I woke up from the jet lag at half past five. Bran was on his back with his golden arms thrown over his head and the faintest wink of new stubble just beginning to show on his golden chin. I slipped out from beside him and crept away to explore.
There was a two-person shower in the nearest bathroom and a door leading out to a pool! An honest-to-God swimming pool. It was bright blue and shaped like a bean with a little baby bean of hotter water in its inner corner. It sat between the patio, full of very shiny plants in brushed-steel planters, and a lawn of Kermit-green velvet grass stretching to where a grey-painted fence almost hid the neighbour’s velvet grass, blue pool, and beige barn. I shrugged off my t-shirt and dived in.
I hadn’t swum in the scuddy since student days, and never alone, floating on my back in warm water like silk, staring up at a pale pink sky as it slowly turned gold and then the gold turned lilac, promising blue. I smiled, rolled over like a seal, and caught just a glimpse of a pair of wide-open eyes, and an even wider open mouth, before I went under and came up coughing.
There was a young man in jeans, boots, and a white t-shirt standing on the tiles at the edge of the pool trying (now at least) not to look at me.
“Pool,” he said.
“Um,” I said. “Can you get me a towel?” He shook his head. “Can you turn round maybe?” I said, twirling a hand to give him the idea.
He turned his back and that was when I saw Cuento Crystal Clear Pool Service written on his back. I thrashed my way to the edge and slithered out, grabbing my t-shirt and scampering for the bathroom door.
When I had added a towel skirt to my wet t-shirt, I went back out to say a proper hello.
“Sorry about that,” I said, walking up to where he was crouched at the business end of the pool fiddling with a filter. “Thanks for not laughing or puking. Lexy Campbell.” I stuck my hand out.
He shook it, saying six or seven syllables I took to be his name.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “Do you come at the same time every day?”
“I don’t speak English,” he said.
“And yo no hablo Español,” I said. “That looks like that then. Adios and … ” The only other thing I knew that wasn’t about food or bullfights was via con Dios, which might come over a bit threatening, so I waggled my eyebrows and went back inside just as two more guys in jeans, boots, and white t-shirts let themselves in through the gate from the drive, carrying what looked suspiciously like plant-shining gear.
“Buenos dias,” I said.
“Que pasa!” said one, to which I had no answer.
In the kitchen a short, round woman with a long black ponytail was going over the wall above the cooker with a feather duster.
“Yo no hablo Español,” I said.
“Me either,” she told me. “I’m from Toronto.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m kidding,” she answered with a wink. “I’m Lupe,” she added, when I had finished laughing. “From Merry Maids.”
“D’you want some coffee, Lupe?”
She frowned. “You gonna drive like that? No shoes? They won’t serve you.”
That was how I found out Branston didn’t possess a coffeemaker, and there was no way to get any caffeine inside me without driving through a Starbucks. Luckily, Lupe had started her day with a vente and was willing to share. There was God knows what assorted crap in it that wasn’t coffee (definitely cinnamon, vanilla, and big cold blobs of cream), but there was a seam of black stuff somewhere underneath and I could feel it flooding my blood at the first sip.
I padded along the passageway and entered the master bedroom on tiptoe. The bed was empty but, following the sound of rhythmic pounding and clanking, I found Bran in a second bedroom going at a treadmill like a crazed hamster, curling dumbbells up and down in each hand and watching a huge television screen high on the opposite wall where two more golden people were discussing the Nikkei index. They could have been twins. I looked from their faces to Bran’s. They could have been triplets.
“Hiya,” I said.
“Hey!” He jumped off the treadmill, put the dumbbells in their rack, and wrapped his arms round me. “Where were you?”
“Meeting your household,” I said. “Lupe and them. I didn’t catch the pool guy’s name, though.”
Bran shrugged. “Who’s Lupe?” he said. And a bell rang. I wish I could say it was an alarm and I heeded it, but actually it was his phone. He snatched it up, shouted with joy at whoever it was on the other end, and then spent five minutes telling them he couldn’t, he was busy, he couldn’t say, he was tied up all weekend, he wouldn’t free up half an hour even if he could, all the while twinkling at me. When he hung up and threw his phone down again, I snuggled up shamelessly.
“Completely tied up all weekend sounds nice,” I said. “But it’s Tuesday.”
“Right,” he said. “I’m going in late and I’ll leave early. If you give me a ride you can have the car. Knock yourself out. Meet me for lunch. Show me round my own town by moonlight. You’ll find great stuff I’ve missed for ten years. I just know you will. So let go of me and let me finish my workout. Sooner I’m done, sooner I can get you your coffee. What do you get in the morning?”
Back in the here and now, I took another sip of the cop shop’s nameless brew, noticing for the first time that tomato soup definitely came down the same spout as the cocoa, coffee, and tea.
I’m not the first person to fall in love and make a poor decision. I might be the first person trained in relationship psychology to fall in love with a town and marry a dentist, though.
Four
And it was definitely the town of Cuento I fell for. I never warmed to the Beige Barn—who could?—but Cuento was a different story. The wide downtown sidewalks with benches and dog bowls and hippies playing the street-corner pianos. The street-corner pianos! The quiet streets in the old residential neighbourhoods with the shade trees and the basketball hoops and kids on skateboards waiting their turn at the stop signs. I liked the way the pizza joint would start selling hot slices at closing time, and I liked the taco wagon with the outsize burritos. I liked the way people put free stuff out on the sidewalk with cardboard signs saying free stuff and the way it took ten minutes to buy a newspaper. “Hey, how are you today?” “I’m good. How are you?” “I’m great, thanks for asking. What can I do for you this morning?”
Bran was the one who brought me to it all and shared it with me, and he was so pretty and horny and he laughed all the time. And any time he puzzled me, I assumed I was picking him up wrong. Oh, how I chuckled at the way we didn’t understand each other. Oh, how blithely I assumed it would all make sense in time. Oh, how much more attention I should have paid.
When we went out for dinner with his partner and his partner’s new husband, I thought I was missing something. Or they were joking. Americans, I told myself, are known for their irony. The partner, Brandeee (with three es), had got married just before Bran set off for Turnberry and his own whirlwind romance, and they were still at the nauseating stage: feeding each other forkfuls of pasta, dropping hints about their sex life, trying out various pet names. I asked them about living in Cuento just to stop the pookies and punkins, since we were trying to eat.
It sounded, to the untrained ear, as if all three of them agreed: the benches in the downtown attracted vagrants, the dog bowls harboured mosquito larvae, the pianos were scruffy. The roots of the shade trees in the residential streets wrecked the suspension of their Infinitis, the basketball hoops took up parking spots, and the kids on the skateboards were breaking the law. None of them had ever eaten a hot slice and when I waxed on about the burritos from the taco wagon, Brandeee and Mr. Brandeee wrinkled their noses and Bran stared at me. I didn’t tell them I’d got my Converse from a pile of free stuff.
They couldn’t object to the extreme friendliness of the guy in the newspaper
shop, but that was because all three of them got their news on a screen during their morning treadmill session.
I told myself I would learn their ways. They couldn’t all be complete tossers. Bran couldn’t, because I was falling for him and he was nuts about me. He had to be a good guy because he had proposed and I was sorely tempted. He must have hidden depths. If I said yes, I would dive in and find them.
Reader, I married him, as Jane Eyre said. And he was a tosser, wrapped in a blanket of wanker, dipped in asshole batter, and deep-fried in dickhead oil. As she probably didn’t.
I married him, I started working toward counselling accreditation in the California system, I called myself a life coach in the meantime, I hung my shingle (and started learning America-speak like hung my shingle). And to help my case, as soon as I was a legal resident, I applied to become a notary. Who could witness legal documents. Like divorce papers.
I took another sip of my cream of tomato mocha chai latte, now with a hint of lemonade concentrate, gagged, and searched my bag bottom for stray Tic-Tacs.
How soon did I know I’d made a mistake? Well, the honeymoon was great. We went to Saratoga, another real place, as it turned out. Cold drinks, hot sex. Low stress, high hopes. Then we came back.
I had been a marriage guidance therapist for nine years by this time. I had seen dozens, scores, legions of marriages contracted between well-matched couples who knew each other inside out and shared common goals. I had sat there trying not to roll my eyes while most of them descended into pits of lye.
Also, I assumed good intentions. Bran had wooed me, pursued me, and swept me off my Uggs like something from a Regency romance. With Uggs. He wouldn’t have done that for no reason, I told myself. I was right.
The first crack formed on the outer layers at an Easter potluck at Brandeee’s house. And that’s another thing. The bloody potlucks! Dear American people: Have a party or don’t have a party, but don’t have half a party that’s more trouble than it’s worth for everyone. Personally, if I’ve made a big bowl of guacamole, I’d rather stay in my own house on my own couch with Benedict Cumberbatch and eat it, than go and stand around in someone’s back garden with a paper plate and enter it into the guacamole-off with a crowd of passive-aggressive housewives who bought the seasoning mix from Trader Joe’s. And while I’m talking about the paper plates, what’s with the paper plates? And plastic forks? And polystyrene cups? American people! Parties mean dishes. Suck it up. Because nothing says “B-list” like being made to eat Trader Joe’s guacamole off a paper plate with a plastic fork at the house of someone with a dishwasher and a housecleaner.
Not all of which is technically Bran’s fault. So back to the Easter Potluck at Brandeee’s.
“What were you thinking of taking?” I asked him. I was sitting on the beanbag I had bought in Target and dragged into his “gym” so I could hang out and chat while he was on his treadmill in the morning.
“I thought you might want to take care of it,” he said. “You know, bring something … appropriate … that they might not have had before. Make your mark.”
I thought he meant something British. I think if you asked a hundred people in a studio audience, they’d have thought the same.
So I made spotted dick.
And I put a sign on it, because the name’s half the fun.
And there it was on a long trestle table (with a paper cloth) in Brandeee’s back garden, beside the primavera salad and the electric slow-cooker full of lamb meatballs and the bunny-shaped chocolate mousses sitting in a tray of ice. And fourteen plates of recombined product from Trader Joe’s and Costco, let me say.
“What is wrong with you?” Bran muttered with his teeth clenched hard enough to split his veneers. I had found out they were veneers during a night of unusual positions. It endeared him to me at the time.
“Communication breakdown,” I said. “Soz.”
“Was it supposed to be funny?”
“No ‘supposed to be’ about it,” I said. “It is funny. Spotted dick, Bran. Come on.”
“No one is laughing,” he said, looking around like the wrath of God while everyone pretended they didn’t know we were fighting but at the same time spoke very quietly so they could hear us. Paper and plastic are great for that, at least. No clashing and clinking to cover the sweet sound of someone else having a public domestic.
“Blaike laughed like a drain,” I pointed out. Brandeee’s son, Blaike, had just about swallowed his tongue.
“Blaike is fifteen years old,” Bran said. “He’d laugh at a … ”
“Fart gun?” I suggested. It didn’t help.
“I even said ‘appropriate,’” Bran hissed. “I clearly said ‘make something appropriate.’ I meant for Easter.”
“Fine!” I said, quite loud. “Nail it to a fucking cross then.”
And that’s how I found out that, even in California, about as far from the Bible Belt as your bobble hat, in a town with a mosque to its name, there’s still a line.
I talked him down later in the day. Cultural norms, learning process, the long tail of Puritanism informing American—But he started frowning, so I dialled back.
“You remember what it was like in Scotland?” I said. “Even in a golf resort. Remember when you tried to get a bucket of ice and that waiter asked if you had sprained your ankle? It’s just that we’ve got different expectations, Bran. To me, Easter is more about … daffodils and chocolate and … it’s not as if you go to church. Does Brandeee go to church? Only, you said Burk was her third husband and I just—”
“Burt.”
“Blurt?”
“BURT!”
“Burt. You said Burt was her third husband and I just assumed she was pretty secular, you know.”
“She attends the Unitarian Universalist congregation, as a matter of fact,” Bran said, and I had never heard him sound so … prissy. Also, I didn’t know what Yooyoos were then and so I missed the chance to deliver a snort.
“My mistake,” I said.
“I forgive you,” said Bran.
I chewed that over for a good long time before answering. Long enough to go from sarcasm (you are a benevolent master) and nit-picking (I didn’t apologise) all the way to what I finally said which was:
“Well good then.”
It fills me with a kind of nostalgia now: my very first well good then. Like tasting something that, years before, gave you volcanic food poisoning.
These were the memories I was lost in when the door of the interview room opened and a woman put her head round it.
“You’re free to leave, Ms. Campbell,” she said.
“Oh?” I said. “Says who?”
She came a little further in and I saw the empty shoulder holster she wore. Plainclothes.
“We ran the tape from the building entrance,” she said. “In at six and still there when the officers arrived. You are good to go.”
“Great,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Sorry about the coffee,” she said, nodding at the half-empty cup.
“You’re a detective then,” I said. She quirked her head. “I couldn’t get beyond ‘hot beverage’ and that was after drinking it.” She smiled, understanding, and then turned away and set off along the corridor. I kind of wanted to run after her. No one else within a ten-mile cordon would have understood me, I was sure.
I restrained myself and was rewarded when she turned back.
“Like I said, you are absolutely free to walk out. But if you felt like coming back in the morning … Mizz Visalia is going to be arraigned and if I had money on it, I’d guess bailed, so she could use someone around.”
“Have you got any recommendations for where I could spend the rest of the night?” I said. It might have come out weird, because she blushed and cleared her throat before she answered.
“Nearest motel’s just down the bl
ock,” she said. “But can’t you just go home? You’re Branston Lancer’s wife, aren’t you?”
“Ex,” I said. “So no.”
She grunted. “Shuffled the pack again, huh?”
I grunted back. It was a bit too horribly accurate.
About a month after the Easter Potluck came the fateful day. I was supposed to be going to a book club after work, but work had been great. The first actually good day. I had picked up a client—two clients, technically. Clovis and Visalia Bombaro, both in their eighties, needed some guidance on ending their marriage amicably—and I wanted to share the news with Bran. I wanted to tell him that they had met at the age of twelve at a family picnic. They were cousins. In fact, Mrs. Bombaro, sixty-seven years into the marriage, still called him Cousin Clovis, which was weird but hardly worth the effort to change now. After all, he would still be her cousin when the papers were signed and the property divided. Whatever. I looked forward to regaling Bran with the failure of a marriage between people of exactly the same background, the same ethnicity, from the same village in Italy, from the same family, who worked together in the family business Bombaro Pyrotechnics (Nothing goes Boom like Bombaro!), and yet were giving up. It made me hopeful about the two of us, in comparison.
And the book club was reading The Goldfinch.
So I went back to the Barn. I let myself in softly and closed the door behind me with a gentle click. Mrs. Bombaro’s words were still ringing in my ear.
“Boom? Boom is right! Boom, he’s gone. Boom, he’s back. Boom, the toilet seat is up. Boom, the toilet seat is down. He puts a water glass down on a cork coaster and it wakes the dog!”
“Sixty-seven years I work hard all day and come home to this!”
“Minor irritat—” I said, before I gave up. But it made me conscious of the way I usually slammed in and yelled his name, crashed my keys into the bowl, and clomped over to the fridge.
It was Lupe’s day and the house was gleaming. I took my shoes off at the front door so as not to put Converse rubber on the perfect polish of the floor and shushed along the bedroom corridor in my socks.
Scot Free Page 2
