The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [40]
The wood arrives. The firewood man has a limp; he’s missing a toe. I asked, and he told me. He’s a good woodman—the toe was lost canoeing. Jon helps him stack the logs in the shed. I peek in and see that there was already a lot more wood than I thought.
Jon comes into the house when the man leaves. His face is heavy and ugly.
“Why did you order more wood?” Jon says.
“To keep warm. I have to keep warm.”
I fix a beef stew for dinner, but feed it to the dog. He is transfixed; the steam warns him it is too hot to eat, yet the smell is delicious. He laps tentatively at the rim of the bowl, like an epicure sucking in a single egg of caviar. Finally, he eats it all. And then there is the bone, which he carries quickly to his private place under the desk. Jon is furious; I have prepared something for the dog but not for us.
“This has got to stop,” he whispers in my face, his hand tight around my wrist.
The dog and I climb to the top of the hill and watch the commuters going to work in their cars. I sit on a little canvas stool—the kind fishermen use—instead of the muddy ground. It is September—mud everywhere. The sun is setting. Wide white clouds hang in the air, seem to cluster over this very hilltop. And then Jon’s face is glowing in the clouds—not a vision, the real Jon. He is on the hilltop, clouds rolling over his head, saying to me that we have reached the end. Mutiny on the Santa Maria! But I only sit and wait, staring straight ahead. How curious that this is the end. He sits in the mud, calls the dog to him. Did he really just say that to me? I repeat it: “We have reached the end.”
“I know,” he says.
The dog walks into the room. Jon is at the desk. The kneehole is occupied, so the dog curls in the corner. He did not always circle before lying down. Habits are acquired, however late. Like the furniture, the plants, the cats left to us by the dead, they take us in. We think we are taking them in, but they take us in, demand attention.
I demand attention from Jon, at his desk at work, his legs now up in the lotus position on his chair to offer the dog his fine resting place.
“Jon, Jon!” I say, and dance across the room. I posture and prance. What a good lawyer he will be; he shows polite interest.
“I’ll set us on fire,” I say.
That is going too far. He shakes his head to deny what I have said. He leads me by my wrist to bed, pulls the covers up tightly. If I were a foot lower down in the bed I would smother if he kept his hands on those covers. Like grape jelly.
“Will there be eggs and bacon, and grape jelly on toast, for breakfast?” I ask.
There will be. He cooks for us now.
I am so surprised. When he brings the breakfast tray I find out that today is my birthday. There are snapdragons and roses. He kisses my hands, lowers the tray gently to my lap. The tea steams. The phone rings. I have been hired for the job. His hand covers the mouthpiece. Did I go for a job? He tells them there was a mistake, and hangs up and walks away, as if from something dirty. He walks out of the room and I am left with the hot tea. Tea is boiled so it can cool. Jon leaves so he can come back. Certain of this, I call and they both come—Jon and the dog—to settle down with me. We have come to the end, yet we are safe. I move to the center of the bed to make room for Jon; tea sloshes from the cup. His hand goes out to steady it. There’s no harm done—the saucer contains it. He smiles, approvingly, and as he sits down his hand slides across the sheet like a rudder through still waters.
Wanda’s
When May’s mother went to find her father, May was left with her Aunt Wanda. She wasn’t really