Picturing Will by Ann Beattie Page A

visited once a year just before or after his birthday, searched for these buoys the way a drowning insect rides the current until it encounters a solid object to fasten its grip upon. His second wife had had quite a talent for both amusing his mother and keeping her calm, but his present wife had no regard for a woman who chose to live without being smothered by fur or anesthetized by French aromatics, and so it had fallen to Haveabud to squire his mother around, carefully leading her on a zigzag through collapsed women with ulcerated legs and Senegalese hawking imitation Rolexes. Still, she would say to him, “Whoever would have imagined that you would want to live this way?” Amid the chaos of Jackson Pollock at the Modern she would find the simple shape of the treehouse he had once climbed into. Lifting her head to see the blinking warnings to planes on the tops of buildings she would remember carrying him outside to see the stars. His mother had an unerring ability, with her sincere questions and her well-intended assertions about the value of a peaceful life, to make him question every aspect of his existence, and remember to say his prayers at night, too. What was Pollock up to? Might it not have been the externalization of the body’s death wish, bleeding out, so that all the world could see, onto the canvas? How did Diane Arbus have the nerve to poke her camera into the face of a mental patient? If Albers’s colors vibrated, was there really so much value to that? It was all he could do to refrain from mentioning that he had considered suicide himself, that he had been emotionally, and sometimes physically, involved with other men. It made him nearly wild to see his mother, though he thought that perhaps he would have been driven to distraction no matter whom he had to tour around the city unwillingly. You simply had to march forward like the conqueror or you would be done for. The mere presence of a doubter could undercut your own confidence.
    In his breast pocket was a letter from his mother, who would be coming to town in about a week. It was a half-formed thought that perhaps Gloria could be useful in entertaining her—that is, if he could think of a way to make Gloria seem just a casual acquaintance while at the same time communicating to his mother that she must not mention her name to his wife. Or even Jody—surely she would be beholden to him, but the problem was that she might be back in Charleston, or … shit, the name of the town, the name of the town, he simply could not remember. Charlotte. That was it. Or maybe it wasn’t. Charlotte was in North Carolina, and he remembered her saying that she lived near the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Charlottesville, he was thinking triumphantly when she turned the corner, leading a little dog on a blue leash. Mel’s dog? Most dog owners mentioned their pets, and Mel never had. Well, no matter, he would have been happy to see her if she had been leading Quasimodo by the hand. A pigeon flapped a few feet away, clearing the path for her black Indian moccasins (oh, how he admired the outré trendy) and the little dog’s clicking paws. She had style—there was no problem there. Anyone who had melded into Chelsea well enough to wear her lover’s shirt over white painter’s pants with neon-green socks and moccasins would need no coaching on how to make an appearance. Then, in a sudden jumble of thoughts as she saw him and smiled, he imagined fucking her, or, alternatively, asking her to take his mother for tea at the Palm Court. As a groundswell of desperation rose in his brain, he wondered if she was drawn to Mel for the same reasons he was: a steadfastness and dedication that had a loony spin to it, a faint suggestion that a masquerade was going on the more one revealed oneself. He was not, Haveabud firmly believed, either a drug user or—other side of the coin, and harder yet to deal with—a person who had religious beliefs. He did not seem to be reformed