The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [160]
The light changes and the cop car takes off, no siren, at about sixty miles an hour.
“Still nothing behind us,” Wyatt says, patting Corky’s leg. “First rule of driving: Many other dangerous people are driving at the same time you are, and you must drive defensively.”
“Did you think you’d marry Jason?” Corky says.
I never lived in a dorm when I was in college, but Corky did. Lights-out is still a signal to her to start talking.
“We almost got married,” I say. “I told you about that. The summer he bought the house in Garrison. We were as stupid as everybody else who’s breaking up. We kept finding something to do that interested us, so we could pretend that we were interested in each other.”
“What about you and Wyatt?”
“I’ve always thought that he loved somebody else. We had quite a talk about that years ago, and he said I was wrong. Then again, he never mentioned Dorie Vesco until tonight.”
“Archie told me a week before our wedding that he’d been engaged twice before.” She lights a cigarette. “Which was the one who flushed his credit card down the toilet?”
“Sally.”
“And Sondra’s the one who swallowed the ring?”
“A citrine with diamonds. Our grandmother’s. When Archie took her to the emergency room and she filled out the form, she said that she’d swallowed a bone.”
“She had to be nuts not to level with the people in the emergency room,” Corky says.
I roll over to see Corky’s face in the half-dark. She has unrolled the futon sofa into a mat on the bedroom floor, where she will sleep tonight.
“You know the rest of that story, don’t you?” I say. “The next day, he got a book about training puppies. He took it home and showed her the part where they say not to worry if your dog swallows a rock unless it chokes. A joke, but when they went to couples therapy she kept bringing up the dog book.”
Looking back, I can see how Jason liked to manipulate me. He relied on being a Southern boy when he wanted something. He talked about the house he wanted to buy as our opportunity to “live life on the plantation.” Even before we went to look at the property in Garrison, he was planning the afternoon croquet games we were going to play there; we’d play croquet and drink mint juleps, he announced. When Jason really wanted something, he began by making it into some kind of fantasy—the more exaggerated and ridiculous the better. He said that made it easier to cope with whatever problems came up later. We had lived together in the city for more than a year, and he was restless and wanted a place in the country. So he bought the big yellow house up the Hudson in Garrison and he took a leave of absence from his job and spent a month that autumn painting it white. I glazed windows and helped him sand the floors, and by the time the house started to shape up I loved it more than Jason did. In the mornings, I had coffee and watched the sparrows and the squirrel fighting over the birdseed in the hanging feeder outside the kitchen. I began to wait, in the late afternoon, for the sky to get pale and the sun to set. Jason took to sleeping late and reading magazines and watching the evening news. When he went back to the law firm where he worked in New York, I stayed on. Wyatt visited. Jason called and said that he couldn’t come up for a couple of weekends because he had so much paperwork. The next weekend, Corky and my brother drove up, and just before they left she took me by the arm in the driveway and walked me around to the back of their car. “I’d say that if you want to keep Jason you ought to get back to the city,” she said. But by then I wanted to believe what Jason said he believed when he bought the house: that New York City was a battle, that it was important to escape to a place