The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [122]
“This is the church, this is the steeple. Open the door, and see all the people,” Johnny says. “Take care of yourself. I’ll hang up and find out if it’s raining in Key West.”
“Late in the afternoon,” I say. “Everything is fine.”
“Nothing is fine,” Johnny says. “Take care of yourself.”
He hangs up. I put the phone down, and realize that I’m still having trouble focusing, the sight of my cut finger made me so light-headed. I don’t look at the finger again as J.D. undoes the towel and wraps the Band-Aids around my finger.
“What’s going on in here?” Frank says, coming into the dining room.
“I cut my finger,” I say. “It’s O.K.”
“You did?” he says. He looks woozy—a little drunk. “Who keeps calling?”
“Marilyn. Mark changed his mind about staying all night. She was going to bring him home, but her battery’s dead. You’ll have to get him. Or I will.”
“Who called the second time?” he says.
“The oil company. They wanted to know if we got our delivery today.”
He nods. “I’ll go get him, if you want,” he says. He lowers his voice. “Tucker’s probably going to whirl himself into a tornado for an encore,” he says, nodding toward the living room. “I’ll take him with me.”
“Do you want me to go get him?” J.D. says.
“I don’t mind getting some air,” Frank says. “Thanks, though. Why don’t you go in the living room and eat your dinner?”
“You forgive me?” J.D. says.
“Sure,” I say. “It wasn’t your fault. Where did you get that mask?”
“I found it on top of a Goodwill box in Manchester. There was also a beautiful old birdcage—solid brass.”
The phone rings again. I pick it up. “Wouldn’t I love to be in Key West with you,” Johnny says. He makes a sound as though he’s kissing me and hangs up.
“Wrong number,” I say.
Frank feels in his pants pocket for the car keys.
J.D. knows about Johnny. He introduced me, in the faculty lounge, where J.D. and I had gone to get a cup of coffee after I registered for classes. After being gone for nearly two years, J.D. still gets mail at the department—he said he had to stop by for the mail anyway, so he’d drive me to campus and point me toward the registrar’s. J.D. taught English; now he does nothing. J.D. is glad that I’ve gone back to college to study art again, now that Mark is in school. I’m six credits away from an M.A. in art history. He wants me to think about myself, instead of thinking about Mark all the time. He talks as though I could roll Mark out on a string and let him fly off, high above me. J.D.’s wife and son died in a car crash. His son was Mark’s age. “I wasn’t prepared,” J.D. said when we were driving over that day. He always says this when he talks about it. “How could you be prepared for such a thing?” I asked him. “I am now,” he said. Then, realizing he was acting very hardboiled, made fun of himself. “Go on,” he said, “punch me in the stomach. Hit me as hard as you can.” We both knew he wasn’t prepared for anything. When he couldn’t find a parking place that day, his hands were wrapped around the wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
Johnny came in as we were drinking coffee. J.D. was looking at his junk mail—publishers wanting him to order anthologies, ways to get free dictionaries.
“You are so lucky to be out of it,” Johnny said, by way of greeting. “What do you do when you’ve spent two weeks on Hamlet and the student writes about Hamlet’s good friend Horchow?”
He threw a blue book into J.D.’s lap. J.D. sailed it back.
“Johnny,” he said, “this is Amy.”
“Hi, Amy,” Johnny said.
“You remember when Frank Wayne was in graduate school here? Amy’s Frank’s wife.”
“Hi, Amy,” Johnny said.
J.D. told me he knew it the instant Johnny walked into the room—he knew that second that he should introduce me as somebody’s wife. He could have predicted it all from the way Johnny looked at me.
For a long time J.D. gloated that he had been prepared for what happened next—that Johnny and I were going to get together. It took me to disturb his pleasure in himself—me, crying hysterically on the phone last month, not knowing what to do, what move to make