Beatrice sighed. “It’s not that simple. I would still have feelings for him.”
And she wondered at the ease with which she could talk about relationships, having never actually had one herself. It was amazing what practice and imagination could accomplish. By the time she went to her first show, moved into her first apartment, smoked her first cigarette, it would seem, she supposed, like she had been doing it for her entire life. Maybe by the time she had her first boyfriend, even, she would already be tired, having rehearsed so long for all of that trouble.
She explained, “Sometimes we don’t have a say in who we love.”
Even though she said it patiently, she had a feeling that he still didn’t understand, and that he would persist in being obtuse when it came to this subject. There was a willful streak in him, a doggedness, as if he’d picked up the personality of a dandelion or a patch of crabgrass. He asked the same questions every time he called. He asked them in the same tentative, mournful tone. She was trying to break him of the habit.
“Tell me about your day,” she demanded. “Tell me something interesting.”
“Oh god,” he moaned. He was stumped. “That’s impossible.”
Then, as if in disgust, the house shuddered. It was barely perceptible, no more than a mild spasm, because the house was so large and the walls so thick. Workmanship, she had heard repeated. Houses weren’t made that way anymore. When someone slammed the back door, you hardly felt it.
There was the sound of metal scraping across the driveway, and then her father’s voice, clear and deep and appalling: “I’m doing it!” he bellowed.
The person on the other end of the phone let out another moan.
“I don’t get it,” he muttered. “I don’t get it at all.”
How to explain?
“We have a lot in common,” Beatrice said, and strangely, here in the hubbub of her inventions, was something true. Her father relished the tricky fugues she played for him. They both found the back of Calvin’s neck irresistible to touch. And there was an abundance about him, an over-exuberance, that she was unhappily beginning to see in herself. When he hugged you, for instance, you could feel the springy growth beneath his shirt, and on the one hand it was revolting; on the other, it was like resting your cheek against moss.
“A lot in common,” the person echoed, an idea that seemed at last to dishearten him, when obstacles such as the band, and the apartment, had allowed him hope. Maybe he felt, in all of his dullness, a knuckle of truth. He began to cough again in his childlike, enfeebled way.
But then he stopped coughing so abruptly that it made it seem as if he had been pretending all along. He spoke in a calm voice not unlike the one she used with him. He said, “What would you do if one day he just never came home?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’d be all alone. You’d want someone to hold you.”
“I’m sorry?” she asked, as though his cough had prevented her from hearing him correctly. She decided that this cough made it impossible for her to hear much of what he said. His dry little cough was, she decided, settling farther into his chest; it was indicating quite ominous things about his health.
“You should take lozenges,” she said briskly, suddenly ready to get off the telephone. Lozenges was a word she had acquired a year ago, during her book-reading era, before she had discovered the Rock Hotel, in the days when she was still planning to emigrate to England and become a historical novelist. How bizarre. That person, and the person she was now? They wouldn’t even be friends.
THE TELEPHONE WASN’T ALWAYS in her room when she needed it. According to Calvin, he had calls to make. When she saw the long gray cord snaking out of her room and under his door, she would succumb, briefly, to bloodthirsty feelings. He had no one to talk to. Not at this hour. But she could hear him speaking in his bell-like voice, speaking slowly and precisely, like a person giving instructions to someone less intelligent. The conversations were always short. And always obviously pretend. She knew because she had done it herself, in the past, talk to the dial tone as though it were her closest friend.
It was all just an elaborate ruse to further him in his nosy pursuits. He always wanted to know whom Beatrice was speaking to. Whenever the telephone rang, he would dart into her room. “Is it for me?” he’d ask, though it never was. He simply needed an excuse to see who was calling.
Every one of Beatrice’s answers he found unsatisfactory.
“Which guy?”
“Do I know him?”
“Does he go to your school?”
As for Beatrice, she couldn’t decide which was harder: evading Calvin, or resisting the urge to tell him everything. She was frequently overwhelmed by a desire to flatten him with some shocking announcement. The sight of him checking for plaque, or sliding his trading cards into their plastic sleeves, or bobbing up and down to the Rock Hotel, filled her with a sort of mean-spirited abandon.
What would she tell him first?
Why 69 was a disgusting number. About a girl at her school who had slapped her own mother and knocked her glasses off. About girls who tortured other girls by cutting up magazines and sending them serial-killer letters. That Big Black’s new record would be called Songs About Fucking. That she now knew what landscaping was. What DIY was; and PCP; and DOA.
Sometimes she wanted to descend on her brother like a devastating angel and tell him every interesting thing she knew. But as it turned out, she didn’t have to.
“A man called,” Calvin said, holding the telephone. He stood in the doorway of Beatrice’s bedroom. “Looking for you. I told him you weren’t home.”
“Why did you do that?” Beatrice asked, as she tugged the telephone away from him.
“He sounded funny,” Calvin said. “He sounded like a creep.”
“He’s a friend,” Beatrice said.
“That man?”
“We talk a lot on the phone.”
“You do?” Calvin stared at her. “You talk to that man?”
“Stop saying that word!”
“What word?” he asked.
In her arms the telephone rang. She flinched, and put it down on her bed.
“Don’t answer it,” Calvin said.
“Of course I’m going to answer it. He’s my friend, he’s trying to reach me.”
“Don’t answer it. Don’t talk to that—” But he wasn’t allowed to say it.
The telephone kept ringing. She curled her fingers around the receiver.
“No!” Calvin said.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Beatrice said, as she felt herself beginning to worry. “He’s not at the front door. It’s just the telephone.”
“I know,” Calvin said. “But please, don’t answer it. I think it would be a bad idea.”
He took her hands into his. They were hot and slightly sticky. Together she and Calvin sat on her bed, watching the telephone ring. By the time it stopped, Beatrice felt afraid.
“Do you think…,” she began, and then couldn’t finish the question.
If he appeared at their front door, she would not know him. Shred, she would know right away, by his beautiful long fingers and uncombed hair, the skeptical arch of his eyebrow, the leather cord he wore around his neck. But the person on the telephone had no face. He was neither straight nor stooped. His breath was not foul; his T-shirt was not clean or dirty; he had no birthmarks. He was neither nineteen nor forty-one. Without a harelip, a pierced ear; without a nose or a chin or a body. She did not wonder. She said only, “Hello.” She said, “Tell me something interesting.” He had a cough.
Her brother was looking at her in a peculiar way. His eyes moved over her face like it was a landscape and he was up in an airplane. His eyes said, I am not coming down there. But still they kept looking for a place to arrive.