Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

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  “She’s fine now, but she was fragile in those days, and the breakup with my dad tore her up.” Grant talked obliquely about his mother, Sharon. When she would lose a job, or lose another man, she would somehow dissolve, and when she was breaking down, he and Lee had to go live with her sister. Enough to make him shudder even now. “We gave them plenty of trouble. We gave the whole family trouble and finally we were just too much for Mom, so she brought us back here and dropped us off and went back to Yakima.”

  “Did she ever remarry?”

  “Oh yes, finally. She had another family too. I’ve got a half-brother and a half-sister in Yakima.” He shrugged and took off his glasses. “I don’t know them too well. By the time she remarried, Lee and I were too old to go back to her, and her husband didn’t want us anyway. I have a good relationship with Mom now. She’s happy, I think. She came to my graduation and she came to Lee’s wedding.

  But she still doesn’t deal too well with my dad.”

  “Your father seems to have that effect on women.”

  “Professionally, my father is in the construction business. Personally he’s destructive. I’m not like that, Sunny,” Grant said levelly, not taking his eyes from her.

  Sunny bent her head, blew on her tea and turned over a dog- eared little paperback on the table, surprised to find Antony and Cleopatra.

  “I wouldn’t have thought this your sort of reading. It doesn’t have anything to do with sailing.”

  “How do you think they got around the Mediterranean? But I didn’t buy it for that. I bought it after you said you’d played Cleopatra. I wanted to see if I could imagine you in the title role.”

  “I was too young. To play Cleopatra, you need some internal grit, some strength, suffering, some sense of loss and grandeur, to want something passionately and to be denied.” Sunny did not add that she could now play the role; such strength as she had grew out of suffering and a sense of impending loss.

  “A lass unparalleled,” Grant commented. “That’s what they said of Cleopatra.”

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  “She was dead by the time they said that.”

  Sunny asked him for an aspirin and he brought her two and a glass of water. Outside a couple of kids went down the dock, by the Pythagoras, singing. Then they passed, and only the marine radio murmured in the cabin.

  Grant sat back down across from her, his great hands dwarfing the cup he held. For all the time he had spent with Sunny this spring and summer, he could not, he had never dented the shell in which she wrapped herself. But this evening she had leaned into him, leaned against him and neither flinched nor resisted when he’d pulled her up close to his body and held her. And now she was back to flinching and resisting. “What did she die of?” Grant asked at last.

  “Suicide. I thought you read the play.”

  “I did. Twice. I didn’t mean Cleopatra. I meant your mother. A long time ago you told me she died, but you never said what she’d died of.”

  “An accident.”

  “Car accident?”

  “No—not really.” She fluttered the pages of the little book. “It wasn’t an accident. She got sick. Nothing very grand or interesting.

  Not a great life and not a great death. Just an exit. It was not I am dying, Egypt, dying. It was not heroic. It was a long time ago.”

  “Is that the hurt you’re still toting? There’s something. What is it?”

  “You’re mistaken.”

  “Tell me what mistake I keep making with you, Sunny, and I’ll quit. Honest, I will. I’ll quit, but tell me my mistake. I won’t even try anymore if you want, but tell me what I keep doing wrong.”

  Sunny brought her enormous blue eyes up to his gaze. “All I want,” she said carefully, “is to bring my daughter up, to make a life for my daughter. I don’t want to be distracted from that.”

  “By loving someone besides Brio? Let it go, Sunny. Whatever it is, let it go. From the minute I saw you, I could tell, I just knew 207

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  you were carrying around some loss or misfortune, something that has colored the way you look at the world.”

  “You want too much from me,” she bit back. “Please. Don’t ask too much of me.”

  “All I ask is that you look at me, see me for the man I am. I had no part in what my father did, ousting Bobby and you out of Celia’s place, any more than you were to blame for that snap-shot of me up on the wall. Our fathers were once in love with Celia Henry. They slept with Celia Henry. They lived with Celia Henry, in liaisons that felt like marriage, like family, at least to the kids. Then they broke up. The kids got scattered, pulled by their biological parents into new families or houses, or whatever. That’s what happened. It happens to lots of people. But I am not Andrew Hayes any more than you are Bobby Jerome. Just look at me for who I am. That’s all I ask. I don’t think it’s too much.”

  “I have to concentrate on Brio. I don’t have time for anything else.

  I don’t have time,” she insisted. Having spent the greater part of her love life scuttling about in the shallows with the tadpoles of the movie business (all of them eager to be frogs), Sunny knew what it was to be attracted to a man because of his power, his connections, his looks, for the sheer reflection of being seen with him. When she had outgrown all that and broke with Brio’s father, she was never sure what to put in its place. When she was diagnosed with cancer, nothing else mattered except treating the disease. When slowly she had emerged from that, she thought only of Brio, of Brio’s future.

  She was a one-breasted woman with a child to think of. She did not think of men. Did not want to, but in the past months, slowly Grant Hayes roused in her reluctant longing. He would not settle for an ornament. That much was clear. His very presence was demanding.

  Sunny hunched over. “Please. Just leave me alone.”

  “Alone? Why is it that men think it’s so heroic to be alone?” He quoted her ironically. “The unfettered life. Is that what you want?

  Gloriously alone?” He thought perhaps he’d gone too far. He thought she might cry. Short of an apology, there was nothing to say, and he knew if he tried, then she would cry and he would 208

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  feel like an oaf stomping on ground where he’d been told not to tread. So he murmured something about taking her home and rose, turned off the marine radio. With the loss of the weather—the chop of the sea, the wind from the northeast, the tides all over the Sound—the two of them seemed oddly abandoned, as though the Pythagoras rocked far out at sea and not here at the Massacre Marina where laughter echoed amongst the slips. “The car’s in the marina parking lot. I’ll wait for you on deck. Take your time.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Turn off the lights, OK?”

  “Yes.” After he left, she sat, looking around the cabin. She wished she had paid more attention to Nona York’s novels. There were sensations in those novels she could not identify or remember, but maybe—the thought struck her—maybe Nona’s exuberant tripe held some truth. Maybe there was in fact a moment that made you a whole person. Perhaps you could live your entire life just fine without that moment. But maybe you couldn’t. Maybe if you once complicated your life in that fashion, you looked always for some experience that would duplicate it, replicate that sense of life thickening, expanding. If you’d once had that—as Celia had with Henry—you believed it was possible forever. Sunny feared that whatever she did now—or failed to do, decided or decided against, accepted or refused—was and would be crucial. The fear, Sunny reminded herself as she turned out the lights, is worse than the feat.

  The feat could only jell into regret, but fear could become defeat.

  There was a difference. And besides, she told herself, to be brave at the same time you are afraid, well, that’s the true test of courage.

  She found him on the dock, kneeling in the dark, tightening the lines which secured the
Pythagoras. He offered to help her jump off the boat, and she took his hand, but once on the dock, she did not release him. Sunny lifted both arms, as though she might dance with him, and lifted her face to be kissed. And he kissed her tenderly, and then more urgently. He murmured her

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  name. He held her so close she could feel his heart pounding percussively in his chest.

  “I could disappoint you terribly,” she said.

  “I’ll take the risk. We’ll go just as fast or as slow as you want, Sunny. Just let me love you, will you? In your own fashion. In your own way.”

  “I have to tell you the truth, Grant.”

  “The truth can wait.”

  “No, it can’t.”

  “Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter to me. Honestly. Tell me later, Sunny. Give me, give us some time.”

  “I don’t have time. I can’t count on having time.” Silently Sunny took his hand in hers, brought his hardened palm softly to her lips and kissed it, and then slowly she laid his outstretched fingers across her cheek, as though on her cheek some message were written in Braille which he must and should discover. And like a blind man Grant closed his eyes, his dry lips wordless as Sunny led his hand down her throat, over her shoulder and the cold metal snaps of her overalls and lower, to the swell of her chest, holding his hand against there, letting his warmth penetrate through to her very flesh, down to her bones. She willed her own heat to warm him as he warmed her. Though flushed with desire, she nonetheless paused, pressed his hand more closely, held it there over her heart. “Don’t open your eyes,” she whispered, “just feel. Feel me, Grant. What’s missing?

  Can you feel what’s not there?”

  Grant’s hands caressed her, stroked over her ribs, over her back and then round again to where her left breast had once been. Then he did open his eyes. “Is your heart still there, Sunny? That’s all I care about. Did they surgically remove your heart?”

  She thought they had. She told him, later, in the milky dawn as they tangled, tossed in each other’s arms in the bed near the bow 210

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  of the Pythagoras, water lapping audibly underneath, the sailboat rocking gently with the love they made. Sunny had slept beside him, slept briefly but deeply, and when she woke she felt ripened, enriched, his arms around her, their voices low, they talked inconsequentially while dawn seeped in through the open windows along with the harbor smells and cries of the ceaselessly marauding gulls.

  And then, for a woman for whom candor was not her native element, Sunny did her best, pieced together for Grant, in a jigsaw fashion, how, for a long time, she thought they had removed her heart along with her left breast.

  Her mother had died of breast cancer when Sunny was nineteen, already living in L.A. and attending Santa Monica City College while she worked as a waitress, auditioning for every possible role, sharing an apartment with three other girls. She had got a call from Linda’s third husband, a man Sunny had never met. He called to say her mother was in a hospice, dying. “I went to Phoenix right away, of course, thinking she wanted to say goodbye, but there was more than that. She wanted to warn me, she wanted me to know her mother had died of this same terrible disease and it was a curse on the women of our family. Our family? I listened, and I comforted her as best I could, but I did not think of Linda as my family. It had been too long ago, and I was too young when she left. Besides, I was nineteen, and at that age you want to find out who you are, not who you’re hauling around in your chromosomes. Linda knew I didn’t feel related to her, so she kept insisting, I am your mother, I am your mother. I said yes, yes, but I didn’t believe it and she knew that. She kept holding my hand and saying, You are my daughter and I am dying of what may kill you. She was very bitter. It seemed really pathetic to me, to both of us, I think, that I should watch her die, though I had never really seen her live.” And some years later when they found a lump in Sunny’s breast, she felt first rage against Linda and, more heartbreaking, fear for Brio. “I was afraid Brio would only be able to watch me die, and never see me live.”

  “How old was Brio?”

  “Not yet three. I was allergic to something on the set and I 211

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  had these constant respiratory problems, went to the doctor and she’s running a stethoscope over me and she stops. She says, What’s this?”

  It all happened very fast after that, the doctors, tests, hospital, surgery, shunts for draining, therapies, medications, chemo. Sunny felt like a prisoner of her own body, but she had kept her own counsel, telling no one, not Bobby, not Bethie, not Victoria. “At first I couldn’t tell them because it was just too awful to say, and I knew once I said it, I could never take it back and my family would be all over me. If the doctor had told me I was going to die, I would have called my father and my sisters, but he didn’t say that. He said I needed surgery immediately. My friends in L.A., they were great, very supportive. The producer was great; he kept me on the payroll for the benefits even when I couldn’t work. That surprised me. Then after the chemo was over, and that went on forever, the doctor told me, five years. If I took my meds, had tests every three months for a while, if there were no recurrence in five years, I had a chance at a normal life span. But I know—I know from Linda, from watching her die—that this disease, it isn’t something that can be cured. It’s something I carry. Like a death threat. After I faced that, the likeli-hood of death, there was only one question: if I die, what will happen to my daughter?”

  The answers were inadequate. In L.A. Sunny had loyal friends, but they were young people like herself, who had their own lives and their own careers; supportive as they had been, they were not people to whom she could entrust Brio. While Sunny was sick and hospitalized, the Hernandez clan next door had taken Brio in, but that was an act of casual generosity on their part, and not an answer to the question. Brio’s father? His wife tolerated his infidelities in exchange for her own securities and those of her children, but she would never have welcomed his orphaned illegitimate daughter.

  “And I suppose if I made no other arrangements, that’s where the law would send Brio. He was her legal father. Can you imagine anything worse for a little girl?”

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  “Losing your mother is terrible, no matter how it happens. You already knew that.”

  “At least I was nineteen. I wasn’t at the mercy of others. Brio is a little child. I fretted and wept and stayed awake nights, afraid for my daughter. Who would love Brio like I wanted her loved? Bobby and Janice? Never. Not Bethie, she’s too footloose and, well, unfettered. Victoria’s too rigid to deal with a little girl. Who was there?

  One name came back to me. The same name. Celia.”

  “That’s why you came back to Isadora.”

  “Yes. It was all just that calculated. I only told her a few months ago, and no one else knows. She promised she’d raise Brio for me, love Brio. We went to Ellerman’s office and drew it all up. I know now I could die, if it came to that, and not fear for Brio.”

  He wrapped his arms more closely around her. “Don’t talk of dying, Sunny.”

  “It doesn’t bother me anymore. I’m used to it. I can say it without buckling under the prospects. That’s the difference between you and me, between me and everyone else my age, they don’t think about dying and I do. They count on their lovely good health and when that health fails them, they’re betrayed and anxious and angry.

  My body has failed me so many times and in so many ways, I have accepted it finally. I’ve lost a breast. You saw the cesarean scar—”

  “I love the cesarean scar.” He laid his hand across her belly and his lips moved against her cheek. “Don’t talk of dying, because—five years or fifty—what really matters is what you do with your years.

  From that first night in March when I met you, I was dumbfounded.

  I couldn’t believe you were the same girl who’d sometimes sh
owed up here on weekends. You were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. And you hated me.”

  “I didn’t hate you.”

  “You did. Admit it.” He nudged her affectionately. “I about gave up altogether on making you like me, or even notice me till you told me about the bottles of Eau de Soleil. Then I understood. I’d drunk Eau de Soleil as a boy, so of course as a man, I 213

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  would have to fall in love with you. It was the fault of Eau de Soleil.

  That’s why, even when I saw you that first night and you looked so tired and undone, I could feel my old life breaking up. It was the oddest sensation, like running the Pythagoras aground on Assumption. The life I’d had, oh you know, a few beers after work, my friends, my brother, building kites, restoring the boat on weekends, fishing in season, a date or a party now and then, all the unfettered life, you might say, I knew that it would never again be that satisfying. Without you, nothing would be satisfying.”

  She brought her lips to the slight bony indentation on his chest and kissed him there, and put her cheek against him, thinking oddly of Nona York’s novels of romantic sensation. Sensation Sunny still had no words for. And maybe she would not have enough time to find those words. She had this moment for certain. It could not last forever, nor be preserved in the sticky amber of sex, but perhaps it could contribute to some larger design. They had a shared, though not contiguous, past, and so perhaps she and Grant could angle out to a hypothetical future, balance their geometric relationship to create some sturdy whole, as though the theorems of Pythagoras could be understood, applied to the old uncertainties of flesh, never minding the transmigration of souls.

  The rest of July must have suited the English roses. Presumably they have a genetic affinity to summers cowled with clouds and slivered by rain. And perhaps these English days affected the Pythagoras, because there was no more talk of taking it to Central America. The sailboat was outfitted now for picnics with Sunny and Brio, and went all the way to Assumption Island, where the three bundled against the damp, climbed the rocks and barked back at the seals.