The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [28]
“Where will we go?” Richard said.
“How about a seafood restaurant? The motel owner said he could get a babysitter.”
Richard shook his head.
“No?” Alice said, disappointed.
“Yes, that would be fine,” Richard said. “I was thinking more existentially.”
“What does that mean?” the little girl asked.
“It’s a word your father made up,” Sam said.
“Don’t tease her,” Alice said.
“I wish I could look through that man’s glasses again,” the little girl said.
“Here,” Sam said, making two circles with the thumb and first finger of each hand. “Look through these.”
She leaned over and looked up at the trees through Sam’s fingers.
“Much clearer, huh?” Sam said.
“Yes,” she said. She liked this game.
“Let me see,” Richard said, leaning to look through his brother’s fingers.
“Don’t forget me,” Alice said, and she leaned across Richard to peer through the circles. As she leaned across him, Richard kissed the back of her neck.
Vermont
Noel is in our living room shaking his head. He refused my offer and then David’s offer of a drink, but he has had three glasses of water. It is absurd to wonder at such a time when he will get up to go to the bathroom, but I do. I would like to see Noel move; he seems so rigid that I forget to sympathize, forget that he is a real person. “That’s not what I want,” he said to David when David began sympathizing. Absurd, at such a time, to ask what he does want. I can’t remember how it came about that David started bringing glasses of water.
Noel’s wife, Susan, has told him that she’s been seeing John Stillerman. We live on the first floor, Noel and Susan on the second, John on the eleventh. Interesting that John, on the eleventh, should steal Susan from the second floor. John proposes that they just rearrange—that Susan move up to the eleventh, into the apartment John’s wife only recently left, that they just . . . John’s wife had a mastectomy last fall, and in the elevator she told Susan that if she was losing what she didn’t want to lose, she might as well lose what she did want to lose. She lost John—left him the way popcorn flies out of the bag on the roller coaster. She is living somewhere in the city, but John doesn’t know where. John is a museum curator, and last month, after John’s picture appeared in a newsmagazine, showing him standing in front of an empty space where a stolen canvas had hung, he got a one-word note from his wife: “Good.” He showed the note to David in the elevator. “It was tucked in the back of his wallet—the way all my friends used to carry rubbers in high school,” David told me.
“Did you guys know?” Noel asks. A difficult one; of course we didn’t know, but naturally we guessed. Is Noel able to handle such semantics? David answers vaguely. Noel shakes his head vaguely, accepting David’s vague answer. What else will he accept? The move upstairs? For now, another glass of water.
David gives Noel a sweater, hoping, no doubt, to stop his shivering. Noel pulls on the sweater over pajamas patterned with small gray fish. David brings him a raincoat, too. A long white scarf hangs from the pocket. Noel swishes it back and forth listlessly. He gets up and goes to the bathroom.
“Why did she have to tell him when he was in his pajamas?” David whispers.
Noel comes back, looks out the window. “I don’t know why I didn’t know. I can tell you guys knew.”
Noel goes to our front door, opens it, and wanders off down the hallway.
“If he had stayed any longer, he would have said, ‘Jeepers,’ ” David says.
David looks at his watch and sighs. Usually he opens Beth’s door on his way to bed, and tiptoes in to admire her. Beth is our daughter. She is five. Some nights, David even leaves a note in her slippers, saying that he loves her. But tonight he’s depressed. I follow him into the bedroom, undress, and get into bed. David looks at me sadly, lies down next to me, turns off the light. I want to say something but don’t know what to say. I could say, “One of us should have gone with Noel. Do you know your socks are still on? You’re going to do to me what Susan did