The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [151]
I am really at some out-of-the-way beach house, with a man I am not married to and people I do not love, in labor.
Sven squeezes a lemon into the pitcher. Smoky drops fall into the soda and wine. I smile, the first to hold out my glass. Pain is relative.
Like Glass
In the picture, only the man is looking at the camera. The baby in the chair, out on the lawn, is looking in another direction, not at his father. His father has a grip on a collie—trying, no doubt, to make the dog turn its head toward the lens. The dog looks away, no space separating its snout from the white border. I wonder why, in those days, photographs had borders that looked as if they had been cut with pinking shears.
The collie is dead. The man with a pompadour of curly brown hair and with large, sloping shoulders was alive, the last time I heard. The baby grew up and became my husband and now is no longer married to me. I am trying to follow his line of vision in the picture. Obviously, he’d had enough of paying attention to his father or to the dog that day. It is a picture of a baby gazing into the distance.
I have a lot of distinct memories of things that happened while I was married, but lately I’ve been thinking about two things that are similar, although they have nothing in common. We lived on the top floor of a brownstone. When we decided to separate and I moved out, Paul changed the lock on the door. When I came back to take my things, there was no way to get them. I went away and thought about it until I didn’t feel angry anymore. By then it was winter, and cold leaked in my windows. I had my daughter, and other things, to think about. In the cold, though, walking around the apartment in a sweater most people would have thought thick enough to wear outside, or huddling on the sofa under an old red-and-brown afghan, I would start feeling romantic about my husband.
One afternoon—it was February 13, the day before Valentine’s Day—I had a couple of drinks and put on my long green coat with a huge hood that made me look like a monk and went to the window and saw that the snow had melted on the sidewalk: I could get away with wearing my comfortable rubber-soled sandals with thick wool socks. So I went out and stopped at Sheridan Square to buy Hamlet and flipped through until I found what I was looking for. Then I went to our old building and buzzed Larry. He lives in the basement—what is called a garden apartment. He opened the door and unlocked the high black iron gate. My husband had always said that Larry looked and acted like Loretta Young; he was always exuberant, he had puffy hair and crinkly eyes, and he didn’t look as if he belonged to either sex. Larry was surprised to see me. I can be charming when I want to be, so I acted slightly bumbly and apologetic and smiled to let him know that what I was asking was a silly thing: could I stand in his garden for a minute and call out a poem to my husband? I saw Larry looking at my hands, moving in the pockets of my coat. The page torn from Hamlet was in one pocket, the rest of the book in the other. Larry laughed. How could my husband hear me, he asked. It was February. There were storm windows. But he let me in, and I walked down his long, narrow hallway, through the back room that he used as an office, to the door that led out to the back garden. I pushed open the door, and his gray poodle came yapping up to my ankles. It looked like a cactus, with maple leaves stuck in its coat.
I picked up a little stone—Larry had small rocks bordering his walkway, all touching, as if they were a chain. I threw the stone at my husband’s fourth-floor bedroom window, and hit it—tonk!—on the very first try. Blurrily, I watched the look of puzzlement on Larry’s face. My real attention was on my husband’s face, when it appeared at the window, full of rage, then wonder.