The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [1]
Tuesday Night ♦ January 3, 1977
Shifting ♦ February 21, 1977
Distant Music ♦ July 4, 1977
A Vintage Thunderbird ♦ February 27, 1978
The Cinderella Waltz ♦ January 29, 1979
The Burning House ♦ June 11, 1979
Waiting ♦ June 20, 1979
Greenwich Time ♦ October 29, 1979
Gravity ♦ June 2, 1980
Running Dreams ♦ February 16, 1981
Afloat ♦ September 21, 1981
Girl Talk ♦ December 7, 1981
Like Glass ♦ February 22, 1982
Desire ♦ June 14, 1982
Moving Water ♦ November 8, 1982
Coney Island ♦ January 24, 1983
Television ♦ March 28, 1983
Lofty ♦ August 8, 1983
One Day ♦ August 29, 1983
Heaven on a Summer Night ♦ November 28, 1983
Times ♦ December 26, 1983
In the White Night ♦ June 4, 1984
Summer People ♦ September 24, 1984
Janus ♦ May 27, 1985
Skeletons ♦ February 3, 1986
Where You’ll Find Me ♦ March 3, 1986
Home to Marie ♦ December 15, 1986
Horatio’s Trick ♦ December 28, 1987
Second Question ♦ June 10, 1991
Zalla ♦ October 19, 1992
The Women of This World ♦ November 20, 2000
That Last Odd Day in L.A. ♦ April 15, 2001
Find and Replace ♦ November 5, 2001
The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation ♦ April 12, 2004
Coping Stones ♦ September 12, 2005
The Confidence Decoy ♦ November 27, 2006
THE
NEW
YORKER
STORIES
A Platonic Relationship
When Ellen was told that she would be hired as a music teacher at the high school, she decided that it did not mean that she would have to look like the other people on the faculty. She would tuck her hair neatly behind her ears, instead of letting it fall free, schoolgirlishly. She had met some of the teachers when she went for her interview, and they all seemed to look like what she was trying to get away from—suburbanites at a shopping center. Casual and airy, the fashion magazines would call it. At least, that’s what they would have called it back when she still read them, when she lived in Chevy Chase and wore her hair long, falling free, the way it had fallen in her high-school graduation picture. “Your lovely face,” her mother used to say, “and all covered by hair.” Her graduation picture was still on display in her parents’ house, next to a picture of her on her first birthday.
It didn’t matter how Ellen looked now; the students laughed at her behind her back. They laughed behind all the teachers’ backs. They don’t like me, Ellen thought, and she didn’t want to go to school. She forced herself to go, because she needed the job. She had worked hard to get away from her lawyer husband and almost-paid-for house. She had doggedly taken night classes at Georgetown University for two years, leaving the dishes after dinner and always expecting a fight. Her husband loaded them into the dishwasher—no fight. Finally, when she was ready to leave, she had to start the fight herself. There is a better world, she told him. “Teaching at the high school?” he asked. In the end, though, he had helped her find a place to live—an older house, on a side street off Florida Avenue, with splintery floors that had to be covered with rugs, and walls that needed to be repapered but that she never repapered. He hadn’t made trouble for her. Instead, he made her look silly. He made her say that teaching high school was a better world. She saw the foolishness of her statement, however, and after she left him she began to read great numbers of newspapers and magazines, and then more and more radical newspapers and magazines. She had dinner with her husband several months after she had left him, at their old house. During dinner, she stated several ideas of importance, without citing her source. He listened carefully, crossing his knees and nodding attentively—the pose he always assumed with his clients. The only time during the evening she had thought he might start a fight was when she told him she was living with a man—a student, twelve years younger than she. An odd expression came across his face. In retrospect, she realized that he must have been truly puzzled. She quickly told him that