Excerpt from Perfect Recall by Ann Beattie, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Some meeting is probably going to run late, and Mrs. Clinton would be rendezvousing with him from wherever she was, and Chelsea and her friends apparently drive him mad, because they're so unpredictable."

"He didn't know this when he called?" Kathryn says.

"How would I know?"

"Don't you two start in on each other. Think about me, for once. What about my feelings, when I was prepared to be cooking for the president and suddenly he decides to blow the whole thing off because some meeting might run a little late?"

Kathryn and I take this in. I get a mug and pour coffee. We all sit at the table in silence.

"I'm not sure it quite computed with me," I say. "The president visiting, I mean."

"I wonder if the bastard's still having lunch at Antonio's," Lowell says.

"Read the Times," I say. "Would you like me to make you some toast?"

"No thank you," Lowell says. "But it's nice of you to offer."

"I'll be on the deck," Kathryn says. She picks up her mug and half the paper and walks outside.

"Still," Lowell says. "Not everyone gets a call from the president." He looks at me. "Remember a few months after we met, when we had that barbecue over at your uncle's?"

"Of course I remember. He was a great guy. Never charged me a nickel for room and board. A totally generous man. 'Never get too big for your britches that you turn your back on your family,' my uncle used to say."

"You never did," Lowell says. "You sent him food every time we went somewhere exotic."

"Pistachios from Saudi Arabia," I say.

"And I've taken his advice, too. Which means that Kathryn will tyrannize us forever," Lowell says.


Back in Key West that evening, on impulse, I'm almost giddy. I go to the Green Parrot and have a cold draft before going over to the Casa Marina to meet Nancy and her friends in the bar there. Some bikers are at the Parrot with their girlfriends. Somebody who looks like a tweedy professor, except that he's got on pink short shorts as well as the tweed jacket with elbow patches, so he might be just another unemployed oddball. He's playing a game of Nintendo while sipping some tropical drink through double-barrel straws.

I am thinking about what I might have said to the president if he came to dinner.

But then I think: he no doubt already knows the marines are a bunch of dangerous psychos. He always had better sense than to truck with any of that stuff.

What would Nancy say if I suggested moving to New York with her?

Probably yes. She dropped enough hints about the lack of straight guys in Manhattan.

What do you get when you fall in love?

You get enough germs to catch pneumonia.

What happened to all the great singers of yesteryear?

Replaced by Smashing Pumpkins.

"You hear the one about this guy's girlfriend, who's leaving him?" a skinny guy in cutoffs and a "Mommy and Daddy Visited Key West and All I Got Was This Crummy Shirt" tee-shirt says, sitting next to me on a barstool.

"Don't think so," I say.

"The girlfriend says, 'I'm leaving you. I'm out of here.' And the guy says, 'Whoa there, can a guy even know why?' and she goes, 'Yeah, I've heard something very, very disturbing about you.' He says, 'Oh yeah? What's that?' She says, 'I heard that you were a pedophile.' He says, 'Hey, that's a pretty big word for an eleven-year-old.'"

Today I have spoken to this unfunny jerk, and to the president's assistant, George Stephanopoulos. Also to my employer, who is depressed, because the president was going to come to dinner and then suddenly he didn't

Excerpted from Perfect Recall, copyright (c) 2000 Ann Beattie. Reproduced with permission from the publisher; all rights reserved.