“You must’ve been dreaming.”
“A nightmare. I was a kid.” He shuddered.
“It’s all right.” She held his face between his palms, covering his beautiful, damaged mouth and nose with kisses. “Hey, you’re fine. Now come inside.”
Putting an arm around his narrow, firm waist, she led him into the bedroom.
He stretched out on his back in his Bermudas, and she curved next to him, an arm across his chest. After a minute he turned to her and she patted his shoulders and back, soothing him as if he were a terrified little boy.
“You’re not leaving?” he asked.
“Hey, buster, you don’t get rid of me that easy.”
“Never came up against failure before,” he muttered. “That bastard from Paloverde Oil shoots down my every damn idea.”
“It’s a group project.”
“S’my ideas that get shot down.”
“You’re being too sensitive.”
“S’easy for you to say, you’re terrific.”
“So’re you.”
“I’ll never be a project engineer.”
“You will,” she said, rubbing between his shoulder blades. “You will.”
“Christ, I’d give anything t’be in Lalarhein, a guy could prove ’self in Lalarhein.” His words slurred drunkenly, drowsily.
“Shh,” she murmured. “It’s late.”
“Give anything to be there . . . .”
* * *
Joscelyn’s idea of lunch was to remain in her windowless cubbyhole with a tuna on whole wheat: unless Malcolm dropped by to join her, the sandwich would remain half eaten, giving off a fishy aroma while the crusts turned upward. Two mornings after the barbecue, however, she telephoned Honora, inviting her to lunch at Mike Lyman’s.
Joscelyn Sylvander Peck’s soul shrank when it came to asking for anything, and she needed a favor from her sister.
The heatwave had not broken and though she had only a short block’s walk, her trim, sleeveless navy blouson was damp by the time she plunged into the dimly lit, noisy, steak-odored air of Lyman’s. The bar was buried behind businessmen waiting for their tables, but Honora was already seated—the name (Mrs.) Curt Ivory conjured up the magical rustle of five-dollar bills to Los Angeles maître d’s.
“Hi,” Joscelyn said, and sank down in the leather chair. As she sipped her Tom Collins the oppressiveness of her impending request grew.
The conversation, grouchily truculent on her part, drifted on about the broiling weather, the pruning of Japanese cherry trees, and Fuad’s visit until Honora leaned forward, affectionate concern radiating from the dark eyes. “Joss, what’s wrong with your cheek?”
Joscelyn pulled back as far as the leather chair permitted. “Nothing.”
“You’ve got a mark here.” Honora touched her own cheek near the black wave of her page boy.
Joscelyn had applied triple coats of makeup base to the area, successfully covering the gray-purple of the bruise: the restaurant’s dim lighting, however, brought out the shadows of its slightly raised topography.
“Oh, that. Didn’t you notice it Monday night? Over the weekend I decorated myself—I banged the edge of the diving board.”
The waiter set down their lunch salads.
The time has come, Joscelyn told herself. Poking at a large shrimp, she muttered, “Honora, listen, there’s this thing you can do for me.”
“Yes?”
Two couples rose noisily from the next table, and during their forced, clamorous laughter, Joscelyn muttered, “Ask Curt to send Malcolm and me to Lalarhein.”
Blinking, Honora stared at her. “I didn’t get that.”
“Ask Curt about getting Malcolm in on the Lalarheini project.” Joscelyn turned from her sister’s flabbergasted gaze, breaking a roll, buttering the smaller piece. She could feel the sullen set of her jaw.
Finally Honora said, “Joss, I never interfere in his business, you know that.”
“Swell, I really appreciate the help, Honora. Thanks.”
Honora’s brows drew together in pleading intensity. “D-don’t be taken in by the way Fuad acts about your career, Joss.” The slight stammer proved her complete misery. “He’s lived in America. But Lalarhein’s one of the worst Islamic countries as far as women go. They’re not allowed to work.”
“That’s hardly classified information.”
“Then . . . You mean you’re giving up your career?”
“Obviously.”
“But, Joss—you can’t! You’re a truly talented engineer. Whichever team you’re on gets things accomplished—and quickly. Curt’s always saying how lucky Ivory is to have you.”
The humble tone of Honora’s accolades gave Joscelyn a queer shiver of dislocation. She had always been the inferior Sylvander girl.
“The company’ll survive,” she said acidly.
“But what’ll you do there? Joss, you have no idea what it’s like. The mullahs rule every detail. Women stay inside their homes, and if they go out, they’re veiled. They aren’t allowed to drive. Daralam—the capital—isn’t a city, it’s a huge, dirty village with no real shops or restaurants, hardly any trees, no proper water system, no garbage collection—in the photographs it looks picturesque, but it’s horrible. The heat, the flies, the beggers, the smells. Those three days I was there were enough to last a lifetime. Lalarhein’s not a country, it’s an oven, a medieval oven.”
Joscelyn chewed her salad. “Working there’ll be a giant boost for Malcolm.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll keep busy.”
Honora’s head tilted. “Joss, you aren’t preg—”
“God no! I’m not a nineteen-year-old idiot.”
Honora’s soft upper lip quivered and the lovely eyes were very bright. If Curt could see her now, he’d kill me, Joss thought. I deserve to be killed. Yet she couldn’t force herself to apologize.
After a minute, Honora said, “I’m sure that there’s a project in this country for Malcolm.”
“Company policy is to advance people who can handle the tough assignments in tough places.”
A long silence that Joscelyn misconstrued. She thinks Malcolm put me up to it.
“And please don’t tell Malcolm about this. He’d murder me. He gets livid if he thinks the relationship does one iota for him.”
“Oh, Joss, you used to get like this when you were in trouble at school.”
“If you don’t want to help Malcolm, just say so!” Joscelyn burst out. The clatter and voices and smells of the busy lunch hour swam around her. “You’ve never accepted him.”
“We both like him and have from the beginning.” Honora’s voice soothed, her eyes reassured.
“Then why are you being so negative about doing this?”
Honora sighed deeply. “If you’re sure Lalarhein’s really right for you and Malcolm, of course I’ll talk to Curt.”
“Thank you,” Joscelyn said stiffly. She signaled for the check, but when Honora had come in she’d told the captain to put it on Curt’s account.
* * *
The sisters didn’t leave Mike Lyman’s together. Joscelyn was in a rush to get back to the office while Honora’s appointment with the tree man on Olympic Boulevard wasn’t until two forty-five.
As Honora watched the tall, pleasantly angular figure wind around the tables, she was thinking, Poor Jossie.
Her reservations about her younger sister’s marriage had intensified at the barbecue. For a few moments she had seen beyond Malcolm’s endearing, puppyish efforts to please and been aware of another, darker persona. It had been an unnerving revelation.
Did he bully Joss into this? Honora absently formed a triangle of crumbs. She said no, but methinks she did protest too much. She’s really shook up. Honora, who had no experience with physical abuse, did not consider the possibilities connected to Joscelyn’s bruised cheek as she attempted to figure out the unknowable problems surrounding the Peck’s marriage.
She sipped
her coffee until only eight or nine tables remained occupied. The busboys were setting up for dinner. She watched them, her mind drifting back to the thin young waitress at Stroud’s. Now she was covered by a great slagheap of possessions—furs, jewelry designed for her by Van Cleef and Arpels, the estate in Bel Air and the big house with the boat in Newport Beach, a new flat in London on Upper Brook Street, her garden with its rare plants and trees. She was married to a man she adored and who adored her. She had arrived at the Promised Land. So why did one benign day succeed the next, bland and ultimately empty?
I have my period, that’s all, she thought. She had been to specialists here and in New York, suffering a series of painful if minor corrective surgeries, she had tracked her temperature, she and Curt had followed the doctor’s orders on when to make love. With paralyzing regularity her periods flowed. Curt reassured her, he said he couldn’t even remember telling her that he wanted three children, he needed her and nobody else. In the old days I might have been poor, sometimes desperate, but I can’t recollect feeling utterly useless.
She pushed sharply away from the table, sloshing iced coffee into the saucer, leaving the now deserted restaurant.
* * *
It was Honora and Curt’s habit when they dined at home to take an evening stroll in the gardens. As they wound along the lit paths, Honora briefed him about the luncheon and Joscelyn’s request.
“Curt . . . is it true that your top people have all worked overseas?”
“So it’s a promotion’s she’s after?”
“For Malcolm.”
“If that’s all there is to it, no big deal. A little nepotism here and there is good for the soul. The levee job I told you about on the Mississippi—I’ll send them both.”
“She doesn’t want to work.”
“Joss?” he asked, surprised. “A baby?”
“No,” Honora said softly. “Curt . . . well, I don’t really understand, but it came to me that maybe she’s decided she’s too much of a challenge for Malcolm and wants to even things up between them.”
“Turn in her ability on his masculine self-respect?”
“Am I getting a bit far out?”
He halted to pick a pale pink hibiscus. “It makes a kind of crazy sense.”
“I think they’re going through a rough time.”
“She told you?”
“You know Joss better than that. No, it’s just intuition. She’s very intent on Malcolm moving up the ladder.”
“And at the barbecue he seemed very intent on Lalarhein. But, Honora, you take on marital problems there, not lose them. We’ve had several divorces in the few months since the project started.”
“She asked me, Curt, she asked me, and you know that Joss’d go a hundred miles out of her way rather than ask a simple favor. This Lalarhein job for Malcolm means everything to her.”
Curt tucked the hibiscus in his wife’s dark hair. “Okay, Sweet Leilani. I’ll think about it.”
29
The irritating roar of the overburdened air-conditioning unit did not cover the light tap on the plasterboard door. Joscelyn, who had been dozing off with her head propped against the arm of the couch, jumped, and her stationery pad dropped into the pillows behind her. Castigating herself for sinking into yet another unplanned nap, she swung up to a sitting position. “Oh, it’s you, Yussuf,” she said.
As if it could be anyone else. She was alone in the little house with Yussuf, her Egyptian “boy.” It was against Lalarheini mores for a man, no matter how impoverished, to become a servant, and no woman worked outside her home, so household help—and whores, too—were foreign recruits.
Yussuf bowed his white cap and shuffled a few inches forward on feet thrust sockless into oxfords whose backs were stomped down. Spare and short as a gnarled vine, his wrinkled, wood-brown face sprouted a messy gray stubble. “What shall I prepare,” he inquired in his soft, heavily accented English, “for the evening meal?”
“I’ll take care of things tonight,” she said.
Today being Thursday, the eve of Islam’s inviolable Friday sabbath, Yussuf would depart and Malcolm would arrive home from the field. Her husband’s welcoming meal was planned around a contraband can of ham that had just arrived in one of Honora’s care packages. Yussuf was very devout, and Joscelyn—fond of her undemanding fellow prisoner in this air-conditioned prefab—did not insult him by requiring that he prepare foods forbidden by the Koran or serve equally prohibited alcohol, as most of the other Ivory housewives insisted their “boys” do.
“There is still time,” he said politely.
“You just run along.”
“One hundred thanks to you, madam.” He bobbed his head yet deeper. “In the ice box are some good fresh carrots, and a date cake.”
Yussuf purchased whatever they required. When Joscelyn had first arrived in Lalarhein, she had looked forward to shopping as the highlight of her day. Arms and legs covered by a long-sleeved blouse and long skirt, she would park in Daralam Square, where for a few coppers a ragged little boy would watch the red Pinto that Ivory had shipped over with the furniture. She would plunge on foot into the labyrinthian, narrow, cloth-covered alleyways that were crowded with beggars, men in robes, the black ghosts of women. At every step a different alien odor had reached her nostrils. The raucous cries of the hawkers mingled in a wild song. The merchants in their tiny, aromatic shops cheated her outrageously, but she would never have abandoned her exotic jaunts because of that. No, it was the pinching. The surreptitious pinching that other Ivory wives immediately informed her was the fate of all unveiled women. She never saw whose unrelenting, anonymous fingers squeezed her flesh. Her buttocks, her thighs, even her small breasts were marked with purplish bruises when she returned home. Malcolm, who had not hit her since the night of the barbecue and was tender of her body, would run his fingers over the welts, horrified. So now Yussuf looped the big, woven, papyrus market basket over the handlebars of his bike and peddled into town.
“Mr. Peck will enjoy them,” she said, nodding gravely. “Go ahead, Yussuf. We’ll see you on Saturday.”
“If Allah wills it, Saturday,” he repeated, pressing his palms together for a final bow before he left.
Joscelyn heard the back door squeak as he pushed out his prized, ancient English bike. Going to the window, she opened the Venetian blinds to watch the thin old man swerve past a wagon pulled by a camel and donkey on his way to Daralam. The road, or in Joscelyn’s mind, the two-lane, twenty-three-foot-wide wearing surface paved of hot-mix asphaltic concrete, was the first stretch of the job that had so disastrously separated Curt from Honora in the early months of their marriage.
Here, about three miles from town, an Ivory construction crew had assembled identical prefabs, and they stood like Monopoly houses, ten on either side of the road. Given the heat and the exorbitant price of water, it was hardly surprising that there were no attempts at a garden. The yellow weeds straggling below the clotheslines were the sole vegetation.
On the packed, sandy dirt by the Urquharts’ front door was a jumble of tricycles. Flexible Flyers and junior bikes with training wheels. Double U, as everyone called Ursula Urquhart, had invited her over. They were endless, these child-infested afternoons when the women smoked like chimneys and drank endless glasses of iced coffee sweetened with rum. (Although alcoholic beverages were illegal in Lalarhein, vast quantities were consumed by the Ivory people.) It would please Malcolm if she wended her way across the street to join the kaffeeklatch. He was perpetually riding her to get into the social swing.
The motivating thrust of Malcolm’s life being his search for mass approbation, he ached to have her, his wife, be the popularity kid. Loving him as helplessly as she did, Joscelyn wished she could live up to his expectations. She had, however, never possessed the knack of easy friendship—only at college and then at work did she find a measure of intellectual conviviality. In Lalarhein, trapped five days a week in the enclave with women and children, she felt herself shov
ed back into that proud, unhappy loneliness of her school days: she was convinced that the other women, hausfraus to the core, despised her as a stuck-up oddball for being an engineer and were hiding their scornful dislike because she was the Big Boss’s sister-in-law. (There was a measure of truth in Joscelyn’s evaluation but she underestimated the resentment engendered by her sharp, honest tongue.)
From this window she had a view of the camel-colored hills with their scattering of villas built by British officials in the early 1900s when Lalarhein had been a protectorate. Nowadays these houses were owned by the complex family network that was the local royalty. Lacking a hereditary monarchy, the country’s leadership shifted from one branch to the other, and at the moment Fuad’s older brother, Mohammed Abdulrahman, was Prime Minister.
Joscelyn stared rebelliously through the shimmering heat at the Urquharts’ house. If I go over there I’ll have to park my brains and put on a bogus smirk for the II’s. Reducing the women to “II,” or Ivory Idiot, relieved a smidge of her sense of rejection.
“Oh, screw it,” she muttered aloud, and went back to the couch to finish her letter to Langley.
* * *
Just before dusk, the Ivory cavalcade roared along the road. Outside the Peck’s house halted a large, shuddering truck with an elongated flatbed that was specifically designed to carry ninety-three-foot lengths of large-diameter pipe from the Gulf over the incredibly hot Q’ram. (On this job alone Curt had a fortune tied up in heavy equipment: besides several dozen of these pipe carriers, at the site were four enormous Allan Parsons heavy-duty ditching machines, twelve Sideboom tractors, backhoes, tow tractors, bulldozers, cleaning and priming machines, coating and wrapping machines, welding machines, compressors to test the lines, welding trucks and so on.)
Malcolm jumped down from the cab. “Thanks for the lift, Jake, old buddy.”
As soon as the front door was closed, he gave Joscelyn an enthusiastic, sweaty hug, and she felt a mindless happiness. It’s been a good week for him, she thought, spreading kisses along his jaw. When things went well, no nasty squalls rocked their weekend.
Too Much Too Soon Page 21
