Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  This warm May afternoon was the island’s prize for having endured a sulky April. And not until a thin cloud veiled the sky, casting an imperceptible chill, did Sunny wake up with a start, surprised to see Grant Hayes. She hoped she had not snored. Collecting herself with some difficulty, she inquired what had brought him to Henry’s House and how long he’d been there.

  “About fifteen minutes. Ask Brio.”

  “Brio can’t tell time.”

  “All the better.”

  Sunny fluffed her short hair which had grown out a bit in the last few months and now seemed to her uncomfortably long.

  Grant chatted about Launch and the timbers that needed lifting for the kitchen garden, one more thing that needed to be ready for the Joie de Vivre! editor whose arrival on Wednesday 151

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  was the current focal point of all Useless activity. He did not say that none of this had brought him round to the front of the house, or mandated the clean, neat clothes. He did not say that Sunny Jerome was the most elusive and interesting woman he had ever met. Warm, but not always approachable, Sunny carried before her some bright independence, like a candle, or a sword for that matter.

  Having heard her joke once about trying out for Joan of Arc, Grant thought perhaps that wasn’t such a bad analogy. She rather reminded him of Joan of Arc. Even thinking in terms of analogies was new for Grant. By nature and training he thought in geometric terms, and his experience with women had, for the most part, been with women who were themselves of a geometric turn of mind. They geometric-ally took the shortest distance between any two points. Say, between the front door and the bedroom. They were not aggressive, the women he was accustomed to, but efficient. They liked to get the sex out of the way, so as to arrive more quickly at the essential questions, like, if they liked him. They believed and said plainly that if you got the sexual tension relieved, you could decide if you liked the guy, your vision unclouded by anticipation. Grant always agreed this made sense. Oh, eminently sensible, but not altogether fulfilling—a word he was reluctant to use because he was never quite sure what he meant since it could not be described with axioms. And as opposed to the geometric women he was used to, Sunny Jerome seemed an enigmatic spiral.

  They sat together on the grass and watched as Brio delighted herself, rolling downhill, coming to a stop at the edge of the lawn where dandelions shone, golden buttons in the shadows cast by lavender rhododendrons. She stood up and waved at them.

  Between Assumption and Useless, a single sailboat came into view, struggling with the stiff currents and unruly wind. Sunny lay back down, arm draped over her forehead, but Grant watched with interest, admiring the way the sailor tacked. “I still think Pythagoras could beat him though.”

  “Why do men always think of competition first?” Sunny asked.

  “And who was Pythagoras?”

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  “One of those old Greeks, the father of geometry, but he’s also supposed to have come up with the notion of the transmigration of souls. A Renaissance man. Before the Renaissance.”

  “Tell me about Pythagoras,” said Sunny, pleased just to lie there and feel the wind and hear his voice. “The boat—not the transmigration of souls.”

  “Fifty years old, all wood,” he said, relaxing into one of his favorite subjects, going on with the technical descriptions, till he thought her even breathing suggested she had gone back to sleep. “The last owner let it go to hell, so I got it cheap. But it was a mess. I’m restoring it while I live on it. A sailboat is the only kind of boat to have. It tests everything you’ve got, your strength, your savvy, your coordination, your senses, everything. I don’t have any use for the other kind of boats, those big powerboats like the Robbinses’

  Strumpet, that’s nothing but an RV on water. A bus. But a sailboat—well, that’s a combination of art and science and nature. People have been using the same principles to sail for thousands of years, maybe millions. Think about it. Think about the first man who stood on a beach or a high cliff and saw a place far away, a distant shore he wanted to get to. Wind and water. Boats and kites. I love the way they use the wind. It’s, well, poetic.” He flinched slightly at the word.

  “Shakespeare thought so too.” Sunny sat up. “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold, purple the sails and so perfumed”—she opened her arms up wide—“the winds were lovesick with them.” She laughed. “Antony and Cleopatra. I played Cleopatra once. You know, the great lines, I am dying, Egypt, dying. That’s all anyone remembers.”

  Grant did not remember, would not have known I am dying, Egypt, dying from the menu at Little Caesar’s Pizza. “When were you Cleopatra?”

  “A gala theatrical experience at Santa Monica City College.” She lay back down. “I’m done with acting, though, and I’m certainly finished with roles where women kill themselves for love. In books and plays, love motivates everything. Greed and revenge are only close seconds.”

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  “And in life?”

  She regarded him critically. “You’re an odd sort of engineer.”

  “I’m not an engineer. I have the degree and I could have had the job. Fat salary. Benefits. Vacation. 401K plan. The whole American dream, tied up in a great big bow, handed to me right out of college, the rest of my life laid out like the white line on Route 5. That’s what was wrong with it.” Boeing had offered a similar job to his girlfriend.

  They had been living together their senior year in Pullman, and her idea of the glorious future, the possibilities in life, was to move to Seattle, get an apartment, start their jobs with Boeing and work there forever. “I’d been jumping through hoops for years, taking courses required of me, turning in assigned work, all that. Why would I want to graduate and keep on doing the same thing? Different hoops, that’s all. I didn’t want to spend my life, my energy, fretting over some little kink that eighty other engineers were fretting over too.

  So, I just declined the job—and the girl who wanted me to take the job,” he added obliquely, “and I came back here to Isadora. I knew I could always work for my dad. Lee was here. I could have a sailboat here. And besides, I had this idea for a path through Celia’s orchard, connecting her place to Henry’s.” He laughed ruefully. “So look at me, I could be wearing a tie, bent over a computer, or selling something to the unsuspecting. As it is, I’m sitting here on this lawn with you and we’re watching the crazy currents between Useless and Assumption.”

  “And you get to live on a sailboat.” Sunny sat up and stretched.

  “Once Pythagoras is seaworthy I’m going to sail her all the way down the west coast to Baja. To Costa Rica maybe. I hear it’s great down there. That’s the real challenge for any sailor, to do it solo.”

  “Only men think it’s so romantic to go it alone. Look at you—you’re off with your boat—you and no other. Man against the sea! Why do men think you can only be a hero by yourself? Man against Nature! Man against Society! Why don’t men ever acknowledge that keeping something together can be just as he-154

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  roic as being all alone? Men are always against something. Why can’t they be for something?”

  Grant seemed to ponder this. “What are you for? World peace?

  An end to hunger? Human brotherhood?”

  “I’m not committed to universals.” She drew her knees up close and wrapped her arms around them. “I’m for very modest, particular things. An ordinary life. Watching my daughter grow up. Making a home for us. A living. Nothing very grand or ambitious.”

  “To be without ambition doesn’t sound like you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re The Talented One, aren’t you?”

  Only the wind rustled between them, carrying Brio’s bright voice, and off-shore, the seals barked in response. “Talent isn’t enough.

  Talent by itself is a poor thing, li
ke a seed with no dirt or water to make it grow. If it’s going to flower, then you need more than a seed, more than just talent. You need a kind of grit and willingness to sacrifice. I’m not like that. Linda—my mother—was like that.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She died.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Sunny shrugged. “It was a long time ago and I didn’t know her very well anyway. She left us when I was little, went to Denver to pursue her art. She had lots of talent, fancied herself an artist, like Bobby fancied himself a composer. They were bound to break up sometime. All marriages do, I suppose. Although I think Janice and Bobby will probably last. If you can accept chronic pain, you can accept anything.”

  “Bobby is still a composer.”

  “He writes songs. And he loves music,” she said affectionately.

  “He’s a fine musician and his students love him, but he never took on the world and he never will. Linda took on the world. But to do that she had to leave us. Since Brio was born, I’ve kept wishing I could ask Linda, How could you do that? How could you leave me, your daughter? I could never leave Brio. Just walk 155

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  away from her? I moved back here because I couldn’t live con brio, because they were eating up my life in L.A. My little daughter stayed with the neighbors and I only saw her in the morning when we were rushed, and in the evening when we were tired. Even when I wasn’t off on location, there was always someone on the phone needing me. There was always some crisis or another, something that couldn’t wait. The stress was intolerable finally, and I thought, This is the only life I have, the only life I’ll ever get and I’m giving it away to people who don’t really matter to me at all, who flatter me by saying, Oh, Sunny, you’re the only one who can do this or that, fix this, or answer that question. Really? And if I died tomorrow? Wouldn’t someone step in and fill that void? Of course they would. My daughter will not grow up without me. Not if I can help it. I don’t understand how my mother could leave me. Giving up your family, your child, to pursue your art? Maybe it makes a difference to the rest of the world if you turn out to be Picasso, but it doesn’t help the family, does it?” She scoffed lightly, “Whenever my dad wants to explain their youthful aberrations, he gets misty and says, Oh, it was the sixties, like that should explain everything.”

  “My grandmother would excuse crazy things she’d done saying: Oh, it was the War.”

  “Exactly. Too bad for us, huh? What can we say? Oh, it was the nineties?”

  Grant chewed on a dandelion stem. “Why would anyone go to Denver? I mean, for art?”

  “Who knows? When I was little I used to picture Linda pursuing her art and all I could see was this lovely woman, arms outstretched, chasing after a paintbrush or a palate or something she couldn’t quite touch, calling out, Wait! Stop! Wait for me!”

  “Did she catch it?”

  “I know almost nothing about her life. Denver, Taos, Tempe, Phoenix, she would always send me hand-painted postcards and packages. They always had a sun on them, a great big sun with shining rays and the address in the center. So I knew they were for me. That’s my real name, Soleil, French for sun, or sunshine, 156

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  a lovely conceit, I guess. Bethie and Victoria, their real names are Harmony and Clarity.”

  Grant laughed. “Hard to imagine, isn’t it? What was in the packages your mom sent?”

  “Decorative vials from all these hot, sunny places with bright-colored water, each one with a hand-lettered label, Eau de Soleil.

  French, for Sunny’s cologne, something like that.”

  Grant nodded, as though secretly pleased or amused. “What did they smell like?”

  “Paint. They had that wisp or whisper of paint, or maybe food coloring. They didn’t really smell, but they were always lovely colors and beautiful little bottles, corked or capped. Eau de Soleil. I used to line the bottles up on windowsills so they would catch the light.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Lost. Bobby and I moved around a lot for a while. I probably left some at Celia’s.”

  “You did,” Grant said after a time, and with a suppressed laugh.

  “When Lee and I moved in with Dad and Celia, Bethie and Victoria had to double up so Lee and I could have a room. And I found some of these little bottles in a shoe box in the closet.”

  “It must have been my old room. The one Dorothy’s in now?”

  “Yes. I found a box of them on the floor of the closet, Eau de Soleil.

  Well, I didn’t know what the hell that meant, but they looked inviting.”

  “Inviting?”

  “I drank them.”

  They both burst out laughing, so much so that Brio, hearing their voices, looked up from where she had been pelting Baby Herman with the torn-off heads of dandelions and she raced back up the hill.

  “I drank them and I kept waiting for something magical to happen.”

  “Did it?”

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  “Well, I threw up once.”

  The alchemy of the moment worked its magic on Sunny—the happy child running up the lawn, this sun-drenched lawn, the un-ruffled Sound in the distance, the barking of the seals and even the man beside her. Part of Grant’s appeal, she decided, was his own contentment; people whose lives are fundamentally satisfying are always attractive. They suggest about themselves a sort of leisure and generosity that hungry, driven, dissatisfied people can’t fake or emulate. Was that the difference between Grant Hayes and all the other men she had known? Even if he was off to Baja sailing solo, his life was not bifurcated like the men in L.A. who were all writers/directors, actors/models, waiters/producers. Grant seemed all of one piece, though the scholarly glasses were at odds with his calloused hands. She thought he must look like his mother, the woman who had abandoned him and his twin brother, just as Sunny had been abandoned, the lot of them raveled back together by Celia Henry. They were alumni of the Unfettered School.

  She touched his hand, turning it so she could see his watch. “I’ve been here too long. I have to go up to the house. I’m expecting a delivery and I have to make sure everything’s there. Celia always just signed her receipts without counting anything. Then, if she finds she’s short, she’d have to go back through the whole order to find out where it had gone wrong. It was always too much trouble. She lost money.”

  “Maybe so, but she’s doing all right by this place.”

  “She overcharges.” Sunny called out to Brio, insisting she leave the dandelions in peace. “I don’t know why she agreed to this Joie de Vivre! thing. Prestige, I guess. I’ll be glad when it’s over. Celia’s been quarreling with them ever since she agreed to do it, grumbling.

  Endless upheavals with Diane. That’s the editor.”

  “Celia doesn’t like people telling her what to do.”

  “Diane made her submit her guest list and then complained about it. Joie de Vivre! insists on couples. You should have heard Celia. She was in a cursing froth, telling Diane that it was a party, 158

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  not goddamned Noah’s Ark where we all had to get on two by two.

  That’s why you got invited,” she informed him crisply. “So there’ll be an even number of men and women. It’ll be Russell and Celia, Dorothy and Ned, Victoria and Eric, and Bethie and Wade. Then, after all that, when Diane heard Nona York lived on this island, suddenly she didn’t care about couples anymore. Diane went into a swoon, and told Celia how much Nona would enhance the shoot and how the whole world reads her books.”

  “Really? What whole world reads Nona?”

  “The whole world that buys their literature at the checkout counter with batteries and disposable razors and chewing gum. Have you ever read one of her books?” Grant had not. “They’re very instructive if you’re ten or twelve.”

  “You mean like what-goes-where?”

  “What-goes-wh
ere! That will never appear in a Nona York novel.

  It’s all described in terms of sensation. The breathlessness of it is so convincing that when you close up one of her novels, you are certain you will never be a whole person until someone loves you just like that. The kissing is rapture and the sex is so exquisite that you ache.

  It’s silly.”

  “It doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “It isn’t if you’re ten. But for an adult?”

  Grant thought of the women he’d known best, of their sexual directness and ungarnished candor. They were athletic women, full of endurance and strength, and the bed always seemed a sort of diving board from which they could spring and exhibit their form.

  “Maybe people read Nona York’s books because even though they know what-goes-where, they can’t describe the sensation. They need the words. Maybe there is an experience where you do feel whole, but most people can’t express it.”

  Sunny rolled her eyes. “This is the nineties, Grant.”

  “Not for long. Pretty soon it will be something else. Something entirely new. The turn of the century.”

  “You’ll be sailing solo to Baja by then.” She stood, shook out Brio’s little jacket, and smoothed her hair. “See you later.”

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  finish with Launch, you want to go to Sophia’s Beach? You and Brio.

  Ride on the swing? Ice cream afterwards?”

  “I can’t,” Sunny said firmly.