Authors: Ann Beattie
Tony had come up with the idea that Sonja and Marshall should avoid the chaos in their house, along with the bother of the ringing phone, by staying as long as they wanted to in the house Tony now stood in with her, which had been put on the market by friends of his, but which, in the absence of buyers, was currently for rent. This morning, after he had dropped Marshall at the parking lot to get his car, after she had read scribbled directions Tony had taken down about how to find his friends’ house, which it seemed, except for briefly viewing it before it was listed, he had never visited, she found herself in a strange house, considering Tony’s suggestion.
The water was on, the electricity worked (though there was only one floor lamp; the ceiling fixtures had been removed, and splayed wires capped with duct tape protruded from holes in the ceiling), and the wall-to-wall carpeting had been cleaned by the same company that was now in her house, cleaning the blood from the carpets. She was frightened, fearing, on some irrational level, that McCallum’s wife might be there, that she might spring out and do to her what she had done to McCallum. Damn: she had never been very bothered by violence in the movies, had not even been inordinately troubled by
Psycho
, but now she had fanatic-with-a-knife waking nightmares, and as she walked with Tony she took his arm—took it like an old person—because the suspense was too much, the memory … what was she thinking? The
description
of the attack was very chilling. Imagining what had happened seemed to have changed her perception of graceful, long hallways (not always an advantage), and of plentiful closets (think what could hide there). A real problem, considering
her profession. How was she going to act as tour guide in the future, when today she was so oversensitized that the exposed, taped electrical wires seemed a metaphor for the house itself, revealing its vulnerable, underlying nervous system. Marshall would like that, she thought; he’d like the personification of the house; he’d like it that a metaphor suddenly seemed more apt than reality. “I don’t like it,” she heard herself saying quietly, moving ahead of Tony to peek into another near-empty room, and Tony, who had been unnerved by everything that had happened, made an instant decision not to treat her misgivings seriously, becoming an even jollier enthusiast about this house that she knew was not to his personal taste either and that might even be spooking him as much as it was upsetting her on this gray winter morning, with overhead lights that didn’t turn on and the one floor lamp standing in the corner of the living room like a helmeted sentry at his post.
As she walked through the house with Tony, she remembered the way he had chatted with his friends long distance, very upbeat, clearly a man who had a secret to hide, yet how ridiculous: she was his secret—she had listened as he described his “personal friends in distress. Not financial distress. You know: general distress,” Tony had said, as Sonja had sat there hearing herself spoken about as if she weren’t present, missing her comfortable ballet flats, which she’d worn for years now as a kind of security blanket, wrapped in Tony’s robe, unable to shake her gloominess about being displaced, wanting desperately to be in her own house at the same time she dreaded the moment she would have to return. In someone else’s clothes, considering her big, pale feet, she had remembered the awkwardness of being a teenager, felt as humiliated as someone’s unwanted date. She had a closet full of clothes at her house, a husband, a lover, a friend—Tony was both lover and friend—yet there she’d been, twisting her body awkwardly, at one instant feeling that she was an unexpected guest in a stranger’s kitchen, bending forward to hide her breasts, the next moment wanting to shrug off Tony’s robe and be pretty, desirable, anything but the tortured creature she had become as Tony offered his friends a bland account of her current problems. And God: someone lay wounded in the hospital, a man she had just met the night before, a colleague of Marshall’s, and now Marshall had gone to see a lawyer—that was what happened when you were an adult
and not a teenager—though she couldn’t understand why, when they were so obviously innocent in this entire affair, Marshall had become progressively more upset about being questioned by the police, after they returned to Tony’s and he fixed them Sleepytime tea and served it to them in the kitchen.
The illustration on the tea box
, she thought. That must explain her dream of the night before, in which a bear noisily clanged pots while gathering honey, tossing buckets of the stuff at other animals. It had suddenly come to her that the golden honey was like blood. Blood on the walls. It made her shiver, as she had shivered in Tony’s kitchen earlier, thinking about her blood-spattered walls as Tony joked with his friends on the phone, asking how the Versace renovation of some historic apartment building was coming along, inquiring about the street scene outside various cafés in South Beach. She had noticed the way he mentioned “distress” without giving any foundation for it, the way he’d omitted talking about the way violence had entered into his friends’ lives. Though it was probably true: if you wanted a favor, it was better to present your request simply. In general, she thought that men were very good at talking around things—that they communicated with each other in a sort of shorthand, either omitting all specifics or else relying exclusively on them, either way signalling the inherent difficulty of things with a shrug, which was not a gesture women usually made. Ah, yes: the difference between men and women. As if you could generalize. Confused and unhappy, Sonja trailed behind Tony as he toured the house.
“What don’t you like about it?” Tony said. “I’m not trying to sell it to you, you know. I just thought you might be happier having a house to yourselves for a while, wait for the gawkers to go away. I mean, if you’d rather come back to my house, we can certainly do that. We can go back to my house.”
“Tony,” she said.
“ ‘Tony’ what?”
She didn’t answer him, which made him more nervous.
“But, I mean, if it makes you feel strange being in my house, and if the, you know, this furniture here makes you uncomfortable, then maybe a motel would be best. I think we’re only talking about a couple of days. They’re shampooing the rug. Marshall thought you didn’t need to hear about that, but I don’t know: the rug man’s a little
rattled, I’m not sure what sort of job he’ll do. Wanted me to check everything out with the police, questioning my authority and all that. I had to tell him he was expected, because how else was the problem going to be dealt with. I had to say to him, ‘You’re going to shampoo up a bit of blood. Small bit.’ You assume the police have some way of dealing with situations like this, you don’t assume the police find a place roughed up and have to thumb through the yellow pages. You automatically assume there’s a Department of Blood on the Rug, or something. Well, it’s absurd, in a way, isn’t it? Really quite funny, though one’s not sure on whom the joke’s being played.”
“Tony, you’re losing it.”
“Well, about the other matter: I mean, the timing isn’t exactly propitious, is it? Here I am, trying to sort things out, and suddenly all this erupts, so of course my inclination, anyone’s inclination, is to try to help. I mean, I would have felt like worse than a coward if I dropped you at the station and disappeared, a person I’ve come to care about very much, just … what? Dropped you and then phoned along with every other sensation-seeking son of a bitch to see how you were doing? You could have been in the house; she could have been so crazy she came at you. Is that what’s troubling you? That it could have been you?”
“It’s true,” she said. “Two things are true: you’re out of control, and your house makes me uncomfortable.” She slumped against a wall in the hallway. Tony leaned against the opposite wall.
She had already begun to walk ahead of him, trailing her fingertips along the wall. Somebody else’s house. The anonymity of houses. “What if it was a sort of warning? McCallum’s wife flipping out like that, coming to do something awful to him.”
“Are you really being so nonsensical as to say that the McCallums’ family drama was enacted on your stage as a comment on our actions?”
“If you’re making fun of me, how can I tell you what’s bothering me?”
“You’ve told me what’s bothering you, and the only response is to dismiss such insane misgivings.”
“Don’t try to turn this around so the problem is mine, Tony. Yes, I’m upset. I was trying to tell you what was bothering me, and you stopped me.”
“I won’t do it again,” he said, taking her hand. “Listen: I don’t know what the two of us are doing standing around in the Ahlgrens’ house with their fucking deco curtains and their fucking marbleized custom paint job streaked up and down the hallways and their Directoire chairs, except that I suppose I felt a little funny about having you two in my house, I assumed you’d feel that way too, you apparently did feel that way, I just—I shouldn’t have intruded.”
“Did you go to the senior prom?” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Did you, Tony?”
“No, I did not, in part because I arrived in the U.S. midway through what you call senior year and didn’t know anyone well enough to ask, though I lost my virginity at fourteen, if that’s relevant to our conversation. Also, I was shy around girls. My mother didn’t know what was going on, fortunately. She wanted nothing but to be back in Essex, herself. Some party dance that meant she’d have to rent me a tuxedo and buy me slip-on shoes? My mother wouldn’t have wanted to hear about nonsense like that.”
“I can be a big girl and go home tomorrow if they’ll let me, unplug the phone if that’s what we need to do, close the shades. How long can they drive by?”
He let the question hang in the air. He was thinking that he had been unfair to her, snapping at her because she was expressing her misgivings over their affair—“affair” was probably too misleading a way to think of their involvement—the sexualization of their admittedly juvenile, existential angst (what she’d called it from the first) that had led them, a few weeks before, to start having sex in empty houses. It had been a good game, a rather thrilling game, until the impersonality began to seem less thrilling and recently they had begun to retreat to his house. Gradually, even when she was gone, things in his private world had begun to seem slightly altered, to take on some of Sonja’s personality, absorb her essence, an essence he would be the first to admit he did not fully understand, so that discovering more and more things about her, trying to intuit her feelings, to anticipate her reactions, was like having the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle spread on the rug with no idea what the final picture was to be. Then one night she had suddenly been there with her husband, and like cigarette smoke clinging to fabric, Marshall’s own essence had permeated
the house. The scent had made Marshall seem at once all too real and also vaporous, like a ghost who might have been there in spirit, observing all along.
“What are you thinking?” Sonja said. “That if somebody hadn’t gotten stabbed in my house, the two of us could be off today playing the game? Or are you not very interested? Did spending time with Marshall sour you on the idea? It’s hard not to see me as a middle-aged woman with her middle-aged husband, dealing with other people’s pedantic problems, isn’t it?”
“You’re making it out to be shabby,” Tony said.
She looked at the firm set of Tony’s jaw, his eyes straight ahead, peering out the back window to the lawn’s winter-dry grass, grown long and wind tossed like straw thatching, a sifting of snow drifted near trees, piles of sodden packing boxes sagging forlornly. The former occupants must have thrown their extra boxes onto the lawn. She had only been home twenty minutes, half an hour, before McCallum had come to the door; just long enough to shower, after her romp with Tony in the fake Tudor, the one that had just gone on their list as an exclusive, and then the knock had come on the door and, startled, she had looked through the peephole to see a person announcing that he was Marshall’s friend from Benson, that it was very important, he must talk immediately to Marshall, who had just called him. Called from where? She had been surprised, but relieved, to return home and not find Marshall there, but where had Marshall been, and under what circumstances had he befriended such a disconsolate man? After having been chased through rooms of gold wall-to-wall carpeting, with the streetlights outside casting just enough light to transform their nude figures into Modigliani shadows, she had returned home to shower immediately, to consider heating some food for herself, though she’d thought it would be better just to sleep, and to eat in the morning … who had this person been, who suddenly spoke to a convex glass eye as if he were appealing directly to God?
“I think we’re both under too much pressure,” Tony said. “I would suggest that the solution might lie in our being in bed. Elsewhere. After lunch and something to drink.”
He picked up their coats from the sofa in the living room and held hers by the tips of its shoulders. Looking over her shoulder at him, she thought about the way Evie had handled her wet wash, years ago,
when she still lived in her townhouse, lifting it from the washtub and holding it delicately pinched until she could transport the dripping clothing into the dryer. Tony was holding the coat—her dry coat—for her to back into. He slung his own coat over his shoulder and switched off the lamp and opened the front door, turning to lock it behind them.
She sat in the car like a patient, or at least like a patient passenger, replaying scenes from two nights ago. It had all been strange and unexpected, perplexing but manageable. And then, the next morning, after she had dressed and brushed her hair and sprayed perfume underneath her hair, so she could feel the downy hair underneath tingling, she had bent over the bed, intending to tell Marshall that she thought she loved someone else. She had shivered, slightly, with an almost irresistible impulse to speak, in spite of Evie’s having urged her to remain silent, but just as quickly the desire had passed. He had looked at her fondly and the desire had passed. They had both left their house, with McCallum still sleeping, and his wife had come after him and tried to kill him.