What Was Mine by Ann Beattie

Author:Ann Beattie [Beattie, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-76576-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-22T13:00:00+00:00

When he met Francine, it was spring. She was taking acting classes at night and selling ladies’ nightwear at Lord & Taylor during the day. One of the stockbrokers at the company where Stefan worked was married to a dancer. The man, Bryant Heppelson, insisted that the one thing Stefan must absolutely take his word on was that he had met the most amazingly talented, beautiful woman he had encountered since he fell in love with Melly when they were both fourteen. Not only must he take his word, but he must experience her—at dinner at their apartment. Stefan had nothing better to do on Saturday night, so he went.

Francine and Melly (Melly was Bryant’s wife) had met through an ad posted on the bulletin board at the building in Brooklyn where Melly studied dance and Francine went to acting classes. Melly had a car in the city—an unimaginable thing!—and wanted to transport people to Brooklyn, partly for the extra cash and partly because she was afraid to drive alone at night. In the year they had been shuttling back and forth, the two women had grown as close as sisters.

During dinner it came out that Francine had grown up in the Midwest. She had gone to college on a scholarship. When Bryant joked about her ruthless ambition, she had asked whether pairing that adjective with the word “ambition” wasn’t a rather embarrassing reflex some men had. From the kitchen, Melly hollered out that with Francine’s talent, it was a good thing she took herself seriously.

Melly and Bryant lived in a basement apartment in the Village, and even though it was April, it stayed damp and cool. A portable heater was plugged in and sat angled out from the corner, blowing a stream of warm air over them as they sat in butterfly chairs covered with black canvas. It was before people began to get rid of their graduate school furniture, though by then the framed Peter Max posters were usually leaned against a closet wall, or steam-puckered from having been hung in the bathroom.

He could remember talk about dancers’ foot injuries—asking how the tape was used, whether permanent damage couldn’t be done by dancing in spite of pain. Some analogy was made by either Francine or Melly between binding one’s feet to dance and acting a painful scene that pertained to your own life. With more wine came more wild comparisons. Silly toasts were made by one person to some other person’s poorly paraphrased ideas. The conversation alternated, as so many conversations seemed to, outside the workplace, between lofty idealism and a mockery of that idealism that was meant to sound very pragmatic, very of-the-world and of-the-moment. The half-gallon bottles of Gallo Hearty Burgundy from grad school parties had disappeared, replaced by bottles of muscadet or cabernet. At some point between dinner and dessert a bottle of California champagne materialized in a silver champagne bucket. Melly shook her head, blushing and saying it was a wedding present she had tried to return, but it had been given to them without a box.

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