“Come home,” he says. “You’re going to get caught in the rush hour.”
My husband sends me a geode. There is a brief note in the package. He says that before he left for Europe he sat at a table next to John Ehrlichman in a restaurant in New Mexico. The note goes on about how fat John Ehrlichman has become. My husband says that he bets my squash are still going strong in the garden. There is no return address. I stand by the mailbox, crying. From the edge of the lawn, the big white dog watches me.
My lover sits beside me on the piano bench. We are both naked. It is late at night, but we have lit a fire in the fireplace — five logs, a lot of heat. The lead guitarist from the band Jonathan plays with now was here for dinner. I had to fix a meatless meal. Jonathan’s friend was young and dumb — much younger, it seemed, than my lover. I don’t know why he wanted me to invite him. Jonathan has been here for four days straight. I gave in to him and called Lenny and said for them not to visit this weekend. Later Corinne called to say how jealous she was, thinking of me in my house in the country with my curly-haired lover.
I am playing Ravel’s “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales.” Suddenly my lover breaks in with “Chopsticks.” He is impossible, and as immature as his friend. Why have I agreed to let him live in my house until he leaves for Denmark?
“Don’t,” I plead. “Be sensible.”
He is playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and singing.
“Stop it,” I say. He kisses my throat.
Another note comes from my husband, written on stationery from the Hotel Eliseo. He got drunk and was hurt in a fight; his nose wouldn’t stop bleeding, and in the end he had to have it cauterized.
In a week, my lover will leave. I am frightened at the thought that I will be here alone when he goes. Now I have gotten used to having someone around. When boards creak in the night I can ask “What is it?” and be told. When I was little, I shared a bedroom with Raleigh until I was seven. All night he’d question me about noises. “It’s the monster,” I’d say in disgust. I made him cry so many nights that my parents built on an addition to the house so I could have my own bedroom.
In his passport photo, my lover is smiling.
Lenny calls. He is upset because Corinne wants to have another child and he thinks they are too old. He hints that he would like me to invite them to come on Friday instead of Saturday this week. I explain that they can’t come at all — my lover leaves on Monday.
“I don’t mean to pry,” Lenny says, but he never says what he wants to pry about.
I pick up my husband’s note and take it into the bathroom and reread it. It was a street fight. He describes a church window that he saw. There is one long strand of brown hair in the bottom of the envelope. That just can’t be deliberate.
Lying on my back, alone in the bedroom, I stare at the ceiling in the dark, remembering my lover’s second surprise: a jar full of lightning bugs. He let them loose in the bedroom. Tiny, blinking dots of green under the ceiling, above the bed. Giggling into his shoulder: how crazy; a room full of lightning bugs.
“They only live a day,” he whispered.
“That’s butterflies,” I said.
I always felt uncomfortable correcting him, as if I were pointing out the difference in our ages. I was sure I was right about the lightning bugs, but in the morning I was relieved when I saw that they were still alive. I found them on the curtains, against the window. I tried to recapture all of them in ajar so I could take them outdoors and set them free. I tried to remember how many points of light there had been.
About the Author
Ann Beattie lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry.