She had never seen him again.
After that she rarely stayed home for more than a few days, avoiding the ferries, driving hither and yon to consult with her clients face-to-face. Bit by bit, animal by animal, her emotional hemorrhage was sopped up with their neediness until Paul Fortunati became a memory she could regret from a safe distance.
But now there was Gabriel, a man who didn’t share her beliefs and who reviled her profession. She listened for him on the stairs; she watched him from the office window; she conjured him at night as she fell asleep. He had completely stripped her of the brittle dignity she’d worked so long and so hard to create.
Libertine was in love.
SHE AND IVY had taken to eating dinner together every Thursday at the Oat Maiden, since Ivy continued to spend the majority of her time in Bladenham. Now, over a classic pepperoni pizza, Libertine described to Ivy her most off-the-wall interview yet with Martin Choi—as approved by Truman.
“He wanted to know what Friday thinks about having so many people come see him.” Libertine watched Ivy pick pepperoni from her pizza slice and put it in a paper napkin. “Don’t you like pepperoni? You should have told me when I ordered it.”
“What? No, I’m saving them for Julio Iglesias. He loves pepperoni. It gives him gas, but it gives me gas, too, so we just pretend it isn’t happening and fart away.”
Dismayed, Libertine said, “If you’d said something we could have ordered something else.”
“You said pepperoni was your favorite.”
“It is, but if I’d known—”
“My god, will you just stop?” Ivy reached across the table to give Libertine’s hand a stinging slap.
Libertine blanched. Ivy had once told her that she had the lowest self-esteem of anyone she’d ever met. “We have to work on that,” she’d said; and Libertine had been secretly thrilled by the use of the word we.
“So what does the whale think of all the people?” Ivy asked, slurping at a cup of coffee.
“I assume he loves it.”
“Of course he does. He’s a star. Who doesn’t love fame?”
“But he’s still living in a box. It’s a nice box, but it’s still a box. He’s completely cut off from everything natural.”
“Is that you talking, or him?”
“Neither. It’s just the truth. He was wild-caught, you know. He experienced the larger world, even if it was a long time ago. He was born into a pod and swam in the North Atlantic. That’s not something you can unknow.”
“And you think after all this time he still remembers?”
“Maybe not consciously, but of course he remembers. If nothing else, he’ll always have a visceral sense of loss. Any sentient being would.”
“Has he told you that?”
“It doesn’t really work like that.”
“You always say that.”
“I always say it because it’s always true,” Libertine said evenly. “I sense him, and I assume he senses me—though it’s been weeks and weeks now.”
“Really?” Ivy sat up a little straighter, intrigued. “Do you think you’re not psychic anymore?”
Libertine had long since given up trying to get Ivy to call her a communicator. Now she smiled in spite of herself. “It’s not a superpower. I just have this . . . ability. For all I know, anyone can do what I do, if they learn how to listen—or sense, really.”
“Huh,” said Ivy, clearly losing interest. “So anyway, listen. I was thinking of driving home for the weekend. I love my brother and sister-in-law like life itself, but if I don’t get away from them soon I might kill someone. I thought you might want to come along.”
“To Friday Harbor?”
“Yes. We can catch the last ferry tomorrow night, then stay Saturday and come back on one of the late ferries Sunday. Or you can keep me company on the drive and go home to Orcas.”
“No, I’d love to come with you.”
“Great. And if you want some stuff for your apartment, I have rugs and a desk and couch I don’t know what to do with, plus a bed if you like a hard mattress. I’ll have whatever you want shipped down here.”
And so, at five o’clock the next day—after Libertine had finished working, a commitment she took very seriously even if, as Ivy kept reminding her, it was volunteer work, and therefore flexible—Ivy pointed the nose of her old Mercedes north to the ferry in Anacortes. One windshield wiper stuck and the other smeared the rain around unhelpfully. Julio Iglesias rode on Libertine’s lap, jubilant that the booster seat sat empty. Ivy squinted through the heaviest rain, and when it finally let up just south of Olympia she said to Libertine, “So tell me, what do you do when you’re not channeling the animal kingdom? You never talk about anything.”
Libertine shrugged, looking out her side window. She wasn’t used to talking about herself. Over the years she’d found that if she didn’t volunteer information, very few people solicited it, especially in her line of work. “I garden. And I paint sometimes—watercolors. I walk.”
“You’d have made the perfect paid companion.”
Libertine looked at Ivy blankly.
“Haven’t you ever read Rebecca? No? Anyway, you’re brave, I’ll give you that.”
“Not really,” said Libertine.
“Sure. You do what you do in spite of three-quarters of the world thinking you’re certifiable. If that’s not bravery, I don’t know what is.”
Libertine could feel herself flush.
“Oh, for god’s sake,” Ivy said, seeing her. “You know I’m only stating the facts. Take it as a compliment.”
“It didn’t sound like a compliment,” Libertine said doubtfully.
“You’re probably just not used to them.”
Libertine nodded: it was true. They continued in silence for several miles before Ivy said idly, “Why do you think it’s so much easier to talk in the car than anyplace else?”
“Because you’re not looking at each other.”
“Do you think?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Maybe so,” Ivy said thoughtfully. “You know, my brother Dickie and I drove from home to Amherst, Massachusetts, once, while he was going to college there, and by the end we were ready to throttle each other—but in a very insightful way. Until then he’d still been the twelve-year-old kid who liked to beat me at chess and feed his peas to the dog.”
Libertine closed her eyes and rested her head against the seat-back. “A road trip—I’ve never traveled like that. My mother used to talk about driving to California, but we never did.”
“Why not?”
“She was very disorganized.”
“How much organization does it take to get into a car and drive?”
“None, if you have money,” said Libertine.
“Ah,” said Ivy.
They drove in silence past winter-flooded pastures and ramshackle barns and mossy woods, until Ivy said, “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. If you had had a family, or at least children, do you think you’d still, you know, hear animals?”
Libertine took the question in her gut like a blow. “I’ve sensed them ever since I can remember,” she said carefully.
“You didn’t have siblings, right?”
“No.”
“So couldn’t it just be, I don’t know—loneliness?”
“You mean could I be making it all up, like imaginary friends?”
“All I’m saying is, couldn’t it just be your way of filling a void?”
“At three years old? What you really want to know is whether it’s real. My sensing them.”
“I just don’t see how it’s possible.”
“Me, neither, but I do.”
Ivy looked sidelong at her.
“What you really mean,” Libertine said bitterly, “is, could I be schizophrenic or have some weird personality disorder?” How many people had asked her that over the years?
“You do seem lonely.”
“Maybe I’m lonely because I
sense animals. It sets you apart.”
Ivy nodded. “Chicken and egg, then.”
“What—the voices came first, and because of them I got lonely? Or I was lonely first and then the voices came?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t know. I only know what I know. One day maybe I won’t hear them anymore.” Then she gave an uncharacteristically sly smile. “One day maybe they’ll choose you, instead.”
BY THE TIME they reached Ivy’s house it was too dark to see much besides the fact that it was wood-sided and sprawling, as though additions had been added haphazardly over the years. Once inside, Libertine looked around avidly, finding to her surprise that the house didn’t look at all like the home of a wealthy person, or at least not as she’d pictured it. The rugs, though Persian, were worn and spotted; the leather furniture was cracked in several places, and a number of dead flies lay on some of the windowsills. Still, it was cozy in its own messy way, and she breathed in the delicious smell of basil, a spice her mother had worn like a fine perfume.
She excused herself while Ivy spooned out coffee grounds for the morning and set up the pot. Julio Iglesias accompanied her into the bathroom, where he lodged a host of complaints. When they got back to the kitchen she said to Ivy, “I’m afraid Julio Iglesias has something he wants me to mention to you.”
Ivy stared at her and then said bitterly, “It’s the Snugli, isn’t it—it’s about the damned Snugli.”
Libertine couldn’t help smiling. “You’d think so, but no. He’d doesn’t like being outdoors so much when you’re at the pool.”
Outraged, Ivy protested, “Are you kidding me? He’s dressed to the nines in a custom-made Gore-Tex jacket with special pockets all over it to hold those little chemical hand warmers you get at REI. Mink costs less. And if I don’t take him outside with me, he bitches about being left behind, by himself, in the office. He has his own set of china dishes and he sleeps on a memory foam mattress that costs almost as much as mine did.”
Libertine looked at Julio Iglesias, who looked back at her sulkily, and then she said, “Never mind.”
OVER A DELICIOUS late dinner Ivy made with groceries delivered to her house that afternoon—Dungeness crab, asparagus, potatoes—Libertine sipped the last of a whiskey sour Ivy had mixed for her. “I’ve never had one of these before,” Libertine said. “It’s yummy.”
Ivy smiled. “See? I told you I thought you’d like them.”
“Mmmm,” said Libertine.
“They’re potent, though.”
“You’ve already had three,” Libertine pointed out.
“Yes, but I’ve been drinking them since I was eleven.”
“Then I better catch up.” Libertine drained her glass and held it out for another, and then one more. They talked about everything and nothing, and watched the rain run down the windows, and a couple of hours later, when she was tottering down the upstairs hall toward the guest room with Ivy’s protective arm around her waist, she said dreamily, “Do you think maybe we’re falling in love?”
“Oh, honey,” Ivy said. “The only thing falling is you. C’mon, let’s get you into bed.” She opened the guest room door and led Libertine inside with some effort, tumbling her onto the bed and saying cheerfully, “You’re going to feel like death warmed over in the morning.”
“Mmmm,” Libertine purred softly, cozying into the sheets and thick down comforter, which she pulled up to her shoulders. “Night night. Sleep tight.” She giggled. “Sleep tight, get it? I just made that up.”
IVY STRAIGHTENED THE bedding over Libertine, who’d passed out cold, and sat beside her for a while in a little slipper chair that had once belonged to her mother, keeping watch and contemplating friendship. She had never imagined that she would reach the age of sixty-two alone. There had been so many people in her life over the years, but then the falling-out came as surely as springtime, and though the details varied, the outcome was inevitable. Still, she continued to hope she would one day find someone capable of loving as fiercely as she did, who wouldn’t break and run before the roaring winds of her affection.
Maybe we’re falling in love. Ivy would like to be in love, to have someone fall in love with her, and she didn’t even care whether the quality of the affection was platonic or flavored with a watery hint of sexuality—intimacy was the key thing, the kind of intimacy that allowed you to offer up the worst, least attractive, most shameful things about yourself; the kind of intimacy that came with the bottom line, I know you and I love you anyway.
Perhaps she’d find, even this late in life, that she was drawn to other women and had been all along without recognizing the fact. She’d even welcome it—on the whole, she enjoyed the company of women. Plus her sexual experiences with men over the years had been consistently disappointing: wet, nasty kisses followed by groping and fumbling, then panting and pain and a final few merciful wheezing breaths in the dark to signal it was finally over. There might be such a thing as orgasms, but if so, they were happening to someone else. Hardly the stuff blared from the covers of magazines read by young women.
She bent over the sleeping figure and kissed her lightly on the forehead. Libertine sighed and slept on.
Ivy turned off the light and went out, whispering, “G’night, little bird.”
THE NEXT MORNING, once Libertine’s atom bomb hangover had begun to lift and she’d been able to stomach a hearty breakfast of French toast, bacon, and jam made from wild berries harvested right there on San Juan Island, Libertine decided to go home after all. Ivy’s keen attention always left her feeling flayed, plus she suddenly missed her little house, with its cheerful glass and garden art.
If Ivy was disappointed at Libertine’s leaving, she didn’t show it; she simply reiterated that Libertine should pick out furniture before she left so Ivy could have it sent down to Bladenham. In the end Libertine chose the bed she’d slept on in the guest bedroom. The cost to Ivy, she knew, would be considerable, but the soft mattress on the little twin bed Johnson Johnson provided gave Libertine terrible backaches which, combined with the physical nature of her work now, produced enough misery for her to buckle under Ivy’s insistence. The bed was a pretty walnut piece and, granted she’d been drunk, but it had given her a blessedly comfortable night’s sleep. She also capitulated to Ivy’s insistence that she accept the chintz-covered slipper chair that had sat beside the bed. “Julio wants you to have it, and there’s no turning him down,” Ivy had said. “You know how easy it is to hurt his feelings—I’ll have a pee-fest on my hands if you say no.”
They agreed to meet in Anacortes the next day at noon for the return drive to Bladenham, and Libertine walked onto the interisland ferry to Orcas Island with a sense of vast relief. Once home, she petted her walls and gave the refrigerator a light kiss on its old white door. In all the world, this was the one place where she was perfectly herself. She had just put on the teakettle—hoping green tea might flush out any lingering toxic remnants of Ivy’s whiskey—when her old wall phone rang. Libertine picked it up before she had time to think better, and heard the unwelcome voice of animal activist Trina Beemer.
“Oh, good! I’ve been trying to reach you—you’ve become quite the hero around here. How did you manage to infiltrate that place?”
“Pardon me?” Libertine said disingenuously. Trina would have to work for whatever she was after.
“The zoo! The Biedelbaum or whatever. They had that poor, sweet elephant—and now this. We’ve always had them on our radar, of course, what with their building that new porpoise pool, but a killer whale! It’s so much worse. I can’t tell you how happy we are that one of us is on the inside!”
“What do you mean, worse?” Libertine said, ignoring the one of us reference and banging around in her cupboards for some honey for her tea.
“Well, I mean, at least the elephant was a terrestrial animal. Keeping a killer whale in captivity, never mind alone, is no different than putting any one of us in lifetime solitary confinement.”
She could feel the woman hesitate. Then Trina said, in her oddly atonal delivery, “We’re hoping you’d be able to work for us from the inside. You are still on our side, right?”
“I’m not really on anyone’s side,” Libertine said. “Well, I’m on Friday’s side.”
“You know, a lot of people are saying the whole rehab story is just a cover-up for the fact that they’re bringing in a show animal. Is that true?”
“No,” said Libertine.
“No?”
Libertine sighed. “Look, he was dying, pure and simple. Go back and watch the TV footage.”
“He was wild-caught, you know.”
“He’s nineteen years old. That was a long, long time ago.” She had no intention of fueling Trina’s fire.
“Not that long ago,” Trina said. “Killer whales have excellent memories. And they know when they’re incarcerated.”
“You know, it’s funny,” Libertine said. “He’s never once indicated that, at least not to me. Not once. Sick, yes. A prisoner, no.”
“That just means he’s given up hope. They do, you know.”
“Really,” said Libertine neutrally, taking her tea into her little living room and settling into a perfectly lovely chintz chair she’d found once by the side of the road.
“Really,” said Trina grimly. “I’m surprised you don’t know that, given that they talk to you and everything.”
“It’s not exactly talking,” Libertine began, and then decided, Oh, to hell with it.
“You know, we’d love to have you as a speaker at our January meeting,” said Trina, evidently deciding to try another tack. “Would you be able to do that?”
Friday's Harbor: A Novel Page 14
