Property of / the Drowning Season / Fortune's Daughter / at Risk

by Alice Hoffman

  The following Sunday, Rae didn’t dare ask Jessup to go to the beach. The heat was worse than ever, and people with respiratory problems were warned not to go outdoors. Jessup spent most of the day Simonizing the Oldsmobile; he tied a red bandanna over his mouth to filter the air, and took off his T-shirt. At noon, when Rae brought him a beer, Jessup seemed less upset; he stopped working long enough to pull down his bandanna and kiss her. That night Jessup insisted that they go out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant where the air conditioner was turned up so high you could actually feel brave enough to order the extra-hot chili. Rae wore a lavender-colored cotton dress and silver earrings. It seemed more important than ever before that Jessup notice how good she looked, and while he never actually said anything, he did reach across the table to take her hand.

  In the dark booth of the restaurant, Rae managed to convince herself that the trouble between them was over. But when they got home, Jessup ignored her. He went into the kitchen, and, without bothering to turn on the light, he sat there and stared out the window. Rae wondered if it was just that Monday was so close. Jessup worked for several studios—he picked people up at the airport, he messengered film, he delivered platters of shrimp cocktail and pastrami up to the executives’ offices whenever there was something to celebrate. On his tax returns Jessup listed himself as a driver, but whenever someone asked what he did, Jessup would smile and say, “I’m a slave.”

  At the beginning of the heat wave, when he’d first started to act so peculiar, Rae had made the mistake of asking Jessup how his day had been.

  “How was my day?” Jessup had mimicked in a too sweet voice. “Well, I spent most of my time picking up an order of cocaine that cost more than I’ve earned in my entire lifetime. That’s how my day was. If you want me to continue, I’ll be glad to tell you about my week.”

  She hadn’t wanted to know any more. But when they got home from the restaurant no one had to tell her that Jessup was feeling cheated. He sat by the kitchen window and gave the parked Oldsmobile a murderous look. It was then Rae knew he was still thinking about Rolls-Royces, and that thinking about them was just about driving him crazy.

  The worst part was that Rae couldn’t think of a single thing she could do to make him happy. On Monday morning she got up early, so she could bring him breakfast in bed. The heat was still pushing down as she boiled water for coffee and switched the radio on to a low volume. Listeners were calling in to a talk show that followed the news, each with a way to predict the next quake. As Rae poured water through the coffee filter, she knew she shouldn’t be listening to a program about earthquakes—she was so suggestible lately that she could already feel the buildings crumbling around her. But she was hypnotized by the heat, and by the scent of coffee, and as she put some bread in the toaster she continued to listen as a caller insisted that if birds were tracked by radar, entire cities could be saved. It was a well-known fact that birds always left an area long before any catastrophe. Rae found herself drawn to the window; at least there was still a line of blue jays on the telephone wire.

  She took out the frying pan and heated some butter, but when she cracked two eggs into the pan she found blood spots in both yolks. Rae panicked and immediately poured the eggs down the drain, then washed out the pan with hot water and soap. But even after she had started over again with two fresh eggs, Rae kept thinking about the spots of blood. She actually had to sit down and drink a glass of ice water and tell herself that anybody could have brought those eggs home from the market—they just happened to have been in the carton she chose.

  She watched the clock, afraid to wake Jessup. Although how he could sleep in this heat was beyond her. Other people tossed and turned, but Jessup lay perfectly still beneath a thin cotton quilt. Finally, Rae set out his breakfast on a white tray, then poured two cups of coffee. What was the worst that could happen? Freddy could fire her. Los Angeles could be devastated. Jessup could whisper that he’d found someone new.

  “Why is it you people stay in California?” a long-distance caller from Nevada asked on the radio. “Don’t you know that birds can’t save you? Don’t you know that by staying all you’re doing is tempting fate?”

  Rae climbed back into bed with a cup of coffee in either hand.

  “Don’t move,” she warned Jessup.

  Jessup opened one eye and reached for his coffee. Rae put her cup on the night table, then went back into the kitchen. By the time she had returned with the tray, Jessup had finished his coffee and had lit a cigarette. As Jessup tapped ashes into his empty coffee cup, Rae stood by the foot of the bed. There was one thing she knew for sure: Jessup had quit smoking two years ago, when they lived in Texas.

  “You don’t actually expect me to eat that, do you?” Jessup asked when he saw his breakfast.

  “You’re smoking a cigarette,” Rae said.

  “Golly, Rae, that’s what I like about you,” Jessup drawled. “You’re so observant.”

  There had been a time when Rae had made it her business to find out everything she could about Jessup. Of course, that was when the really important things were whether or not Jessup liked long hair, or if he preferred her to wear blue or green. When Rae was fourteen she taped a photograph of Jessup to her closet door so that she could memorize his face. This was one of the reasons Rae’s mother, Carolyn, had decided to move the family out to Newton. It was one thing for Rae to moon over him when she was still in junior high, and quite another to continue this infatuation now that Jessup had graduated, and she was about to go into high school herself. They hadn’t even told Rae until a week before the moving van was set to arrive. She locked herself in the bathroom and refused to come out.

  “I’m not leaving Jessup,” she told her mother through the locked door.

  “Oh, yes you are,” Carolyn had said. “And years from now you’ll thank me.”

  “Oh, please,” Rae said.

  “It’s not just that I don’t like him,” Carolyn said. “It’s that he’s dangerous.”

  Something in her mother’s tone made Rae curious. She turned the lock and opened the door.

  “Please believe me,” Carolyn said, “because I know about dangerous men.”

  For Rae that was the limit. Her father was a lawyer who was home so rarely that Rae was actually surprised whenever she ran into him in the kitchen or the living room. Was he her mother’s “dangerous man”?

  “You can’t tell me anything,” Rae informed her mother. “You don’t even know Jessup.”

  Once they had moved to Newton, Rae continued to see Jessup even more than before. Her friends found him threatening or mean, and they dropped away from her. It was just the two of them, and even Jessup’s mother had to telephone Rae whenever she wanted to locate her son.

  Rae had always been sure that if she knew anyone in this world it was Jessup, but now his suddenly starting to smoke again spooked her. Immediately, she had the sense that this was only one of the things he kept hidden from her.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” Jessup said, as he lit another cigarette. “I don’t eat breakfast any more—you should know that.”

  Rae tried to remember—hadn’t they had pancakes only a few days ago?

  “You have to watch out for things like breakfast when you get old,” Jessup told Rae. “Otherwise you wake up one day and there you are—fat and over the hill.”

  Jessup still wore the same blue jeans he had worn when he was eighteen years old, but he was turning thirty this year, and the only thing that bothered him more than turning thirty was realizing that he cared about his age.

  “I wish you would stop talking about getting old,” Rae said. “It’s ridiculous.”

  She was about to go into the kitchen and get Jessup a second cup of coffee, when he reached over and pulled her down on top of him.

  “It’s just a joke to you,” he whispered. “You’ve got five more years. You’ve got time. I’m the one who has to hurry.”

  Jessup kissed her, and Rae wrapped her a
rms around him. Other women who had kissed only one man in their entire lifetimes might think they were missing something, but Rae certainly wasn’t one of them. Instead, she found herself pitying women who had to settle for anything less.

  “Wait a minute,” Jessup told her.

  Jessup walked down the hallway to the kitchen, and when he returned he was carrying a blue-and-white mixing bowl. As soon as Rae saw that the bowl was filled with ice cubes, she sat up in bed. He did have a mean streak sometimes, and the first thing Rae expected was that he’d dump the ice on her as a way of letting her know it was time for her to get up and get dressed for work.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” she told him.

  Jessup held the bowl of ice and grinned.

  “I mean it,” Rae said.

  “You don’t trust me any more,” Jessup said. “And if you don’t trust me, I don’t see the point in staying together.”

  Maybe he meant it, maybe he was having doubts—Rae pulled Jessup back down on the bed. She closed her eyes and forgot about the ice. But later, when they were making love and Rae was so hot she couldn’t stand it any more, Jessup reached for the mixing bowl. He took an ice cube in each hand and then traced the ice along Rae’s skin. Nothing had ever seemed as delicious and cold, and Rae begged him not to stop. But there was something in the way Jessup made love to her that felt desperate; and what made Rae shiver wasn’t the ice, it was noticing that, as he held her, he was looking at the front door.

  It was nearly ten o’clock by the time Jessup started to get dressed. The phone had rung several times, but they hadn’t answered. Jessup didn’t talk to Rae. He pulled on jeans, then went to the oak dresser for a clean shirt. Rae sat up and watched him get ready. Jessup never bothered with a comb; instead he stared into the mirror and shook his head until his dark hair fell into place.

  “I’m going to have to make up the time I just missed,” Jessup told her.

  He spoke into the mirror as he put on a white shirt. Rae found herself wishing that he would look over his left shoulder—then their eyes would meet and Jessup might see how much she wanted him to stay home with her. If he agreed, she’d be willing to take the whole day off. But that morning the temperature was already at one hundred and two, and the car exhaust on Sunset Boulevard had begun to form a pavilion of clouds, and Jessup simply didn’t have the time to look over his shoulder.

  “Don’t bother to wait for me,” he said.

  Rae didn’t know why she always had the feeling she’d been the one to force Jessup into something—he had been the one who kept coming to see her. Even on the coldest New England day, when the sidewalk was a sheet of ice, she’d look out her window and there he’d be, waiting. But then, after Rae had managed to get out of the house, he always seemed annoyed to see her. And so, Rae never really knew what it was that brought Jessup out to Newton so often.

  That winter, when Rae was sixteen, was the last time Carolyn tried to separate them by force. When she realized who it was out there on the sidewalk nearly every day, Carolyn Perry called the police. After they’d taken him down to the precinct house, Jessup was threatened with charges that made him laugh out loud: loitering. But from where she stood in the driveway, all Rae could see was Jessup being hustled into the rear seat of a patrol car. She was certain they were driving him straight to the penitentiary. She ran upstairs, locked her door, and tried to slit her wrists with a nail file.

  Carolyn, of course, gave up. She stopped questioning her daughter each time she left the house, and now whenever she looked out the living-room window and saw Jessup outside, Carolyn simply drew the curtains. Rae was delighted with her own courage, but when she told Jessup about the nail file, he wasn’t impressed.

  “You’ll never kill yourself that way,” he told her.

  But the nail file had changed one thing—Rae and Carolyn no longer spoke to each other, they didn’t even fight. In the mornings, Rae left for school before her mother came downstairs; at night she sat up in her bedroom on the third floor and waited for Jessup to call. Whatever shred of control Carolyn had had before disappeared. Now Rae did as she pleased, and whenever she wanted money she simply took it. If Carolyn noticed the dollar bills missing from her purse, she never said a word, and the silence between mother and daughter grew deeper and deeper, until finally, even if there had been anything for them to say to each other, it would have been impossible to speak.

  Then one day, Rae couldn’t find any change in her mother’s purse and she decided to look through the bureau drawers in her parents’ bedroom. In Carolyn’s sweater drawer, between two wool cardigans, Rae discovered a red leather wallet. She knew she had found something important, but she had never expected so much—fifteen hundred-dollar bills, all folded neatly in half.

  Without stopping to think, Rae telephoned Jessup and told him she had to see him. That night she ran all the way to the parking lot of the Star Market.

  Jessup was crouched by a brick wall; as soon as he saw Rae he jumped to his feet. It had just begun to snow and the parking lot was deserted; it was the kind of night when you didn’t go outside, unless your life depended on it.

  “My mother has money hidden,” Rae told Jessup breathlessly.

  “Is that what you got me out here to tell me?” Jessup said. “Look, Rae, everybody’s mother has money hidden. My mother has fifty bucks in a plastic bag in the freezer.”

  “No,” Rae said. “I mean a lot of money.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Jessup said, almost interested.

  “Fifteen hundred dollars,” Rae whispered.

  It was so cold in the parking lot that Rae could feel her toes freezing through her wool socks and her boots. But she didn’t dare hurry Jessup; she just watched as he stood there and lit a cigarette and thought about her mother’s money.

  “I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” Jessup said finally. “We’ll keep that money in mind.”

  Rae didn’t know whether to feel disappointed or relieved—she had half expected Jessup to suggest she go right home and steal the money that night. But even if Carolyn’s bankroll was safe for now, when Rae walked Jessup down to the bus stop, she knew she had betrayed her mother. She told herself it didn’t matter; after all, her mother was her enemy now. And in no time Rae forgot all about the money—although maybe she let herself forget because she knew that Jessup was remembering. And two years later, when Rae was nearly eighteen and they were about to leave Massachusetts together, Jessup reminded her.

  “I want you to take that money now,” he whispered.

  Jessup’s arm was around her and they were sitting in the dark, on the bleachers behind the high school. Rae found herself wishing that she had never told him about the money in the first place. But when she suggested they didn’t really need it, Jessup took his arm away from her, so quickly you’d think he’d been stung.

  “Listen, I’ve had that money in mind all along,” he told her. “If you want us to get a car we need that money.” Jessup had been working at gas stations and construction sites ever since he left high school. “How much money do you think I earn?” he asked Rae now. “If you think I earn enough to buy a car, think again. Your mother doesn’t need that money, Rae. We do.”

  Rae swore she would do it. But for days she put it off. If she imagined she was giving her mother some extra time to move the money to a new hiding place, it just didn’t work. When Rae finally went to the bureau to check, she discovered that the wallet was in the same exact place, and there was more cash than before, twenty-two hundred dollars. The night before they planned to leave, Rae telephoned Jessup and told him she couldn’t do it.

  “Oh, great,” Jessup said. “Here we go. This is just like when you tried to kill yourself with the nail file. You’ve got to learn if you’re going to do something you’ve got to do it right. Do you think I want to hitchhike down south with some underage minor whose parents can have me put in jail? Think about it,” Jessup told her, “and you’ll soon see the attraction of having a car.”

 
; Rae admitted that she saw the attraction.

  “If we leave Boston together we do it right, or not at all,” Jessup said.

  Rae could hear him breathing into the receiver. She knew that he had pulled the phone into the hallway so that his mother wouldn’t overhear; he was standing there, waiting for her answer—and waiting was definitely something he did not like to do. There was no doubt in Rae’s mind that, given one good reason, he would leave her behind.

  “It’s totally up to you,” Jessup told her.

  It was her decision, and she chose a night when the sky was so clear that the stars seemed no farther away than the rooftops. As her parents slept, Rae went into their room, carefully opened the dresser drawer, and took out the leather wallet. After that they were able to do it right, just the way Jessup wanted. They bought the Oldsmobile and drove to Maryland, and they never once went back. But even after seven years, whenever Rae couldn’t sleep she blamed her mother. On those nights, Rae could open every window in the apartment and still feel haunted by the scent of her mother’s Chanel perfume. The odor was everywhere, in the sheets and the curtains, in the dishwater and in every kitchen cabinet. And even though Rae knew it was impossible for Carolyn to have tracked her down after all this time, she found herself searching through the closets and kneeling to peer under the bed—and there were times when she actually believed she might find someone hiding.

  The scent of Chanel was particularly strong on that Monday when Rae came in late to work.

  “Did you have some woman up here?” she asked Freddy Contina.

  “I wish,” Freddy said.

  Rae turned the air conditioner to fan and opened some windows. It was somehow much worse to smell that phantom perfume during the day; at night there seemed the possibility of an explanation: the woody scent of the bamboo outside the kitchen window, a neighbor’s cologne filtering through the walls, the terrible power of nightmares.