Secrets & Surprises (40 page)

Authors: Ann Beattie

BOOK: Secrets & Surprises

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After Corinne and Lenny leave, I write a second letter to my husband, pretending that there is a chance that he did not get the other one. In this letter I give him a detailed account of the weekend, and agree with what he said long ago about Corinne’s talking too much and Lenny’s being too humble. I tell my husband that the handle on the barbecue no longer makes the grill go up and down. I tell him that the neighbors’ dog is in heat and that dogs howl all night, so I can’t sleep. I reread the letter and tear it up because these things are all jumbled together in one paragraph. It looks as if a crazy person had written the letter. I try again. In one paragraph I describe Corinne and Lenny’s visit. In another I tell him that his mother called to tell me that his sister has decided to major in anthropology. In the last paragraph I ask for advice about the car—whether it may not need a new carburetor. I read the letter and it still seems crazy. A letter like this will never make him come back. I throw it away and write him a short, funny postcard. I go outside to put the postcard in the mailbox. A large white dog whines and runs in front of me. I recognize the dog. It is the same one I saw last night, from my bedroom window; the dog was staring at my neighbors’ house. The dog runs past me again, but won’t come when I call it. I believe the neighbors once told me that the dog’s name is Pierre, and that the dog does not live in Woodbridge.

When I was a child I was punished for brushing Raleigh with the dog’s brush. He had asked me to do it. It was Easter, and he had on a blue suit, and he came into my bedroom with the dog’s brush and got down on all fours and asked for a brushing. I brushed his back. My father saw us and banged his fist against the door. “Jesus Christ, are you
both
crazy?” he said. Now that my husband is gone, I should bring Raleigh here to live—but what if my husband came back? I remember Raleigh’s trotting through the living room, punching his fist through the air, chanting, “Ling-Ling, Ling-Ling, Ling-Ling.”

I play Scriabin’s Étude in C Sharp Minor. I play it badly and stop to stare at the keys. As though on cue, a car comes into the driveway. The sound of a bad muffler—my lover’s car, unmistakably. He has come a day early. I wince, and wish I had washed my hair. My husband used to wince also when that car pulled into the driveway. My lover (he was not at that time my lover) was nineteen when he first started coming, to take piano lessons. He was obviously more talented than I. For a long while I resented him. Now I resent him for his impetuousness, for showing up unexpectedly, breaking my routine, catching me when I look ugly.

“This is foolish,” I say to him. “I’m going into the city to have lunch.”

“My car is leaking oil,” he says, looking over his shoulder.

“Why have you come?” I say.

“This once-a-week stuff is ridiculous. Once you have me around a little more often you’ll get used to it.”

“I won’t have you around more often.”

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he says. “Two, actually.”

“What are they?”

“For later. I’ll tell you when you get back. Can I stay here and wait for you?”

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.”

“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 barette 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, but he never says what he wants to pry about.

I pick up my husband’s note and take it into the bathroom and reread it. It was a street fight. He describes a church window that he saw. There is one long strand of brown hair in the bottom of the envelope. That just can’t be deliberate.

Lying on my back, alone in the bedroom, I stare at the ceiling in the dark, remembering my lover’s second surprise: a jar full of lightning bugs. He let them loose in the bedroom. Tiny, blinking dots of green under the ceiling, above the bed. Giggling into his shoulder: how crazy; a room full of lightning bugs.

“They only live a day,” he whispered.

“That’s butterflies,” I said.

I always felt uncomfortable correcting him, as if I were pointing out the difference in our ages. I was sure I was right about the lightning bugs, but in the morning I was relieved when I saw that they were still alive. I found them on the curtains, against the window. I tried to recapture all of them in ajar so I could take them outdoors and set them free. I tried to remember how many points of light there had been.

About the Author

Ann Beattie lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry.