The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [178]
He was looking in the mirror and rubbing his chin, though he had shaved just a few hours ago. Every afternoon, she knew, he felt for a trace of beard but didn’t shave again if he found it. “They probably don’t even notice we’re not there,” he said. “Who’d have time, with my sister and her au pair and her three kids and her cat and her dog and her rabbit.”
“Gerbil,” Cammy said. She sat at the foot of the bed while he undressed. Every year was the same; they offered to visit his parents in Kentucky, and his mother hinted that there was not enough room. The year before, he had said that they’d bring sleeping bags. His mother had said that she thought it was silly to have her family sprawled on the floor, and that they should visit at a more convenient time. Several days ago, before Cammy and Peter left New York for Boston, they had got presents in the mail from his parents. Each of them had been sent a Christmas stocking with a fake-fur top. Cammy’s stocking contained makeup. Peter’s was full of joke presents—a hand buzzer, soap that turned black when you washed your hands, a key chain with a dried yellow fish hanging from it. Peter’s stocking had had a hundred-dollar bill folded in the toe. In the toe of her stocking, Cammy found cuticle scissors.
While Peter showered, she wandered around her old room; when they arrived, they had been tired from the long drive, and she went to sleep with no more interest in her surroundings than she would have had in an anonymous motel room. Now she saw that her mother had got rid of most of the junk that used to be here, but she had also added things—her high-school yearbook, a Limoges dish with her Girl Scout ring in it—so that the room looked like a shrine. Years ago, Cammy had rolled little curls of Scotch Tape and stuck them to the backs of pictures of boyfriends or would-be boyfriends and then pushed the snapshots against the mirror to form the shape of a heart. Only two photos remained on the mirror now, both of Michael Grizetti, who had been her steady in her last year of high school. When her mother had moved them and put them neatly under the frame of the mirror, top left and right, she must have discovered the secret. Cammy pulled the larger picture out and turned it over. The hidden snapshot was still glued to the back: Grizzly with his pelvis thrust forward, thumbs pointing at his crotch, and the message “Nil desperandum x x x x x x x x x x” written on the snapshot across his chest. It all seemed so harmless now. He was the first person Cammy had slept with, and most of what she remembered now was what happened after they had sex. They went into New York, with fake IDs and fifty dollars Grizzly borrowed from his brother. She could still remember how the shag carpet tickled the soles of her feet when she went to the window of their hotel in the morning and pulled open the heavy curtains and looked across a distance so short that she thought she could reach out and touch the adjacent building, so close and so high that she couldn’t see the sky; there had been no way to tell what kind of day it was. Now she noticed that there was a little haze over Michael Grizetti’s top lip in the photograph. It was dust, not a mustache.
Peter came out of the bathroom. Over the years, he had gotten his hair cut closer and closer, so that now when she touched his head the curls were too tight to spring up at her touch. His head looked a little like a cantaloupe—a ridiculous idea, which would be useful just the same; she and her friends always said amusing things about their husbands when they wrote each other. She saved the more flattering images of him as things to say to him after making love. Her high-school English teacher would have approved. The teacher loved to invent little rhymes for the class:
Your conversation can be terrific;
Just remember: be specific
Peter’s damp towel flew past her and landed on the bed. As usual, he discarded it as if he had just finished it off in a fight. The week before, he had been in Barbados on a retreat with his company,