The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [136]
The day he went to Greenwich to visit for the first time after the divorce, Ben and Shelby hadn’t been there. Inez was there, though, and she had gone along on the tour of the redecorated house that Amanda had insisted on giving him. Tom knew that Inez had not wanted to walk around the house with them. She had done it because Amanda had asked her to, and she had also done it because she thought it might make it less awkward for him. In a way different from the way he loved Amanda, but still a very real way, he would always love Inez for that.
Now Inez is coming into the study, hesitating as her eyes accustom themselves to the dark. “You’re awake?” she whispers. “Are you all right?” She walks to the bed slowly and sits down. His eyes are closed, and he is sure that he could sleep forever. Her hand is on his; he smiles as he begins to drift and dream. A bird extends its wing with the grace of a fan opening; los soldados are poised at the crest of the hill. About Inez he will always remember this: when she came to work on Monday, after the weekend when Amanda had told him about Shelby and said that she was getting a divorce, Inez whispered to him in the kitchen, “I’m still your friend.” Inez had come close to him to whisper it, the way a bashful lover might move quietly forward to say “I love you.” She had said that she was his friend, and he had told her that he never doubted that. Then they had stood there, still and quiet, as if the walls of the room were mountains and their words might fly against them.
Gravity
My favorite jacket was bought at L. L. Bean. It got from Maine to Atlanta, where an ex-boyfriend of mine found it at a thrift shop and bought it for my birthday. It was a little tight for him, but he was wearing it when he saw me. He said that if I had not complimented him on the jacket he would just have kept it. In the pocket I found an amyl nitrite and a Hershey’s Kiss. The candy was put there deliberately.
In the eight years I’ve had it, I’ve lost all the buttons but the top one—the one I never button because nobody closes the button under the collar. Four buttons are gone, but I can only remember how the next-to-last one disappeared: I saw it dangling but thought it would hold. Later, crouched on the floor, I said, “It stands to reason that since I haven’t moved off this barstool, it has to be on the floor right here,” drunkenly staring at the floor beneath my barstool at the Café Central.
Nick, the man I’m walking with now, couldn’t possibly fit into the jacket. He wishes that I didn’t fit into it, either. He hates the jacket. When I told him I was thinking about buying a winter scarf, he suggested that rattails might go with the jacket nicely. He keeps stopping at store windows, offering to buy me a sweater, a coat. Nothing doing.
“I’m going crazy,” Nick says to me, “and you’re depressed because you’ve lost your buttons.” We keep walking. He pokes me in the side. “Buttons might as well be marbles,” he says.
“Did you ever play marbles?”
“Play marbles?” he says. “Don’t you just look at them?”
“I don’t think so. I think there’s a game you can play with them.”
“I had cigar boxes full of marbles when I was a kid. Isn’t that great? I had marbles and stamps and coins and Playboy cutouts.”
“All at the same time?”
“What do you mean?”
“The stamps didn’t come before the Playboy pictures?”
“Same time. I used the magnifying glass with the pictures instead of the stamps.”
The left side of my jacket overlaps the right, and my arms are crossed tightly in front of me, holding it closed. Nick notices and says, “It’s not very cold,” putting an arm around my shoulders.
He’s right. It isn’t. Last Friday afternoon,