Ann Beattie - The New Yorker Stories

Also by Ann Beattie

Distortions

Chilly Scenes of Winter

Secrets and Surprises

Falling in Place

The Burning House

Love Always

Where Youll Find Me

Picturing Will

What Was Mine

Another You

My Life, Starring Dara Falcon

Park City

Perfect Recall

The Doctors House

Follies

Walks with Men

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2010 by Ann Beattie

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First Scribner hardcover edition November 2010

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Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010032933

ISBN 978-1-4391-6874-5
ISBN 978-1-4391-6876-9 (ebook)

Zalla, Second Question, from Park City: New and Selected Stories by Ann Beattie, copyright 1998 by Irony and Pity, Inc. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

A Vintage Thunderbird, Colorado, The Lawn Party, Distant Music, Secrets and Surprises, Weekend, Tuesday Night, Shifting, from Secrets and Surprises by Ann Beattie, copyright 1976, 1977, 1978 by Ann Beattie. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

Home to Marie, Television, Horatios Trick, from What Was Mine by Ann Beattie, copyright 1991 by Irony and Pity, Inc. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

Coney Island, Lofty, Times, Heaven on a Summer Night, In the White Night, Janus,
Summer People, Skeletons, and Where Youll Find Me, reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from Where Youll Find Me and Other Stories by Ann Beattie. Copyright 1986 by Irony and Pity, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Women of This World reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from Perfect Recall by Ann Beattie. Copyright 2001 by Irony and Pity, Inc. All rights reserved.

Find and Replace, The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation, and That Last Odd Day in L.A., reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from Follies by Ann Beattie. Copyright 2005 by Irony and Pity, Inc. All rights reserved.

The following stories appear courtesy of Ann Beattie: from Distortions (1976), A Platonic Relationship, Fancy Flights, Wolf Dreams, Dwarf House, Snakes Shoes, Vermont, Downhill, and Wandas; from The Burning House (1982), The Cinderella Waltz, The Burning House, Waiting, Greenwich Time, Gravity, Running Dreams, Afloat, Girl Talk, Like Glass, and Desire; previously uncollected, Moving Water, One Day, Coping Stones, and The Confidence Decoy.

For Lincoln

Contents

THE

NEW

YORKER

STORIES

A Platonic Relationship

W hen Ellen was told that she would be hired as a music teacher at the high school, she decided that it did not mean that she would have to look like the other people on the faculty. She would tuck her hair neatly behind her ears, instead of letting it fall free, schoolgirlishly. She had met some of the teachers when she went for her interview, and they all seemed to look like what she was trying to get away fromsuburbanites at a shopping center. Casual and airy, the fashion magazines would call it. At least, thats what they would have called it back when she still read them, when she lived in Chevy Chase and wore her hair long, falling free, the way it had fallen in her high-school graduation picture. Your lovely face, her mother used to say, and all covered by hair. Her graduation picture was still on display in her parents house, next to a picture of her on her first birthday.

It didnt matter how Ellen looked now; the students laughed at her behind her back. They laughed behind all the teachers backs. They dont like me, Ellen thought, and she didnt want to go to school. She forced herself to go, because she needed the job. She had worked hard to get away from her lawyer husband and almost-paid-for house. She had doggedly taken night classes at Georgetown University for two years, leaving the dishes after dinner and always expecting a fight. Her husband loaded them into the dishwasherno fight. Finally, when she was ready to leave, she had to start the fight herself. There is a better world, she told him. Teaching at the high school? he asked. In the end, though, he had helped her find a place to livean older house, on a side street off Florida Avenue, with splintery floors that had to be covered with rugs, and walls that needed to be repapered but that she never repapered. He hadnt made trouble for her. Instead, he made her look silly. He made her say that teaching high school was a better world. She saw the foolishness of her statement, however, and after she left him she began to read great numbers of newspapers and magazines, and then more and more radical newspapers and magazines. She had dinner with her husband several months after she had left him, at their old house. During dinner, she stated several ideas of importance, without citing her source. He listened carefully, crossing his knees and nodding attentivelythe pose he always assumed with his clients. The only time during the evening she had thought he might start a fight was when she told him she was living with a mana student, twelve years younger than she. An odd expression came across his face. In retrospect, she realized that he must have been truly puzzled. She quickly told him that the relationship was platonic.

What Ellen told him was the truth. The man, Sam, was a junior at George Washington University. He had been rooming with her sister and brother-in-law, but friction had developed between the two men. Her sister must have expected it. Her sisters husband was very athletic, a pro-football fan who wore a Redskins T-shirt to bed instead of a pajama top, and who had a football autographed by Billy Kilmer on their mantel. Sam was not frail, but one sensed at once that he would always be gentle. He had long brown hair and brown eyesnothing that would set him apart from a lot of other people. It was his calmness that did that. She invited him to move in after her sister explained the situation; he could help a bit with her rent. Also, although she did not want her husband to know it, she had discovered that she was a little afraid of being alone at night.