Picturing Will by Ann Beattie Page A

days Will wanted to be Ace, some Butch. She thought that on the day the picture had been taken he was Ace. Ace in need of a haircut. Ace, who swung as hard as he could and still didn’t raise a bruise on Mel’s bicep. (“Of course you can’t hit me in the stomach,” Mel had said to him. “You’d hurt me.”) She looked at the lipstick on the saucer on top of the toilet tank. Mel would like it—he liked any profession of affection, however corny—if she scrawled I LOVE YOU on the bathroom mirror. The lipstick had cost ten dollars. Ten dollars for lipstick! She took off the cap and put lipstick on her lips but didn’t write on the mirror. She filled a glass with water and rose on tiptoes to water the spider plant. Putting the glass back in the holder, she remembered one of Mel’s peculiarities: wiping the glass, after use, with his bath towel. How could men be so neat about some things and so haphazard about others?
    She tried to remember the name of the man she would meet that night. Could it really be Haveabud? His first name was probably Steve or Ed. No, there were no more Steves or Eds in New York. They were now Steven or Edward, whether they were gay or straight. If they had money, they didn’t have a nickname. Everybody was into high seriousness, so that now even dogs were named Humphrey and Raphael.
    When Angela buzzed and Jody let her in, she was dressed in stone-washed jeans, probably about a size three, and an enormous sweatshirt with a green-faced, red-lipped Oriental on it and raised red letters spelling SUMO . Her hair was yellow—not any shade of blond but yellow, Crayola-crayon yellow. Pink ballet slippers. No socks. On her wrist a coiled bracelet that ended in the triangular head of a spitting snake. An earcuff and a diamond stud in one ear, a replica of the Empire State Building dangling from the other.
    “I’ve left my old man, but it’s a good thing. I just don’t want him inquired about ever again. But wait, you weren’t here when he came to help out last time, were you? Tell Mel that it’s over, and to please not ask how he is, because that’s as boring as somebody calling you to tell you how their day went. The thing I’m handing you now”—Jody had stopped on the second-floor landing as Angela rushed up the stairs two at a time, heading for the top—“is a date-and-prune tart. The prunes cut the sweetness of the dates, but don’t tell anybody about the prunes because they won’t eat it. They think prunes are those things they bring you in wet bowls in Miami Beach, and prunes actually don’t cause you as much trouble as corn, but try telling that to anybody. So. I’m double-parked, and if you can help me carry stuff upstairs I can leave the car at the curb. It’s salmon mousse for the main course. And I love that lipstick. That’s going to look fantastic by candlelight.” Angela smiled a beatific smile. The waves that surrounded her face looked more like a corona than overdyed yellow hair. “Room temperature,” Angela said, handing the platter to Jody. She put her hand over her heart. “As if we know no seasons in New York. As if each moment is purely invented.”
    ———
    After the party that night, Mel listened to the message tape. Duncan was flying to New York in the morning. Jody shrugged. “Why does Duncan think I’m going to get involved in the problems of a man I’ve never met?” she said to Mel. Then they fell into bed and drunkenly made love.
    In his dream Mel sank to the bottom of the ocean in a submarine. At first it was one of those submarines the tourists get into to see the coral reef and the fish swimming around, but a few seconds into the dream everything changed, and suddenly there was a commanding officer who was quite annoyed with him for thinking of the submarine’s downward path as “sinking.” “We are descending!” the man shrieked shrilly at Mel, who suddenly had to endure the stares of the other Navy men. One woman from the first part