Small Change (14 page)

They have been fighting, and though they’re not fighting now, you can hear the earlier fight in their voices. They’re
talking on the phone because they are afraid to see each other. They are talking cautiously but one of them has more confidence, more breeziness in her manner, and she is talking less. The one who is less sure of herself is talking more, and this annoys her: once again she is at a disadvantage.

During the fight the uncertain one said too much. She should never have begun the discussion (forgetting that she didn’t begin it), and once she found herself in it, should have found a way out, short of yelling bullshit and hanging up.

They are talking. They have nothing to say to each other, but they are talking so the friendship won’t seem to end the way it did, but be given a peaceable burial. Neither of them believes they will see each other much after this call. From time to time, but not much. Not the way they used to.

It is four in the afternoon, an hour later than the phone call several weeks earlier that ended so explosively.

The one who is uncertain detects some amusement, wryness, in the other’s tone. Her own questions seem artificial. They skirt the disaster and hang up.

It won’t be easy. They will convey with their questions and tones of voice the trappings of friendship, but the effect will be hollow and strange, so that while they speak they will want to stop speaking, but they’ll keep on, because there is no natural ending to what has ended unnaturally.

B
eth thought of herself – this was after putting on Carol’s brown leather boots – as a cowgirl with notches in her belt for friendships wrestled to the ground and hauled off for slaughter. Plenty of slaughter and all in her mind. Not for the first time she envied the more active life of men and their peaceable if almost non-existent friendships. Few of the men she knew had many friends.

A cowgirl shooting down Indians, wrestling actively and all the time with unfriendly cattle, sleeping under an open sky which meant not sleeping much. Counting up notches in her belt.

But no physical release. The Wild West was bottled up in her brain, racketing around up there until she was tired, lassoed, worked over and tied up by her own thoughts.

Beth got back from the meeting after ten, too dismayed to talk. Ted followed her into the kitchen where she
made a face and gestured with her hands to indicate: mess.

“Something went wrong?” he asked.

And still she couldn’t talk. But finally she said something. She explained what happened.

“That leak from Anabel’s apartment has been going on for months. Henry showed us the damage and I said we have to say who’s responsible. If your apartment is the source of the leak you have to fix it, you have to act. And Anabel got huffy and said I was blaming her, I was always making a fight, and she was leaving. I said, ‘No. You
can’t
leave. You have to stay. I’ll leave.’ And I left.”

“Good for you,” said Ted.

Beth said, “Well – it’s all awkward now.”

“Well, maybe it has to be,” he said.

That made her feel better. She hadn’t said she was a schmuck, he hadn’t said she was a schmuck. However, she still felt like a schmuck.

Her mother had always complained about her tone of voice. “Why are you so belligerent?” her mother would ask. It had never seemed like much of a question. Her mother made her angry, so did her father and one of her brothers. It was only a good question now because it had been going on for so long. Ted believed she liked to be angry. He went so far as to say she needed to be angry. “I don’t understand,” he said, “your need for anger.”

Beth walked past Anabel, out the door and down the hall, and heard Anabel say, “She’s always like that,” while someone else said, “May I make a suggestion?” And what she felt as she walked down the hall, besides relief at getting away, was a
sort of sick dismay. Things had gone wrong and once again she was to blame. Her temper was to blame.

She had fought with Anabel before. Anabel hadn’t paid her rent for the two years she had been president of the coop, and it had taken long hours of bookkeeping and a lot of arm-twisting to get her to begin to pay her arrears. It had fallen to Beth to do the arm-twisting.

Anabel is a big woman. Beth sees her in the street in her padded yellow jacket with her large head of hair, and she doesn’t flee. She smiles weakly and says hello. Anabel smiles too, even though they can’t stand each other. There has been a leak from her bathroom to the bathroom below, and sometimes the one below that, for six months. The people below find it easier to come to Beth than to deal with Anabel.

Beth lies in bed reading a story about a woman who is virtually immobilized except for her anger. She wonders if this is the main female fuel – anger – and if so, why.

She remembers Anabel’s face as the discussion about the leak began, the deliberately blank look that came over her – a woman who hopes that if she does nothing the building will do everything – and her quick accusation that Beth was blaming her, her quick move to remove herself, which Beth countered handily, she has to admit, in the process leaving everyone else to clean up her mess.

She can’t sleep. Whenever she has a fight with someone she can’t sleep.

What is going through her head? The fight, of course. Every detail, everything that anyone said, and future fights. She is awake to the future and to questions about her character. She tries hard not to care what people think of her, but she still must care a great deal because as she lies awake she feels that a spotlight is trained on her: she is exposed, as herself, for everyone to see.

She walked down the hallway in the blue corduroy pants and brown leather boots passed along by Carol (with whom she fought two weeks ago) while she heard Anabel say, “She’s always like that.”

What she really wants to do is sock somebody in the kisser. Men get to sock each other in the kisser and it must make them feel a lot better.

She wants to lasso real cattle on a real plain, then hunker down beside a fire and brew a nasty cup of coffee. Maybe a dog for company, maybe a bottle or two of gin.

S
trange how we become different with different people. I write to you and feel myself being reshaped, not saying certain things, saying other things, always with you in mind. If I were writing to Susan, how different this letter would be. You never met her, but the two of you knew people in common.

I’ve been reading Thurber. At the moment I like him more than E. B. White. He has more animosity. White is sweetly wise: the decent, honest, understated American writing at thirty as if he were sixty. With Thurber you can see the wounds, the rumpled clothes, the short-sighted blinking stare. I’ve been reading his description of Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda: “… rarely relaxed enough for true comedy or comfortable enough for genuine humour, they seemed to move dramatically, from the beginning, in settings designed for tragedy.”

Thurber is much more bitter than White (at least in these posthumous essays) and I like his bitterness – his
anger – for itself, and for the tenderness and generosity that shoot through it. He appears to have been a wonderful friend, though writers tend to be better friends on paper than in person. He and White were wonderful friends until they had a falling out over some inexcusable rudeness of Thurber’s, I think. Some transgression.

You introduced me to White. Do you remember? You mentioned how fine his writing was, and I went to the beautiful old library beside the river and couldn’t believe how good his essays were. You were my well-read friend.

That was a long time ago. I remember your very white skin and the set of your mouth. I didn’t realize how unhappy you were, or how funny, or how down-to-earth. The combination of mouth, skin, and glasses – large glasses, tight mouth – threw me off. I had no idea then of the rejection you were living through and still are. A man saw you in a particular light and after he left the light stayed on.

You told me I was very serious. We were down in the cafeteria drinking coffee and it was a summation of my character. We had known each other less than a year, and I’d been so proud of how I had made you laugh.

This is the tragedy of love. We are most serious with the people we most admire, and the people we most admire love to laugh.

You say my letters are funny. That’s because when I’m feeling funny I tend to write to you. I have to be in a particular mood – friendly, forgiving, companionable – since you almost never write back. Often the best letters occur when I don’t feel like writing but write anyway. I say whatever enters my head, unworried until after the letter is mailed.

There was a period when I couldn’t write to you at all. I had written twice, you hadn’t answered; I had visited (seeing Stephen in the hospital) and become convinced you thought poorly of me. This went on for a year. Then I called you from the airport, passing through, a two-hour wait, a phone call I almost didn’t make, and you were so pleased to hear from me and we talked so easily that I wondered what all the fuss had been about.

Thurber and Fitzgerald met only once. They didn’t feel the need to stay in touch. Maybe that’s what a good friend is: not someone with a long attention span, not someone who stays in touch, but someone who refuses to take us all that seriously, then writes about us in a flattering way. Thurber wrote his essay and it was really a portrait of loyalty: Fitzgerald to Zelda, Fitzgerald to Hemingway, Fitzgerald to Ring Lardner, Thurber to Fitzgerald.

You taught me about loyalty. You were the one who put flesh on that bone. You said, “The most wounding and terrifying thing about T is that he’s incapable of loyalty.”

So why don’t you write to me?

You’ll need my new address. I’ve been packing all week. Around my desk are boxes of books and a black garbage bag full of old papers. I’ve been going through old writing, appalled at how many versions of the same lousy piece I’ve kept. Again and again I find a small interesting observation passed over in favour of a “telling” image or metaphor. I’m always trying to make what I see
into
something, in an odd and unhappy overextension of myself.

There is something I want to say. Or perhaps to confess. It has to do with the time I went to see Stephen. I found him on the fifth floor in a private room, an altogether different man: serene, open, at peace with himself. “It’s a relief,” he told me. “David has it and I wouldn’t want to be alive if he isn’t.”

I came back to your house and you said, “It must be so painful for you. It must be just awful.”

I shook my head and didn’t answer. Then I said it should be more awful than it is. You looked at me and said you didn’t believe that.

You would have cared more. I picture you hearing the news, then drawing the curtains and lying down for several hours. In my mind your hands are over your face, and your face is pressed against the back of the dark red sofa.

You met David only once. We went over to his apartment and had supper together. It was early summer and warm, long before (or maybe not so long before) he got sick. We sat on the balcony as he set food on the granite slab he used as a tabletop. An unmarked gravestone he had dragged home from somewhere. You may have been the one to notice that.

You talked about your daughter. Have I ever told you how your voice changes when you speak to her? How tender it becomes? David was teaching art to children and you asked him many questions about creativity. You were very precise in your questions, and he was vague in his answers. You liked each other.

Now I think of you and David in the same breath.

I should have written to him more often. Months went by between the letters I sent, and they were cards as often as letters. I suppose it was hard to write because of my
phoniness. I wrote the letters (the cards) knowing how much he wanted to come for a visit, but never inviting him despite my expressions of love. I was afraid of having to explain to Frank the landlord what sort of sickness he had as I shouldered him up and down the stairs.