The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [143]
She is the first to cry, though any of us might have been.
Bruno, the dog, has shifting loyalties. Because Martin threw the football for him after dinner, he has settled by our bed in the living room. His sleep is deep, and fitful: paws flapping, hard breaths, a tiny, high-pitched yelp once as he exhales. Martin says that he is having running dreams. I close my eyes and try to imagine Bruno’s dream, but I end up thinking about all the things he probably doesn’t dream about: the blue sky, or the hardness of the field when the ground gets cold. Or, if he noticed those things, they wouldn’t seem sad.
“If I loved somebody else, would that make it easier?” Martin says.
“Do you?” I say.
“No. I’ve thought that that would be a way out, though. That way you could think I was just somebody you’d misjudged.”
“Everybody’s changing so suddenly,” I say. “Do you realize that? All of a sudden Barnes wants to open up to us, and you want to be left alone, and Audrey wants to forget about the life she had in the city and live in this quiet place and have children.”
“What about you?” he says.
“Would it make sense to you that I’ve stopped crying and feeling panicky because I’m in love with somebody else?”
“I’ll bet that’s true,” he says. I feel him stroking the dog. This is what he does to try to quiet him without waking him up—gently rubbing his side with his foot. “Is it true?” he says.
“No. I’d like to hurt you by having it be true, though.”
He reaches for the quilt folded at the foot of the bed and pulls it over the blanket.
“That isn’t like you,” he says.
He stops stroking the dog and turns toward me. “I feel so locked in,” he says. “I feel like we’ve got to come out here every weekend. I feel it’s inevitable that there’s a ‘we.’ I feel guilty for feeling bad, because Barnes’s father beat him up, and my sister lost two babies, and you’ve been putting it all on the line, and I don’t feel like I’m keeping up with you. You’ve all got more energy than I do.”
“Martin—Barnes was dead-drunk, and Audrey was in tears, and before it was midnight I had to admit I was exhausted and go to bed.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he says. “You don’t understand what I mean.”
We are silent, and I can hear the house moving in the wind. Barnes hasn’t put up the storm windows yet. Air leaks in around the windows. I let Martin put his arm around me for the warmth, and I slide lower in the bed so that my shoulders are under the blanket and quilt.
“What I meant is that I’m not entitled to this,” Martin says. “With what he goes through at the hospital, he’s entitled to get blasted on Saturday night. She’s got every right to cry. Your head’s full of music all the time, and that wears you down, even if you aren’t writing or playing.” He whispers, even more quietly, “What did you think when he said that about his father beating him?”
“I wasn’t listening to him any more than you two were. You know me. You know I’m always looking for a reason why it was all right that my father died when I was five. I was thinking maybe it would have turned out awful if he had lived. Maybe I would have hated him for something.”
Martin moves his head closer to mine. “Let me go,” he says, “and I’m going to be as unmovable as that balloon in the tree.”
Bruno whimpers in his sleep, and Martin moves his foot up and down Bruno’s body, half to soothe himself, half to soothe the dog.
I didn’t know my father was dying. I knew that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what dying was. I’ve always known simple things: how to read the letter a stranger hands me and nod, how to do someone a favor when they don’t have my strength. I remember that my father was bending over—stooped with pain, I now realize—and that he was winter-pale, though he died before cold weather came. I remember standing with him in a room that seemed immense to me at the time, in sunlight as intense as the explosion from a flashbulb. If someone had taken that photograph, it would have been a picture