The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [33]
Noel is wonderful. I reach in my pocket, hoping a dime will suddenly appear.
Noel and I go to visit his friends Charles and Sol, in Vermont. Noel has taken time off from work; it is a vacation to celebrate our decision to live together. Now, on the third evening there, we are all crowded around the hearth—Noel and Beth and I, Charles and Sol and the women they live with, Lark and Margaret. We are smoking and listening to Sol’s stereo. The hearth is a big one. It was laid by Sol, made out of slate he took from the side of a hill and bricks he found dumped by the side of the road. There is a mantel that was made by Charles from a section of an old carousel he picked up when a local amusement park closed down; a gargoyle’s head protrudes from one side. Car keys have been draped over the beast’s eyebrows. On top of the mantel there is an L. L. Bean catalogue, Margaret’s hat, roaches and a roach clip, a can of peaches, and an incense burner that holds a small cone in a puddle of lavender ashes.
Noel used to work with Charles in the city. Charles quit when he heard about a big house in Vermont that needed to be fixed up. He was told that he could live in it for a hundred dollars a month, except in January and February, when skiers rented it. The skiers turned out to be nice people who didn’t want to see anyone displaced. They suggested that the four stay on in the house, and they did, sleeping in a side room that Charles and Sol fixed up. Just now, the rest of the house is empty; it has been raining a lot, ruining the skiing.
Sol has put up some pictures he framed—old advertisements he found in a box in the attic (after Charles repaired the attic stairs). I study the pictures now, in the firelight. The Butter Lady—a healthy coquette with pearly skin and a mildewed bottom lip—extends a hand offering a package of butter. On the wall across from her, a man with oil-slick black hair holds a shoe that is the same color as his hair.
“When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Eastertime, too,” Dylan sings.
Margaret says to Beth, “Do you want to come take a bath with me?”
Beth is shy. The first night we were here, she covered her eyes when Sol walked naked from the bathroom to the bedroom.
“I don’t have to take a bath while I’m here, do I?” she says to me.
“Where did you get that idea?”
“Why do I have to take a bath?”
But she decides to go with Margaret, and runs after her and grabs on to her wool sash. Margaret blows on the incense stick she has just lit, and fans it in the air, and Beth, enchanted, follows her out of the room. She already feels at ease in the house, and she likes us all and wanders off with anyone gladly, even though she’s usually shy. Yesterday, Sol showed her how to punch down the bread before putting it on the baking sheet to rise once more. He let her smear butter over the loaves with her fingers and then sprinkle cornmeal on the top.
Sol teaches at the state university. He is a poet, and he has been hired to teach a course in the modern novel. “Oh, well,” he is saying now. “If I weren’t a queer and I’d gone into the Army, I guess they would have made me a cook. That’s usually what they do, isn’t it?”
“Don’t ask me,” Charles says. “I’m queer, too.” This seems to be an old routine.
Noel is admiring the picture frames. “This is such a beautiful place,” he says. “I’d love to live here for good.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Sol says. “With a lot of fairies?”
Sol is reading a student’s paper. “This student says, ‘Humbert is just like a million other Americans,’ ” he says.
“Humbert?” Noel says.
“You know—that guy who ran against Nixon.”
“Come on,” Noel says. “I know it’s from some novel.”
“Lolita,” Lark says, all on the intake. She passes the joint to me.
“Why don’t you quit that job?” Lark says. “You hate it.”
“I can’t be unemployed,” Sol says. “I’m a faggot and a poet. I’ve already got two strikes against me.” He puffs twice on the roach, lets it slip out of the