The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [79]
The music, in contrast, grows lovelier.
Lenore goes into the kitchen to get the salad and hears George say, “I simply won’t let you girls leave. Nobody leaves on a Saturday.”
There are polite protests, there are compliments to Lenore on the meal—there is too much talk. Lenore has trouble caring about what’s going on. The food is warm and delicious. She pours more wine and lets them talk.
“Godard, yes, I know . . . panning that row of honking cars so slowly, that long line of cars stretching on and on.”
She has picked up the end of George’s conversation. His arm slowly waves out over the table, indicating the line of motionless cars in the movie.
“That’s a lovely plant,” Julie says to Lenore.
“It’s Peruvian ivy,” Lenore says. She smiles. She is supposed to smile. She will not offer to hack shoots off her plant for these girls.
Sarah asks for a Dylan record when the Telemann finishes playing. White wax drips onto the wood table. George waits for it to solidify slightly, then scrapes up the little circles and with thumb and index finger flicks them gently toward Sarah. He explains (although she asked for no particular Dylan record) that he has only Dylan before he went electric. And Planet Waves—“because it’s so romantic. That’s silly of me, but true.” Sarah smiles at him. Julie smiles at Lenore. Julie is being polite, taking her cues from Sarah, really not understanding what’s going on. Lenore does not smile back. She has done enough to put them at ease. She is tired now, brought down by the music, a full stomach, and again the sounds of rain outside. For dessert there is homemade vanilla ice cream, made by George, with small black vanilla-bean flecks in it. He is still drinking wine, though; another bottle has been opened. He sips wine and then taps his spoon on his ice cream, looking at Sarah. Sarah smiles, letting them all see the smile, then sucks the ice cream off her spoon. Julie is missing more and more of what’s going on. Lenore watches as Julie strokes her hand absently on her napkin. She is wearing a thin silver choker and—Lenore notices for the first time—a thin silver ring on the third finger of her right hand.
“It’s just terrible about Anna,” George says, finishing his wine, his ice cream melting, looking at no one in particular, although Sarah was the one who brought up Anna the night before, when they had been in the house only a short time—Anna dead, hit by a car, hardly an accident at all. Anna was also a student of his. The driver of the car was drunk, but for some reason charges were not pressed. (Sarah and George have talked about this before, but Lenore blocks it out. What can she do about it? She met Anna once: a beautiful girl, with tiny, childlike hands, her hair thin and curly—wary, as beautiful people are wary.) Now the driver has been flipping out, Julie says, and calling Anna’s parents, wanting to talk to them to find out why it has happened.
The baby begins to cry. Lenore goes upstairs, pulls up more covers, talks to him for a minute. He settles for this. She goes downstairs. The wine must have affected her more than she realizes; otherwise, why is she counting the number of steps?
In the candlelit dining room, Julie sits alone at the table. The girl has been left alone again; George and Sarah took the umbrellas, decided to go for a walk in the rain.
It is eight o’clock. Since helping Lenore load the dishes into the dishwasher, when she said what a beautiful house Lenore had, Julie has said very little. Lenore is tired, and does not want to make conversation. They sit in the living room and drink wine.
“Sarah is my best friend,” Julie says. She seems apologetic about it. “I was so out of it when I came back to college. I was in Italy, with my husband, and suddenly I was back in the States. I couldn’t make friends. But Sarah wasn’t like the other people. She cared enough to be nice to me.”
“How long have you been friends?”
“For two years. She’s really the best friend I’ve ever had. We understand things—we don’t always have to talk about them.”
“Like her relationship