarily the best place to find yourself when you’re undergoing self-doubt. You pick up that conch shell and hold it to your ear, you know what you hear? A roar. A hollow roar. If you’re already down, you’ll take it as the absolute truth.”

At Mallory Dock, the air was suffused with the odor of meat and onions frying on a grill, the roar of fruit and juice liquefying in a blender, the triple blast of a cruise ship calling for the last passengers so it could sail away before dark. Smaller boats crisscrossed the water, sailboats and motorboats, people clustered on deck as the boats blew back and forth, turning to keep the sun in sight, bands playing at the open-air bars on shore, recorded music or an amplified guitar drifting off the water toward land, people drinking swampy margaritas and cheap wine included in the price of the sail that would give them instant headaches. Near where they stood, a bagpipe player puffed his cheeks and began to finger his next song, drowning out the Bob Dylan imitation undertaken beside him by a barefooted man who stopped singing every half minute to berate people in the crowd for walking on the cord that attached his guitar to the amplifier. People grabbed each other’s hands, snaking through the dense crowd, yelling over their shoulders for others to follow, evading jugglers, backing off to provide a small circle of space to a man who raised a shopping cart containing four bowling balls, with a bicycle tied to the cart, from his shoulders to his forehead, then moved it from his forehead to his mouth, taking small, bent-kneed steps while finally tipping it enough to balance the entire shopping cart by its handle on his teeth. Children were lifted to parents’ shoulders, teenagers tumbled against each other’s bodies, using shoulders and legs as springboards, their T-shirts rolled to reveal tattoos of the setting sun inked into their biceps, along with skulls and crossbones, Merlins with crystal balls, long-haired, big-breasted women galloping on unicorns. Dirty, shoeless men with caved-in chests stood squinting in the background, looking for abandoned hot dogs or half-full cans of Pepsi left on the ground. Dogs nosed through the crowd while others of their kind performed: a white dog in a bandanna who jumped over three Vietnamese pigs in graduated sizes, their tails braided, who in turn jumped over the expressionless dog, landing in a perfect line, one-two-three; a cat in red booties who jumped, at the crack of a whip, through a flaming hoop. He thought, suddenly, of Janet Lanier, telling him, “Your wife will be very sympathetic about the hoops you’ve had to jump through.”