Ann Beattie
My Life At The Very Top
In 1975, I was offered a job for one year at the University of
Virginia. My ex-husband was also given a part-time job, and the next
year things reversed: he taught full-time, I taught one course. In
1977 I went to Harvard. That was the end of full time teaching,
ever. Three times I returned to pinch-hit for John Casey, who was
always kind enough to think of me when he was either on leave or
when he’d gotten a great award that precluded teaching. When I
returned, I lived in the then rather-dilapidated Altamont, where in
one apartment my father pried open the painted-shut windows and
rigged up a shower, and in another a friend stood in the dark with
me for what seemed like hours, tennis racket at the ready, window
open in hopes that the bat who’d taken up residence would fly out.
When I left New York City in 1984, I again moved to the Altamont;
interestingly, the house I soon bought was right outside, viewable
from my rented apartment window. The elderly lady who owned it was
impressed that (though I didn’t say it was not currently true) I
taught at "Th’University" (all one word), and sold to me though her
grown son was surprised that his mother had listed the house. My
mother never did approve of me buying a house right outside an
apartment building (then again, she and my father loved to chop down
trees: as soon as a tree they’d planted gained substantial height,
he’d get out the buzz-saw). Now, when I take her for a drive, we
sometimes drive by the old house, which of course brings back a lot
of memories: the time she bought me strings of ghost lights to
decorate for Halloween; how pleased my parents were to give me the
gift of a back deck; my yard that she came from Washington to rake,
so many times. She and my father used it as a weekend house.
Sometimes I was there, and sometimes I wasn’t. I went to Paris for
the first time the year after I moved in. It was there that I bought
furniture that was shipped to Virginia and arrived the day after I
met Lincoln, my husband-to-be-now-long-my-husband. He came back
after our first "tea" to check out the furniture. We still have it
in Key West, where it is comfortable and scratched and stained. He,
it turns out, is addicted to tea.
But this takes me far from the Altamont. As the Altamont always
took me far from Th’University -- the University that originally
took me far from New England (blundered Ph.d), where one friend in
Connecticut had turned the unheated pantry into a bedroom, and
where, located in the center of town, I held lawn sales with the
town first selectman, who was also the garbage man and who rescued
"good stuff" from the trash ("Hal, doesn’t this look just like that
decanter Uncle Fred sent us last Christmas?") Religious items I got
at auction were big sellers. I bought "box lots" for 50 cents,
discarding all but the colander or the carving fork ("Look, if you
tilt it this way, there’s a tear rolling down his cheek."). Those
New England auctions were a riot: one auctioneer, in particular, who
called the enormous men who hauled out boxes you couldn’t see into
"Boys." All the women who bid were asked, "How can you be so pretty,
and be so cruel?" I once wrote a short story in which a young boy
goes to an auction and agrees to take a puppy his father is later
shocked he’s said he’ll take. In real life, I’m female, was ten
years older than the character, and resisted.
I guess what I’m writing about is a place and a time, when I kept
returning to the same place in Virginia to live – much to my
surprise -- as if all roads had switch-back curves that eventually
terminated at the tall icon of a building that commemorated itself
by announcing that its day had passed ( peeling linoleum;
claw-footed tubs. But oh, that blasting heat that would anesthetize
you (how extravagant, I think now). It had no University of Virginia
affiliation. A friend who still has an apartment there pulled
strings time and again to get me back in. And once when my editor,
wife, and child came from New York to stay, and it was a little
overcrowded in my one bedroom, he jimmied open a door of a vacant
apartment, where he dragged my mattress for me to spend the night.
I wrote fiction there (signaling goodnight to one of my best
friends, whose light also glowed across the way late into the
night); I was sometimes kind (not nearly enough) to my neighbor,
Mil, who lived next door with her grown daughter, Shirley. I loved
her stories about being a clerk at the most prestigious jewelry
store in town – her being called upon after hours to model
engagement rings someone was debating between for his girlfriend.
When the story concluded (we both liked it so much, it was told more
than once), she and I would both look at her old hands as stunned as
Lady Macbeth (minus the guilt, of course). There were plenty of
residents in those years who could tell you what the town had been
like: retired schoolteachers; widows who used to go dancing. One old
gentleman was known to poke pretty girls in the side with his cane
in the elevator. Another man who lived on the first floor swung his
hands ten times at his side before every slowly completed step
forward (my husband used to watch him through the window of our old
house: he does a great imitation).
Now the mall has taken off, the building is in a great location,
people adore the views, and the high ceilings. You pretty much can’t
get in. I think all the old people are gone. I only know what one
apartment inside looks like. It’s not exactly memory lane when I go
back, but I do remember my husband doing a painting looking down
from way up on the roof, and our climbing the same "hidden" ladder
to watch the fireworks, and a lot of stories I wouldn’t tell on
myself. In the late seventies, early eighties, it was filled with
what would now be called "seniors," and I had their stamp of
approval because of my University connection. It was a lot easier to
explain than that I was a bleak Minimalist who wrote about
characters lamenting the insufficiency of their white wine. Today,
if people on a plane ask, "What do you do?" I’ve learned never to
say I’m a writer. I don’t even need to tell you, parenthetically,
what heartbreak such a statement engenders. (Oh, okay, I can’t
resist: they, too, are writers, though they haven’t yet written.) I
also try to say, "I work at the University" rather than "I teach,"
and if I blow it and indicate that I’ve written something, I make a
pre-emptive strike by saying they won’t have heard of me. (They
haven’t.) (To the ruder question, "Should I have heard of you?" I’ve
taken to responding, "Well, book sales help me eat.")
Now I have my AARP card (I regularly throw it away, but that
doesn’t mean I don’t have it). I haven’t exactly come full
circle -- the image I hold is more like a dog chasing its tail --
beginning as a one-year lecturer to being re-hired twenty-five years
later as Professor Beattie. I live in a house not too far from the
Altamont. My friends all joke about what we’re going to do when we
get older. Let’s buy a building, they say, get somebody to live
there and take care of all of us. (Wouldn’t be a bad job: pretty
soon, we’d all kill each other.) We joke, we nervously joke. Not
quite yet needing perfect shelter – which is what the Altamont once
represented -- we can pretend our scenarios for the future are
amusing speculation. We can assume the way forward is a straight
line, when we already know better, when few of us have escaped those
motion-sickness-inducing switchback turns. And the beacon at the top
is gone, of course: the more the Altamont stands firm, the more
obvious it is that it’s gone. The University leaps and bounds,
spills over, plans passageways over the traffic (or is it
underneath?). But the Altamont – never a part of the University, but
never entirely removed from it, either -- was allowed to age so
gracefully that it finally did its Phoenix routine. There it stands,
so desirable. As was our youth.
Ann Beattie is Edgar Allan Poe professor of literature and
creative writing at the University of Virginia. Ann’s interview with
Lacy Crawford can be accessed at www.narrativemagazine.com, where
there is a picture of her back porch in Maine. Also: page 12 of this
interview shows Ann, in white socks, with big dog. Bliss.
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