The man was about her age, somewhere in his fifties, stubby ponytail, worn T-shirt with the 49er logo, jeans stiff with oil and whatever. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around here before.”
“I’m from over Madrono Valley.”
Madrono Valley was on the other side of the hill from the ocean, a collection of RVs and dilapidated houses, broken cars in the yards and a raucous roadhouse flashing beer signs. All the local crews were busy readying the other summer cottages for the season. She only had this weekend to finish the job—on Monday she had to be back at the college to teach her classes—and there were gutters to be unclogged, the overgrown field mowed, mice nests to clean out of the carport, a dozen other chores before the place went on sale. She was relieved that someone had seen her ad. And this fellow was big and looked strong-bodied, and he probably needed the work. “Is thirty an hour okay?”
“Sounds about right.” The man reached past her and with his thumbnail scratched a patch from the salt-coated window. “You live here?”
“Yes. I’m selling it.”
“Too lonely, huh?” He gestured at the houses sparsely scattered over the field and down the cliff. “Not much to do for fun.”
Fun? Perhaps she had been too quick to hire him. “Maybe not fun,” she said, “but there’s plenty to do for work. You can start out there.” She pointed the trowel at the waist-high grasses in the field around the cottage. “Can you use a scythe?”
The man cocked an eyebrow and said, “Lady,” in a disgusted voice.
“Not everybody does, you know. You’ll find one in the carport.” She turned away and then turned back. Maybe she had been too abrupt, rude. “What’s your name?” she asked. “In case I need to call you.”
“I’ve been called Heyyou and Lookee-here and a lot worse,” the man said, grinning, “but my friends call me Eddie.”
She laughed at that. “Okay, then, Eddie, if you get thirsty there’s a hose bib behind the carport.”
As Eddie walked past her toward the carport, she looked down at the marigolds and petunias still to be planted. The agent had told her she should spruce up the outside with flowers. But she wouldn’t kneel and bend over again with this stranger around. The flowers would have to wait. There was plenty else to do. She climbed the three steps to the porch and went on into the kitchen.
The burned grease on the oven walls looked like a diseased growth, a melanoma, maybe. It had been accumulated over years of sputtering fat and little fires as she and Lamar had broiled steaks and chops together. She found the oven cleaner under the sink and began to spray it on the hardened crusts.
A harsh screeching sound came from the carport, and she looked through the back window. Eddie was bent over with a pocket knife, scraping the blade of the scythe, cleaning off the petrified grass and mud left on it the eighteen years she and Lamar had owned the cottage. When he looked up, she nodded approval and went back to spraying. She had been right to hire him—he, at least, knew how to work.
When the fumes began to burn her eyes, she closed the oven door. Let the stuff do its job. She took two wine boxes down the hall to the guest bedroom to divide the books that had made their way up from the city. When she had first met Lamar, she had discovered that each possessed a worn copy of Middlemarch, and that had made her think they were truly soul mates. So much for literary taste. She sat on the floor in front of the bookcase and reached for a book. Was it a his or a hers? Hell with it. She’d give them all to Goodwill, along with the other discards. If Lamar had wanted his books, he should have taken them with him. She quickly emptied the shelves.
On the way back to the kitchen, she stopped and gazed out at the craggy cliffs and the Pacific swelling in the distance. Her happiest days had been spent here, just the two of them, hiking down to the rocky shore, reading while they listened to Verdi and Mozart, making love to the sound of the sea. Though it was more than her fair share, Lamar had insisted she take the cottage as her part of the settlement. That was like Lamar, thoughtful, generous, and a little patronizing. After a year of lonely weekends, spinning incessantly on her loss, on Lamar and his betrayal, she realized that being in the cottage only worsened her misery. Though leaving was wrenching, she knew she had to move on.
She glanced over at the field. Eddie was mowing away, his shirt off and the sun glistening on his back. An immense tattoo spread like a giant spider around his shoulder and arm. When she peered closer, she made out a yellow sunburst with thick jagged red and blue rays. Why would he brand himself that way, leaving an ugly smear across a perfectly nice body? Perhaps a tattoo was a mark of belonging in Madrono Valley, as a good haircut or well-kept fingernails might be for the summer people.
The ringing of the telephone broke through the stillness, and she went into the kitchen and picked it up. “I’m at Jake’s Deli,” Lamar said. “I heard you were selling, and I want to pick up some of my stuff. Okay?”
Apparently he thought he could just show up without warning. But there was no point in letting herself be angry, in telling him off. It was over, and whatever wounds she had needed to inflict surely she already had—most of them on herself. “You’re just in time,” she said in a cheery voice. “I’m getting everything ready for the movers.”
“Well, I’ll give you a couple of hours this afternoon. I figure since I helped make the mess, the least I can do is help clean it up.” He spoke in his joking voice, expecting her to be amused
“I really don’t want…” she began. But rejecting his help would only expose how wounded she still felt. “…you to think you have to, though I could use a strong back.”
“What do you say I have Jake make us a couple of sandwiches?”
“I say great. Sure beats another bowl of corn flakes.” Remembering Eddie, out in the sun, mowing away, probably ravenous, she added, “Make that three and a six pack of beer.”
***
The oven cleaner had done its work, and with a handful of paper towels she wiped off the black slime. Then she started cleaning out the refrigerator, loading the garbage can with half-empty jars of mustards and pickles and jellies. The orange marmalade, a Lamar favorite, had hardened into stone. She tossed it into the garbage sack. The dregs of a marriage.
At first she and Lamar had been disappointed not to have children, but they had come to see it as a blessing. Couples they knew had racked up debts they couldn’t even calculate, paying for cures for their druggy children. Her own nephew was catatonic after a skateboard accident, Lamar’s niece suspended in a haze of powerful pills. Being childless had at first made her and Lamar very sad, but they knew they had been saved from the real heartache. And they had time and money to enjoy the good life. Self-centered, yes, and that had often bothered her, but they drove hybrid cars, recycled bottles and newspapers, reused their grocery bags, and at the end of the year made large gifts to their favorite charities.
She had finally come to realize that in her smugness she had been blind to Lamar’s discontent. When he confessed that he had fallen in love with a new associate at his law firm, she had tried to joke it away—these little infatuations are like adult male mumps, she had said, painful, dangerous in the rare case, but you’ll survive. When she realized that she had lost him, a desperate fury boiled up, and evening after evening she spewed scalding words over him—and lay awake regretting them, knowing they were driving him further away.
Once Lamar had moved out, her fury collapsed, and she gave way to months of despair, hardly able to teach her classes, feeling worthless, discarded like a pair of Lamar’s worn-out shoes or a shirt with frayed cuffs. At last she thought that if she sold the cottage, breaking the final connection, surely she would return to her old self.
***
She had finished wiping out the refrigerator and had begun to wrap the dishes when she heard Lamar’s car rolling up to the carport. A moment later he was standing in the kitchen door. “Hello, Helen,” he said. His expression was kindly and remote and a little wary, the face he had shown her ove
r the past year as though she were a volatile neighbor to be placated at the mailboxes. “Nice to see you.”
“You, too.” See how cool I am, her smile said.
“So you decided to sell.” He set the sack of sandwiches on the counter and stuck the beer in the refrigerator. “I guess real estate is doing pretty well around here.”
“So the agent assures me.”
“Well, I hope you make a fortune. What can I do? Find me a job. Anything.”
She smiled at that. He was wearing his usual summer look—blue oxford button-down, pressed khakis, white Nikes, blond-gray hair clean and crisp. She could not imagine him out in the sun like Eddie, whacking away at the grasses. He had done the mowing that first year, but after that they had hired a local crew to do the spring clean-up. “Pick out what you want to take back with you, and then I’ll find something.”
He went down the hall to the guest bedroom, and she heard him rummaging through the Goodwill boxes, humming and half-singing the toreador song. She picked up a handful of newspapers and went back to wrapping plates.
***
“I guess I’ll go to the deli and get something to eat.” Eddie stood in the doorway, drying his head and neck with his shirt bunched in his hand.
“We have some sandwiches and beer here if you’d like them,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows. “Well, now, you’re what I call a real nice lady. Thanks.” He tossed his shirt out to the porch railing, and washed his hands at the sink.
Lamar came into the kitchen. “Oh, hello. I thought I heard a man’s voice.”
“Eddie’s helping me fix up the place for the sale,” Helen said, “and Lamar is…we’re divorced,” and quickly added, “Time for lunch.”
The two men followed her into the alcove off the kitchen and sat down, and she emptied the sack of sandwiches onto the table. “Roast beef,” she said, picking up one of the sandwiches. Lamar’s favorite at Jake’s. Pickles and mustard, caramelized onions, lettuce, and tomato. He was smiling at her, so confident, so sure of himself, so sure of her. “I bet you’d like this one.” She handed the package to Eddie. When she felt rather than saw Lamar’s smile vanish, she felt confused, uneasy. No, she told herself. Don’t fall back into that old trap of making things right for Lamar. “Take your pick, Lamar,” she said. “Tuna or egg salad. I’ll get the beer.”
As she opened the refrigerator, she heard Lamar say, “So you’re a friend of Helen’s?”
“You could say that,” Eddie answered after a pause.
“Known each other long?”
“Not too long.”
“You live around here?”
“You’re asking a lot of personal questions,” Eddie said.
“Sorry,” Lamar said in a startled voice. “I don’t mean to be intrusive.”
“And I don’t mean for you to be,” Eddie said.
Chuckling silently, Helen took the six-pack from the refrigerator. The clever lawyer put on the defensive by the likes of Eddie Heyyou. Good old Eddie.
She didn’t know she was going to do it until she was doing it, but as she came around the table, she lightly brushed the six-pack across the sunburst on Eddie’s shoulder and smiled at him when he glanced up. She freed one of the cans from the pack, pulled off the tab, and handed the can to Eddie. Then she set the six-pack on the table and motioned for Lamar to help himself. That’s how it began, the deception, the pretense, the little charade. Let Lamar think there was someone else in her life, some other knight being chivalrous. He needn’t know it was for a price.
As they ate their sandwiches and drank the beer, she addressed most of her talk to Eddie, frequently touched his arm to emphasize a point or underline a joke, and then turned to say something to Lamar as though suddenly remembering his presence and her manners. Lamar responded in monosyllables and registered his irritation with disdainful glances from her to Eddie.
Eddie seemed very pleased with the attention and laughed and talked easily, about his motorcycle, about a ride down to LA with a buddy who owned a Harley. When Eddie had finished his sandwich, Helen shoved half of hers over to him and insisted he eat it even though it was just egg salad. Eddie said it was good egg salad because it was made by a good egg named Jake. He took a bite of the sandwich and talking around a mouthful said, “Jake was on the Snake’s old Raiders team.”
“Snakes? Snakes play football?” Lamar said, springing suddenly to life. “Baboons, maybe, gorillas, certainly, but snakes?”
Eddie hurried the last of the egg salad down with a swallow of beer. “You never heard of Kenny Stabler? The Snake? Never noticed his picture behind the cash register at the deli? ‘To my old pal Jake who saved me from a ton of pain’?” He cocked his head at Lamar and narrowed his eyes, as though summing him up. “I’d say sports ain’t your thing, right?”
Helen knew Eddie had touched a boil. Lamar had never been athletic and had always felt a little uneasy when other men talked about sports.
“I prefer different forms of entertainment,” Lamar said. “For instance, music, opera.” His voice was a little haughty and his chin rose in defiance, a show of false assurance Helen knew very well. For a moment she thought of intervening, then decided to let it play out.
“Opera? Those big fat women going lalala?” Eddie dismissed that with a laugh and a wave of his hand. “Not me. I like rock, Pearl Jam, that kind of music. Opera sure ain’t my thing, I’ll say that.”
“I would never have thought it was.” Lamar waited a moment for that to sink in. “Helen and I had season tickets to the opera and thoroughly enjoyed it. Didn’t we, Helen?” He leaned toward her, nodding, his expression complicit and insistent. It was true. They had gone on Sunday afternoons and sat in the front row of the Grand Tier, and she had loved it as he had—though she had sometimes thought it was because he had.
“I’ve reverted,” she said. “I’m back into rock.” She smiled at Eddie and stood up. “No more dawdling, you guys. Back to work.”
“Yes, ma’am, boss,” Eddie said with a salute. She reached over and flicked her fingers against his tattoo.
When Eddie had gone back to the field and Helen was gathering up the sandwich wrappings and beer cans, Lamar leaned against the kitchen door frame and, jerking his shoulder toward the field, said, “What’s that guy’s name again?”
“Eddie.”
“Just Eddie?” Lamar asked, his voice impatient. “No last name?”
“Williams,” she said, shoving the mess into the garbage can. If she’d had time, she might have come up with something unusual, not so obvious. “Edward H. Williams.” H for Heyyou.
“The two of you, I don’t know.” Lamar shook his head. “I mean, I’m not a snob or anything, but he doesn’t seem to be your type.”
“My type? What’s my type?”
“I mean, he’s just…” He raised his hands at the difficulty of coming up with acceptable words. “He just doesn’t seem very intellectual.”
“I guess I’m going in for the more physical type now,” she said. “I’ve always had a secret yen for the hard hats.”
“You never told me that.”
“Would I have told you?”
Obviously annoyed, he walked to the window and looked out to where Eddie was working. “And that tattoo?” He swung around to face her and puffed out a sneery laugh. “So now you have a yen for tattoos?”
“I think that one is quite beautiful,” she said. “It’s a sunburst, the perfect symbol for Eddie. Energy, vigor, vitality. Isn’t he wonderful?” And indeed she felt quite wonderful herself, to think all that up.
Lamar’s lips tightened. “I can give you about three more hours. Then I have to get back to the city. Where should I start?”
***
Through the afternoon they worked, Lamar washing the windows with wet newspaper, Eddie hacking away at the grass, Helen finishing up the kitchen. When she saw that Eddie was almost finished with the mowing she took a cold beer out to the field. Lamar was working on the front
windows and she felt him pause as she passed.
“Once you’ve finished here, would you mind going up on the roof and clearing out the gutters,” she said to Eddie. “There’re garbage bags in the garage you can use for the muck.”
“You afraid I’d dump all that nasty stuff on your pretty head?”
“What? No, of course not, but I don’t want you to throw it down on the flowers.”
“Yes ma’am, boss. Hey, lookee. The ex is sure giving us the eye.”
She glanced at the porch where Lamar was dipping a handful of paper into the bucket of soapy water, his head cocked so he could see her. Let him get a good look. She pressed the cold can against the tattoo. “Here, this is for you. Let me know when you finish the gutters.”
As she walked back into the cottage, she glanced at Lamar. He had turned back to the window, but she could see the sullen droop of his lips and disapproving set of his jaw, and she felt elated.
***
At a little after five, Lamar stuffed the soggy paper into a garbage bag and threw the dirty water down the toilet, gathered up some books and CDs and reclaimed a favorite windbreaker from the Goodwill box. He came to where Helen was wrapping cups.
“I wish I didn’t have to go back to the city,” he said. “I hate to leave you when there’s so much to do. I could maybe come back tomorrow.”
“Thanks but Eddie’s very good help.” She pointed upwards where Eddie was rattling the gutters.
“Physical work, maybe, but since you’re planning to sell, you need somebody who knows something about business.”
“How do you know Eddie doesn’t?”
“Come on, Helen, it’s obvious. He couldn’t possibly know how to deal with the agent about his percentage or negotiate with the bank, stuff like that.” He smiled. “After all, I am a lawyer.”
When he moved closer to her, she could smell his familiar odor, the ironing smell of his crisp shirt, the after-shave he used, his fresh sweat. He put his hands on her arms and slid his fingers up the wide sleeves of her blouse, and she saw in his eyes the delicious look she had once known so well. “Would you like me to come back tomorrow?” he said in a husky low voice, moving his thumb across her armpit toward her breast. “I still care for you, Helen. Very much. You don’t just wipe away all those great years we had together.”
Old Ladies Page 5
