“Yes,” Ella said.
“Well, it’s a long, dull story, really. Legal battles are dull. Not like Hollywood courtroom scenes. To put it as briefly as possible, when Marie and I separated I was so angry and so…bewildered, really, that I agreed to several arrangements too hastily. To put it briefly, I’ve been forced to the conclusion that she’s not fit to bring up my son. So we’re into the classic custody battle. I’d rather, frankly, that she didn’t even have visiting rights, but I’ll compromise if I have to. Judges favor the mother, of course. But I intend to win. And I will. My lawyers are very good. If only the process were faster. It’s very painful to me to wait through the delays and procedures. Every day he’s with her will have to be undone. It’s as if it were a disease for which there is a cure, and I have the cure. But they won’t let me have him to begin the cure.” Wow. So much conviction, and so quiet. So certain. Ann studied his face briefly sidelong. Handsome, stern, kind, sad, like God. Was he possibly very very very conceited? Was he possibly right?
“Is it—Is she drinking?” Ella hazarded, sounding weak, and setting down her glass.
“Not to the point of alcoholism,” Stephen replied in his gently measured way. He looked down into his margarita-slush. “You know, I don’t like to say these things. We were married for eleven years. There were good times.”
“Oh, yes,” Ella murmured pathetically, squirming with the pain his understatement concealed. But why didn’t he squirm?
“But,” he said. “Well. Far be it from me! God knows. No job, but a credit card—Where my child-support payments go I don’t know. Three schools for Todd in two years. Disorder, bohemianism—but if that were all—it isn’t that. It’s the exposure of my child to immorality.”
Ann was terrified. She had not expected this. Debt, dirt, disorder, OK, but immorality—her child would be exposed, exposed to immorality. Naked, soft, helpless, exposed. She would expose it by giving birth to it. By being its mother she would expose it to the dirt, the disorder, the immorality of a woman’s life, her life. Its father would come from Riverside with a court order on clean, white paper. It would be taken from her, taken into custody. She would never see it. No visiting rights. No birth rights. It would be stillborn, it would die of immorality even before she could expose it.
Ella’s mouth was drawn in, her eyes cast down. Stephen had just said a word to her that explained all. And Ann had not been listening. Had the word been “woman”?
“You see why I can’t leave the boy there,” Stephen said, and though not squirming he was in pain, no doubt of it, his hand tight on the arm of the chair.
Ella shook her head in agreement.
“And this—woman’s friends. All—the same kind. Flaunting it.”
Ann saw the monstrous regiment.
Stephen’s head moved in tiny, rigid spasms as he spoke. “And the boy alone, in that. With them. Eight years old. A good kid. Straight as an arrow. I can’t. I can’t stand. To think of him. With them. Learning. That.”
Each staccato burst hit Ann like machine-gun fire. She set down her lemonade glass on the flagstone, got carefully to her feet, and slipped away from Margaritaville with a vague smile, bleeding, bleeding evil monthly blood, nine months’ worth bleeding from the holes he had shot in her. Behind her, her mother’s voice said something consolatory to the man and then was raised, thin and weak, to cry, “Ann?”
“Back in a minute, Mama.”
Passing the cannas flaming in twilight, she heard Ella say, “Ann is taking a year off from college. She’s five months pregnant.” She spoke in a strange tone, warning, boastful. Flaunting.
Ann went on to the bathroom. She had left her old underpants and shorts and T-shirt all over the bathroom when she showered, and he would have come to pee before they left and seen them and then her mother would have too and died. She picked things up. The bullet holes had been closed by her mother’s voice. The blood had sublimated and etherealised into tears. She snivelled as she dropped dirty clothes and wet towels into the dirty-clothes hamper, she cried gratefully, she washed her face and opened the bottle of Jardins de Bagatelle, the perfume of the mother tiger, and put it on her hands and on her face where she could smell it.
LIVING IN YINLAND
Duffy slung on her knapsack and went out, saying over her shoulder, “Back around seven.”
Her motorcycle revving and roaring off left silence behind. The Sunday paper was all over the living room. Nobody had got up till after noon.
“God, you know,” Ella said, dropping the comics, “we get our periods exactly the same time now, within a day?”
“Hey, yeah? I’ve heard of that. That’s kind of neat.”
“Yeah, only I was beginning to stop having periods most of the time. Oh well. Tit for tat, as they say.” Ella snorted. “I want some more coffee.” She got up and shuffled off to the kitchen. “You want some?” she called.
“Not now.”
Ella shuffled back in. She wore pink feather mules with low heels that flopped off if she lifted her foot.
“Those are really frivolous, El. I mean seriously frivolous.”
“Duffy ordered them for me from some mail order catalogue.” Ella sat down on the couch again, set her coffee cup on the table, and lifted one leg to look at the slipper. “She thought they’d suit me. Actually it’s kind of like the things Stephen used to buy me sometimes. Mistakes.”
“Like the stuff you make at school and then your parents have to use them.”
“Like women buying men ties, it really is true. I love paisley and Stephen hated it, he thought paisley looked like bugs, those curvy sort of shapes, you know, and I didn’t realise it and I always bought him these beautiful paisley ties.”
“Isn’t it weird how…”
“How what?”
“I don’t know, how we don’t get through to each other, you know, only we sort of do, only not where we thought we were. I mean, like you’re wearing those. Well, and like both of us thinking the other one would like disapprove, and all that stuff you went through psyching yourself up to call me about selling Mother’s house. Everything backwards. But it works. Sometimes.”
“Yeah,” Ella said. “Sometimes.” She had put both pink-feathered feet up on the edge of the coffee table, and gazed at them, her small, bright, light-blue eyes stern, judgmental. Her half-sister Ann, a much larger woman fifteen years younger, sat on the floor amidst the comics and classifieds and coffee cups, wearing purple sweatpants and a red sweatshirt with an expressionless yellow circle-face on it labelled, “Have A Day.”
“Mom used that chicken ashtray I made in fourth grade till she died,” Ella said.
“Even after she quit smoking. El, did you like my dad?”
Ella gazed at her feet. “Yeah,” she said. “I liked him. You know, I didn’t ever remember a whole lot about my own father. I was only six when he got killed and he’d been overseas a year. I don’t think I even cried except because Mom cried. So I wasn’t comparing, or anything. I guess what I didn’t like when Mom and Bill married was I missed her and me being together. Like this, you know, slopping around. Women slopping around. That’s partly why I like it with Duffy. Only Duffy’s more, well, it has to do with sex, not gender, I guess. With Duffy it’s not so easy, you have to watch it. With Mom it was so easy. With you it’s easy.”
“Too easy, sort of?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I like it, though. Anyhow. I wasn’t ever jealous of Bill or anything. He was a sweet guy. I guess in fact I had a crush on him for a while. Trying to compete with Mom. Practicing…”
Ella’s smile, which was infrequent, curved her long, thin lips into a charming half-circle.
“I got a crush on everybody. My math teacher. The bus driver. The paper boy. God, I used to get up in the dark and wait at the window to see the paper boy.”
“Always men?”
Ella nodded. “They hadn’t invented women yet, then,” she said.
Ann stretched out flat on the floor and rai
sed first one purple leg, pointing her toes at the ceiling, then the other.
“What were you when you got married? Nineteen?” she asked.
“Nineteen. Young. Younger than, Christ, fresh eggs. But you know, I wasn’t really dumb. I mean Stephen was a really good guy, I mean a prince. You probably only remember him after he was drinking.”
“I remember your wedding.”
“Oh Christ yes, when you were flower girl.”
“And that little fart son of Aunt Marie’s was ring bearer, and we got into a fight.”
“Oh God yes, and Marie started crying and saying she never thought to have people in the family who were minorities, and Mom got mad and said why not call Bill a spick straight out then, and Marie did, she started yelling, ‘A spick then! A spick then!’ And she had hysterics, and Bill’s brother the vet got her squiffed in the vestry. No wonder things went wrong with a start like that. But I did want to say about Steve, he was a really, really bright, lovely guy. See, I can’t say that to Duffy. It would just hurt her for no reason. She isn’t very secure. But sometimes I need to say it, to be fair to him, and to myself. Because it was so unfair what being alcoholic did to him. And you know, I had to finally just get out and run. And for me that was OK, it’s worked out fine. But I think of how he started out and how he ended up, and it, I don’t know, it isn’t fair.”
“You ever hear from him any more?”
Ella shook her head. “I’ve been thinking the last year or so he’s probably dead,” she said in the same quiet voice. “He was down so far. But I won’t ever know.”
“Was he the only guy you went with seriously?”
Ella nodded one nod.
After a while, looking at her pink-feathered feet, she said, “Sex with a drunk is not the biggest turn-on. I don’t guess anybody but Duffy could of got through to me, maybe.” She blushed, a delicate but vivid pink appearing suddenly in her rather sallow cheeks and fading slowly. “Duffy’s a very kind person,” she said.
“I like her,” Ann said.
Ella sighed. She slid her feet out of the feathered mules, letting them drop to the floor, and curled herself up on the couch. “What is this, true confession time?” she said. “I was wanting to ask you how come you didn’t want to stay with the baby’s father, was he a jerk or something.”
“Oh God.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No. It’s just embarrassing to say. Todd’s seventeen. Eighteen by now, I guess. One of my Computer Programming students.” Ann sat up and bowed her head down to her knees, stretching tension out of her back and hiding her face, then sat up straight; she was smiling.
“Does he know?”
“Nope.”
“Did you think about an abortion at all?”
“Oh, yeah. But see. It was me that was careless. So I wondered, why was I careless? And I wanted to quit teaching anyhow. And get out of Riverside. I want to stay around the Bay here and get work. Temping to start with, till I find what I want. I can always find a job, that’s no problem for me. I want to get into programming eventually, and maybe consulting. I can have the baby and then go back part time. And I want to live alone with the baby and kind of take my time. Because I kept sort of rushing into everything, you know? But what I think is I’m a maternal type, actually, more than a wife type or a lover type.”
“Could take some finding out,” Ella said.
“Well, that’s why I want to sort of slow down. But I’ll tell you my long-range plans. I’ll find this executive, fifty, fifty up, maybe sixty up, and marry him. Mommy marries Daddy, see?” She bowed her head to her knees again and came up smiling.
“Dumb, dumb, dumb,” Ella said. “Dumb shit sister. You can leave the baby here on your honeymoon.”
“With Auntie Ella.”
“And Uncle Duffy. Christ. I haven’t seen Duffy with a baby.”
“Is Duffy her real name?”
“She’d kill me if she knew I told you. Marie.”
“Cross my heart.”
They unfolded and refolded various sections of the paper, leafed slowly. Ann looked at pictures of resorts in the Northern Coast Range, read advertisements from travel agencies, fly to Hawaii, cruise Alaska.
“What ever happened to that little fart son of Aunt Marie’s, anyhow?”
“Wayne. He got some degree in Business Administration at UCLA.”
“It figures.”
“What are you? Pisces?”
“I think so.”
“It says this is a good day for you to make long-range plans, and look out for an important Scorpio. That’s your sugar daddy, I guess.”
“No, what’s November, is that Scorpio?”
“Yeah. Till the twenty-fourth, it says.”
“OK, that’s this long-range plan in here. I’ll look out for it…”
After a pause Ella, reading, said, “Seventeen.”
“All right,” Ann said, reading.
MIRRORING
The lower edge of the lawn above the riverbank was planted in red cannas. Beyond that intense color the river was gunbarrel blue. Both the red line and the blue reflected in Stephen’s mirror-finish sun glasses, moving up and down across the surface and seeming to change the expression of his face incomprehensibly. Todd looked away from this display with an irritable turn of the head. Stephen asked at once, “What’s wrong?”
“I wish you didn’t wear mirror shades.”
“See yourself reflected in them?” Smiling, Stephen slowly took the glasses off. “Is that so bad?”
“What I see is all these colors running across your face like some robot in the movies. Mirror shades are like aggressive, you know? Black dudes coming on cool. Hank Williams Junior.”
“If you’re behind them, they’re defensive. Soft-bodied animal hiding. Protective mimicry. I bought them for this trip.” Stephen’s face without the glasses did look soft, not doughy or rubbery but soft-finished like stone or wood long used, worn down to fineness. All the lines that etched his face were fine, and the cut of lip and nostril and eyelid was delicate but blurred by that softening, that abrasion of years. Todd looked down at his own big, smooth hands and knees and thighs with a sense of self-consciousness that sharpened to discomfort. He looked back at Stephen’s hands holding the sun glasses.
“No, you’re right,” Stephen said, “they’re aggressive.” He was holding them so that the curved, insectile planes reflected his own face and behind it the white facade of the hotel against the dark mountain. “I see you—you don’t see me…But I want to look at you all the time. And with these on, I can do just that. And you don’t have to see as much of me.”
“I like seeing you,” Todd said, but Stephen was fitting the glasses back across his face.
“Now I can be contemplating the river, for all they know, while all the time inside here I’m actually staring, staring, staring at you, trying to get my fill…I don’t believe you. I can’t believe you. That you came. That you wanted to come. That you wanted to give me this incredible gift. I have to wear these when I look at you. You are nineteen years old. I could go blind. You don’t have to say anything. Letting me say these things is your gift to me. Part of your gift to me.” When he wore the mirroring glasses his voice was smoother, softer, deflecting answers.
Todd said doggedly, “The giving goes the other way too. Mostly, in fact.”
“No, no, no,” Stephen murmured. “Nothing. Nothing.”
“All this?” Todd looked around at the red cannas, the white hotel, the dark ridges, the river.
“All this,” Stephen repeated. “Plus Miz Gertrude and Miz Alice B. My God, those women follow us like reflections in a funnyhouse. Don’t look!”
Todd was already looking over his shoulder to see the two women coming up the path between the lawns from the river. The old one was in the lead and the young one a good ways behind her, carrying fishing poles. Seeing him turn, the old one held up a couple of good-sized trout and called out something ending with “breakfast!”
Todd nodded and made a V for Victory sign.
“They catch fish,” Stephen murmured. “They beach whales. They play five-card stud. They fell giant sequoias. They deploy missiles. They gut bears. Only please God let them stay busy and leave us alone! A fish-waving bull dyke is more than I can cope with just now. Tell me that they’re going away.”
“They’re going away.”
“Good. Good.” The curved black surfaces turned again, canna-red flashing across them. “They’ll have vacated the rowboat we were hoping for, presumably. Shall we go on the river?”
“Sure.” Todd stood up.
“Do you want to, Tadziu?”
Todd nodded.
“You do whatever I ask or suggest. You should do what you like. Your pleasure is my pleasure.”
“Let’s go.”
“Let’s go,” Stephen repeated, smiling, standing up.
On the lazy water of the lake above the dam, Todd shipped the oars and slid down to lie with his back against the seat.
Behind him Stephen’s husky voice sang in a whisper, “Dans les jardins de mon père…” and then, after a silence, spoke softly aloud:
“Ame, te souvient-il, au fond du paradis,
De la gare d’Auteuil, et des trains de jadis?”
“No assignments on spring break,” Todd said.
“No one could translate it in any case.”
Todd felt Stephen’s finger like a feather caress the outer rim of his left ear, once.
It was completely silent on the water. On his lips Todd tasted the salt of his sweat from rowing. Behind him Stephen sitting in the prow made no sound, said nothing.
“One of them left a fly box under the seat here,” Todd said, looking down at it.
“Under no circumstances take it to them. I’ll turn it in at the hotel desk. Or drop it overboard. It’s the excuse they’ve been waiting for. It’s a plant. Oh how kind of you we’ve just been dying to talk to you and your father and I’m Alice B and this is Gertie and isn’t this place just bully for all us boys? It’s called the dyke bursting.”
Todd laughed. Again the feather touch went round his ear, and he laughed again, repressing a shudder of pleasure.
The Unreal and the Real - Vol 1 - Where On Earth Page 29
