Where I Live Now

by Lucia Berlin

  They went out for almost two months before they did You Know What. This event was going to occur in Big Sur, on a three-day trip. What to tell Ephraim?

  “Oh, that’s easy,” I said. “You and I will go to a Zen retreat. No phones! Nothing to tell because we’re just going to be silent and meditate. We’ll sit in the hot springs under the stars. In the lotus position on cliffs overlooking the ocean. Endless waves. Endless.”

  It was annoying not to be able to go out freely those days, to screen my phone calls. But it worked. Ephraim took the children out to dinner, fed the cats, watered the plants and missed her. Very very much.

  On the Monday after the trip there were three big bouquets of roses in the office. One card said, “To my cherished wife with love.” Another was from “Your secret admirer,” and one card said, “She Walks in Beauty.” Ruth confessed that she had sent that last one to herself. She adored roses. She had hinted to both men that she loved roses, but never dreamt they’d actually send any.

  “Get rid of the funeral arrangements right now,” Dr. B. said, on his way to the hospital. Earlier he had asked me again to fire her and again I had refused. Why did he dislike her so?

  “I told you. She’s too cheerful.”

  “I usually feel the same way about cheerful people. But hers is genuine.”

  “Christ. That’s really depressing.”

  “Please, give her a chance. Anyway, I have a feeling she’s going to be miserable soon.”

  “I hope so.”

  Ephraim stopped by to take Ruth to coffee. She had done nothing all morning, had been on the phone to Hannah. I could tell the main reason he had come was to see how she liked the roses. He was very upset about the other ones. She told him one was from a patient called Anna Fedaz, but then just giggled about the secret admirer. Poor guy. I watched jealousy hit him smack in the face, in the heart. Left hook to the gut.

  He asked me how I had liked the retreat. I hate to lie, really can’t stand lying. Not for moral reasons. It’s so hard, figuring it out. Remembering what you have said.

  “Well, it was a lovely place. Ruth is very serene and seemed to adapt perfectly to the atmosphere there. I find it hard to meditate. I just worry, or go back over every mistake I ever made in my whole life. But it was, er, centering. Serene. You and Ruth run along now. Have a nice lunch!”

  Later I got the scoop. Big Sur had been the adventure of Ruth’s life. She knew she wouldn’t be able to tell the M.P.s about doing You Know What. Oral S. for the first time! Well, yes, she had done Oral S. to Ephraim, but never had it done to her. “And M A R…I know it has a ‘J’ in it somewhere.”

  “Marijuana?”

  “Hush! Well, mostly it made me cough and get nervous. Yes, that was very nice, Oral S. But the way he kept asking, ‘Are you ready?’ made me imagine we were going somewhere and ruined the mood.”

  They were going to Mendocino in two weeks. The story was that she and I were going to a writers’ workshop and book fair in Petaluma. Robert Haas was to be the writer-in-residence.

  One night in the middle of the week, she called and asked if she could come over. Like a fool I expected her, didn’t understand that it was a cover, that she had gone to meet Julius. So when Ephraim phoned I could honestly sound cross because she still hadn’t arrived, was even crosser the next time. “I’ll have her call you the minute she gets here.” After a while he called again, this time furious because she was home now and said I had not given her the message.

  The next day I told her I wouldn’t do this for her anymore. She said that was fine, that they were starting play practice on Monday.

  “You and I are in a flower-arranging class on Fridays, at Laney. That’s it.”

  “Well, that’s the last one. You’ve been so lucky he hasn’t asked any specifics.”

  “Of course he wouldn’t. He trusts me. But my conscience is clear now. Julius and I don’t do You Know What anymore.”

  “Then what do you do? Why go to all this secrecy and trouble to not do You Know What?”

  “We found out that neither one of us is a swinger type. I like You Know What with Ephraim much more, and Julius isn’t that interested. I like the sneaking around part. He likes buying me presents and cooking for me. My favorite thing is to knock on a motel door in Richmond or somewhere and then he opens the door and I rush in. My heart beating away.”

  “So what do you do then?”

  “We play Trivial Pursuit, watch videos. Sometimes we sing. Duets, like ‘Bali Hai’ or ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.’ We go for midnight walks in the rain!”

  “Walk in the rain on your own time!” Dr. B. shouted. We hadn’t noticed him come in.

  He was serious. He stood there while she packed up all her Bon Appetit magazines and Trivial Pursuit cards and her knitting. He told me to write her a check for two weeks pay, plus what we owed her.

  After Dr. B. left she called Julius, told him to meet her at Denny’s right away.

  “My career is ruined!” she sobbed.

  She hugged me goodbye and left. I moved out to her desk, where I could see the waiting room.

  Ephraim came in the door. He walked slowly toward me and shook my hand. “Lily,” he said, in his deep enveloping voice. He told me that Ruth was supposed to have met him at the Pill Hill Café for lunch, but she never showed up. I told him that Dr. B. had fired her, for no reason. She probably had completely forgotten lunch, had gone home. Or shopping, maybe.

  Ephraim continued to stand there.

  “She can find much better jobs. I’m the office manager, and of course I’ll give her a good recommendation. I’ll really miss her.”

  He stood there, looking at me.

  “And she will miss you.” He leaned in the little window above my desk.

  “This is for the best, my dear. I want you to know that I understand. Believe me, I feel for you.”

  “What?”

  “There are many things I don’t share with her as you do. Literature, Buddhism, the opera. Ruth is a very easy woman to love.”

  “What are you saying?”

  He held my hand then, looked deep into my eyes as his soft brown ones filled with tears.

  “I miss my wife. Please, Lily. Let her go.”

  Tears began to slide down my cheeks. I felt really sad. Our hands were a warm wet little pile on the ledge.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Ruth loves only you, Ephraim.”

  The Wives

  Anytime Laura thought about Decca, she saw her as if in a stage set. She had met Decca when she and Max were still married, many years before Laura married him. The house on High Street, in Albuquerque. Beau had taken her. Through the wide-open door into a kitchen with dirty pots and pans, dishes and cats, open jars, plates of runny fudge, uncapped bottles, cartons of takeout Chinese, through a bedroom, bumping into piles of clothes, shoes, stacks of magazines and newspapers, mesh sweater dryers, tires. Dimly lit center stage a bay window with frayed saffron nicotine-stained shades. Decca and Max sat in leather chairs, facing a miniature TV on a stool. The table between them held an enormous ashtray full of cigarette butts, a magazine with a knife and a pile of marijuana, a bottle of rum and Decca’s glass. Max wore a black velour bathrobe, Decca a red silk kimono, her dark hair loose and long. They were stunning to look at. Stunning. Their presence hit you physically, like a blow.

  Decca didn’t speak but Max did. His thick-lashed heavy-lidded stoned dark eyes looked deep into Laura’s. He rasped, “Hey, Beau, what’s happening?” Laura couldn’t remember anything after that. Maybe Beau asked to borrow the car or some money. He was staying with them, on his way to New York. Beau was a saxophone player she had met by chance, walking her baby in his stroller on Elm Street.

  Decca. How come aristocratic Englishwomen and upper class American women all have names like Pookie and Muffin? Have they kept the names their nannies called them? There is a news reporter on NBC called Cokie. No way is Cokie from a nice family in Ohio. She is from a fine old wealthy fa
mily. Philadelphia? Virginia? Decca was a B—, one of the best Boston families. She had been a debutante, studied at Wellesley, was partly disinherited when she eloped with Max, who was Jewish. Years later, Laura too had been disinherited when her family heard of her own elopement with Max, but they relented when they realized how wealthy he was.

  Decca called around eleven that night. Laura’s sons were asleep. She left them a note and Decca’s number in case one of them woke up, said she’d be back soon.

  The reason it always seems like a stage set, she told herself, is because Decca never locks her doors and never gets up to answer the doorbell or a knock. So you just go in and find her in situ, stage right, in a dim light. At some point, before she sat down and started drinking, she had lit a piñon fire, candles in niches and kerosene lanterns whose soft lights catch now in her cascading silken hair. She wears an elaborately embroidered green kimono over a still lovely body. Only close up can you see that she is over forty, that drink has made her skin puffy, her eyes red.

  It is a large room in an old adobe house. The fire reflects in the red tile floor. On the white walls are Howard Schleeter paintings, a Diebenkorn, a Franz Kline, some fine old carved Santos. Underwear dangles from a John Chamberlain sculpture. Over the baby’s crib in a corner hangs a real Calder mobile. If you looked you could see fine Santo Domingo and Acoma pots. Old Navajo rugs are hidden beneath stacks of Nations, New Republics, I.F. Stone Newsletters, New York Times, Le Monde, Art News, Mad Magazines, pizza cartons, Baca’s takeout cartons. The mink-covered bed is piled with clothes, toys, diapers, cats. Empty straw-covered jugs of Bacardi lie on their sides around the room, occasionally spinning when cats bat at them. A row of full jugs stands next to Decca’s chair, another by the bed.

  Decca was the only female alcoholic Laura knew that didn’t hide her liquor. Laura didn’t admit to herself yet that she drank, but she hid her bottles. So her sons wouldn’t pour them out, so she wouldn’t see them, face them.

  If Decca was always set on stage, in that great chair, her hair in the lamplight shining, Laura was particularly good at entrances. She stands, elegant and casual in the doorway, wearing a floor-length Italian suede coat, in profile as she surveys the room. She is in her early thirties, her prettiness deceptively fresh and young.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Decca says.

  “You called me. Three times, actually. Come quick, you said.”

  “”I did?” Decca pours some more rum. She feels around under her chair and comes up with another glass, wipes it out with her kimono.

  “I called you?” She pours a big drink for Laura, who sits in a chair on the other side of the table. Laura lights one of Decca’s Delicados, coughs, takes a drink.

  “I know it was you, Decca. Nobody else calls me ‘Bucket Butt’ or ‘Fat-assed sap.’”

  “Must have been me,” Decca laughs.

  “You said to come right away. That it was urgent.”

  “How come you took so long then? Christ, I’m operating in total blackout now. You still on the sauce? Well, yeah, that’s obvious.”

  She pours them both more rum. Each of them drinks. Decca laughs.

  “Well, you learned how to drink, anyway. I remember when you two were first married. I offered you a martini and you said, ‘No thanks. Alcohol gives me vertigo.’”

  “It still does.”

  “Weird how both his wives ended up lushes.”

  “Weirder still we didn’t end up junkies.”

  “I did,” Decca says. “For six months. I got into drinking trying to get off of heroin.”

  “Did using make you closer to him?”

  “No. But it made me not care.” Decca reaches over to an elaborate stereo system, changes the Coltrane tape to Miles Davis. Kind of Blue. “So our Max is in jail. Max won’t handle jail in Mexico.”

  “I know. He likes his pillowcases ironed.”

  “God, you’re a ditz. Is that your assessment of the situation?”

  “Yeah. I mean if he’s like that about pillowcases, imagine how hard everything else will be. Anyway, I came to tell you that Art is taking care of it. He’s sending down money to get him out.”

  Decca groans. “Christ, it’s all coming back to me. Guess how the money is getting there? With Camille! Beau was on the plane with her to Mexico City. He called me from the airport. That’s why I called you. Max is going to marry Camille!”

  “Oh, dear.”

  Decca pours them both more rum.

  “Oh, dear? You’re so lady-like it makes me sick. You’ll probably send them crystal. You’re smoking two cigarettes.”

  “You sent us crystal. Baccarat glasses.”

  “I did? Must have been a joke. Anyway, Camille told Max they’re going to Acapulco for their honeymoon. Just like you did.”

  “Acapulco?” Laura stands up, takes off her coat and throws it on the bed. Two cats jump off. Laura is wearing black silk pajamas and slippers. She is weaving, either from emotion or so much rum. She sits.

  “Acapulco?” She says this sadly.

  “I knew that would get you. Probably to the same suite at the Mirador. The scent of bougainvillea and hibiscus wafting into their room.”

  “Those flowers don’t smell. Nardos would be wafting.” Laura holds her head in her hands, thinking.

  “Stripes. Stripes from the sun through the wooden shutters.”

  Decca laughs, opens a new jug of rum and pours.

  “No, Mirador is too quiet and old for Camille. He’ll take her to some jive beach motel with a bar in the swimming pool, the stools underwater, umbrellas in the coconut drink. They’ll drive around town in a pink jeep with fringe on it. Admit it, Laura. This pisses you off. A dumb file clerk. Tawdry little tart!”

  “Come on, Decca. She’s not so bad. She’s young. The same age as each of us were when we married him. She’s not exactly dumb.”

  This fool is genuinely kind, Decca thought. She must have been so kind to him.

  “Camille is dumb. God, but so were you. I knew you loved him, though, and would give him sons. They are beautiful, Laura.”

  “Aren’t they?”

  I am dumb, Laura thought, and Decca is brilliant. He must have missed Decca a lot.

  “I wanted a baby so badly,” Decca says. “We tried for years. Years. And fought over it, because I was so obsessed, each of us blaming the other. I could have killed that ob/gyn Rita when she had his baby.”

  “You know she researched all over town and picked him. She didn’t want a lover, just a baby. Sappho. What a name, no?”

  “Weird. Weirder is years after we’re divorced and I’m forty years old, I get pregnant. One night, one damn night, no maybe ten blooming minutes in mosquito-infested San Blas I fuck an Australian plumber. Bingo.”

  “Is that why you named your baby Melbourne? Poor kid. Why not Perth? Perth is pretty.” Unsteadily, Laura gets up and goes to look at the child. She smiles and covers him.

  “He’s so big. Wonderful ginger hair. How is he doing?”

  “He’s great. He’s a pretty damn great kid. Starting to talk.”

  Decca stands, stumbles slightly as she crosses the room to check on the child and then goes to the bathroom. Laura finishes her drink, starts to stand and go home.

  “I’ll be going now,” she says to Decca when she comes back.

  “Sit down. Have another drink.” She pours. They are drinking from ludicrously small tea cups considering how often they are refilled.

  “You don’t seem to grasp the seriousness of this situation. Now, I’m fine, set for life. I got a huge divorce settlement plus I have family money. What about any inheritance for your children? This woman will wipe him out. You were a fool not to get child support. Blithering fool.”

  “Yeah. I thought I could support us. I had never had a job before. His habit was eight hundred dollars a day and he was always wrecking cars. So I just got money for their college funds. You want to know the honest truth? I didn’t think he could possibly live much
longer.”

  Decca laughs, slapping her knee. “I knew you didn’t! What’s her name, she didn’t wany any child support either. Old lawyer Trebb called me after your divorce came through. He wanted to know why it was that all three of us women had gigantic life insurance policies from Max.”

  Decca sighs, lights up a fat joint that had been lying on the table. It sputters and crackles; little flames make three big holes in her lovely kimono. One right in the middle of the Italy-shaped rum stain. She beats on them, coughing, until the fires are out, passes the joint to Laura. When Laura inhales, she too creates a little shower of sparks that burn holes in her silk top.

  “At least he taught me how to de-seed weed,” she says, talking funny through the smoke.

  “So,” Decca continues. “he’ll be clean when he gets out. Alive and well in Acapulco. I gave him the best years of my life and now look. He’s alive and well in Acapulco with a car-hop.” Decca’s speech is slurred now, her nose running as she wails, “The best years of my life!”

  “Hell, Decca, I gave him the worst years of my life!”

  The two women find this hysterically funny, slap at each other, hold their sides, stomp their feet and knock over the ashtray, laughing so hard. Laura starts to take a drink but spills it down the front of her pajamas.

  “Seriously, Decca,” Laura says. “This may be a really good thing. I hope they’re happy. He can show her the world. She will adore him, take care of him.”

  “Take him to the cleaners. Is she a floozy or what? Tacky car-hop.”

  “You’re dating yourself. She’s more of a Clinique salesgirl, I’d say. You know she was once Miss Redondo Beach?”

  “You have style, B.B. A subtle, lady-like bitch. You’ll act simply delighted for the nuptial pair. Probably throw rice at them. So tell me now, how does it really feel, thinking of them in Acapulco? Imagine. Sunset now. The sun is making a green dot and vanishing. ‘Cuando Calienta el Sol’ is playing. Lots of throbbing saxophone, maracas. No, the music is playing. ‘Piel Canela’ now but they’re still in bed. She’s asleep, tired after sun and water-skiing. Steamy sweaty sex. He lies full against her back. He grazes the back of her neck with his lips, leans, chews on her ear, breathing.”