I thought about Michael’s favorite sport coat, the one we bought at Gieves and Hawkes on Savile Row in London. It had cost six hundred dollars, a lot of money at a time when we could scarcely scrape up the airfare. Michael was a history professor, and he didn’t even have tenure yet. Still, it fit him perfectly, and the material was so beautiful and fine. He wore it for every major social event in our lives that didn’t demand a suit, continuing long after it should have been honorably retired. All his other clothes had been given away, but the coat was still hanging in the closet, mummified in a garment bag.
“Yes,” I said. It was both too simple and too complicated for any other answer.
“Then why did you turn me down when I offered to introduce you to one of my friends?”
He meant well, so I tried to explain. “You mean the emergency-room doctor who just got divorced?”
He nodded. “He was ready to get on with a new life. Don’t you want that?”
“Sure, but it’s different. When you’re divorced, the person is still around, even if you hate him or her. Maybe you secretly lust after him, too. And there’s always a one-in-a-billion chance that things will work out. When someone dies, that’s it. It takes longer to get over, because the only thing you resent about the person who’s gone is that he died on you. Your relationship doesn’t dwindle over time; one day, it just evaporates. People who are divorced can’t relate to that. Besides, it makes them uncomfortable.”
He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Then what do you do for sex?”
I laughed. “Nothing.”
He looked horrified, as if I’d confessed to multiple ax murders.
“But how can you? You’re y—” He had started to say “young” but amended it to retain credibility. “Well, not that old, and you’re very attractive, and if you worked out more you could have a really incredible body, I’m sure,” he said in a rush of sincerity.
“Thank you,” I said dryly.
“No, I mean it.”
“Thanks.” I smiled.
He shook his head. “This is even worse than I thought,” he said despairingly.
I might not have been the merry widow, but I hadn’t been quite as noble and ascetic as I let on.
Everyone told me I was coping beautifully, but I knew better. I went through the funeral dry-eyed, winning approval for my restraint. “You’re so brave,” women said to me, as I kissed one scented cheek after another, like an automaton. “I really admire how well you’re handling this.” Men patted me on the back, like a baby.
The truth is, I deserved no credit. The rituals of grief sustained me socially, but I felt no solace. I smiled at all the people who brought covered dishes to the house, nodding yes, I would be fine. The food tasted like ashes in my mouth, but I smiled anyway. In the months afterward, I made myself get up and fix breakfast for myself and Andy every morning—something substantial, like eggs or oatmeal, foods that Michael had liked. I just went on, because that was all I could do. But I wasn’t brave. I was depressed, and depression is numbness, not hysteria.
After a while, people said, “You’ll find someone else someday. You’ve held up so well, but you shouldn’t be alone forever.”
I smiled at that, too, politely. It was too much effort to disagree.
After Michael died, I slept with an old friend’s lover.
I have seen Summer of ’42 and a number of similar movies, so I know that what is supposed to happen is that the widow gets the bad news, loses her head entirely, and sleeps with somebody half her age, preferably a virginal teenage boy who has a crush on her. Nice for him, comforting for her, and completely over in the morning.
In my case, it was a lot messier, plus it happened more than six months after Michael died, so I didn’t even have the excuse of immediacy, though I did have the excuse of continuing grief. But grief doesn’t let you off the hook for betraying someone trying to do you an act of kindness, for screwing up somebody else’s happiness on a whim.
Labor Day, a few years ago. It was dry and hot, the ugly season in Southern California. The brittle brown scrub covering the hillsides was just a spark away from igniting into brush fires. This is the natural landscape, the way everything would look without sprinklers and the long-distance aquatic largesse of Northern California snowpacks and the Colorado River. Check out Tijuana, if you don’t believe me.
When something of epic proportion happens to you—like the untimely death of your husband—it catches your friends off guard. Nobody knows what to say. Some of them ignore you, embarrassed by their inadequacy. Some offer platitudes. Some rattle on about diet and exercise, searching for reasons.
Sometimes people really come through for you, and Cynthia Weatherford was one of those. Cynthia and I had a complicated relationship, left over from high school. All right, it was a rivalry, and I was always a little bit jealous of her looks, her brains, and her popularity. When Michael died, she organized my life just the way she’d organized the cleanup when somebody tried to burn down the Administration Office all those years ago. She helped me sell the house in Manhattan Beach and buy the condo. She gave me lists of grief workshops to attend. She brought me home-cooked food, although I couldn’t eat it, and offered to take Andrea to the movies. All this while working as a journalist, a feature writer for City of Angels magazine.
When I set up my consulting business, she was my first client. I didn’t have many contacts in the beginning, but I found her a beautiful painting by the Brazilian artist Sergio Telles, through a dealer friend in New York who happened to be the artist’s daughter. On that hot September Monday, I had let myself into her house on the beachside thoroughfare known as the Strand to install it. Cynthia was off researching the collapse of medical services for the poor in city hospitals, but we had agreed on the appropriate site for the installation. The man she lived with, Richard Edmonton, was supposed to be in Vermont, visiting his parents.
It’s a pain in the neck, literally, to live on the Strand, because people are skating, walking, riding, etc., right past your front windows at all hours. Mornings may find the odd romantic couple fornicating in the garage, if you forget and leave it unlocked. The sea air assaults your paint and exterior metals with a vengeance. Still, it is very desirable real estate, with nothing but a bike path and a pedestrian walkway between you and the beach.
The strong reflected light from the ocean and the direct rays from afternoon sun made it difficult to find the perfect niche for an oil painting—I certainly didn’t want to hang it on the exposed side, but that’s where the public areas, the living room and family room, were located. The painting had strong, vivid colors, and Cynthia and I had finally settled on an interior wall of the dining room, away from external view.
As soon as I turned the key in the lock, I knew someone was there. The curtains were open, and I could hear the clink of ice cubes in the kitchen. It was about four in the afternoon. I hesitated.
“Hello?” I called.
Richard appeared around the corner. I knew him casually; he was a very hot advertising copywriter at a top agency downtown. One wall in the extra bedroom was hung with his awards.
“Hi,” he said. “Sorry if I startled you. I know I was supposed to be out of town, but I had to cancel at the last minute. Just go on as if I weren’t here.”
I tried to, but he made it difficult. We kept crossing paths in the dining room while I arranged the lighting and double-checked the measurements of the wall. Finally, he brought me a glass of wine without asking and sat down on a chair to watch. I don’t usually drink while I work, but the wine was cold and I felt nervous about screwing up, so I sipped it. As bad a reason to drink as there ever was.
Okay, so you don’t need a signpost to guess what happened next. We started talking about the artist and the painting, then about my new business, then about his work…It was a relief to talk about something other than Michael’s death, which is what everyone else had wanted to discuss almost exclusively for the last six months. You get th
e picture. By the time he offered to help me with the hanging, the air was supercharged. Then our fingers touched on the frame, and that was it. Instant electricity.
This is so trite, but I was so lonely. It felt good to be held by some other human being who wasn’t just a sympathetic fellow mourner offering comfort. It was fine to obliterate the grieving widow, to be utterly absorbed in something completely outside my history with my husband.
That’s the way it started, anyway. It’s hard to explain what happened next. I sort of…lost control, is the only way I can think of to describe it.
I let my hand slide between his legs, rubbing. I made low moaning sounds. I found myself in a white heat, so inflamed I wouldn’t have cared if Cynthia had walked in on us with a shotgun. I fumbled at his clothes, but my hands couldn’t manipulate the zipper.
We stumbled into the bedroom. Cynthia’s bedroom, shared with Richard. A framed picture of the two of them hiking in the Alps stood on the dresser to prove it. I didn’t care.
He straddled me, urging me down to the bed.
I couldn’t catch my breath. I started hitting at his chest with my fists.
In the middle, I heard myself shrieking.
Afterward, I cried.
Not genteel tears, either. I filled the awkward postcoital silence with genuine sobs, so deep and wrenching that my stomach heaved. I sat there on the edge of the bed, not even fully undressed, and cried into my hands.
Richard, to do him justice, tried to comfort me, though he must have been appalled by what he had gotten himself into. He brought me tissues and a glass of water. He even patted my back.
I was so shaky, he had to help me dress. He did it clinically, as if he were my grandfather. It was after six, and Cynthia might get home anytime.
When I had dressed and collected my things, I left. Simple as that. I didn’t discuss what we had done. I didn’t apologize. I didn’t shake his hand. I just said “good-bye” and closed the door. My temples ached and the sunlight hurt my eyes, even behind the dark glasses.
In a couple of days, I got a check for the painting from Cynthia. There was nothing else in the envelope, so I knew she knew. I would have liked to return it, but I had to pay the artist. I rehearsed a million ways to bring it up, to apologize, but I was so mortified that I convinced myself there was the barest possibility she hadn’t found out. A few months later, I met Cynthia at a dinner with mutual friends. She was breezy but distant. She said she and Richard had broken up, that he had moved to New York. She never said anything more, and neither did I, though we met several times after that in the following years. So I added cowardice to betrayal.
I don’t like to overanalyze events—I’ll leave that to the psychologists and the self-help writers. Still, I had to wonder about my motives in picking Richard as my partner for my one outburst of sexual mania, my moment of Dionysian frenzy. I mean, I scarcely knew the guy, and I never even talked to him again.
It unnerved me to think I might have done it out of some long-held secret grudge against Cynthia. Just because she was chosen editor-in-chief of the high school yearbook, while I only got to be art editor, isn’t enough reason for a stab in the back. And I’d long ago gotten over the resentment I’d felt when she asked the English lit teacher to raise her grade from a B-plus to an A-minus because she needed the grade point to make valedictorian. Just because he went along with it didn’t mean the disgust should last into the second decade, did it? I couldn’t have done something so serious for such silly reasons.
And what about the oppression of gratitude? Could I have been so destructive just because I had the slightest bit of resentment at being so indebted to someone who, when all was said and done, I couldn’t quite bring myself to like?
I had to wonder about Richard, too. Why me, if not to get back at Cynthia? I’m sure there are some people who sleep with other people out of pity, and I was definitely in the pitiable category at that moment. I’m not saying I haven’t had my femme fatale period, but right after Michael died, I had everything but a “vulnerable” sign around my neck, and I doubt that “wounded” is all that sexy. And why did he tell her? He must have, because I certainly didn’t.
So, we all had our murky motives. You may wonder why I am carrying on about this incident, which, after all, happened several years before this story takes place. One reason is to explain why I no longer trusted my judgment about sex. Mark might have been appalled, but it seemed to me that abstinence was a lot better than tawdry lapses of judgment that end up causing pain to other people as well as yourself. It was not, as people seemed to assume, that my married sex life was so outstanding that I couldn’t bear to sully the memory with inferior imitations. Sex with Michael was perfectly fine, but after so many years, it had something of a rehearsed quality. No, it was the lack of control, the memory of that complete abandon, that scared me out of testing the waters after that. It wasn’t safe, it wasn’t right, and I didn’t want to hurt myself or anyone else like that again.
The other reason I’m telling you this, is to explain why it was going to be so awkward to call up Cynthia and ask her for a favor after a number of years of polite but perfunctory exchanges of a decidedly superficial character.
Because I was going to have to call her. She was the only person I knew in the city of Los Angeles who’d done a complete magazine profile of dating and matchmaking services throughout the entire metropolitan area.
Whatever my true motives were in continuing to investigate Natasha Ivanova’s murder—and they remained less than perfectly clear, even to me—I wanted that information, even if I had to risk humiliation to get it.
7
But first things first.
My mother lived in a small two-bedroom apartment in Torrance, not far from the shopping center where she had once reigned as Queen of the Sales Ladies. The other bedroom was occupied by a very nice woman who took care of her in exchange for room and board and a modest salary. Mother persisted in calling her “the girl,” although she was thirty years old, and in regarding her with suspicion. She fired her regularly, but since she never remembered it afterward, I asked Lili to try to ignore it.
Lili had taken care of her mother until she died, the designated daughter staying on in the house while her siblings moved out and married. Just like Like Water for Chocolate, without the food. If she resented that, she never said so, and she was infinitely tolerant of my mother’s mercurial moods and eccentricities, the most recent of which was an insistence on storing her underwear in the refrigerator. I suppose there was a kind of logic to it, at least in the summertime, but Lili’s patience, apparently unforced, made me feel guilty.
Lili was hampered in her economic ascent by her imperfect, albeit charming, command of English. She might even have been illegal, but I never asked. You’re supposed to demand verification of legitimate resident status, but for such informal arrangements no one ever does. Besides, she needed a home, and I needed someone to live with my mother, who had nothing but what I could give her and her Social Security to live on. I dreaded the day when Lili would find another living situation. Everyone I hired to take care of my mother eventually did.
I was never sure how long it took for my mother to recognize me. Her eyes often looked a little vacant, partly from the fact that increasingly less and less was going on behind them and partly because she wanted to watch television from eight in the morning until eleven at night. When her expression changed to disapproval, I knew it had dawned on her who I was. Somewhere inside her was a very angry woman, fighting through the mists of confusion to get out. Before her illness, she’d been quietly aggrieved and almost unnaturally controlled; now her moods could erupt and flare unexpectedly.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, bending to kiss her cheek. “How are you feeling today?”
She looked at me accusingly. “She stole my clothes.”
I tried to sound patient, although the strains of Matlock reruns in the background probably drowned out any tone I adopted. “No one stole you
r clothes, Mom.”
“Look,” she insisted. “Go look in the closet.”
I walked through her bedroom and pulled open the sliding mirrored doors. The closet was jammed full of clothes dating back as far as 1958, if I was any judge. My mother had never thrown anything away that still had “plenty of good use left in it.” To do her justice, since she’d spent so much time around clothing stores, she’d bought lots of nice things at bargain prices.
“See,” I told her. “They’re all there.”
She frowned at the contents of the closet, taking inventory. “What about the red cotton dress?” she asked triumphantly.
“You’re wearing it, Mom,” I said softly.
She looked down. “Oh.”
The dress had a grease stain the size of a quarter on the lapel. More than anything, that single blotch symbolized my mother’s decline. In her lucid days, she not only would have noticed, she would have ripped the offending garment off her body on the spot. A lady doesn’t wear soiled clothing, she’d told me. More than once. Wear a clean slip! What if you get in an accident?
I started to put my arms around her, but she stopped me. “You never believe a word I say,” she said. “No matter how many times I tell you what’s really going on, you always think I’m making it up.” She looked at the television screen, where Andy Griffith was summing up, preliminary to effecting Perfect Justice fifty-five minutes into the hour. I suppose it was more upbeat than soap operas, but I didn’t see the attraction, at least not on a daily basis. My mother had other ideas.
“He knows I’m telling the truth,” she said, pointing at the screen. She lowered her eyes flirtatiously, in another lightning change of mood. “He admires me,” she confided.
“Mom—” I never knew whether to go along with these riffs to avoid upsetting her or to contradict her and help her maintain a slender hold on reality. There was no easy choice, no matter what “Matlock” said.
Staying Cool Page 7
