The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [69]
I had Raleigh come live with my husband and me during the second year of our marriage. It didn’t work out. My husband found his socks in the toilet; Raleigh missed my mother’s constant nagging. When I took him home, he didn’t seem sorry. There is something comforting about that house: the smell of camphor in the silver cabinet, my grandmother’s woven rugs, Daisy’s smell everywhere.
My husband wrote last week: “Do you miss wonderful me?” I wrote back saying yes. Nothing came of it.
Corinne and Lenny have always come to Woodbridge for visits. When my husband was here, they came once a month. Now they come almost every week. Sometimes we don’t have much to say to each other, so we talk about the old days. Corinne teases Lenny for not noticing her back in high school. Our visits are often dull, but I still look forward to their coming because they are my surrogate family. As in all families, there are secrets. There is intrigue. Suspicion. Lenny often calls me, telling me to keep his call a secret, saying that I must call Corinne at once and arrange to have lunch because she is depressed. So I call, and then I go and sit at a table and pretend not to see her until she sits down. She has aged a lot since their daughter’s death. Her name was Karen, and she died three years ago, of leukemia. After Karen died I began having lunch with Corinne, to let her talk about it away from Lenny. By the time she no longer needed to talk about it, my husband had left, and Corinne began having lunch with me to cheer me up. We have faced each other across a table for years. (Corinne, I know, tells Lenny to visit me even when she has to work on the weekend. He has come alone a few times. He gives me a few Godiva chocolates. I give him a bag of fresh peas. Sometimes he kisses me, but it goes no further than that. Corinne thinks that it does, and endures it.)
Once Corinne said that if we all lived to be fifty (she works for a state environmental-protection agency, and her expectations are modest), we should have an honesty session the way the girls did in college. Lenny asked why we had to wait until we were fifty. “Okay—what do you really think of me?” Corinne asked him. “Why, I love you. You’re my wife,” he said. She backed down; the game wasn’t going to be much fun.
Lenny’s first wife, Lucy, has twice taken the train to visit me. We sat on the grass and talked about the old days: teasing each other’s hair to new heights; photo-album pictures of the two of us, each trying to look more grotesque than the other; the first time we puffed a cigarette on a double date. I like her less as time goes by, because things she remembers about that time are true but the tone of wonder in her voice makes the past seem like a lie. And then she works the conversation around to Corinne and Lenny’s marriage. Is it unhappy? Both times she visited, she said she was going back to New York on the last train, and both times she got too drunk to go until the next day. She borrowed my nightgowns and drank my gin and played sad music on my piano. In our high school yearbook, Lucy was named best dancer.
I have a lover. He comes on Thursdays. He would come more frequently, but I won’t allow it. Jonathan is twenty-one and I am thirty-three, and I know that eventually he will go away. He is a musician too. He comes in the morning and we sit side by side at the piano, humming and playing Bach’s B-Flat-Minor Prelude, prolonging the time before we go to bed as long as possible. He drinks diet cola while I drink gin-and-tonic. He tells me about the young girls who are chasing him. He says he only wants