Secrets & Surprises by Ann Beattie Page A

She was sharing a one room apartment with a girl who went to B.U. The girl was the one who introduced them; she had gone to high school with Griffin, and he had looked her up when he moved to Cambridge. In the short time since high school he had changed a great deal, and she no longer felt very comfortable with him. Had he not literally stumbled into her table, where she sat with Diana, just before Jacks bar closed, she would have avoided talking to him. She certainly would not have introduced him to Diana. She had nothing on her mind about introducing the children of famous men to one another—he pitched into her table, and when the boy he was with pushed him by the shoulders so that he slumped into a vacant chair at the table, she tried to make the best of the situation by pretending that he was not as drunk as he was by introducing him. Or perhaps part of the lurch into the table was show to begin with: outside, he had not been too drunk to ask for, and scribble down, Diana’s phone number. “I lost yours,” he said to Louise. “I know hers is the same, but if I don’t have yours—” Griffin’s friend clapped his hand around his neck and began to move him away from the two girls. “His father’s Joseph Berridge,” Louise said to Diana when they turned to begin the walk back to their apartment. “And Griffin decided to be fucked up about it all of a sudden and dropped out of Harvard. I think he’s faking—I knew him in high school, and there was nothing wrong with him. When he got here he started drinking and not going to classes. He’s just doing it to spite his father.”
    Louise answered the phone when Griffin called. She said, “One moment,” and handed the phone to Diana and went into the kitchen. She thought that Griffin had a nasty streak, and had even in high school, when he was usually fun to be with, and it irritated her that now he was pretending they were not even friends. On the phone he had only asked her formally to speak to Diana.
    She listened as Diana hesitated, then agreed to see him over the weekend. She was glad that even though Diana was shy, when put in a bad position, she would fight for her rights. She thought that Diana could—and would probably have to—handle Griffin.
    “We’re going to the movies,” Diana told Louise, coming into the kitchen and grinning like a girl who had just been asked on a first date.
    “What are you going to see?”
    She shrugged. “Whatever’s at the movies.”
    Louise had to smile. Not to have smiled would have looked as if she were sulking.
    Louise was average in height and a little overweight, with hair that was pretty and wavy, even though it was no special shade of brown. Next to Diana she looked almost petite; Diana was a little taller than five nine, and her hips and shoulders were broad, so that people thought of her as a big person, even though she was slender. When Diana was depressed, Louise remembered not to stand by a mirror with her. She had done that once, inadvertently, walked up to Diana slumped in the hallway and tried to cheer her by insisting that she was pretty, and Diana had turned and stood facing forward, next to Louise, the mirror in front of them, and said simply, “See?” Louise had seen. Mirrors seemed to distort Diana’s body in some way, so that she actually did look taller than she was.
    The “Griffin Berridge” that Diana scrawled on the bathroom mirror with lipstick was a real shock to Louise. And because she knew the message had not been left for her, she did not know whether it was all right to wash it off. She decided to be good-humored about it—even though it was her tube of lipstick.
    On Saturday they went to the movies, and on Sunday afternoon he drove to her apartment in his black Volvo. It was a first-floor apartment, so Diana went to the window when the honking started. Diana thought it was hilarious that he sat outside blowing the horn, and grabbed her sweater and keys, and calling goodbye to