I Remember You

by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

  Heike said nothing for a moment. There was a drop of condensation on the outside of her glass, and it ran down and pooled against her skin.

  — I thought he was so much older, she said.

  — He was, Arden said. He was, but he’d come home from college on holidays. You have to understand, his picture was all over the house. I’d brag to my friends about this big brother I had. So I’d beg him to play hide-and-seek, and he’d just leave me hiding forever. One time he found me crammed into the bottom of a wardrobe and locked me in there. He teased me from the other side of the door while I cried for him to let me out. Keep in mind that he was nineteen years old and I was nine.

  She paused, twisting her glass back and forth in her hand.

  — That sounds petulant, she said. So many years later.

  — You were a child. Heike let her eyes flick briefly to the stairs, and then back to Arden. Children remember such things.

  It wasn’t a conversation she particularly wanted to have.

  Arden’s brow furrowed slightly. She let her hand with the drink in it fall to her waist.

  — And I had this doll, she said. Penelope. She shook her head. It’s funny. I hadn’t thought about her for years. I suppose I haven’t seen Eric for so long, and being with him these last few days, suddenly she popped to mind. My father gave her to me, just before he died. A birthday present. Arden’s forehead relaxed, cheeks lifting a little. She had the loveliest crinolines, she said. A white porcelain doll—you can imagine the kind. Anyhow, I’d been building a flotilla of sailboats out of newspaper for the Girl Scouts, you know, some sort of badge, and Eric bet me that they wouldn’t float. I kept trying them out in the bathtub, one after another. He taunted me about it, kind of. One day he said a boat isn’t seaworthy if it can’t carry a passenger. So he wouldn’t honour the bet, even though they floated just fine.

  But she’d insisted. Indignant the way a young girl can be, she said. It was Eric who suggested they use Penelope.

  — Off we went to Coney Island. With the Ferris wheel going and the noise of the barkers and every other child sticky-chinned and laughing, and me kneeling down on the boardwalk, casting Penelope out to sea in a paper boat.

  She pushed a hand out in front of her, fingers splayed, then, catching herself, stopped and fixed her hair instead.

  Heike dropped her gaze, almost motherly.

  — But a porcelain doll is so heavy, Arden.

  — Oh, she floated for a while. Arden shrugged, her voice flatter now. The tide was going out. It’s just as you say: a porcelain doll has that heavy head. I watched the boat curl up around her until she slipped into the ocean. Gone.

  She downed the last of her drink.

  — Anyway, she said. That wasn’t the point. The point is, I see so little of that left in him when he’s with you. You must be a good influence.

  Heike frowned.

  — I’m not sure I have any influence on Eric at all.

  The image of the little doll, tipping into the ocean, had upset her. She could imagine the doll’s hair, fine and soft, fanning out all around her in the water. She looked out at the veranda. John still stood with his back to them, his glass resting on the railing beside him.

  — Do you remember yesterday when I asked you about that little cottage, up the way?

  — The squatter’s place?

  — I think maybe someone is there.

  Arden popped a heel out of her shoe and flexed her foot. They were high shoes, meant for sitting or dancing, but painful to stand around in.

  — Eric doesn’t seem to think so, she said.

  Heike bit down on a piece of ice with her molars. The cold of it sent a jerking pain high into her cheekbone. A delicate nerve. She was imagining Daniel at the pond, as she had seen him when she first came up for air, his body folded tight on the edge of the raft, leaning in close, peering down at the water in the moment before he fell.

  Daniel upstairs now, chin-deep in bath water while Eric dressed in the next room. Slipping beneath the surface of the bath, silent and sinking. Or Eric there with him, his back turned to the bath. Eric, his hand pushing down on Daniel’s head, pushing him under.

  Arden pressed the foot back into her shoe.

  — But of course, you’re the only one who’s seen the place.

  The ice cube cracked in Heike’s teeth, and a shard slid to the back of her throat, edges smoothing in the new heat. She felt it there like a cherry stone, a moment’s almost-choke before it melted clean.

  — I have to go.

  She turned and ran up the stairs, slipping and catching her own fall, fingertips brushing the carpet. Hand over hand on the knob, shoulder hard against the bathroom door.

  She swung into the room. Eric stood at the counter, absently making a notation in one of the black books he kept stashed all over the house. The bath full and still: bubbles thin and used and floating there listlessly in cloud formations. No sound. Not a hair of him. Heike felt her stomach turn. Her breath locked in her throat, choking her.

  The blue-striped boat rested on the edge of the tub. Eric tossed the notebook back into an open drawer and pushed the drawer shut.

  Daniel, wrapped in his hooded towel, just behind the door, the thing Heike saw last. She almost cried out: air rushed into her lungs all at once, her body flooding with relief.

  He lifted his face to her. The little fingers and toes bare and wrinkled with damp.

  4

  The living room of Dolan’s house already had the look of a midnight buffet the morning after a long party. A solid oak table ran down the middle of it, the colour of its cloth unknowable except where the trim hung down, pulled unevenly by the placement of platters, packed edge to edge. The platters themselves were by turns fresh and full or else ravaged. Cold meat and salty, lurid shrimp with their springing eyes still attached, great wooden boards of bread ends and the smeared remains of creamy white and blue cheeses, little ramekins of mousse, spoons of all sizes, and everybody’s crumpled napkins left behind to decorate the blank spaces, abandoned to their fate. There was a bowl of fresh figs and another of oranges already scooped from their shells and left resting in them, in that way that’s meant to make them look like jewelled castles. This was a trick that Heike performed herself when she wanted Daniel to get some vitamins, on a day she was making his pancakes in the trinity shape of Mickey Mouse. The couch and chaises had all been pushed over to one side in a hurry. They pointed in different directions and pressed up against each other, bawdy, front to front or back to back. In some cases you’d have to climb over the back of one to get into the seat of another. This hadn’t stopped guests from using them; on the contrary, it created a squall of loungers on one side of the room, bordered by a dangerous-looking pile of discarded shoes. Spiked heels aimed every which way.

  It was only nine-thirty when they arrived. Dolan himself was standing in one corner of the kitchen, eating an apple.

  — He’s a divorcé, you know. Arden lifted a tiny white pot-de-crème closer to her face and dug around in it with a silver spoon. They were standing at the edge of the kitchen themselves, near to the living room passage, next to the pile of shoes. When Arden brought the spoon to her mouth, Heike saw that it left a blackish stain against her lipstick. So, not a pot-de-crème after all. Caviar. Arden handed the container to Heike and shook the spoon in Dolan’s direction.

  — His wife ran out on him, she said. From Barcelona, I think. Very dark about the eyes. I could never understand a word she said, but then I don’t suppose they spoke much. Arden sucked on her spoon for a moment. With her other hand, she squeezed Heike’s elbow and leaned closer. What I mean is, I don’t suppose it was a meeting of the minds.

  You could see that she was pining for the vetoed society job. Heike touched her forehead to Arden’s.

  — You would have made a terrific newspaperwoman.

  — A reporteress, Arden said. The world will never know what it missed.

  She tapped the edge of the spoon against he
r wrist and then passed it, clean and wet, to Heike.

  — What was she? A political refugee, or a movie star?

  — She had the most amazing round breasts, Arden said.

  She said the wife’s dresses had always been too high- or too low-cut, but you can get away with that if you don’t talk.

  — Silence made her seem pristine. Like a dark dolly. I bet she never owned a girdle.

  Heike took a lick of roe off the spoon.

  — But surely if he only wanted to sleep with her he could have left her in Barcelona?

  — Did I say Barcelona? Maybe she was Mexican. I know she ran off with someone else. A prizefighter. She followed him back to Europe.

  — To Barcelona!

  Arden’s forehead creased up.

  — England, I think.

  — So he didn’t care much for words, either, then. Heike jangled the spoon, scraping the last of the caviar out of the little jar.

  — I suppose not.

  There weren’t any children, or at least, none that Arden had ever heard of. She wasn’t the kind of woman to get caught like that, Arden said. By caught she meant pregnant.

  — Spain is a Catholic country. Heike took a last lick off the spoon and set the little empty vessel on a side table.

  — Catholics can be tricky, Arden said. Believe it.

  Heike shrugged her cardigan down off her shoulders and let it hang like a scarf around the small of her back. The crush of bodies moving to and from the kitchen made it hot in the passageway. Arden twitched her head, distracted for a second by a loud whoop somewhere to the left of the living room. Otherwise, both women aimed their attention over the crowd, to where Dolan stood in the kitchen, apple still in hand. He was maybe ten or fifteen feet away, just off-centre of a noisy group, but Heike couldn’t tell if he was engaged with the conversation or if people just liked standing near him. Greatness by proximity. Leo Dolan was a captain of his own industry. Radio plays, sure, but he also owned a small chain of stations. John classified Dolan’s move into television as breakneck.

  This in the car on the way over. A moment later, Eric had turned sharply into the driveway and pulled up hard on the brake, leaving even the usually dignified John to jounce against the window.

  — Breakneck, Eric had said. Don’t you just love it?

  Heike said that Eric always acted like a child when he was jealous, and a shot of silence ran through the car, electric. The words had just slipped out, off-hand almost; even Heike was surprised. Her head felt clear and light. John began to laugh. Eric told Heike to settle down before she embarrassed herself.

  Arden said it was a well-known fact that the house was empty half of last year, Dolan working the whole winter in California.

  As punctuation, she’d swung open her door and climbed out.

  Dolan had some colour to his cheeks. Looking at him now, Heike thought that might be booze. His hair was a little longer than the fashion, with a mark of grey at the temple. He’d been wearing a grey pinstripe suit, but the jacket had come off and been lost before they’d arrived, so that he was in his vest and shirt sleeves, the cuffs rolled almost to the elbow. He was possibly the tallest man in the house. Certainly he was taller by three inches than any other man in the room.

  There was almost no red skin left on his apple now, and Heike watched as Dolan took a bite off the bottom of the core.

  — I’d better find Eric, she said, already turning away from where Arden leaned against the wall. He’d stayed with them for the first fifteen minutes, long enough to wrap a hand around Heike’s champagne glass and guide it back to the table, giving her a stern shake of the head. She’d only picked it up again after he’d left them alone.

  Now she abandoned the empty glass and picked her way out of the living room, weaving to avoid a few wayward limbs that stuck out of the clustered lounge chairs. Her cardigan, still hanging loose across her back, caught on someone’s hand and rather than stop and disentangle herself, she simply let it go, walking out of the garment with her fingers trailing behind her. In the other direction was the hall leading back to the front vestibule where they’d first come in, and the tall door to what she remembered to be the study. A few low men’s voices, and the door standing halfway open, as if to discourage less diligent guests. Heike curled a few fingers around the edge of the door and pulled it a little wider but didn’t quite look in. She could hear Eric talking, vehement and almost rough. The hall near the door smelled of cigar smoke and she wondered if he was working up some kind of a deal, even here, angling for new donors to fund his work. He was always looking for interested parties. Backers, he said, who might “smooth the rough edges” of his research project: a new medicine that worked to calm the nerves.

  There was a burst of harsh laughter. Cards. In which case he wouldn’t be missing her at all. If he was gambling, he wouldn’t later want to know where she’d been all night, who she’d been with, why she’d embarrassed him by avoiding standing next him even for five minutes. She didn’t need to check on him.

  From inside the study, there was a woman’s voice.

  Heike leaned into the room.

  The furniture had indeed all been pushed back against the walls to make way for card tables, five or six of them set close enough together that the chair backs almost touched. Games of four men at a time. The woman laughing was the caterer’s girl, passing out highballs from a tray. She closed her mouth again and tucked a bill inside her blouse and then moved toward the door, her body brushing up against Heike in the doorway. Eric was there, but he didn’t look up. The girl stopped for a moment and rolled her eyes at Heike.

  — Get two drinks in ’em and oh brother!

  Heike inclined her head in the not-unfriendly way she’d cultivated before learning to speak English. The girl dropped her arm and walked off toward the kitchen, swinging her empty tray as she went. Eric still hadn’t looked up, and Heike could see by the shape and size of his glass what he was drinking: straight rye, or maybe bourbon. No ice, no twist. Every reason to think he might still be working the table, playing name-dropper over and around the game. Put it all together and it meant she was off the hook. She started to turn away. There was a pile of money on his table instead of chips, and smaller piles to the right of each player. She couldn’t remember if John and Eric had talked about it as a gambling party on the drive over. Where had Eric come up with the buy-in if he hadn’t known in advance?

  Suddenly anxious, Heike moved past the door and out into the vestibule, where her coat and purse were hung on a rolling rack. She unsnapped the purse and slipped a hand down into a slit in the lining where she kept her own billfold, whatever she could put away without Eric noticing. The money was there; he hadn’t found it. She counted it by feel, with the edge of her thumb, then snapped the clasp together and sank the purse down into the sleeve of her car coat. It made her feel almost giddy. For a moment she imagined telling Arden about this, Arden’s delight at the very idea of a secret stash. Relieved, she leaned against the coats on the rack.

  The weight of her body set the wheels moving and Heike stumbled backward into the soft rustle of fabric as the rack rolled and then stopped hard against the wall. There was the sharp bang of a wooden ornament hitting the ground, and then the hall was quiet again. She sat back into the coats. The ornament rolled to a stop somewhere to her left.

  For a moment everything was still and then, quick footsteps. A maid. No: this woman was too senior to be only a maid, matronly in her uniform, her grey hair pulled back. Practical shoes. She arrived so quickly it was almost as though she’d been just around the corner, watching to see what trouble Heike might cause. The shoes stopped in front of where Heike sat, ensconced in the coats. The woman leaned down and reached for the ornament, a kind of mask with a new notch now chipped out of the top corner, pausing to look Heike square in the eye as she did.

  Heike hadn’t moved. She could hear the men talking in the study and over that the broad noise of the party in the kitchen. Dolan did n
ot rush in to assess the damage, as she had feared he might. The housekeeper stood waiting, her face blank and somewhat hostile.

  Heike drew herself taller, tilting her chin to return the stare. After a moment she slipped off her shoes and, rising nobly to her feet, carried them in one hand past the woman standing there, back down the hall, and out the open doors to the lawn. The grass was cool against her bare feet. There were fairy lights strung along the edge of the house and railings, and they blinked and shone, reflecting off the windows. Pockets of revellers sprawled out in lounge chairs or piled up on the ground with their tilting cocktail glasses. Two men had carried the hi-fi console outside, and a couple of girls were dancing together at the edge of the veranda, their arms straight out like Argentinians. Heike walked away from it all, toward the darkness at the back of the property.

  It was quieter the farther she got from the house, the voices flattening out into a faraway hum, pierced only now and then by some woman shrieking. Her skirt brushed against her knee, and she bent to fix it, thinking for a second it must be Daniel, tugging at her. A child’s needs such a constant thing, her reflex automatic. But Dani was fast asleep at home, the blankets tangled around his feet or thrown off the bed entirely. Heike pictured him there, his little chest moving in sleep breath. The hair at his brow still damp from the bath and the heat of the upstairs bedroom.

  There was a gardener’s shed shaped like a little barn set back against the fence line. A greenhouse domed out of one side, its door not quite shut. Beyond this, only the blackness that she knew must be open water. Another lake, the idea of it giving her a chill despite the warmth of the evening. Heike looked back over her shoulder at the house for a moment, to make sure Eric wasn’t out on the porch, trying to find her, but nothing had changed. She pushed the greenhouse door a little wider, until the edge of it grated against the wood floor and it stopped.

  Inside, the place smelled of soil and manure and wet ferns. The floor was damp and gritty—she still had her shoes in one hand. There was a little light coming through the panes of the greenhouse wall, moonlight and whatever glimmer stretched there from the house, and the leafy stems and fronds of plants reached out of their pots, organized more or less by size on shelves that graded up toward the roof like stairs. Everything seemed sharper than usual, heightened: the pale strand of light, the wetness in the air, the smell of damp earth. Or she was more than usually aware of it all, the roughness of the floorboards beneath her feet. The night air had left her feeling focused. At home inside her skin.