“Our trip should be productive for the Circle. Lisbon in particular has a very active chapter.”
They started almost immediately after Julie’s exams by flying to Portugal and checking into a super-smart little hotel, with a roof garden that looked out over the city; and there was sunshine after the winter gloom of Paris. Away from the tension around Gilda, away from her own dreaded urbanism class in which she was not excelling despite being used to getting good grades, Julie was suffused with happiness. In the hotel bar, the British politician ordered her a Manhattan and said, “We should just get this issue out of the way at the outset: this is where I hit on you, Julie. The loveliest young woman I know. We might have a delightful few weeks together.”
Julie was startled at this directness but not altogether surprised, since men almost always hit on her. Not that she approved of distinguished Englishmen using American teen slang like “hit on.”
“Can you envisage a relationship with an old man like me?” He rephrased the question.
“I don’t think of you as old,” she said, which was perfectly true; she thought of him as powerful, a powerful politician, the most attractive attribute imaginable. Probably only in his fifties. Younger than Grandpa Ran. He could yet come back into office. She also liked his aftershave, something really English about it.
“That sounds great to me,” Julie said, with a lot of curiosity about the future and only a little regret about not seeing Ian for a while longer and, most important, a vengeful feeling connected to his marriage. Why shouldn’t she have some fun? This would show him.
She maybe wouldn’t mention her new job to her mother. Without formulating to herself in words the details of her revenge fantasy, she was satisfied that married Ian Aymes would be chagrined to hear she’d gone off with a world leader.
Later, Julie was also delighted to discover that male enthusiasm in bed overrode age, and that art compensated for stamina, up to a point. There were now some things she could teach Ian someday, and in all, she was enjoying her temp job with the British politician. They were received in a number of cities, distinguished statesman and beautiful young secretary, a familiar conjunction, like stocks and dividends.
* * *
—
Before her flight from San Francisco to France to look at the Woodses, Lorna had had an SMS from Armand-Loup that he’d be waiting at the Grenoble airport. She remembered their many instances of misunderstood directions for missed rendezvous, so her heart lifted with relief to see him standing there in Grenoble, cordoned behind a rope with other greeters right outside the arrival door, rather grandly dressed in a suit and open-collared shirt, and carrying an umbrella: a handsome, substantial older man. He gave her a brief husbandly peck and commandeered her rolling bag. They walked outside. In the distance, a frieze of white snowy peaks dazzled and thrilled her with the impending change in her circumstance—the Alps, Europe, a different language, a different climate zone, air crisp already with winter.
Armand-Loup was parked in the short-term lot only a few steps away—he always managed to avail himself of desirable perks. “How was the flight, chérie? How do you manage to step off a plane looking so rested and pretty?” She recognized his typical gallantry, and it was always pleasant. On the short drive to Pont-les-Puits, he caught her up on village doings, especially the planned celebrations for the re-enterrement of the cemetery bones.
“That will be any day now. Needless to say, Hôtel La Périchole is complete and neither can you stay in my—our—house for a reason that may surprise you: some of your relatives are coming. Or maybe they told you? They rented it from me some time ago—your granddaughter Julie and some others, I guess Julie would be your granddaughter—she is one I don’t know—with two other girls, and the parents of one of them are expected: the father of your children and his wife, if I have it right.”
Lorna could not express her irritation; she gaped dumbly. Of all the times to have come, and for her not to have been told: Ran and Amy and their child the pregnant teen in her own house? And it was she herself who’d brought this on by mentioning that Armand might be renting the house out to foreigners and strangers. Since it was Lorna who had suggested to Peggy that Armand’s house was empty and that Armand could use the rent, and Peggy had passed this news along to Ran as the perfect place for the Parisian schoolgirls to spend the holidays, it was her own fault.
“Where am I staying?”
“With me, since you are my wife. I promise we won’t quarrel or anything dismaying. My rooms are perfectly comfortable, it’s only a few days. If you like, no need even to admit you’re here, we can skulk around without your family seeing you. We’ll concentrate on the Woods paintings, and you can see your granddaughter later, back in California.”
“Oh, Armand.” Lorna knew there was no way out. “Where are you living?”
“Still over the bakery. Still very pleasant. Lovely smells of baking bread.”
45
Though they had paid the rent, Ran didn’t think he and Amy would stay in Lorna’s former house in Pont-les-Puits, no, that would be a little weird for Amy, but the girls could, and there must be a hotel for him and Amy. Ran called Dr. Karas to tell him his travel plans.
Karas caught Ran up on Gilda’s condition, though Ran had been talking to him almost daily. “She’s very cooperative,” said Dr. Karas. “So mature for fifteen, she understands all.” Ran doubted that but was glad to hear it. The same great unspoken questions hung behind Ran’s conversations with the French doctor as they had with American doctors, a sort of collegial reproach: How could this happen? Why did you permit this dangerous pregnancy to continue in an underage diabetic? If these questions had been spoken, Ran wouldn’t have had an answer. How was it events slid by you? He was a sentient and even controlling guy, yet things slid by. He had respected the natalist views of Amy and Gilda.
Ran and Dr. Karas had discussed which measures of surveillance to institute in the face of preeclampsia, mostly frequent blood-pressure checks and medication to lower it. They agreed that the preeclampsia was probably not harmful to the fetus at this late stage, almost seven months, but if or when hospitalization was required, proper facilities must be had in mind, both in the vacation village and in Paris. Ran needed some input from French medical colleagues about where would be best. In Paris “not the American Hospital,” Ran specified, “the best crisis pregnancy place,” which as far as they could find out was called Maternité Port Royal and was centuries old though in a new building. They also discussed her return to California for early delivery if signs warranted it.
On their last visit, Amy and Ran both had been braced to see a change in Gilda, who was just entering her last trimester. Even so, they had been shocked to find how much she had thickened with a definite baby bump; and she was generally fatter, more like she herself had looked as a baby, with a little angel’s double chin and round cheeks. This prompted especially tormenting reflections about how Gilda was still a child herself. Their precious daughter, the victim of unfair biology since her birth, was now trapped for the indefinite future. Biology was destiny, even though they’d tried to protect her, a futile effort.
The victim, as always, had been joyful to see them and was evidently having a wonderful time with her studies and with Julie and Carla, though on that last visit, Julie was for some reason not there. “She has a temp job,” Gilda explained. “She’s in Portugal. She’s helping someone she knows from her cult. He was almost the prime minister of England or something. She’ll be back before New Year’s.” Her absence peeved Ran a little, since he was paying for her to follow a course of studies, not to go off on dirty weekends with men.
Amy and Ran didn’t know of any cult, let alone likely prime ministers. “Prime minister? Come on,” they said, wary of men with far-fetched claims, to say nothing of cults. Gilda laughed. “The Circle of Faith. It meets across from Grandma Lorna’s, where Grandm
a was living when she got to San Francisco, Julie showed me.”
“You don’t even know Lorna,” Amy pointed out. “She’s not in any sense your grandmother.”
“Julie showed me Lorna’s house when we went to a meeting. The man she’s helping is one of the sponsors. It’s not a cult, it does good works—educational—and food packages. Not really religious in the bad sense. Bookney Ravanel and I went to a couple of meetings on our own and no harm came to us.”
* * *
—
Amy had planned to book their tickets to Paris for the week between Christmas and New Year’s and the first week in January, but they had a complication that kept them in California through Christmas: the deteriorating American economy. Finance people drew together like refugees. Though Amy was assured by her financial people that her positions were sound, the market was crashing and she was entirely in the market, mostly in tech futures. The talk was of nothing but bailouts and safe havens, and what the government might do to save people. She herself didn’t expect to be rescued; she thought that the new president should use money set aside for the so-called bailout of failing banks and crooked brokers to bail out individual homeowners instead of letting families lose their homes and sink into renting and poverty. They heard from Hams that the slum rental he and Misty were living in was itself being foreclosed on the landlord who was underwater with his empire of tottering Oakland rentals. The crisis was national, but Amy felt somehow personally involved, as if, by staying in California, she could influence a conversation about what measures would be taken.
Earlier, Ran and Amy had had other rationalizations for staying away from France; they didn’t want to hover, wanted to encourage Gilda to take responsibility for her own health as she always had. And they had confidence in Carla; after all, preeclampsia notwithstanding, Gilda’s pregnancy still had more than two months to go, and Carla reported that Gilda spent the designated time lying down with appropriate docility. Until he himself could travel, Ran spent a lot of time with Gilda on the phone. “What’s your blood pressure today?” When they had nothing else to say, he and Gilda had always had her numbers to discuss. Today her numbers were too high.
“You know, honey, we may have to think about bed rest for a few weeks, or early delivery,” he said.
“Delivery, yay,” Gilda said.
Ran explained about preeclampsia, and how it was important to control, and again felt her resistance to pregnancy, this runaway process that was dictating the terms of her life. Her spirit was already wary, and honed by her lifelong diabetes to a state just short of bitterness, and though they had done their best to make her illness as easy as they could—diabetes camp, Mrs. Klein—here was another ultimatum, another imposition of fate, the liabilities of being female.
“Born today, the baby could survive, with a lot of support, but in a couple of weeks its chances would be better, so there’s some thinking that your just taking it easy, lying down pretty much of the day…”
“Exams are next Thursday and Friday.”
“Could you somehow take them at home?”
“No, Papa, I’ll take them at school like everybody else.”
“I’m sure they’d understand.”
“No.”
“You’ll be taking some medicine to lower your blood pressure, and it may make you feel a little…less sharp…”
“Okay, okay.” Gilda never wanted to talk about her health. He took “okay” to mean don’t talk about it anymore, not that she was giving in.
They negotiated. Gilda could go to school but come right home afterward and lie in horizontal boredom till dinnertime and had to go to bed at eight. Okay, she could lie on the sofa and watch TV or listen to the radio with her earphones till ten. Carla would enforce this. The idea of this stringent regime didn’t seem to bother Gilda. It wasn’t as if she had made friends who were likely to ask her out, though she, Carla, and Julie had gone to a lot of movies until Julie had split. Now Amy sent them a DVD player.
Gilda took her exams and remained top in Latin and middling in French, which she didn’t care about; she was delighted to outrank the snooty British girl and show the other girls who might have thought a pathetic, knocked-up American girl was probably stupid. She overheard her principal British rival also say, “Money talks,” but she ignored it and wore the aura of her dominance with becoming modesty, as someone else remarked. What made Gilda happiest was the commendation from Mrs. Whistle, the head of the school, who said, “I have heard of your fine results, Mrs. Aymes, and I do hope you plan to continue your education.” She seemed to glance at Gilda’s swollen belly.
“Yes, Mrs. Whistle, I do,” Gilda said.
46
In California, Ran and Amy had taken a few other things in hand: someone must go look for Curt and drag him home, now that they were sure he was alive and in Singapore or Thailand. Peggy, as having the least to do, though they didn’t put it like that, had been designated to travel, and Ran would cover her house payments and, as he said to himself, confront Dick Willover about his duty in that quarter. Donna, beside her lively twins, now had her business interests to oversee, while Peggy was—well—dispensable, as she herself recognized, with no job and no pressing concerns. They had a quick picture of large, blondish Peggy wandering lost among the dainty Thai. Lorna bought her some tropical clothes.
Thus Peggy found herself in Bangkok with a new light cotton wardrobe from Lands’ End and L.L Bean, looking very American. She was in a trance of deracinated happiness, delighted at the way invisibility and anonymity set you free. It was strange to be in a place, warm, exotic, beautiful, that took no notice of Thanksgiving or Christmas. Why live forever in Ukiah? Why knock yourself out about Christmas, all those damn presents to wrap?
She was on a little barge thing taking her across the river from her hotel to the main part of Bangkok. She didn’t know the name of the river. The hotel was superbly fancy, paid for by her father or, frankly, her father’s wife. Her twentieth-floor room had a balcony for gazing across the river and down upon the smoggy city. There was a television sunk into the marble wall above the bath taps so you could watch TV while in the tub, and lounge chairs for reading—she’d bought several paperbacks in the San Francisco airport before she left, in case they had no books in English; but you could get everything here. If she could live here, how would she make her living?
She was crossing to the main business district. Other tourists, and businessmen with briefcases, stood near the far edge of the ferry, ready to leap off when they bumped up to the dock. Orange peels and palm fronds swirled in the draw of the water. No Easter and no Christmas here. As she stepped off into the busy lane leading away from the ferry, she felt her name fade away, too, wafted off on an odorous breeze of lemongrass and the toxic exhaust fumes of the tuk-tuks. She was anonymous and free.
Her rendezvous with the detective hired by Dad and Amy was to be at Jim Thompson, a famous tearoom attached to Jim Thompson’s house-turned-museum, chosen as easy to find and symbolically appropriate, Thompson a figure who in the 1960s had wandered into the jungle and vanished the way Curt had vanished. Peggy had printed out the baroque, inscrutable address—6 Rama 1 Road, Khwaeng Wang Mai, Khet Pathum Wan, Krung Thep Maha Nakhon 10330—to show when asking people the way, but each passerby she stopped waved her confidently toward this well-known establishment.
Suddenly some peculiar impulse made her slow her steps. What was the rush? Maybe she should call the guy and postpone the meeting until tomorrow or the day after. There was so much to see in the fragrant boutiques selling carved Buddhas and strings of mirrored beads and painted fans and other crafts she should learn about. She could feel out whether her decorated dog collars would sell in Thailand; it looked like they would, there were lots of posh little dogs everywhere. The shop interiors were dim; at the backs were promising teak armoires filled with T-shirts and carved rosewood combs. Next to the tiny pro
prietors, Peggy felt like a big ox woman invading them. People came and went along the street on scooters or pushing carts of merchandise; a breeze stirred the T-shirts festooning the doorways of the cubicle boutiques. A vague smell of cooking oil carried scents of shrimp and lemongrass while skyscrapers swayed overhead.
On the veranda of the tearoom, it was Curt himself sitting at a little round table, and he slightly rose when Peggy approached. Postponing the recriminations, they joyfully embraced. Peggy sat down, looked at the English menu, babbled of the amazing thing, them both being in Thailand. His shoulders felt solid, not those of the thin invalid who had left; he’d gained weight, back to his normal self preaccident, muscular and fit. He smelled of sandalwood.
“This is so weird,” Peggy said.
“Sister mine.”
“You were perfectly easy to find, why haven’t you been answering everybody?”
“I’d taken a kind of oath of silence for a while,” Curt said. “Now I can talk about it.”
“It better be good, as Mom and Dad used to say.” In her relief, she almost didn’t care about explanations. Curt had always had plausible explanations.
“What would you like? I’m having a beer. Thai beer is excellent.”
“Okay. It is very nice here,” Peggy agreed.
Lorna Mott Comes Home Page 29
