Authors: Ann Beattie
He had turned on the radio and was listening to the weather report. Colder that night, with warmer air moving in toward the end of the weekend. There was no mention of the snow that had begun to fall lightly. Then the weatherman segued into the sports announcer, and as he turned off the light and started the ignition he heard the crack of a baseball going off a bat. What would the sounds of McCallum’s
attempted murder have been, he wondered: the crash of the overturned sofa; the wife’s hysteria; McCallum’s attempt at reason, or just his fearful first scream, as she snuck up on him? The crowd—people at spring training in Florida—cheered wildly, and he scanned the radio for the classical music station, watching the green digital numbers roll until the preset channel came in and his thumb depressed the button, locking the station into place, the sound of a cello intensifying as if responding to his firm touch.
All his life, he had hated to visit people in the hospital. The antiseptic smell, the smell of boiled vegetables and recirculated air, made him gag. The rooms were at once empty and crowded, rooms impossible to personalize, made bleaker by flower arrangements and Mylar balloons blown about by the perpetual haze of hot air rising through metal radiator covers under windows that looked out over parking lots. He concentrated on the anonymity of the hospital, no doubt, because it pained him to concentrate on the patients. Easier to look at the floor than at the IV going into the arm; simpler to glance upward at the television than to make contact with a person’s drug-fogged eyes. It was one of the reasons he hated to go with Sonja to visit Evie; the nursing home would inevitably remind him of a hospital. If all of this wasn’t the life Sonja had imagined, it wasn’t the life he’d imagined either, though he couldn’t exactly remember having had a clear scenario, even at the beginning. They were compatible; they liked many of the same things, though they went about pursuing them differently: she liked to travel; he liked to read essays on travel; he loved talking about literature; she loved internalizing the books, keeping them as part of herself, those she really responded to—with the exception of what she always described, a bit hurtfully (though he knew she didn’t mean to offend him), as her very “nonacademic” book discussion group. He once heard her describing herself as liking “major houses and music in a minor key,” which did seem true of her: selling real estate had nothing to do with her admiration of certain rather grand architecture—grander, more unique houses than she usually ever had a chance to present to clients. Still, they were alike in that he tried to elucidate texts, and she tried to present possibilities—what might be called, and not in the pejorative, fictional possibilities about how people might inhabit certain houses so that the house, and the people, could assume more complex personalities.
He had come up with that late one night, not so long ago, rubbing her back, thinking out loud, trying to console her because business had been bad and she had been discouraged, claiming that she was interchangeable with some obnoxious salesman going door to door, no one wanting his wares.
At a red light, he realized the car that had been tailgating him was coasting around, saw that the woman inside was rolling down her window. He touched the button on the side of the door and his own window lowered so he could hear what the woman was saying to him. She was someone who worked at Benson, though he couldn’t exactly place her. A tall man who was probably her husband was driving, and in the backseat was a row of grocery bags. “I’m so sorry it happened,” the woman hollered, and he turned down the music, slightly surprised that now condolences were being shouted through snowy winds as he sat in traffic, nodding with a false smile, suggesting with an exaggerated shrug that soon this would all be over, what a mess but he understood that soon it would be over, perplexing and sad, but soon over.… Her husband was calling to him, too, but he could hear only a few words, among them the word “bitch,” which caused the woman in the passenger’s seat to turn away from Marshall and to begin lecturing the man. Then it came to him: she was President Llewellyn’s secretary, Barbara. The President had been quoted about “the regrettable incident,” that phrase Marshall remembered from the too-long newspaper article. It made him uncomfortable to be recognized inside his car, and when the light changed he accelerated too fast, which caused the car to veer off at an angle. Pulling out of the skid, he saw their faces bright under the streetlights, two faces staring over their shoulders, suddenly registering his nervousness, his awkwardness, if they had not before. What was it going to be like for McCallum when he got out of the hospital? Everyone would be watching, trying not to be obvious about it, while riveting their attention on him. Where was McCallum’s son? Who had the boy if his wife was in custody and he was in the hospital? Though he quickly controlled his fear, at first it struck him with the force of an anxiety dream: like a person who found himself walking down the street without clothes, holding his breath and hoping he would not be found out, it seemed for a few horrible, irrational seconds that only he could know there was a son—everyone else must have forgotten
and the boy would be somewhere, abandoned, frightened, starving, perhaps even dead. Surely that was impossible. Someone would have gotten him from school—a family member, a friend, the police. How ridiculous that he could be in a cold sweat, as though responsibility for the boy’s existence rested with him. The boy would be (he went through the obvious possibilities again) with relatives, or with friends, with the parents of one of his friends, somewhere. Hadn’t McCallum complained about his mother-in-law, whom he saw all too often? She must live nearby. The boy would be with his grandmother; McCallum’s wife was in custody; McCallum was in the hospital. People were where they were supposed to be. It was all quite logical in its own terrible way. At the next light, though, he scanned the article for mention of the boy and found none before the light turned green. Why was that so upsetting, that his quick glance at the disorganized article gave him no information about the child, whom he was sure was with someone, not forgotten, like some waif in a sad fairy tale? Still, his heart went out to the boy, whose mother was suddenly gone, whose father had disappeared. Who knew what he had been told about what had happened. Children always thought they were responsible for what went wrong. What would McCallum’s son, who must already intuit the difficulty he posed, think now that his parents had disappeared, what could he think but that whatever had happened to them was his fault? He had an image of the child, standing in the living room McCallum had recently described: the missing sofa; the ladder-back chairs; standing there quietly in the calm, stoically indifferent to what was occurring around him. It was an unshakable image, though Marshall tried to clear his head by rolling down the window. He tried to concentrate on the traffic instead of imagining—what a strong, strange image—the boy standing in an uncharacteristic way, like a paperdoll instead of like a real boy, arms at his side, paradoxically both peaceful and frightened, the fate of his parents unknown, his life changing because it was dependent on what did not exist anymore, or would not exist in the same way. Then another boy appeared, another paperdoll, and, fighting to overcome his sudden dizziness, Marshall coasted to a stop at the next intersection, steering with great concentration because an effort of will was necessary to bring the car to a stop. Like someone who was stoned, he was approximating the motions, concentrating excessively, imagining that
He had done a very good job in persuading … whom? The people in the other cars? Beside him, in a red Subaru wagon, was a harried young woman with a crying baby strapped into a car seat beside her. Her hand went from the chest of the crying child to her hair; she was looking at her hair in the rearview mirror, smoothing it, glancing quickly at Marshall with embarrassment, because she had been caught primping while her child wailed. Of course McCallum’s son would be fine. Eating dinner, perhaps. Taken care of by someone. At the house of a friend. When the light changed, Marshall stole another look at the woman; she was looking straight ahead, pretending not to notice he still looked at her, and something about her forward gaze shook him, took him back to the two paperdolls. As he drove off, he watched brake lights tapped on, then off, ahead of him. He snapped out of the reverie, and he realized what he had been seeing: it had been himself, the smaller of the two paperdolls, and his brother, Gordon, in a room—not McCallum’s room, but another room that he now saw distinctly: a room with blue upholstered chairs, and on the table a Bible, and on the floor a box of paperdolls. His mother, having read the 121st Psalm, was explaining that she was going to die, looking not at them but straight ahead, out the window at the moon, and then someone, or something frightening: his father, pacing, his head obscuring the light from the moon. It was only his father. He and Gordon sat inside, crushed by what they’d heard, while their father moved outside, beginning the retreat he would make total once she did die, once she was absent from the room, and the Bible had been removed, never to appear again, as far as Marshall could remember. My God: he was remembering the night—he must have been three or four years old when his mother told them that they must be brave and take care of each other, because she was going to disappear, and he could remember clearly that he had tried to compress himself into a smaller child, flatten himself into one of his paperdolls so he would not be so noticeable, absent himself by making himself inconsequential: an unimportant person who would not be given such information. He could remember looking at Gordon, wanting Gordon to deny what they had just heard, but Gordon had shrunk, too. The two of them were very small and their mother much larger, almost a ghost, she was telling them, standing there in the living room in her long white flannel nightgown, at first looking toward the window and
then turned away from the window, and then away from them, where they had moved together as if magnetized. “Lift up your eyes,” she had said—or was that the psalm? Was he remembering her reading the psalm, asking nothing of them, quoting the words “mine eyes” and saying nothing about what they were to do or where they were to look? What was it she expected them to do without her? What was she talking about?
Ahead of him, the parking lot attendant’s lighted booth shocked him back to reality, though as he coasted to a stop the attendant waved him past, indicating that he should take a card from the automatic machine to activate the gate. He rolled down the window and punched the button and saw that it was 5:45 p.m., put the card on the dashboard, turned into the first empty space, and turned off the headlights and the ignition. He stared straight ahead, testing: he knew his image had been exact, though it tortured him that he could not conjure up more details, that he had only seen it as in a few moments of pulsing strobe light, first his father outside the window, then the flash illuminating the blue fabric of the chairs, shining in a nimbus around the two brothers huddled together, their mother in a nightgown he had just a few moments before seen distinctly and now could only remember as being long and white. Hadn’t there been details? Endless details he was forgetting? “Lift up your eyes,” he remembered her saying. He recalled the tone of her voice, the slightly skeptical way she said it, as if she, herself, was not sure this was the thing to ask for.
Ahead of him, through the snow-covered windshield, was the hospital, and as he got out of the car, locking it, grabbing his coat closed instead of taking time to button it, he reflected that because of the wind, no one would think that he was crying, but assume the wind had dashed tears from his eyes.
Martine, Most Dear
,
I must hope your last letter was written in haste, and that you are not seriously suffering the distress you imply. I am certain—I say this most emphatically, and I do hope you will believe me in this if in nothing else—Martine, I am absolutely certain that there is no such thing as retribution sent by God Almighty, if God Almighty indeed exists, to rain down on the heads of those of us on earth who may have committed misdeeds. In our time, we have seen science come to the fore to increasingly provide answers to many mysteries, including the previously unknown medical causes of particular physical afflictions. Whether or not there is a just or an unjust god is a question men have been grappling with through the ages. I myself believe that it is a way to avoid personal responsibility, an obscuring of one’s role in one’s destiny … though I do not see this in any way as contradicting my position, which is to say that though painful things may be thrust upon us, in time science may reveal more cause and effect at work than we suspect. I am constantly upset by backsliding, such as the very unexpected stance taken by my brilliant acquaintance J. R. Oppenheimer, who has shown us the key to materializing one amazing creation but who has hesitated on alleged moral grounds about continuing to use his brilliant mind to provide others. I do not mean to compare you two, because I know you have exhibited great courage and will continue to do so, yet in your situation and in his I see some similarity. One must proceed by logic. It is our ally. I have been unfair in announcing my arrival so many times, but you must not feel that because you are alone there without Alice and me (you know she would prefer to be there; you know I prefer it) huge forces have conspired against you. Please think of each situation in its own context and do not do yourself the disservice of jumbling everything together so that one bit of bad luck and then another become a cumulus cloud hanging over your dear head. I am sure there are any number of explanations for why Alice’s letters to you have suddenly ceased, by the way. I, too, have been carrying a
heavy burden, though I am certain that nothing that happens to you, or to me, or to Alice, has befallen us because it is justice dealt us by cosmic forces
.
Ever
,
Your devoted M
.
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