Better Luck Next Time

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  Now, I am not a fan of motorcycles. “Murdercycles” would be a better name for them. Can I tell you, entre nous, what we in the emergency room used to call people who rode motorcycles? “Organ donors.” I would no more let a child of mine ride one than I would a hoot owl. I guess it’s just as well I never had any offspring of my own.

  Oh, sure, there was a time when, like most young men, I found the idea of riding a motorcycle thrilling. You know what cured me of that? Being in a motorcycle crash. It happened during the war. Every moment of our lives seemed so dangerous then that things that should have scared us simply didn’t. I got a concussion, dislocated a shoulder, hurt my back. I’m convinced that old wound is why I have to use this blasted walker to get around today. Arthritis, exacerbated by a history of injury. If I’d never straddled that cursed machine I might still be actively practicing medicine. Oh, well. Like they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty.

  On the upside, the French nurse who took care of me was a darling, capable of joking around in both French and English, and absolutely unflappable. When bombs fell close enough to the hospital to make the bedpans rattle and orderlies dive under tables, she went about her business without breaking stride. I did my best to convince her to marry me and move to the States after the war. Every time I asked, she thanked me graciously and explained that, hélas, that would be impossible. She could not leave behind Mother France and her French mother, who wasn’t going anywhere once she got her château back from the Nazis. Bad luck on my part, not being born in France myself. Then I might have stayed on there forever, too. That nurse struggled pronouncing “Howard,” so you know what she used to called me? “Quartier,” the French word for “Ward.” I thought that was funny, because, well, I’ll get to that. Her name, get this, was Emily. Which I was able to forgive her for since she spelled it the French way. E-m-i-l-i-e.

  “Are you going to let your daughter ride in that thing?” Zep asked our American Emily as Portia climbed into the sidecar after breakfast that morning.

  Emily looked thoughtful for a minute. “Yes,” she said. “I’m going back to bed.”

  “Wait! I forgot my hat!” Portia said. She hopped out of the sidecar, dodged her mother, and pounded up the stairs.

  “I brought along another scarf for you to tie your hat on with,” Hugh called after her, waving it exuberantly overhead. Nina, doubled up on the motorcycle seat with Hugh, was already tying on the scarf he’d been thoughtful enough to bring along for her.

  I headed inside to help Margaret with the dishes, and found Emily at the mail table, flipping through an issue of Life magazine that had just been delivered. “I know I said I was on my way to bed, but Life intervened,” she said.

  I looked around quickly to make sure that we were alone. Then I stepped close to her and said, “Emily, I have to tell you something.”

  She looked around, too, then murmured, “Is it that I look more beautiful than you imagined possible right now?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “But that’s not what I need to tell you.”

  Her smile dribbled away. “Oh,” she said. “Is something wrong?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. I outlined what had happened in the kittens’ stall and what I’d said to Portia before I realized she, not Emily, was inside Bottom’s head. I finished with, “I’m not sure what to make of it. I’m not certain how much of what I said she understood.”

  “Do you think she heard any of it?” she asked. “With that thing on it’s almost as hard to hear as it is to see.”

  “I’m not sure about that, either,” I said.

  Emily frowned. “Well, she hasn’t said anything about it to me. Of course, she never says anything to me if she can help it. I wonder when she got her hands on that awful old thing. I swear I saw it in my room last night before I came to visit you. While I was changing my underwear I was trying to decide when I was going to have the chance to scare you with it.”

  “Do you think Portia came into your room in the night, looking for you, and took it?” I asked.

  “While I wasn’t there, you mean?” she asked. “Oh. Dear. I don’t know.” She paused, considering. “Let’s not panic yet. I’m not sure the head was in my room last night. Maybe it was the day before that I’m remembering. I’ve lost all sense of time. I blame you for that.” We looked at each other, and then I guess we must have gotten lost in each other’s eyes. Emily grabbed my dimple and pulled my face down to hers and kissed me. “I doubt Portia made anything of anything she might have heard,” she said. “She’s just a kid.”

  If that had been true at the beginning of our conversation, it certainly wasn’t true by the time Emily released my chin. When the two of us disengaged, Portia was standing at the bottom of the stairs with Sam’s old hat in her hands. She hadn’t made a sound coming down those steps. When Portia was feeling sad and couldn’t sleep, Nina must have taught her to play the same game of squeaky-floorboard chess she’d taught Emily.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “I guess you and Papa are even now,” Portia said. Her voice was calm and her facial expression inscrutable. Then she mashed Sam’s hat onto her head and left us.

  Emily followed Portia at a remove and stood on the porch watching as her daughter climbed into the motorcycle’s sidecar. As the three of them roared down the driveway, Nina turned to wave to Emily; Portia did not.

  When I joined her on the porch, Emily murmured, “That went about as well as could be expected, didn’t it? Portia and I will talk about it as soon as she gets back.”

  I wasn’t convinced that it had gone as well as all that, having seen Portia’s face over Emily’s shoulder. She’d given me the sort of calculating look Max gave when he hefted his shovel onto his shoulder. The look that Max himself might give me soon enough if Portia reported catching me with my hand in her mother’s cookie jar. A wiser, more mature man than I was might have backed off then. But remember, I was lost in sorrow, and not quite twenty-five years old yet. I’m not a mind reader, so I couldn’t have explained Emily’s reasoning then to you.

  That night, as we lay corkscrewed together on the slim ledge that was my bunk, Emily said, “You know, it’s not like that with us.”

  “What’s not like what?”

  “I’m sorry. Of course you have no idea what I’m talking about. I’ve been thinking about what Portia said. With us, it’s not the way it is with my husband and his—his—”

  “—his cheap floozies?” I traced a finger up her sternum, spread my hand flat across her chest. I was able to span almost the entire distance between her shoulders with my fingers and my thumb. Emily really was a tiny thing. Lucky, that. If I’d hitched my wagon to Nina, we never would have been able to fold the both of us into my small bed.

  Despite the heat, Emily shivered and closed her eyes. “This is different because I love you,” she said.

  “You what?” I asked. No woman I’d been entangled with had ever said as much to me.

  Emily propped herself up on an elbow. “I know you’re from a humble background, Ward, but I promise I’m not taking advantage of your ignorance. I’m not slumming with you, the way Archer does with his floozies. I love you.”

  I could see that she was serious, but I confess I was taken aback by what she said about slumming and my ignorance. I’d sort of assumed Emily recognized me as a princeling in disguise, not some semiliterate cowboy. The very stuff of fairy tales and Shakespeare’s lighthearted romances and all the best screwball comedies. I was so surprised that she hadn’t seen me for who I really was that I started laughing.

  Emily disentangled herself and sat up, fast. “Oh,” she said.

  “Hold on,” I said.

  But she leapt to her feet and started gathering up her things. “Don’t laugh at me. Don’t you dare laugh at me.” She threw her dress over one shoulder, clutched her moccasins to her chest, and headed for the window. I was worried she planned to take off across the yard like that, barefoot and buck naked. Instead she sat down on the sill and sh
oved a foot into a moccasin. “You must do this all the time,” she said. “What a fool I’ve been. This may not mean anything to you, cowboy, but it does to me. I promised myself I wasn’t putting up with this sort of thing anymore.” She pulled on her other moccasin and put a foot on the windowsill.

  “Don’t go yet,” I said.

  “Don’t try to stop me,” she said.

  “Your dress,” I said.

  She looked down at it draped across her shoulder, bunched it up in her hands, buried her face in it, and burst into tears. I tried to put my arm around her but she shoved me away. “Don’t touch me,” she said.

  “Fair enough,” I said, and sat on my bunk again. “But listen to me for a minute, will you?”

  She shook her head vigorously, still buried in her wadded-up dress.

  “I’m laughing because that’s about the last thing I expected to hear you say.”

  She lifted her face. “Why? Do you think I do this sort of thing all the time?”

  “I sure hope not.”

  Because I saw it then, a glimpse of life’s possibilities, viewed from the deck of a yacht. In San Francisco, I’d finish my undergraduate degree at Stanford. Heck, go to medical school there, too. Emily would float me financially at first, and then she’d be more than paid back after that by having her own private physician, me. Honestly, wouldn’t you be more surprised if I said that idea hadn’t occurred to me? Of course, of course I was in love with Emily. Why wouldn’t I be? As a former guest who got her start working the necktie counter at Neiman Marcus had sagely opined over dinner once, “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.”

  “Let’s get married,” I said.

  I don’t know what response I expected, but it wasn’t the one I got. Emily dropped the dress but didn’t say anything. After what felt like an eternity, I picked the dress up and returned it to the hook it had been hanging on. Both of us stared at it on the hook until I said finally, idiotically, “We don’t want that pretty thing to wrinkle.”

  “You don’t mean that,” she said. “About getting married.”

  After another eon or two I said, “No. Of course not. Forget I said it.”

  Now it was Emily’s turn to laugh, although honestly it was more of a cackle. “It would be a crazy thing to do, wouldn’t it? Tell you what. Why don’t you see if you can convince me to come around to your way of thinking.”

  She kept her moccasins on.

  Later, while we were catching our breath, I told Emily Margaret’s story about the cleft in my chin. Emily put her thumb in it and kissed me. “It’s true. You are perfect. How did I get to be so lucky? Imagine stumbling onto you, here. My diamond in the rough.”

  After my run-in with Portia I got jumpy, sure the kid would rat me out. But it seemed she’d chosen an option some of my patients with frightening symptoms used to go for—ignore the problem, and maybe it will go away. Sometimes that approach works. Usually it doesn’t.

  A couple of days later, with Margaret’s permission, I was set to drive the Pierce-Arrow into town so that Nina and Emily could meet with their lawyers while the others rode in the Chevrolet with Sam. Coming back from fetching the car keys hanging on their designated hook by the back door, I almost blundered into Emily in the front hall, arguing with Portia. I hung back in the dining room. I didn’t want to interfere.

  “No, thank you,” Portia said bitterly. “I will not go into town with you to see your divorce lawyer. How could you ask me to do such a thing?”

  “I wasn’t asking you to do that. I was asking if you wanted to go into Reno with us and look around some while I see my di—”

  “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, I do not want to go, do you hear me? You don’t need me there to tell the guy that my father is a bad man, and that you never loved him. You can tell him that yourself.”

  “Portia, that’s not true. Your father is not a bad man.”

  “So my father isn’t a bad man, but it’s true that you never loved him? I knew it!”

  “Oh, Portia, I loved your father,” Emily said. “I loved him once. I promise you I did.”

  “So why can’t you love him again?” Portia wailed. “Is that so much to ask?”

  I didn’t wait for Emily’s answer. I didn’t want to hear it. I pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen, put my shoulder to the wall, and closed my eyes. It’s not a good feeling, knowing the price of your future happiness is being paid for with someone else’s pain. Of course I felt guilty about it. I am not made of stone.

  When I opened my eyes again, Margaret was regarding me with some concern. “You look like somebody just ran over your dog, Ward,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “That poor kid,” I said, guiltier still for passing off what I was feeling as worry for Portia. “Emily’s daughter just wants her parents to stay together. So they can be one big happy family again. Or one little happy family. I don’t see that happening. Do you?”

  Margaret wiped her hands on her apron. “I don’t,” she said. “Some kids would do anything to keep their parents married, but let me tell you, Ward. When a couple stays together for the children—” She shook her head. “That story usually doesn’t end well for anybody. The parents are miserable and the kids don’t know to hope for any better for themselves.”

  “My parents never fought. They were devoted to each other. Are, I mean.” I hadn’t told Margaret yet that they were dead.

  Margaret tsked and shook her head. “That’s hard in a different way, Ward. Makes your standards too high. You waste your life thinking you’ll find the perfect match, but perfect matches don’t exist.”

  “Oh, yeah? You and Max seem pretty perfect together,” I said.

  She laughed. “Trust me, sweetheart, we’re not perfect.” She leaned her elbows on the counter that ran through the middle of the kitchen and got that starry-eyed look she wore whenever she talked about Max. “We do love each other, though. I got lucky. We both did.”

  “It’s a good thing you two happened to go to the same beach that day,” I said.

  “Beach? What beach?”

  “The beach in Atlantic City. Where you met.”

  Margaret looked confused. “I didn’t meet Max at the beach in Atlantic City. Who on earth told you that?”

  “Nina. She says you still have the swimsuit Max was wearing when you met him.”

  “Ha! Max in a swimsuit. That I’d like to see. That girl has such an imagination. No, I met Max in Chicago. He was doing work for my husband. My husband introduced us, in fact. Poor guy. He never saw what was coming. None of us did.”

  “I didn’t know you’ve been married more than once,” I said.

  “I haven’t been,” she said. “My husband wouldn’t agree to a divorce, so—” She shrugged, then winked at me. “Don’t tell the guests. I don’t want to shock them.”

  By the time I pulled the car around for Nina and Emily, Portia had vanished. But we saw her when we reached the turnoff for the highway, astride an unbridled Dumpling, bareback. Or I surmised it was Portia, anyway, as it was someone wearing the clothes Portia had been wearing earlier, plus the papier-mâché ass’s head. Instead of sitting up front with me like in the good old days before Portia came, Emily had gotten into the back seat and Nina had piled in after.

  In my side mirror I saw Nina roll down her window to wave at Portia. “Cute kid,” Nina said. “Looks more like her father every day.”

  Nobody spoke for a few miles after that. I stole a glance in my rearview at Emily, who was indulging in the kind of frowning Zep would have warned would give her wrinkles. Nina, meanwhile, rolled the window up again and sighed.

  Soon after that, Emily snapped at Nina, “Will you stop making that infernal racket?”

  “What?” Nina asked distractedly.

  “What are you jingling in your pocket? Is it change? The sound is driving me crazy. Quit it.”

  “Or what?” Nina said. “You’ll put me in the corner for the afternoon? Make
me write on the blackboard a hundred times, ‘I will not jingle the bullets in my pocket’?”

  That set Emily back. “You’re playing with bullets?” she asked.

  “The ones that go in my revolver.” Nina pulled the evidence from her pocket. I peeked in the rearview again and saw the three small brass and copper cartridges laid across her palm.

  “Why?” Emily asked.

  “So I won’t bite my fingernails,” Nina said. “Bullets aren’t dangerous unless they’re coming at you from the barrel of a gun. You do know that, right?”

  “I’m not an idiot,” Emily said.

  “Of course you aren’t,” Nina said, her tone softening. “I’m sorry, Emily. I’ll try to leave the bullets alone if the sound is bothering you. I forgot that I’m not the only one here who might be on edge.”

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” Emily said. “I’m not myself today.”

  I looked in the mirror again long enough to see Nina put the bullets back into her pocket. “Emily, I know you’re worried you’re making a mistake, leaving Archer,” she said. “There’s no real way of knowing, I suppose, though it seems the only way to go to me. But since when am I an expert? I never should have married Hugh. My mother told me it was a mistake, and I knew it was a mistake, but I did it anyway. I didn’t love my first two husbands. I liked them. The first one, anyway. But Hugh—” Her sentence ended so abruptly that my eyes flicked to the mirror to see if she was crying, but her face was blank with despair. “Hugh and I weren’t like the other kids, but it didn’t matter because we had each other. Him I loved. And it just—” She shook her head. “There was no way.”