Authors: Ann Beattie
Love Always (3 page)
“Boredom might be good for her,” Jane said. “Don’t people develop their imaginations if they’re bored?”
Why argue? Lucy thought. If Jane had made up her mind, the visit from Nicole was a
fait accompli
. Only seconds elapsed before Jane’s ideas materialized. Their mother likened Jane’s mind to a dollop of pancake batter dropped on a hot griddle.
“Both of you come, and we’ll go to Philadelphia and visit Mother,” Lucy said.
“I’m going to tell you something that you can never tell another soul,” Jane said. “I’ve gained eight pounds since you last
saw me. I’m on a macrobiotic regime. I have to stay close to the seaweed store. I’ll come visit when I’ve finished ingesting half of the ocean.”
“Does Nicole want to come?” Lucy said.
“She loves you,” Jane said. “She had such a good time the last time she visited. She still talks about Heath Bar Crunch ice cream and Hildon’s motorcycle.”
“He sold it,” Lucy said.
He had sold his motorcycle because he wanted a pickup instead, but so far he hadn’t found one with the right ambience.
“Come on,” Jane said. “Martyr yourself.”
Lucy laughed. She spent no more time than other people thinking about being a do-gooder. Like the rest of the world, she was preoccupied and imperfect: she had had an abortion, crushed a few rabbits under tires as she rolled down country roads, turned the page of the magazine when her eye met the eyes of the orphan she could save if she made out a check and sent it before the winds of fate blew the urchin’s last grain of rice away.
Take Nicole for the summer? To Lucy, she was still a baby—the poor baby whose father had died before he ever saw her, two months after he and Jane married, off the southernmost point of the United States, in Key West, after drinking ten piña coladas with friends. After Nicole had been born, Jane had gotten engaged again, to an actor. They broke it off when Jane had a miscarriage, but before they did, he arranged for Nicole to meet his agent. Just after her first birthday, Nicole had done a toy ad, hugging a Baby Do-Right doll against her cheek, and the rest was history. From the first, she had not just been personable in front of the camera. Other children had rashes and insect bites, but Nicole’s skin was unblemished; she always looked windswept rather than rumpled. She was the perfect California girl long before her mother took her there. Her bedtime lullaby, suitably enough, was harmonized by the Beach Boys, who also played at her kindergarten graduation. She tap danced on the
Tonight
show, sharing the limelight with Charles Bronson and a macaw. The first time Nicole visited
her grandmother in Philadelphia, Grammy could not believe that the child had never learned a prayer. Instead of rattling off “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” when she was put to bed, Nicole waited patiently to be questioned. At night her mother always asked, “How do you feel about everything?” When Grammy took Nicole to see a Shirley Temple movie, Nicole’s whispered comment was, “What’s wrong with that girl?”
Lucy had not seen much of Nicole the last few years, so this phone call came as a surprise, but if she needed anything besides Jane’s request to persuade her, she had only to remember that Nicole was her only niece: beautiful, intelligent, talented, and famous—the gleam of her deceased daddy’s eye that now gleamed in Hollywood. She was also a fourteen-year-old girl who was difficult. But really—how could anyone know how much of Nicole’s difficult behavior was the result of fame and how much was just a given with any girl that age? It was perfectly possible, Lucy thought, that like a rabbit drawn into danger by the beam of a headlight, Nicole had been lured away from the relative normalcy of places like Vermont and stunned by exploding flashbulbs. Looking at stars—real stars in the sky—might be just what Nicole needed. As Lucy and Jane discussed Nicole’s visit, tiny birds began swooping through the air. Vermont really was paradise in a way—Les had been right about that. It was more beautiful than any invented backdrop, a sky against which Lassie could be painted, noble and romantic, with wind-fluffed fur. White pansies blew like handkerchiefs held in the air. An image came to Lucy’s mind of ladies waving goodbye to soldiers as the train pulled out. Just as quickly, she thought that this scene had already passed into myth; handkerchiefs were an anachronism, and the next war would blow the Earth away. Nobody was going anywhere by train. The inevitability she felt about this made her sad. Of course she wanted to spend time with her niece.
By the time she and Jane hung up, Lucy felt energized. As she waited for Hildon, she picked up her clipboard, uncapped the fountain pen, and invented the week’s column.
Dear Cindi Coeur,
My brother and I are in big trouble and we don’t know what to do. Our parents have grounded us because the cops found us acting suspiciously in a garage that’s under a restaurant complex where our parents often eat. What we were doing was playing “Deep Throat,” but neither of us thought we could tell anybody. The cops questioned us, and we said we were playing hide-and-seek. See, my brother stands behind a pillar, and I go around the garage until he makes a noise or I catch on where he is, and then I go over with a real serious look on my face and he whispers something to me. Then he closes his eyes and I go off and do the same thing. When we get bored, we make strange telephone calls from the pay phone in the garage, but nobody knows about that. My brother is sick of being grounded and thinks that we should just confess, but I think we should wait it out, or maybe there is another way. Do you have any advice?
Tina the Throat
Dear Tina,
Often I receive letters and worry that, in reading between the lines, I am understanding more than the people realize they are revealing. I would be avoiding the real issue if I did not tell you that Freud would be even more interested in the game you and your brother play than either the cops or your parents. You did not choose to play “Deep Throat” as opposed to Monopoly without a reason, and the reason is that it is a game highly charged with sexual undertones. I am not entirely sure that even the original players, Woodward and Bernstein, realized this. Stop for a moment and think of the pillars as penises, and you will begin to understand what I mean. But what a thing is and what we can make it appear to be is very important. Why not tell your parents about the game, but call it “Woodward and Bernstein” instead of saying that you were playing “Deep Throat?” You can suggest, by carrying a notebook when you speak to them, that you are interested in a career as a journalist.
As he pulled into the driveway, Hildon consulted his watch. It had been a Christmas present from Lucy: a watch that would tell him, even as he fell into the ocean, what time it was in Cairo. He sat for a few seconds before getting out of the car. Behind him a tractor rattled by on the dirt road, and he felt a tremor in his ribs as it passed. He was slightly hung-over from the party, and he needed a hit of Cindi Coeur to cheer him up. Some butterflies flickered up from the dust and beat their wings. He watched them fly away, to an area where rhododendron bushes had recently been planted.
Lucy was in the kitchen, sitting on the counter, having her daily lunch: a diet chocolate ice cream cone. What might be mistaken for sprinkles was actually a Diet Trim capsule she had broken into a bowl through which she rubbed the ice cream.
“Mon coeur,” Hildon said, kissing his fingertips and flicking them away from his lips.
The door had been open. He had told her a million times to lock it, just in case some lunatic came by, but of course she did not lock it, and today he had no intention of saying anything.
He opened the refrigerator. Perrier on the top shelf, bottles arranged neatly. He considered removing them and setting them up on the floor like bowling pins, which he could knock down with the pomegranate. There was mold inside the applesauce jar. There was chutney. A plate piled high with snow peas. As usual there was nothing to eat.
“What’s this?” Hildon said, thumbing a newspaper on the kitchen counter.
“Research,” Lucy said. “Jane called today. She’s sending Nicole for a visit.”
In preparation for this, Lucy had gone out an hour before to buy the tabloids so that she could read the Hollywood gossip. She had found a picture of Ed Harp and Nicole, both in indecent bikinis, at the beach. Nicole with Philippe (Jane had told her in a recent phone call that he was a Greek midget they were trying to pass off as a ten-year-old French boy). Nicole leaving Ma Maison, after dinner à deux with Gillie—another superstar who worked hard to make his affectations antic: he went everywhere, including Ma Maison, with his two Samoyeds. The color reproduction was bad in the photo: Nicole’s face, Day-Glo pink, seemed to be sliding off sideways into Gillie’s mottled pink and yellow jaw. It was rumored, in another paper, that Nicole had her eye on Brandt Buchanan. That picture showed Nicole riding on the shoulders of a boy who wore a shirt, the main purpose of which was to display unbuttoned buttons. Farrah was still with Ryan—no word on his son, whose teeth he had knocked out. There was a diet that guaranteed you would lose ten pounds a month, snacking on beans. Many women, all of them on TV shows that Lucy had never heard of, were said to be infanticipating. The boyfriends and husbands looked gay. Michael Jackson had added another llama to his menagerie. Alana’s life
was
livable without Rod. Another diet featured the eating of squash blossoms.
Lucy handed Hildon the week’s column.
Dear Cindi Coeur,
I understand that small children often exaggerate without thinking of it as a lie. My question is about my son, who has been complaining that his best friend has better lunches than he has. He says that instead of bringing tuna fish sandwiches to school, the boy has a whole tuna. I told him that this was not possible, because a real tuna fish would weigh hundreds of pounds. Nevertheless, my son refuses to eat tuna sandwiches anymore, and I feel that tuna sandwiches are better for him than the protein found in the only other sandwich he will eat—pork chop. I am also worried about his telling lies. He refuses to admit that he has made up the story about the tuna. I have questioned him in detail about how this would be possible, and he just continues the lie. He says the
boy does not bring the sandwiches in a lunch box, but in a box the size of a bed. Should I discipline him, or just pack tuna sandwiches and insist that he face reality and eat them?
A Worried Mom
Dear Worried,
It seems to me that you have quite a few options. You could refuse to replace the tuna sandwiches with sandwiches made of pork chops, and substitute something such as quiche, which will get soggy and appeal to no child. You could also get a pig and put it in a cage, telling your son that this way he would have something to rival his friend’s tuna fish, and that it is his problem to get it to school. You might also consider the possibility that the other boy is being forced to eat sardine sandwiches and is trying to compensate for his own embarrassment by insisting that they are tuna fish. You may want to ask yourself what your son is missing at home that makes him have such a strong empathetic reaction with the other boy. You might also consider the possibility that one or both boys needs glasses.
The phone rang, and Lucy answered it. From her end of the conversation Hildon could tell that she was talking to the kid at the nursery—the kid he had met with her the week before who had now developed a crush on her and who had stolen what looked like quite a lot of rhododendron bushes and planted them in her backyard. Lucy always elicited strong reactions from people. They loved her or hated her—their intensity was the one constant. Hildon, of course, couldn’t understand people’s negative impressions; he and Lucy had been friends and lovers since their college days.
Hildon wandered into the living room, not wanting to hear any more of the conversation. He had never been insulted that Lucy hadn’t wanted to marry him until he met the person she did want to settle down with—Les Whitehall. Les had even more preppie refinement than Hildon, but no sense of humor about it. Hildon thought he bore as much resemblance to a real man as Play-Doh did to a rock. Instead of being a real shit kicker, he was an intellectual shit kicker: he gave lazy paraphrases of philosophers’ thoughts, pretended to think ironically of his own existence, and chose the easiest audience a coward could find—college kids.
“No!” Lucy said. “I would
not
think it was funny if you planted willow trees to weep in your behalf in my yard!”
“Come in here, Lucy,” Hildon said. “You’re acting like a jackass.”
“That was my father,” Lucy said into the telephone. “He’s very outspoken. He gets away with everything because he’s six five. Daddy thought the bushes were beautiful, by the way. Let me put him on to thank you.”
Lucy came to the doorway and smiled at Hildon. Such a tease. Putting him on the spot. He decided to turn the tables on her. He walked past her and picked up the telephone. “Shtup my daughter and your ass’ll fly farther than Johnny Unitas’ football,” he said. He slammed the phone down.
