The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [71]
A maroon sweater that I gave him for his birthday is tied around his waist. He sits in front of the hearth and strikes a match on the bricks. He lights a cigarette.
“Well,” he says, “one of the surprises is that I’m going to be gone for three months. Starting in November.”
“Where are you going?”
“Europe. You know that band I’ve been playing with sometimes? One of the guys has hepatitis, and I’m going to fill in for him on synthesizer. Their agent got us a gig in Denmark.”
“What about school?”
“Enough school,” he says, sighing.
He pitches the cigarette into the fireplace and stands up and takes off his sweater.
I no longer want to go to lunch. I am no longer sorry he came unannounced. But he hasn’t jumped up to embrace me.
“I’m going to investigate that oil leak,” he says.
Later, driving into New York, trying to think of what the second surprise might be (taking a woman with him?), I think about the time when my husband surprised me with a six-layer cake he had baked for my birthday. It was the first cake he ever made, and the layers were not completely cool when he stacked and frosted them. One side of the cake was much higher than the other. He had gone out and bought a little plastic figure of a skier, for the top of the cake. The skier held a toothpick with a piece of paper glued to it that said “Happy Birthday.” “We’re going to Switzerland!” I said, clapping my hands. He knew I had always wanted to go there. No, he explained, the skier was just a coincidence. My reaction depressed both of us. It was a coincidence, too, that a year later I was walking down the same street he was walking down and I saw that he was with a girl, holding her hand.
I’m almost in New York. Cars whiz by me on the Hutchinson River Parkway. My husband has been gone for seven months.
While waiting for Corinne, I examine my hands. My gardening has cut and bruised them. In a picture my father took when I was young, my hands are in very sharp focus but the piano keys are a blur of white streaked with black. I knew by the time I was twelve that I was going to be a concert pianist. My father and I both have copies of this picture, and we probably both have the same thoughts about it: it is a shame I have almost entirely given up music. When I lived in New York I had to play softly, so as not to disturb the neighbors. The music itself stopped sounding right. A day would pass without my practicing. My father blamed my husband for my losing interest. My husband listened to my father. We moved to Connecticut, where I wouldn’t be distracted. I began to practice again, but I knew that I’d lost ground—or that I would never make it as a concert pianist if I hadn’t by this time. I had Raleigh come and live with us, and I spent my days with him. My father blamed my mother for complaining to me about what a burden Raleigh was, for hinting that I take him in. My father always found excuses. I am like him. I pretended that everything was fine in my marriage, that the only problem was the girl.
“I think it’s insulting, I really do,” Corinne says. “It’s a refusal to admit my existence. I’ve been married to Lenny for years, and when Lucy calls him and I answer the phone, she hangs up.”
“Don’t let it get to you,” I say. “You know by now that Lucy’s not going to be civil to you.”
“And it upsets Lenny. Every time she calls to say where she’s flying off to, he gets upset. He doesn’t care where she’s going, but you know Lenny and how he is about planes—how he gets about anyone flying.”
These lunches are all the same. I discipline myself during these lunches the way I used to discipline myself about my music. I try to calm Corinne, and Corinne gets more and more upset. She only likes expensive restaurants, and she won’t eat the food.
Now Corinne eats a cherry tomato from her salad and pushes the salad plate away. “Do you think we should have another child? Am I too old now?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“I think the best way to get children is the way you got yours. Just have them drive up. He’s probably languishing in your bed right now.