Authors: Ann Beattie
“I’m sorry,” he said. What was he sorry about? Was he sorry that for almost a week, Sonja had gone to the hospital to see Evie every day, while he had dropped out days ago? Sorry he had picked up the telephone just now to get Cheryl’s call? Or was he simply sorry that McCallum had done such a thing? Sorry to be involved in this, that was for sure, yet he sympathized with Cheryl. She’d been dragged into a messy situation, and he was about as useful, right now, as McCallum’s hearty, but ultimately dismissive, “God bless.” He hadn’t gotten in touch not only because he didn’t want to be kept posted on Livan Baker’s sad situation, but also because he didn’t want his own life to become a sad situation: a middle-aged man paying too much
attention to a teenage girl, himself not so unlike McCallum in being another opportunist, a person who barged into another person’s life just because the opportunity was there. Tonight, Cheryl’s voice was weary, the fatigue barely disguising real alarm. Just thinking about what happened to Cheryl’s roommate made him so depressed he was tempted to personify the weather, to see it as pathetic, this long winter of cold asterisks with diagonal slashes moving in behind and dark puffs of cloud streaming over Boston like steam escaping from a train, obliterating what clarity there was in the sky. McCallum and some kid:
Goddamn
.
“If somebody can’t talk sense to her, I don’t think she’s going to recover,” Cheryl said.
“I understand,” he said. “I’ve put in a call to my wife’s friend at student health, but there’s been something of a crisis here, and I wasn’t able to keep the appointment.”
“She’s not going to eat tonight,” Cheryl said.
“You’re doing what you can,” he said, realizing as he spoke that he was deliberately missing the point: the point was not that Cheryl felt bad, but that her roommate was losing ground. He was aware of that, but he was sitting on a stool by the phone, about to cook a package of Ramen noodles and eat them in front of the fire he’d just started in the fireplace in the living room—the simple, sensual pleasure of it almost made him laugh: as a young man, would he ever have thought an ideal evening would be sitting cross-legged by the hearth, slurping up twenty-cent noodles, reading an essay in
The New England Review
by McCallum deconstructing Arthur Bremer’s diary?—when suddenly the quality of his evening, already under a gloomy cloud of anxiety because of Evie’s critical condition, was yet again being tempered by a big dose of reality, the asterisks falling on Boston like footnotes offering bad prognoses about sexual aggression, the devil’s face more ominous than usual, seen on the fireback through flames crackling off burning logs. McCallum’s face … stupid, deranged McCallum, who earlier in the week had walked past his office, flanked by several students, raising his hand in a distracted, two-fingered wave, an odd gesture as if he were speaking in sign language to his troops:
There it is, guys; destroy it
. That was, of course, what Marshall feared: that somehow, once he was dragged in, it would be war and he would become McCallum’s enemy. Opening the package
of noodles, he flinched at what a coward he was, saw himself (chin wedging phone against his shoulder) as self-absorbed, a middle-aged man dodging responsibility in order to eat some fast food while basking by a pleasant fire. He should be interrupting his evening to talk to Livan, if only as a token adult, someone whose sympathetic presence might in some small way mitigate the aftershock of the dreadful trip.
“… at your apartment,” he heard himself saying.
“I would really appreciate it,” Cheryl said. “I would really, really appreciate it.”
He scribbled directions to her apartment on the back of an envelope. He put the package of noodles with its torn corner back on the shelf, turned off the boiling water, walked to the living room doorway and looked briefly at the already dwindling fire, and with as many misgivings at leaving the fire unattended as with dread about what he was setting out to do, he pulled on his coat, picked up his car keys, wrote a note to Sonja saying he’d explain where he’d been once he was back, then went out to the driveway. In spite of the snow and slush, a boy was riding by on a bicycle, and for a moment he remembered the springtime rides he’d taken with his father and brother, his father’s exercise program meant to keep demons at bay and also to wear the two boys out, because of course, in those days, no one jogged, and if his father had gone running, what would anyone have made of the two of them running behind? He watched until the boy grew small and disappeared in the graying distance. The kid on the bicycle made him feel out of shape and out of sorts, so that as he settled himself in the car, he had to remind himself that winter always got him down, that he was going off to do a good deed, that Cheryl Lanier had a crush on him, that, ridiculous as it seemed, he took a little pride in not being the sort of jerk who would exploit those feelings, let alone take a student off to where the hell had it been? Revere. It didn’t take much imagination to think of someplace classier than a triplex in Revere for a seduction, though McCallum had probably been cynical enough to do what was convenient. Sort of like opening a package of Ramen noodles when your wife was keeping a vigil at the hospital—anything would do. Sex as Ramen noodles. He remembered, again, McCallum’s wave, which had come just as he’d lifted his eyes from a very beautiful poem about a forever-missed moment
by Jay Parini, more of the words that rose in front of his eyes every day, as inevitably as the fog that now hazed his windshield. McCallum’s wave had been a slight acknowledgment to a colleague already greeted too many times that day, more a gesture that acknowledged one should make a gesture than the gesture itself. An allusion to a gesture that would allude to their complicity in not speaking meaningfully. A postmodern gesture, he thought, amused at his own bemusement. In fact, of the people who were predictably around the department, conversations devolved into sound bites, most often attended by vague kidding or chiding, a tacit admission of I-know-what-you’re-interested-in/you-know-my-own-preoccupations. Where did a person go from there? Into a corridor, a real and symbolic corridor, where any connecting or reconnecting would be done between teacher and student, not between teacher and teacher, a hierarchical system in which adults played king-of-the-hill, with their knowledge a caveman’s club to keep those wishing to ascend far below:
I’m saying this as a friend. I think that you should tone it down
. He heard her words as he drove down the hill, aware that his anxiety about the house’s catching fire was displaced fear, more certain as the seconds passed that he was a coward, whether or not he’d been lured out of the safety of his house, a coward for not having taken McCallum aside when he’d first heard about the outrage he’d perpetrated, instead of looking up, blank-faced, letting McCallum walk by the door simultaneously greeting and dismissing him. Marshall had swivelled his chair to look at the empty space left behind McCallum, finding in it the ghost of a question. Wasn’t it at all possible that Livan was hysterical, or crazy in some way, a liar, a young girl who wanted to destroy her professor because … because what? Because he had what she didn’t have: a mate, a home, a life. Money and vacations. What if McCallum hadn’t done anything to her? What if there had been no trip to Revere, what if her boyfriend had gotten her pregnant and she decided McCallum could be the fall guy, maybe because they had gone to Boston together, even visited Revere, but they’d been in a hotel: room-service strawberries and quadruple-priced California champagne, a quick night of laughing at old movies on TV, Livan knowing none of the actors’ names, McCallum having remembered wrong, for years, all the famous lines, feeding each other expensive morsels, the two of them slightly tipsy.
He was trying to find a way to blame the victim, he realized. Why bother? If McCallum didn’t know to keep his hands off undergraduates, this was exactly what he deserved. But was it really possible that McCallum, striding along in his black sweater and his gray-and-white-striped jeans that were so out of fashion they could quite possibly be of-the-moment, hipper than hip—was it likely that he had tortured one of his students, then returned to campus to deconstruct coming-of-age novels, walking and talking the same way, offering passing waves to colleagues, his vampire fangs retracted into small, slightly buck teeth he self-consciously covered with his hand when he spoke? That was it: there was something about his embarrassment about his protruding teeth, there was some awkwardness in the way McCallum carried his body because of his shame about his teeth, that made him question whether the events in Revere were as unambiguous as Livan made them out to be.
Thinking this, he noticed, sadly, a cluster of dead elm trees as he pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store and tried to think what to do. There was an outdoor phone, over by the pyramid of stacked soft drink cartons—what did they do, disassemble the pyramid every night, so the Cokes wouldn’t freeze?—and he eyed it, wondering whether he should call Cheryl and tell her they needed to talk before he got to her apartment, or whether he should simply call home (if the house hadn’t burned, his house would be right where he’d left it) to ask Sonja’s advice, or even whether he should call McCallum to ask for his side of the story. Of the three possibilities, calling McCallum seemed the most upsetting, so he decided he would, indeed, call McCallum. He would at least give the man the benefit of the doubt so he could address the accusations.
A teenage girl came out of the store, her arms thrown around a boy’s arms, pinning them to his sides, giggling. She had on a cap with a tassel, and on her feet the same camouflage boots Sonja was so fond of, though purple leg warmers rose from the girl’s boots to just below her knees. Even in her padded jacket, he could see that the girl was scrawny—a word his father had used, which he realized no one used anymore—scrawny and full of enthusiasm, teasing the boy about something and laughing. They got in their car, a beat-up Ford of some indeterminate color that reminded him of the walls in a house he had toured recently, when it was first listed with Sonja’s agency. What had
Sonja said they were called? Sponged and glazed. The half-rusted, sun-faded car looked like the sort of paint job rich people wanted on their walls now. He watched them climb into the car, and then, as the headlights went on, noticed a strange blur of movement inside the back window: cats, it was—kittens, five or six of them, their legs slipping out from under as the boy abruptly gassed the car, many of them thrown back against the window, or, Marshall guessed, spilling onto the backseat, one or two dark shapes remaining as tires squealed and the Ford lurched onto the road, bucking as if it were about to stall, then shooting into the far lane. What was the story behind that? Two teenagers with kittens from some stray cat they’d taken in. It was sad, but at the end of every school year, abandoned cats and dogs—even turtles and snakes—would prowl the campus looking for their owners, growing gradually thinner as they tried to find a new friend, many of the dogs and some of the cats following everyone and anyone, in desperation. Once, an obviously malnourished yellow lab had jumped in Marshall’s car and sat hopefully in the passenger’s seat. He had found a starved cat dead in front of a Coke machine outside the gym. But McCallum’s having found a box turtle,
HIS HIGHNESS MR. TURTLE
painted on its shell with red paint … wait: McCallum had been dismayed and angry to have found the turtle upside down in the center of the sidewalk—a football; he had taken it, at a distance, to be a football—did it stand to reason that a man who rescued a turtle would take a student to another city and tie her to a bed? Of course, Hitler had been a painter, a vegetarian. Too many people were bored with what they were doing, and also passionate about something else they did: the internist a lepidopterist, his nurse a blackjack player, the accountant in the waiting room a collector of Byzantine coins. Most of the time Marshall found such things wonderful, but in a way such situations also made him sad—his suspicion that so many other people were not pursuing those things they really loved, as if only the young had immunity from society’s questioning a person’s desire to be a doctor who catches butterflies and who enjoys discussions about ancient coins, with a few other interests thrown in, such as figure skating, raised-bed gardening, an attempt to read the complete writings of Henry James, plus an interest in the occult and a passion for rappelling. Which, in fact, was true of the doctor Marshall had seen for five or six years, who had finally left the area to
study neonatal surgery, while attending whatever performance art was happening in Seattle, as the blackjack-playing nurse, who had become his wife, began to think seriously about adopting a second Rumanian baby. With this multifaceted man, he had once discussed a burning feeling when urinating. A peculiar stiffening of his knee. A rash behind his ears. Those odd yet invigorating office visits: a shot of cortisone for the knee, but how could Marshall, a professor, not have read
The Golden Bowl?
An ointment for the rash, but had Marshall thought about the possibility of learning to scuba dive instead of settling for snorkeling? He felt a kind of hero worship toward the doctor, while at the same time being in the man’s presence too long could exhaust him. They’d kept in touch, exchanging books and Christmas notes, and Marshall felt that if the man had stayed in New Hampshire, they would probably have become friends. In fact, for all his colleagues and in spite of Sonja’s love, he sometimes felt that he had no friends: they would be, like Sonja, more than friends, or, like McCallum—
God, McCallum, you insane fucking fool
—people who gave intermittent signs of being a friend, but were not.
He parked and went inside the store, where he poured himself a cup of coffee and paid with a dollar bill to get change for the phone. Sonja might be back at the house, and he could ask her advice, tell her about the visit he was about to make. He deposited the money, hunching his shoulders against the wind. The line was busy. As he redialled, the amusing thought crossed his mind that calling home to explain his whereabouts was not something Shelley or Keats would ever have worried about. Yeats. Could anyone imagine Yeats chatting on the phone? The beautiful closing line of Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” passed quickly through his mind. Here he was, in a rather ridiculous situation, suddenly contemplating life and death, which could only mean that he was very anxious, he thought the stakes in his mission were high, or feared they might be. Sonja, of course, would think his involvement in this was a big mistake. Maybe not the involvement so much as the way he was handling things. Though how was he handling things? So far, by conjuring up lines of poetry written by Yeats, while loitering around a convenience store and wondering about the lives of people who got in their cars, by sipping coffee which would keep him awake later that night, by being on sensory overload.