Authors: Ann Beattie
“Just need the key. I already given him the receipt,” she said.
“My brother,” Marshall said. “Was he able to find out from you where the nearest airport was?”
“Would have been, but didn’t ask,” the woman said. He saw that there was also a tooth missing on the bottom.
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Thank you,” the woman said.
He went back to the car and drove to the diner across from the motel. Climbing the steps, he saw at the top a plaster rabbit and three small plaster bunnies clustered around an empty terra-cotta planter into which someone had thrown a beer can and a used rubber. Inside, on a metal stand, the local paper was piled up, with a canister attached to the side of the rack marked
25 CENT HONNOR SYSTEM
. A child’s doll lay on the bottom shelf, its blue dress folded under its head. He passed through the fog of cigar smoke rising into the air from the man paying his bill at the register and walked to the back counter. A short man in a denim jumpsuit was crumbling saltines into a bowl of tomato soup. Two seats away, a woman looked straight ahead and puffed a cigarette, a full cup of coffee in front of her.
“I’d like one of those bran muffins,” he said to the waitress, pointing into a hazy plastic container on the counter, “and a coffee to go. Light.”
“Tuesday,” the woman said. “Second muffin, Danish, or cream horn half price. Only one cream horn left.”
“Oh,” he said. “Then I guess I’ll have a Danish too.”
“Apple raisin strawberry.”
“Apple, please.”
She poured coffee, put the top on the container. With plastic tongs, she lifted an apple Danish from a tray, centered it delicately on a precut piece of foil she pulled from a box, and wrapped it. Then she opened the container that held the bran muffin, lifted it with the tongs, and dropped it, unwrapped, into a white bag. She carefully placed the pastry in the bag, closed the top, and handed him the coffee separately. “Cream’s at the register,” she said.
“I think my brother came in earlier,” he said. “Walked a little
funny? Nice looking, about my height. I wondered how he was feeling this morning.”
“Feeling like he meant to leave town!” the waitress said. “I gave him our biggest takeout bag to write on, and I thought: I never seen a man write for so long about how to get to the airport. Either that is the most forgetful man in the world, or I gave such detailed directions I scared him to death.”
“Let me have a beef barley soup and more of these crackers,” the short man down the counter said.
“Let me once in my life live someplace where people eat breakfast at breakfast and lunch at lunch and dinner at dinner,” the woman two seats away said to the waitress.
“I heard that at Donald Trump’s Atlantic City casino, if you’re winning big you can call for poached eggs on toast at two in the morning and have them carried right up to you on a silver platter as long as you don’t push back your chair and walk away with your winnings,” the waitress said.
“You thinking about rejoining the fire department?” the woman said. It was the first indication she knew the man.
“Might,” he said.
“Silly snit, if you ask me. This isn’t a community where one person taking exception to another person can ruin things to the point where we don’t have enough firemen.”
“Beef barley,” the waitress said, lifting the pan off the burner and pouring it into a bowl. She put the bowl on a plate and carried it to him, doing a deep knee bend to pick up one package of crackers on the way.
“I order more crackers, tell me no,” the man said.
“That’s what I like,” the waitress said. “A man who tells me what to tell him. You want to put the words right in my mouth, Randall?”
“ ‘Oh, Randall, you look so handsome today,’ ” Randall said in falsetto.
The woman on the stool laughed.
“Hear me repeating them?” the waitress said. “Then everybody’d really have something to laugh about, because Betty would have finally lost her mind.”
Marshall smiled, taking the bag and coffee container to the cash register.
“What do you think it is about banana nut?” the woman said, peering into the bag, then punching cash register keys. A dollar and fifty-one cents came up, and the woman automatically reached into a dish for a penny as she gave Marshall two quarters. He pocketed them, thanking her, then took two small, wet half-and-half containers from an ice bucket. “Used to be everybody preferred banana nut.”
In the car, he broke off a piece of muffin and ate it while looking at the map. He wasn’t sure that he shouldn’t call McCallum and wish him well, just for the sake of closure. There was a phone booth in the gas station, beyond the diner, but someone was inside. Marshall moved his finger along Route 84 toward this day’s destination: somewhere in South Carolina. It couldn’t start to get warm fast enough. Just walking from the diner to the car, his feet felt frozen. He scuffed them back and forth on the floor, trying to warm them a little with the friction. He turned on the radio and searched for a station, stopped when he heard music he thought was Beethoven. The person was still in the phone booth. He took another bite of muffin, dropped the remaining lump in the bag. He peeled back a little rectangle of plastic from the top of the coffee container and sucked up mostly air, deliberately, testing to see how hot the coffee was. Hot enough to make him shiver, because his body was so cold. No McCallum up front, so he could leave the map unfolded on the seat. On the floor, he saw one of McCallum’s pens. Thinking about that, and about the shirt, he had the sudden image of a snowman that had melted and could be conjured up only by the carrot on the ground, the black coal eyes. That brought to mind the snowman and snow woman on campus he had seen when he went back after Evie’s funeral. He thought briefly about the snow woman’s breasts with their spoutlike nipples, then remembered Sophia Androcelli’s irate letter to the newspaper, preceded by her equally irate comment to him that he shouldn’t dismantle the snowpeople when he went outside. The person was off the phone, so he started his ignition and drove onto the road, then immediately turned off, coasting to a stop in front of the phone booth. When he got there, he was sure he didn’t want to call McCallum. Instead, suddenly and surprisingly on the verge of tears, he dialled his own number, to talk to Sonja. His hand was shaking. An automated voice asked him to reenter his card number. Then the call went through, and he heard the familiar double ring of his home
phone, over and over, ringing in the empty house. She wasn’t there. It seemed more than possible she wouldn’t be, but it made him suspicious that she might be with Tony. It seemed completely far-fetched she would be buying groceries. Ludicrous to assume she would have returned to the dry cleaner’s so quickly. Then, taking a deep breath, he hung up and began rationalizing another way. What if he had reached her? What was there to tell her? More about McCallum’s odd behavior; chitchat in a diner. He drove away, but was only on the road a few minutes when he decided he’d made the wrong decision; it was the sound of her voice he needed to hear, not Beethoven, not his own roiling thoughts, the silent conversations he’d begun having with himself. He dialled the area code, but couldn’t remember the number of Hembley and Hembley. The thought of Tony made his fingers tingle, so he took another deep breath and reminded himself that except for calling, he wouldn’t need to have anything to do with Tony ever again. Even Sonja was fed up with Tony. Hadn’t she said that? Forcing calmness into his voice, he reached New Hampshire information and asked for the number, tracing the numbers on the dusty metal shelf under the phone. His fingers were so sweaty, the numbers were perfectly legible. He called the number, hoping Tony wouldn’t answer the phone. Gwen, the other agent who worked there, answered, but he didn’t want to talk to her either; he disguised his voice, finding it very little trouble to sound tremulous and slightly high-pitched. And she was there. Sonja had gone back to work. Sonja was there!
“I’m so glad I got you,” he said. “I miss you. I’m standing beside the highway sweating, and it’s not that hot here. I’m—”
“I know you hate it when I do this, but I’ve really got to put you on hold,” she said.
Her voice sounded official. She did not sound delighted to hear from him. Probably Tony was standing right in front of her. Probably she and Tony were having a discussion. Even Gwen might be in on it.
“Hi,” she said. “Sorry.”
“You’re sorry? I’m sorry. I don’t know how things went so out of focus”—he saw the white line painted up the center of the highway running along, as if it were a conveyor belt—“I’m here without you. This doesn’t make any sense.”
“I thought you had to see your brother, and McCallum had to have a vacation,” she said.
“You’re furious at me,” he said. “Why? Why are you?”
“I’m not,” she said. “I thought a trip would do you good.”
“Why?” he said.
“Have you called to start a fight about a trip you told me you wanted to take?”
“Is he standing right there?” he said.
“ ‘He’ Tony? No, he’s not in the office. He does own the place, though.”
“I don’t care what he fucking owns, he doesn’t own you.”
“I realize that,” she said.
“You just don’t realize that I love you,” he said. “And maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe I’ve really blown it. McCallum—McCallum went off to apologize to some woman he knew from years ago when they were kids in summer camp. After all this time, he needed to apologize to her. I understand that. It’s not easy, sometimes. Too much time passes. You don’t know what to say. I don’t exactly know what to say now.”
“Write me a love poem,” she said. Her voice softened slightly.
“I’ll build you that tree house and climb up into it with you and read it to you there. How’s that?”
“It’s funny you teach poetry and you never write poems,” she said. “Do you write them and keep them hidden from me?”
“No,” he said. He shuddered as he remembered the grotesquely inept poem written by Mrs. Adam Barrows. “What are you doing?” he said quickly.
“Sitting here, waiting for an electrician to stop by and explain something to me about an exploding stove,” she said.
“You could fly to Key West,” he said. “Meet me.”
“Maybe we should take another vacation. Another time.” A pause. “McCallum is setting right some wrong? New lease on life and all that?”
“He jumped ship. He’s flying back.”
“And you wouldn’t be calling just to get me to pinch-hit for McCallum, would you?”
“I love you. Don’t you know that I love you?”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
He looked again at the highway. The line was no longer moving, but cars were. The sun had begun to shine on his back. He turned away from it, facing into the phone booth. “The reason I called was
to say I loved you. I’m afraid you’re going to leave. Have you been thinking about leaving?”
“I’ve given some thought to a brief vacation in Santa Fe, floating over the desert and eating blue corn tortillas.”
“That would be great,” he said. It sounded terrible. Far away, and pointless.
“I think I’m going with Jenny. Maybe after you write me your poem, you and I can go to, oh, Niagara Falls.”
“Anywhere,” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
“I love you. Can you say you love me even if you’re at work?”
“I love you,” she said.
“You’d say it if Tony was there, right?”
“I’m not in love with Tony,” she said.
“Does Gwen know about this? Did everybody besides me know?”
“You mean, did I confide in McCallum that night we had our little chat?”
“You did?”
“In fact, I didn’t. Listen: here’s the electrician. Once this stove situation gets fixed, everything’s going to be fine. We’ll be fine. Write the poem. Buy the lumber.”
“Niagara Falls. Hell, I really will take you, if you want to go.”
“I was kidding,” she said.
“But not about the other?” he said.
“No,” she said, lowering her voice. “I do love you. You’re always so distracted. I mean, you didn’t even pay attention to Evie. I don’t know if it was your class you were thinking about, or—”
“Don’t say any more,” he said. “This isn’t sounding as good as when you just said, ‘I love you.’ ”
She laughed. “You do make me laugh,” she said.
“I didn’t do well enough by Evie. I haven’t done well enough with you.”
“We’ll talk about it when you get back,” she said.
“I will,” he said. “I’ll get back.”
He looked around him, smacking his lips dryly to send her a small kiss as he hung up, his hand still shaking as he replaced the phone in its cradle.
It would be good to get to Gordon and Beth’s. That would be his own version of McCallum’s sitting by the hearth, nestled in a chair,
himself the center of attention, a drink on the table, forget the coffee and tea, a drink. It would be interesting to start from the beginning, with two people who knew nothing about the situation except its outcome—its ostensible outcome, since who knew what McCallum would do, and who knew what would happen to Susan, when and if she was released from the prison psychiatric ward to stand trial?—to discuss how McCallum had for reasons of his own decided he was entitled to be a part of Marshall’s life, which was in counterpoint to Marshall’s having decided he would distance himself from Gordon. Absenting yourself was a decision made by default, wasn’t it? What had happened that he and Gordon had for years kept a distance from one another? Wives? Geography? Their jobs? All those things, though Sonja had encouraged him to see more of his brother (more time for Tony?), and he’d always had the same amount of vacation time he had now, he could have gotten on a plane. It was too far to drive. He’d just driven because McCallum had stars in his eyes about being out on the road, though now he saw that McCallum had an ulterior motive. That left the category “jobs.” Okay: his had allowed him to turn inward, to spend his time passively, reading and thinking. Things that had once seemed a great luxury had become habit. Following the complexities of books had ultimately made him naïve about what was happening around him: everyone’s complicated lives; their difficult-to-articulate desires. Perhaps, having no ability to compete with his brother, he’d taken the opposite path, learned vocabulary while Gordon was learning skills, surrounded himself with other thoughtful people, while Gordon had concluded the optimal life was about more action and less thought.