Mason played barman. “Martini, ma’am?”
“Thank you,” I said. I had never drunk a martini in my life.
After dinner, on the unnecessary excuse that my official arrival called for celebration, we drove into town, everybody laughing and carrying glasses, horns blaring and cars pulling over so that people could switch places for no particular reason at the roadside. Ned, in high good spirits, a cigar in one hand and a brandy in the other, steered the Buick the whole way with his knees.
We went to La Roseleda. It was an ordinary enough place, but they were thrilled with it, and in the stardust of their company, even the cakey orange smile of the familiar fat girl at the bar took on new glamour.
The owner, recognizing me, beamed at the clientele I had brought him and showed us, with novel pomp, to a table by the window. He took our drinks order himself and, a few minutes later, oversaw the careful work of a waiter unloading them from a tray.
Mason began to drum a soft fingertip rhythm on the table edge, and Patsy, next to him, put down her cigarette and jumped to her feet. “Come on,” she said, taking his hand. Her hips swiveled figure eights as she wound him through the tables. At her back, Sally lifted her cigarette, which was still smoldering, between a manicured finger and thumb, and, expressionless, extinguished it, dropping the butt into a large black ashtray before brushing off her hand, as if some of the lipstick staining its tip might have adhered. It hadn’t.
In front of the small raised area where the band played, Patsy turned and smiled, lifting her chin a little, and Mason, pulling her to him, smiled too. Watching them as they were drawn into the shadowy loop of the other dancers, I was surprised by a sudden tug of loneliness in the pit of my stomach.
“Frankie…Frankie?” Ned had to shout over the music. “Dance?” He jerked his head toward the dance floor and winked.
I was glad to dance with Ned. He was easy and smooth footed.
“Quite the little mover, aren’t you?” He grinned.
I laughed. He twisted me away from him and spun me deftly back.
“You’re a good kid,” he announced suddenly, leaning back to look into my eyes. And then, settling his cheek again nearer to mine, he said, “Watch yourself,” or at least I thought that was what he said; it was difficult to hear.
Back at the table, as I retook my seat, he stood behind me for a moment with both hands on my shoulders. It was a gesture that felt paternal.
The crowd had thickened with the night and the band was playing something loud when a man with a neat crease in his trousers approached our table and asked Mason’s permission to dance with his wife.
“He says,” I translated, “that she is a very lovely woman, and you are a husband very lucky and that, while he is dancing with her, he will leave with you his car keys…for security.”
Mason glanced over at Sally and then turned to the man, who was staring intently at Patsy.
“He thinks Patsy is your wife.”
“Shall we tell him?”
“No,” I said. I was wary of the kind of embarrassment the contradiction would cause.
Mason put his shirtsleeved arm on Patsy’s slender bare one and whispered into her hair. She listened, her brow slightly creased, with her head inclined. Then she laughed. When she stood up, the man took a set of keys from his pocket and laid them with some ceremony on the table.
“Tell him five minutes.”
“Cinco minutos.”
After the man had collected his keys and deposited Patsy, giggly, back at the table, tequilas arrived. With the compliments, explained the patron, gesturing toward the bar where the man raised his glass to the lucky husband.
“To lucky husbands everywhere,” Ned said.
“To what?” Richard yelled, cocking his head.
“Lucky husbands.”
“Oh, yeah,” Richard grinned. “Here’s to ’em.”
Bee Bee raised her tequila. “And Patsy’s pert little rear,” she added.
Everybody laughed except Sally who, tequila untouched, slid one corner of her silk shawl onto her shoulder, readying to leave. She spoke across the table to her husband. “You should dance with Frankie before we go. It’s her party.”
Mason, apologetic, asked me to dance. I was embarrassed. There was something vaguely adolescent about the situation, like being invited to parties by the prompted sons of my mother’s friends, but I stood anyway and went with him to the dance floor. He put his hand on the small of my back and said, “I like your dress.”
I was grateful for that; it made so many things easier. Then, drawn against him, I noticed the width of his shoulders and the smell, faint, at the base of his neck, of cloves.
On the way home we killed a dog. It was a stray, scrawny and ill-looking—the town was full of them—but Bee Bee, who had been driving, was upset, and drunk enough to turn maudlin. When the carcass had been hauled to the side of the road, Sally, laying her shimmery little handbag deftly on the dash, took steady control of the Buick while Ned and Richard and I sat sobering up to the heavy soundtrack of Bee Bee’s sobs.
Patsy and Mason had gone ahead in the jeep, Patsy snatching the keys from Mason’s hand under the soft light of a street lamp and running with them, her dress rising, sail-like, behind her. They had sped off, Mason laughing, clambering into the passenger seat after the car had already begun to move, like a television hero.
At the house they were sitting outside, opposite each other in the dark.
“I thought we’d lost you,” Mason said, looking up at our arrival. He was leaning forward, lighting the cigarette between Patsy’s lips with her silver lighter. When he edged back their knees disengaged.
“We hit a dog,” Richard explained.
“Killed it,” Bee Bee slurred, ragged now from drink and crying.
Sally, watching her friend with an expression that struck me as a bit pitiless, said in an even voice, “It was just a stray.”
Bee Bee, her mascara-stained eyes wild-looking in the blue glow of the pool lights, stared, momentarily on the dangerous edge of anger, but Ned, nurselike, reached an arm out to her, and she acquiesced, letting him lead her slowly into the house.
“I need to get cleaned up,” Richard said, holding his hands open like a child. He turned toward his wife, expectant. It was very late.
“It’s very late,” Sally confirmed. Then with the same cool expression she had leveled at Bee Bee, she turned to Patsy. “Let me relieve you of my husband, dear,” she said.
Patsy drew hard on her cigarette, her eyes on Mason. He dropped his head and got to his feet.
“See you in the morning, Frankie,” he said, passing me as he followed his wife inside.
Behind him Patsy turned toward the dark of the sea. She didn’t answer when I said goodnight.
• • •
There are things, I can admit now, that I have kept from those days, or things that have stayed with me at least, despite my assurances to myself that I had closed the door firmly and securely on that chapter of my life. I have always remembered, for instance, that way they had of divesting themselves of all seriousness, all responsibility. It was a trait that I came to abhor in part, perhaps prematurely, perhaps making myself seem older, sterner at times than I am, but that is because I witnessed the outcome. Saw what lack of responsibility can leave in its wake. Nevertheless, along with the negative aspects, the carelessness, came the fun. It is such a small word, and corny, I guess. One associates it with garish advertisements for family days out. But it is the right word. I am not talking about joy, after all, or elation or anything on that grand sort of scale. I really mean fun. They understood it.
I tried later to emulate them in that—though I wouldn’t have admitted it—particularly when Chloe was young. We had torchlit suppers in the playhouse with her friends; we had treasure hunts; we went on picnics and mystery bike rides, and more than once we turned ordinary, workaday rooms into fairy lands. Such a deliberate contrast, I realize now, to my own childhood. My parents se
emed so untouched by my existence; there was never any trail, any messy clue of child in any of our neat houses. But I didn’t learn it by myself, that frivolity; they taught me. The carefree Americans.
• • •
With an eccentricity that I thought delightful at the time, Bee Bee disappeared at some point the day after we had killed the dog and came back with what she called a vacation puppy. It was a mongrel, with a triangular face and ears too big for its head. Bee Bee claimed that she had rescued the creature from a gruesome end at the hands of an unscrupulous chef, but Richard pointed out that she was confusing Mexico with China. Anyway, the act had apparently afforded her some sort of catharsis. The run-over dog was never mentioned again.
The children were delighted. The puppy was fitted with a collar of red plastic beads, and somebody christened her Tallulah. Lesley fashioned a pasha’s bed with the yellow silk cushions from the chairs in her parents’ bedroom, and Tallulah was set upon it royally and fed with unsuitable titbits until she was sick. Christina’s lips, as she set a bucket of ice for drinks on the sideboard, took on a scolding line. The children argued with her in chorus.
“She was still hungry,” Jenny insisted.
“So we gave her some more dinner,” Howie added.
Mason, sitting with his feet propped on a low table in the long, glass-doored room that faced the pool, just laughed.
“You can’t just go on feeding and feeding an animal, Howie,” Richard said.
“She was still hungry,” Howie repeated lamely.
“I think she’s cute.” Patsy lifted Tallulah and kissed her head before dropping her back onto the floor, where Hudson made a swift grab for her tail.
Sally, watching, shelled a pistachio and let the husk fall into an oval dish near her husband’s feet. “We’ll all have ringworm within the week,” she said.
Richard, at a slight disconnect from the hilarity as always, said, “I’ve set the fishing trip up for tomorrow.”
Howie quit the writhing and shrieking that the mention of ringworm had triggered in him and looked at his father.
“Just us guys,” Richard said, ruffling the boy’s hair.
“What if there’s a big storm?” Howie asked.
“I don’t think there’ll be a big storm, Howie,” Richard replied, tender suddenly. “But if there is, we won’t go.”
“Because we might crash,” said Howie, relaxing.
“Because we might sink,” Richard answered patiently. “We won’t sink, though. We’ll just catch lots of fish, and maybe swim. It’ll be great.”
Richard leaned then and lifted Hudson, who was at his feet clutching a handful of trouser leg. Holding the child under the arms, he gave his round, dangling form a little shake, making him grin and gurgle, before settling him down again and sending him, with a pat on his yellow-rompered bottom, crawling enthusiastically in the opposite direction.
“Early start, though,” he announced to the men.
Ned groaned.
“You Paul Bunyan types need to remember that my husband is a fine Chicago-raised fellow whose constitution runs best on equal measures of dry vermouth and nicotine,” Bee Bee said.
“Someone,” Ned insisted, cupping a handful of nuts to his mouth, “has got to fly the flag for bad habits and idleness.” He crossed his long, lounge-lizard legs. They were clad that night in pink velvet trousers.
• • •
Ned used to toast to high times. And that is what they were, for me anyway, high enough to threaten chasms, just as these rugged days do. It is the easy times that level. The easy times that lull us complacent, and cocksure too. Even I, with so little reason, believed for many years that life had become some sort of ordered pathway, that there were neat and fathomable rules to direct me. If…then. But dilemmas do not always turn up in the neat packages we imagine when none lurk. Predicaments have frayed ends and rough edges, and you can’t always just seal them off cleanly and be done.
After watching Phillip and Josee part, I knew that I had witnessed a great love scene, the kind that closes an act. That my husband had ended his affair, but that it had been an affair of the heart, a passion. I had a husband who had left someone he loved, deserted her, for me. I could not fit all the pieces together. For the first time I felt that I was a sick woman, and it was a sick woman who Phillip came home to at exactly the time that he said he would.
My illness from that point took the same course as the illnesses of so many others; one minute steady, optimism surfacing, and the next laborious, effort at every turn. There are no real patterns, no absolutes, though we look for them, we sufferers, especially at first, heartened a little by the happyending tales that well-wishers are so keen to pass on. But after a while we know that, despite the similarities, despite the shared pain and the same prescriptions and the similar symptoms, we are on a lone journey, with its own peculiar variations and pitfalls, and outcome.
My journey at least has been undertaken in comfort. We live a life that is privileged, if lacking in glamour, so when I got back from that second, more grueling hospital stay, I did not have a lot to be concerned about in practical terms. Joan, the woman who has cleaned and babysat and cat-sat and watered plants for us for many years, had come to an arrangement with Phillip in my absence to work every day, rather than the two mornings that had been her previous quota. Since my return she has often taken it upon herself to prepare lunch, and she irons more now too, ferrying Phillip’s shirts upstairs in soft, warm piles.
It has occurred to me that if the situation had been reversed, if Phillip had been the one afflicted, people would not have arrived with casseroles the way that they have, would not have been at such pains to relieve us of the burden of domestic things. They would have thought that I could manage the washing by myself. But that’s how it is, isn’t it, the conspiracy of men’s helplessness? We are all complicit in it. And anyway, I don’t want to seem ungrateful. I was glad, particularly, of Joan’s help. She is a kind woman, and quiet, which mattered very much to me then. So many things were intruding on my peace.
Our house is big enough that a downstairs room could be dedicated as a dayroom for me. Phillip chose which one, and organized it, for which he was rather proud of himself, while I was away. I agreed with his choice. There are good windows in that room and a wide ledge beneath them. There is a fire too, and Phillip lit it the day of my return, to ward off the chill of the early spring afternoon. The air smelled faintly of lemons, and there were daffodils winking in a jug on the mantel. A wide sofa that usually lives elsewhere had been moved in to serve as a resting place, and next to it a piecrust table, polished to gold, had been stacked with magazines.
I did not need that household sanctuary then the way that I do now, but I nevertheless took to sleeping there in the afternoons. The days had begun to draw out and I would wake around five without the unsettled feeling that waking in early evening brings. Phillip, as promised, was at home all the time, and we fell into new routines, brought forward our customary six o’clock drink to five thirty and took to having it on the terrace, sitting in the cast-iron chairs, extra sweaters over our daytime clothes.
Chloe came most weekends, often with Ed, who is goodlooking and polite, and funny too when he relaxes. In some ways it was a strangely happy time, one of those limpid spells in life that feel like they will last forever.
• • •
On the day that the men went fishing and left the women alone, I went to Maria’s house to give her an English lesson before anybody else was awake. I called her first from the little vestibule near the hardly used front door. A creamy telephone sat in there on a purpose-built shelf. There was a virgin white notepad next to it and a freshly sharpened pencil. Then I waited on the front step for Arturo’s driver to collect me, watching cotton clouds scud across the blue helmet of the sky. They darkened patches of the sea from turquoise to navy.
Maria was even less interested than usual in her lesson.
“Es muy grande, sí?”
“In English, Maria.” She paid me whether I taught her anything or not, but I felt that I ought to at least try. It was such a happy arrangement.
“Biig, la casa?” She opened her arms, offering her palms to the ceiling of the shady room at the back of her house where we always spent these fruitless hours.
“The house is very big, yes,” I answered her.
“E beautiful?”
“Very beautiful.”
“Piscina?”
“There is a swimming pool.”
She sucked the air in between her teeth.
“It’s a very big house, with white walls and shining floors and many lovely paintings and you can see the sea and the sky and almost all of Mexico lindo from every room,” I said. I was very fond of her.
She grinned. She wanted to know how many servants.
“The Severances’ housekeeper Christina, who traveled with them. Puerto Rican.” She was unimpressed by this. “And maybe six others, local, who came to help with the cleaning and the pool and the garden.” This she liked.
“Café?” she asked, patting my shoulder affectionately. “Coffee?”
“Thank you.”
She went to call the maid.
When I got back, the house was still quiet, so I walked the cliff path to the beach. I sat under the ridge where the earth turned the bleached color of bone and let a handful of sand run through my fingers. Then I lay back and closed my eyes. As the sun stained the underside of my eyelids, uncertainty swamped me. That had happened often lately.
What was I going to do?
Adam had asked me, over and over, in those emotional days before he had left, but it had only been on the walk back, alone, from the goodbye at the bus station that I’d felt the first real prick of concern. What was I going to do? My mother’s letters, little stone weights in my life, were full of niggling inquiry.
The View from Here Page 5
