The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [148]
In our bedroom, Oliver cups his hands around my hard stomach as I lie on my side facing away from him and kisses my hair from underneath, slowly moving down my spine to where his lips rest on one hipbone.
“My glass of ice water just made a ring on the night table,” he says. He takes a sip of water. I hear him sigh and put the glass back on the table.
“I want to get married,” I mumble into the pillow. “I don’t want to end up bitter, like Barbara.”
He snorts. “She’s bitter because she kept getting married, and when the last one died he left almost everything to Craig. She’s bored with Sven, now that his pictures aren’t selling anymore.”
“Oliver,” I say, and am surprised at how helpless I sound. “You sounded like your mother just then. At least talk sense to me.”
Oliver slides his cheek to my buttock. “Remember the first time you rubbed my back and it felt so good that I started laughing?” Oliver says. “And you didn’t know why I was doing it and you got insulted? And the time you got drunk and sang along with Eddie Fisher on ‘Wish You Were Here’ and you were so good I laughed until I got the hiccups?” He rolls over. “We’re married,” he says. He slides his cheek to the hollow of my back. “Let me tell you what happened on the crosstown bus last week,” he goes on. “A messenger got on. Twenty or so. Carrying a pile of envelopes. Started talking CB chatter to the baby on the lap of a woman sitting next to him. The woman and the baby got off at Madison, and between there and Third he started addressing the bus in general. He said, ‘Everybody’s heard of pie in the sky. They say Smokey in the Sky. Smokey the Bear’s what they call the cops. But you know what I say? I say Bear in the Air. It’s like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—LSD. LSD is acid.’ He had on running shoes and jeans and a white button-down shirt with a tie hanging around his neck.”
“Why did you tell me that story?” I say.
“Anybody can get it together to do something perfunctory. The minute that messenger got off the bus he tied that tie and delivered that crap he was carrying.” He turns again, sighs. “I can’t talk about marriage in this crazy house. Let’s walk on the beach.”
“It’s so late,” I say. “It must be after midnight. I’m exhausted from sitting all day, drinking and doing nothing.”
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he whispers. “I can’t stand to hear Barbara and Sven making love.”
I listen, wondering if he’s putting me on. “That’s mice running through the walls,” I say.
Sunday afternoon, and Barbara and I are walking the beach, a little tipsy after our picnic lunch. I wonder what she’d think if I told her that her son and I are not married. She gives the impression that what she hasn’t lived through she has imagined. And much of what she says comes true. She said the pool would crack; she warned Craig that the girls weren’t to be trusted, and, sure enough, this morning they were gone, taking with them the huge silver bowl she keeps lemons and limes in, a silver meat platter with coiled-serpent handles, and four silver ladles—almost as if they’d planned some bizarre tea party for themselves. He’d met them, he said, at Odeon, in the city. That was his explanation. Craig is the only person I know who gets up in the morning, brushes his teeth, and takes a Valium blue. Now we have left him playing a game called Public Assistance with Sven, at the side of the pool. Oliver was still upstairs sleeping when I came down at eleven. “I’ll marry you,” he said sleepily as I climbed out of bed. “I had a dream that I didn’t and we were always unhappy.”
I am in the middle of rambling on to Barbara, telling her that Oliver’s dreams amaze me. They seem to be about states of feeling; they don’t have any symbols in them, or even moments. He wakes up and his dreams have summarized things. I want to blurt out, “We lied to you, years ago. We said we got married, and we didn’t. We had a fight and a flat tire and it rained, and we checked into an inn and just never