The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [72]
“Twenty-one isn’t exactly a child.”
“I’m so jealous I could die,” Corinne says.
“Of Jonathan?”
“Of everything. You’re three years younger than me, and you look ten years younger. Look at those thin women over there. Look at you and your music. You don’t have to kill the day by having lunch.”
Corinne takes a little gold barrette out of her hair and puts it back in. “We don’t come to your house almost every weekend to look after you,” she says. “We do it to restore ourselves. Although Lenny probably goes so he can pine over you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t sense it? You don’t think that’s true?”
“No,” I say.
“Lucy does. She told Lenny that the last time she called. He told me that she said he was making a fool of himself hanging around you so much. When Lenny hung up, he said that Lucy never did understand the notion of friendship. Of course, he always tries to pretend that Lucy is entirely crazy.”
She takes out the barrette and lets her hair fall free.
“And I’m jealous of her, going off on all her business trips, sending him postcards of sunsets on the West Coast,” Corinne says. “She ran off with a dirty little furrier to Denver this time.”
I look at my clean plate, and then at Corinne’s plate. It looks as if a wind had blown the food around her plate, or as if a midget army had marched through it. I should not have had two drinks at lunch. I excuse myself and go to a phone and call my lover. I am relieved when he answers the phone, even though I have told him never to do that. “Come into the city,” I say. “We can go to Central Park.”
“Come home,” he says. “You’re going to get caught in the rush hour.”
My husband sends me a geode. There is a brief note in the package. He says that before he left for Europe he sat at a table next to John Ehrlichman in a restaurant in New Mexico. The note goes on about how fat John Ehrlichman has become. My husband says that he bets my squash are still going strong in the garden. There is no return address. I stand by the mailbox, crying. From the edge of the lawn, the big white dog watches me.
My lover sits beside me on the piano bench. We are both naked. It is late at night, but we have lit a fire in the fireplace—five logs, a lot of heat. The lead guitarist from the band Jonathan plays with now was here for dinner. I had to fix a meatless meal. Jonathan’s friend was young and dumb—much younger, it seemed, than my lover. I don’t know why he wanted me to invite him. Jonathan has been here for four days straight. I gave in to him and called Lenny and said for them not to visit this weekend. Later Corinne called to say how jealous she was, thinking of me in my house in the country with my curly-haired lover.
I am playing Ravel’s “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales.” Suddenly my lover breaks in with “Chopsticks.” He is impossible, and as immature as his friend. Why have I agreed to let him live in my house until he leaves for Denmark?
“Don’t,” I plead. “Be sensible.”
He is playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and singing.
“Stop it,” I say. He kisses my throat.
Another note comes from my husband, written on stationery from the Hotel Eliseo. He got drunk and was hurt in a fight; his nose wouldn’t stop bleeding, and in the end he had to have it cauterized.
In a week, my lover will leave. I am frightened at the thought that I will be here alone when he goes. Now I have gotten used to having someone around. When boards creak in the night I can ask “What is it?” and be told. When I was little, I shared a bedroom with Raleigh until I was seven. All night he’d question me about noises. “It’s the monster,” I’d say in disgust. I made him cry so many nights that my parents built on an addition to the house so I could have my own bedroom.
In his passport photo, my lover is smiling.
Lenny calls. He is upset because Corinne wants to have another child and he thinks they are too old. He hints that he would like me to invite them to come on Friday instead of Saturday this week. I explain that they can’t come at all—my lover leaves on Monday.
“I don’t mean to pry,” Lenny says,