Walks With Men by Ann Beattie

Author:Ann Beattie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

If it had been a movie I could edit, this is the way the new version would go:

Neil’s wife wore jeans, which fit her well, and flat shoes, which were then so unfashionable, they were fashionable. She smoked Benson & Hedges. There was a book of matches … what restaurant’s logo? Shoulder-length hair. She wore a gold wedding band. She hadn’t gone running out of her Upper East Side apartment without giving thought to how she looked. She said: “I imagine that you knew without knowing. Don’t you think that’s true?”

“Hi, excuse me, I’m in the middle of an emergency,” Raymond, the psychologist, said, opening the gate and sprinting up the steps. I heard his key opening the front door. Her feet were pressed together. My world was about to change. Some poet … Rilke. Rilke had been all for that. Easy for someone else to say that you should change your life. “To be honest, it would be better if you weren’t sitting here ten minutes from now. I’m expecting someone who’s having a very bad day,” Raymond called over his shoulder. The door closed behind him.

“He has patients,” I said to her.

“He seemed quite impatient.”

“No, he’s a shrink. Psychologist, I mean.”

“Oh. I thought you and I just had very different perceptions.”

“You can have him,” I said. “I don’t want someone who deceived me.”

She ran her hands down her jeans, though they fit her too tightly to have wrinkles.

“My friends were suspicious,” I said, wishing my voice had come out louder. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could talk. “My friends call him, flirting. I guess he’s vain because he has reason to be.”

“Does he ask you what he should do about them? Like it’s your problem? He wants you to think you don’t have real friends. That way he gets more power over you.”

There was the seminary across the street. The trees. The same view I looked at every day. Her ring sparkled less when the sun went behind a cloud. Thereafter, the cloud drifted away, and the sky was blue and empty.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“You’re like him, aren’t you?” she said. “Very tentative about asking a question. Like the question mark’s going to get airborne and stick its hook between your eyes.”

We were looking at each other.

“Lisa,” she said. “And of course I’m so enlightened, I keep my maiden name. Lisa Pauline Haley. And you are Jane Jay Costner. The Jane Jay Costner. I saw your movie after it won the Academy Award. You’re pretty and young and talented. My guess is that Jay was your mother’s maiden name. That you’re Southern. Maybe.” She shook her head. “So I’m sitting on a step in Chelsea, finally done with my husband, and now you don’t want him either.”

She thought she knew everything. She was a version of him. What if I did want Neil? There’d be no reason to tell her, even if it was true.

She said: “Well, it turns out to be his bad day, doesn’t it? But there’s no spark between us.

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