Authors: Ann Beattie
“Sophia,” he said. “In the past twenty-four hours I have noticed a remarkable lack of civility in my life. Perhaps you could enlighten
me: You’re saying you sense mockery on my part? Mockery, when I should take seriously, say, a teenage girl’s accusations of sexual trauma that are quelled by the delivery of a Domino’s pizza? Colleagues whom I should address seriously about matters of the human heart when they are so narcissistic that the simplest polite question from me results in a blow-by-blow account of their encounter with a bag lady near Boston Common, hoping to impress me with their deep sensitivity toward schizophrenics? Colleagues who have made the sort of marriages in which one member expresses herself by stalking her husband to my home and attempting to stab him to death because he is insensitive? ‘My weariness amazes me,’ to quote a prophet of my generation. My weariness fucking amazes me.”
“Your weariness doesn’t ‘fucking amaze’ you; it amazes you because you’re fucked. Get it?”
“Sophia,” he said, after catching his breath. “Look at it from my point of view. After too long a period of being involved in the problems of others, after a very traumatic event, I come into my office to find you having taken over my desk, after lying to the floor polisher about your right to be here—and let me point out that you are as guilty of stereotyping as you accuse me of being, if you assume that being paid minimum wage was necessarily the reason why the floor polisher did not throw you out—let me just say that it seems to me I should occupy less of everyone’s attention, if everyone has the amount of equilibrium he or she claims.”
“Cheryl was right,” Sophia said. “You really are impossible.”
“What does that mean? That I don’t take shit?”
“Listen,” she said, sinking back into his chair, pushing pleats between her legs, “you just don’t get it. You don’t get it that things have changed and now you’re required to be a more genuine human being. For example: many people might look at what had been put in their hand before starting in with their own complaints. Even normal human curiosity might have set in with a lot of people. But all you want to do is banish me, like you’ve banished her.”
This was the first time Sophia Androcelli seemed disturbed; he watched her bottom lip as if watching a once-tugged fishing line. But the fish went free, the lip relaxed into a ripple as her expression devolved from angry to blank. “Banished her” hung in the air, more perplexing to him the longer it hovered.
He sat in the chair beside his desk. He unfolded the pieces of paper and scanned what seemed to be a hastily scrawled note from Cheryl.
Marshall
,
I’m writing this to explain, as best I can, some of my thoughts before I get the bus and get out of here. When Timothy came back from the library and found me gone, he hitched a ride to the house in Dover and we had a long talk that resulted in my realizing that I’d gotten very caught up in Livan’s situation because it bore very strongly on my own life—things I was going to tell you that we never got around to talking about because everything got so hectic. You were the first person, male or female, I’d ever felt as mature as I know I am around, because in spite of the way you act sometimes, I could see that we were (forgive me) kindred spirits. I put up blockades too, and like me, I’m sure you have your reasons. It’s not your fault that I also fell in love with you, but as Timothy says, I have to suspect that reaction, too. Let me tell you something you have to know. When Livan was telling me about what McC. did to her, it was pretty vague. I sort of told her how to embellish it, though what I thought I was doing was sharing some private things about my life with her, and then she picked them up and said them back to me as if they were hers. That thing with her godfather never happened, but it did happen to me, but not when I was very little, only five years ago, because my mother had me baptized and then later she insisted I have a godfather. I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye because next year I’m going to come back and I’d like us to be comfortable when we pass each other in the corridors. I understand that you didn’t do anything to me and that you were just reaching out to me in the car, but it made me see that there was a subtext—that we weren’t that far away from being Livan and McC. This is an apology as well as a confession, because if I hadn’t told Livan about my experience with my godfather she probably would have chilled out eventually, but once I did tell her, and then she told it all back to me as if it was hers, it was like I’d really given it away and it was someone else’s. I know that you’re closer to McC. than you say, so I’m asking you to tell him about this because inadvertently I did cause McC. problems, and I’m very sorry for
that and also sorry that you and I (I know this is going to sound stupid, but I’m going to say it anyway) aren’t the same age, that I couldn’t really be close to you. But we’re close enough that I had to write this note. Goodbye, and take care
.
Cheryl
He looked at the corner of the room, and out the window, familiar with the sameness of what he looked out on, yet still hoping for something: a group of students passing, a car driving through campus, Llewellyn’s black dog in the snow. “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow” went through his mind—a line of poetry he had probably first read when he was Cheryl Lanier’s age, the meaning of which escaped him even as it stopped him dead.
So much depends upon what?
he thought now.
What does it depend on? That people make confessions and provide you with new understanding? Or that you look high up into the corner of your office and see the dusty remains of what must have been an inefficient spiderweb—that you take pride in being more farsighted than your myopic middle-aged colleagues
. So much depended on making eye contact with your fellow man, in this case Sophia Androcelli, who clearly had read every word of Cheryl’s letter, who had become his accuser though her friend Cheryl had not. How would she not be upset with him if she knew he’d kissed her friend in a car? Jealousy, perhaps. High-mindedness. A lack of sophistication about the way things were. All that was left to him was to move his eyes to hers, to see if the situation was impossible, or if there might be a chance he could present his case.
“I’ll tell you what she said when she gave me her notebook,” Sophia said quietly. “She said, ‘I wasn’t totally honest. He deserves to know the way things really are. He’s got his problems, but he’s basically a very kind person.’ So I end up the messenger for her note, delivered to a guy on the make who isn’t worthy of her compassion. Your weariness. Tell me about it,” she said, picking up the backpack, standing, and walking past him.
When she was gone, he looked back to the spider’s web for any missed signs of life, wrinkling Cheryl’s missive the way he’d once ruined schoolboy drawings he ran out of school with, taking them proudly to Evie, the same way he’d pressed the life out of lecture notes his thumb worried into blurred lines of type, practicing some
difficult new lecture by reciting it silently the night before he intended to give it, walking back and forth in his living room. His living room. His bedroom. The smeared blood in the hallways.
Okay: now it was known that Cheryl Lanier, for reasons of her own, had intentionally or unintentionally added her own unpleasant experiences to Livan’s, thereby fuelling Livan’s fury. Not the end of the world, but certainly worth factoring in. Though it was not pleasant to acknowledge that the world could be such a terrible place that well-intentioned Cheryl could at one point in her young life have been exploited by a man assumed to have her best interests at heart. What if he either rushed after Cheryl or paid a hospital visit to McCallum, to tell McCallum what Cheryl had told him—what if, instead of being made to feel guilty because he’d been compromised, he asserted his control over the situation by standing firm and insisting that enough was enough, that henceforth he was entitled to a private life, that he would not willingly accept other people’s projections, that he had a right to his former life, that he was entitled to peaceful domestic tranquillity.
In that state of mind he shuffled some sheets of paper on his desk and looked at the telephone, dialled information, dialled McCallum’s hospital, reached the switchboard, and was finally connected with patient information. In a pleasant, calm voice, the woman who answered the telephone told him that no information was available on the patient he was inquiring about. “That’s NOS, sir. Although the patient is at the hospital, we are not provided with information, ourselves, about his condition.” What kind of an answer was that? “It’s marked NOS, sir; it’s not on the screen, at someone’s request. Perhaps the family. The doctor.” He thanked her and hung up. Perplexed, he stared again at the spider’s web without really focussing, brought his eyes back to the piece of paper. That long night of conflict seemed long ago. To remember it tired him physically, as if the episode existed concretely and he had brought it down on his shoulders like a boulder he should not have reached for. Should not, should not: Wasn’t it the new accepted groupthink that people give up thinking in terms of what they should or shouldn’t do and think, instead, originally? If so, what original thoughts might he have had? Perhaps a bit like thinking of a snappy rejoinder a day late, and yet he was tempted by his little challenge to himself. One answer might be that he could have turned
his back on the situation. Or even that, setting out, he might have changed course, followed the car full of kittens being jostled about. He could have turned his life into an existential errand, an amusing bit for a farcical movie on the subject of middle-aged angst. Without his phone call, was there even a remote possibility McCallum would have ended up at his house? If McCallum had always considered him his friend, then just maybe. But couldn’t he and Sonja have sent him on his way, wouldn’t the drama have been diffused by sending him home after a brief conversation, and if he’d gone home, would his wife have become so enraged? Still, he did not feel personally guilty about what had happened to McCallum. At the very least McCallum probably knew the woman was violent, knew—or should have known—enough not to deride her over the telephone, reporting on her irrational actions to the first person who happened to call. How peculiar it was: that you could just edge over into someone’s life, like a cat creeping through an open door, dashing in unseen, perhaps dashing out again, too, except that in place of the tinkling-bell collar of warning, McCallum had dangled words, and they had felt obliged to respond to them, to weigh them, and to consider them, instead of smacking their hands together and hurrying him out. McCallum had told a fascinating alternate account of what had happened between him and Livan Baker, and as he’d done it he’d been both in character and also enough out of character that the account had seemed convincing, much the way certain artists could pull things off, Marshall thought now—artists who’ll tell you the quickest way to attain verisimilitude is to improvise, not to translate exactly. McCallum could have gone on stage with his Bag Lady monologue. Of course this was not to say that he hadn’t told it the way it had happened, not to say the inherent awkwardness and the painful truths hadn’t registered on him so that now he could show them to others, as easily as touching ink and holding up his hands to prove where he’d been. An image of a dirty-palmed McCallum came to mind—wishful thinking, or a true insight?—McCallum as the archetypal boy with his hand in the cookie jar, McCallum as the member of a species tagged to trace its eating habits, its migratory patterns. Well, for all that, a bird’s wing could be tagged, some animal’s ankle banded, and presumably by tracking it, you would have information—but McCallum had only tagged himself, and with no one to watch, or at least
with no one but a bag lady and the clearly unbalanced Livan. So here it was: so-called real life, which he’d analyze totally differently than he would a text. He looked again at Cheryl’s note and was surprised that he felt a little pang because not only the note, but also the slightly harried way it was written, let him know immediately that everything was heartfelt. The way her handwriting revealed that the writer was young—female handwriting, not male, though of course such things could only register privately; it would be anathema to reveal such politically incorrect assessments. If she was gone, so much the better. As he began the process of resuming his normal life, he could do without recriminations. He could also do without facing the guilt he felt—okay; he felt it—because, acting like a person younger than his years, he’d been too quickly taken in by overblown problems, found them perplexing and then compelling. He’d become a little tantalized by his increasing involvement, which he knew, deep down, had been tinged with another kind of curiosity—all right: sexual curiosity. And he’d known it before she wrote what she did about that moment in the car—that almost inconsequential moment that had registered on him as strongly as it had registered on her, the connection that defined a missed moment.
He folded the letter and put it in his pocket, because it wasn’t something he would want to risk having fall into the wrong hands. The wrong hands: the police, whom law-abiding adults were supposed to respect; his wife, presumably his closest confidante. Maybe he would present the note later to McCallum, reveal his own vulnerability by letting McCallum see how he nearly got sucked in, empathize with McCallum a little.
Not on screen
, he thought, as he walked down the corridor. Technology was now supplying metaphors faster than poets ever had.
On the stairs, two girls he didn’t know began whispering the second he’d passed them. It should have come as no surprise to him—though it did—that the local newspaper had a story about McCallum on the front page. He saw it in a vending machine at the entrance to the faculty parking lot, dropped in his quarter, and took the last copy from the box. He stared at the fuzzy picture of a younger, bearded McCallum. He read the report of what had “allegedly” happened in his own house. The adverb made his life seem absurdly like a TV police drama. On the jump page there was an equally fuzzy photograph
of one of the angry-bull cops, standing in front of what he immediately recognized as his own couch, overturned. He, himself, he read, was “alleged” to have been out of the house at the time, as was his wife “alleged” to have been gone. He sat in the car with the overhead light switched on and read as much of the article as he could. It was a long article, and he found it terribly annoying, perhaps any assessment of this awful situation would be terribly annoying, but every fact seemed to miss the point, the story had no shape, the writer moved through official opinions and paraphrased or unattributed speculations (“Yes, she seemed strange, Mrs. McCallum”) like an overwrought person navigating a minefield. Halfway through the piece, he read that his wife was a real estate agent, and that he was currently up for promotion (in fact, the promotion had been given him the previous spring). A neighbor was quoted as saying they were very quiet, pleasant people (he didn’t recognize the name; neighbors on his street? did Sonja know them?), as if that were at all to the point. As if, had he and Sonja been big party givers, a madwoman crashing through their house might have been entirely comprehensible. He stopped reading when he got to the paragraph talking about “the early hours of dawn.” He had not left the house until about nine-thirty, leaving behind a note for McCallum saying he would soon return, and driving to school to teach his morning class. A little drive before his life changed rather dramatically, it turned out. No good deed without punishment—as the uninspired reporter would have been happy to write, if she had been able to make contact with him. He could have given her clichés; she could have dully recorded them. The thing was, the situation really had to do with pent-up emotions, grievances, people’s personal pain, their breaking points, and those who found themselves churned up in other people’s storms, everybody suddenly as vulnerable as airborne particles, some chilly, uncontrollable wind propelling them. The real story was about storms that came without warning.