The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [162]
It’s logical that everyone wants to be in love. Then, for a while, life isn’t taken up with the tedium of thinking everything through, talking things through. It’s nice to be able to notice small objects or small moments, to point them out and to have someone eager to pretend that there’s more to them than it seems. Jason was very good at that—at convincing me that somehow, because we were together, what we saw took on an importance beyond itself. The last autumn we were together, we drove over to Cold Spring, late one afternoon. We drove to the far side of the railroad tracks, past the gazebo, to the edge of the paved area where cars park at the edge of the Hudson. How could he have tried to convince me, later, that he didn’t love me? We were young lovers then, getting out of the car and throwing stale bread to the black ducks on the river. We sat on a bench, looking at the high cliffs across the water and tightening our hold on each other’s waist as we imagined, I suppose, the voyage we’d have to take to get there, and the climb to the top. Or maybe we squeezed each other tighter because we were safe where we were: no boat, no possibility we’d swim, no reason to make such an effort anyway. It was October, and the wind was so strong that it nearly knocked us off the bench; tears came to my eyes long before Jason whispered to me to look: such strong wind—it made it seem that the water was being blown downstream, instead of flowing.
Coney Island
Drew is sitting at the kitchen table in his friend Chester’s apartment in Arlington. It’s a bright day, and the sun shining through the kitchen curtains, patterned with chickens, gives the chickens an advantage they don’t have in real life; backlit, they’re luminous. Beautiful.
Drew has been at Chester’s for a couple of hours. The light is sharp now, in late afternoon. Between them, on the table, the bottle of Jack Daniel’s is half empty. Chester pours another half inch into his glass, wipes the bottle neck with his thumb, licks it. He twirls the cap back on the bottle, like people who replace the cork after they’ve poured a glass of wine. Chester likes wine; his wife, Holly, converted him, but he knows better than to offer wine to Drew. Holly is in the hospital now, and will be there overnight; his tests for infertility were negative, and now the doctors are doing some kind of minor exploratory surgery on her. Maybe he would have gotten loaded today even if Drew hadn’t shown up.
Drew is tapping the salt and pepper shakers together. The shakers are in the shape of penguins. What a sense of humor his friends Ches and Holly have! One penguin looks like a penguin, and the other has on a vest and top hat. Probably they were manufactured as jokes.
Chester’s radio needs new batteries. He holds it in his right hand and shakes it with the motion he’d use to shake a cocktail shaker. Earlier, he thought about shaking up some Manhattans, but Drew said he preferred his bourbon straight.
Today, Drew drove across the mountains from Waynesboro to come to his nephew’s christening in Arlington. The party afterward was at his mother’s. Before the party he had pruned some bushes, fixed the basement door so it wouldn’t stick. Afterward, when everyone had gone and his mother was in the bathroom,