The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [75]
“Why do I let what go on?” she said.
There was a long silence. “Whatever this sick game is, I don’t want to get involved in it,” he said at last. “It was none of my business to ask. I understand that you don’t want to talk about it.”
“But it’s really cold out there,” she said. “What could happen when it’s freezing out?”
He shook his head, the way George did, to indicate that she was beyond understanding. But she wasn’t stupid, and she knew what might be going on. She had said the right thing, had been on the right track, but she had to say what she felt, which was that nothing very serious could be happening at that moment because they were walking in the woods. There wasn’t even a barn on the property. She knew perfectly well that they were talking.
When George and the young woman had come back, he fixed hot apple juice, into which he trickled rum. Lenore was pleasant, because she was sure of what had not happened; the young man was not, because he did not think as she did. Still at the kitchen table, he ran his thumb across a pea pod as though it were a knife.
This weekend Sarah and Julie are visiting. They came on Friday evening. Sarah was one of George’s students—the one who led the fight to have him rehired. She does not look like a troublemaker; she is pale and pretty, with freckles on her cheeks. She talks too much about the past, and this upsets him, disrupts the peace he has made with himself. She tells him that they fired him because he was “in touch” with everything, that they were afraid of him because he was so in touch. The more she tells him the more he remembers, and then it is necessary for Sarah to say the same things again and again; once she reminds him, he seems to need reassurance—needs to have her voice, to hear her bitterness against the members of the tenure committee. By evening they will both be drunk. Sarah will seem both agitating and consoling, Lenore and Julie and the children will be upstairs, in bed. Lenore suspects that she will not be the only one awake listening to them. She thinks that in spite of Julie’s glazed look she is really very attentive. The night before, when they were all sitting around the fireplace talking, Sarah made a gesture and almost upset her wineglass, but Julie reached for it and stopped it from toppling over. George and Sarah were talking so energetically that they did not notice. Lenore’s eyes met Julie’s as Julie’s hand shot out. Lenore feels that she is like Julie: Julie’s face doesn’t betray emotion, even when she is interested, even when she cares deeply. Being the same kind of person, Lenore can recognize this.
Before Sarah and Julie arrived Friday evening, Lenore asked George if Sarah was his lover.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “You think every student is my lover? Is Julie my lover?”
She said, “That wasn’t what I said.”
“Well, if you’re going to be preposterous, go ahead and say that,” he said. “If you think about it long enough, it would make a lot of sense, wouldn’t it?”
He would not answer her question about Sarah. He kept throwing Julie’s name into it. Some other woman might then think that he was protesting too strongly—that Julie really was his lover. She thought no such thing. She also stopped suspecting Sarah, because he wanted that, and it was her habit to oblige him.
He is twenty-one years older than Lenore. On his last birthday he was fifty-five. His daughter from his first marriage (his only marriage; she keeps reminding herself that they are not married, because it often seems that they might as well be) sent him an Irish country hat. The present made him irritable. He kept putting it on and pulling it down hard on his head. “She wants to make me a laughable old man,” he said. “She