The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [120]
I lower my voice. “Some party. Tucker’s here. J.D. never showed up.”
“Well,” she says. “I’m sure that what you cooked was good.”
“It’s so foggy out, Marilyn. I’ll come get Mark.”
“He can stay. I’ll be a martyr,” she says, and hangs up before I can object.
Freddy comes into the house, tracking in mud. Sam lies in the kitchen, waiting for his paws to be cleaned. “Come on,” Freddy says, hitting his hand against his thigh, having no idea what Sam is doing. Sam gets up and runs after him. They go into the small downstairs bathroom together. Sam loves to watch people urinate. Sometimes he sings, to harmonize with the sound of the urine going into the water. There are footprints and pawprints everywhere. Tucker is shrieking with laughter in the living room. “. . . he says, he says to the other one, ‘Then, dearie, have you ever played spin the bottle?’ ” Frank’s and Tucker’s laughter drowns out the sound of Freddy peeing in the bathroom. I turn on the water in the kitchen sink, and it drowns out all the noise. I begin to scrape the dishes. Tucker is telling another story when I turn off the water: “. . . that it was Onassis in the Anvil, and nothing would talk him out of it. They told him Onassis was dead, and he thought they were trying to make him think he was crazy. There was nothing to do but go along with him, but, God—he was trying to goad this poor old fag into fighting about Stavros Niarchos. You know—Onassis’s enemy. He thought it was Onassis. In the Anvil.” There is a sound of a glass breaking. Frank or Tucker puts John Coltrane Live in Seattle on the stereo and turns the volume down low. The bathroom door opens. Sam runs into the kitchen and begins to lap water from his dish. Freddy takes his little silver case and his rolling papers out of his shirt pocket. He puts a piece of paper on the kitchen table and is about to sprinkle grass on it, but realizes just in time that the paper has absorbed water from a puddle. He balls it up with his thumb, flicks it to the floor, puts a piece of rolling paper where the table’s dry and shakes a line of grass down it. “You smoke this,” he says to me. “I’ll do the dishes.”
“We’ll both smoke it. I’ll wash and you can wipe.”
“I forgot to tell them I put ashes in the sauce,” he says.
“I wouldn’t interrupt.”
“At least he pays Frank ten times what any other accountant for an art gallery would make,” Freddy says.
Tucker is beating his hand on the arm of the sofa as he talks, stomping his feet. “. . . so he’s trying to feel him out, to see if this old guy with the dyed hair knew Maria Callas. Jesus! And he’s so out of it he’s trying to think what opera singers are called, and instead of coming up with ‘diva’ he comes up with ‘duenna.’ At this point, Larry Betwell went up to him and tried to calm him down, and he breaks into song—some aria or something that Maria Callas was famous for. Larry told him he was going to lose his teeth if he didn’t get it together, and . . .”
“He spends a lot of time in gay hangouts, for not being gay,” Freddy says.
I scream and jump back from the sink, hitting the glass I’m rinsing against the faucet, shattering green glass everywhere.
“What?” Freddy says. “Jesus Christ, what is it?”
Too late, I realize what it must have been that I saw: J.D. in a goat mask, the puckered pink plastic lips against the window by the kitchen sink.
“I’m sorry,” J.D. says, coming through the door and nearly colliding with Frank, who has rushed into the kitchen. Tucker is right behind him.
“Oooh,” Tucker says, feigning disappointment, “I thought Freddy smooched her.”
“I’m sorry,” J.D. says again. “I thought you’d know it was me.”
The rain must have started again, because J.D. is soaking wet. He has turned the mask around so that the goat’s head stares out from the back of his head. “I got lost,” J.D. says. He has a farmhouse upstate. “I missed the turn. I went miles. I missed the whole dinner, didn’t I?”
“What did you do wrong?” Frank asks.
“I didn’t turn left onto 58. I don’t know why I didn’t realize my mistake,