“I was just—” Richard began.
“Stop!” Patsy commanded. Richard turned to her. “You’re letting them make a fool out of you,” she said, “fools out of both of us.”
Behind Ned, Mason stood watching. Patsy squeezed her eyes closed for a second and seemed to forcibly control herself. She sighed. “Look…sorry…Just forget it.” She raised a palm, then smiled a small apologetic smile.
“I always get cranky when I’m inappropriately dressed,” she said. She still had on her white tennis outfit, an intricate affair of sewn-together daisies. She and Ned had played before lunch. She turned and walked off, ostensibly to change.
Richard, meek, followed her.
“Terribly highly strung,” Sally commented dryly to Bee Bee.
“Distinct touch of the Scarletts,” Bee Bee agreed.
I turned away, uncomfortable with the subtlety of their mockery and, worse, the hint of truth in it. Patsy could be hysterical. But I thought of her as a friend. And, recently, more than that, an ally.
Ned applauded that night, in the square, beneath the twinkling night-lights, when Sally parked the Chevrolet. “Hats off to Mrs. Severance,” he said as the stately tail of the staff’s big sedan slipped easily between the Buick and the jeep. Sally had volunteered to drive so that we could take three cars.
“The thing’s a tank to handle,” Ned had warned.
“But we won’t have to cram,” she had said. “I hate to cram.”
“Never underestimate Mrs. Severance,” Bee Bee told us now with a wry look.
“Any friend of yours, my dear…” Ned grinned, taking her arm for the short walk.
The hinged windows at La Roseleda were angled open toward the sea and a light breeze blew the cigarette smoke generated by two men at the bar toward the barman who was wiping glasses behind it. It was quiet. The musicians, playing rather listlessly for a lone couple on the dance floor, perked up a little at our entrance and the beat brightened as we took our table. When Patsy, standing, shrugged off her knee-length jacket, baring her back to a point below her waist, one of the men at the bar whistled and we all laughed. Then, seated, we fell momentarily silent, the atmosphere between us suddenly flat and a little self-conscious.
“Hell, I’ve seen wakes more lively,” Ned challenged.
Richard, spurred, got up and invited Patsy to dance. As she stood, he held her chair and watched her with the expression of a boy who has caught a butterfly in a jar.
“Frankie?” Mason asked as they moved off.
I was surprised and pleased at his boldness. In his arms, my chin at his shoulder, I remembered something. Myself. However many hours, or days, or weeks ago it was, dancing with him here before. What was it that had changed so? Everything. I shut my eyes for a minute and pretended we were alone.
“Hello.” Patsy turned, her arms open to us, and peeled off with Mason.
Richard flashed his eyebrows. “Take me on, Frankie?” he said, leaning toward my ear.
“Sure,” I answered, disarmed, as he placed one hand carefully on my waist and extended the other, cautiously crooked, for me to hold.
I got to dance with Mason again later. The table shuffled, once, twice. Everybody danced with everybody. I flirted with all the men, even the waiter, in the way that a woman who is crazy in love with one man does.
“Do you think you’ll buy the house?” I asked alone with him at the table. Richard had escorted Sally to the dance floor, Ned was dancing with Patsy, and in his absence Bee Bee had wandered to the bar. She was propped there now, happily absorbed with the barman, smoking a slow cigarette.
Mason shook his head over the noise. A lively group of young people had come in. “No.”
I smiled at him. What did I care? In the bright new future his love promised, a lot of things would be wonderfully unimportant.
Ned said maybe we ought to make tracks. Bee Bee, heading vaguely for the ladies’ room, had lost her bearings and ended up in the street. Ned had had to bolt down the narrow staircase to fetch her.
“I’d be happy to,” Sally replied. She gave her chair a short, rigid push backward. “Perhaps someone could alert Fred and Ginger.”
Richard, who was as drunk that night as Bee Bee, got up messily and padded to the dance floor. At the edge of it he lifted his thumb and indicated the door. I watched as his wife, noticing him, turned her face from Mason’s shirt front. Her expression tightened angrily.
Ned slid Bee Bee into the Buick’s backseat, behind Mason and me, but she just grinned and kept on sliding and hauled herself out the door on the other side. She tottered toward the Chevrolet. Sally had got in to drive it.
“She’s all on her lonesome,” Bee Bee called back, her voice loud in the quiet street.
There was a slam, then the purr of an engine, and Sally pulled out. I saw Patsy put the jeep into gear as Richard, in the passenger seat, gave his head a little shake, fighting sleep. Ned’s presence prevented Mason from reaching for my hand as we moved off, but I was glad, anyway, to be sitting beside him. We exchanged a smile. In the back Ned was humming.
Just past the turnoff to my apartment some men were smoking together under a streetlamp. One of them turned as we passed and looked at me and touched his hand to his head. Dizzy from the lovely day and the dancing, and Mason’s proximity, I waved childishly, fluttering my fingers, and then I shut my eyes for a while.
That was all I could remember later. The men. The wave. Ned’s leisurely hum behind me. Then the crack, the slap of Mason’s arm across my ribcage as I hurtled forward toward the dashboard.
I screamed, shocked, involuntary air forcing my voice, but by the time I had lurched back against my seat, I was aware that I had heard the violent exploding sound of buckling metal. It wasn’t us. We hadn’t hit anything, though the jeep’s taillights loomed directly in front of us.
“What the…” Ned had been jerked forward off his seat.
I flicked my head toward Mason, who had already flung his door open. He sprang and was gone. Ned and I, slower, dazed, watched stunned for a moment in the faint flicker of the interior light. Then we were out too. Running behind Mason through the chaotic, crisscrossing beams of headlights.
We were near the trash dump. People were coming out of the little houses, shouting. I recognized among them the little boy that Jessica had waved to, sleepy in an undershirt and cotton Y-front briefs. But I kept running, like everyone else, toward Sally’s car and the sound we’d heard. And something else—the plaintive echo of a locked car horn.
Richard tugged the Chevrolet’s passenger door open and began pulling Bee Bee out, his solid torso bending to her frail one. She emerged, papery, his solid grip on her upper arms, one of her hands faltering slackly ahead of her. Patsy, on the other side, was leaning in, talking to Sally, asking her something. Mason, reaching them, grabbed Patsy’s waist and flung her so forcefully out of the way that she stumbled.
“Sally,” he shouted. “Sally?”
The car was at a forty-five-degree angle to the road, the long hood jammed against a thick wooden post. Sally’s head was on the steering wheel, and one arm, bent at the elbow, was pinned between the wheel and her chest.
“Darling?” Mason squatted at the open door beside her, and Sally slowly raised her head. She lifted one hand, tentatively, as if it did not belong to her, and pushed her hair back from her face.
“Something ran out,” she said, quietly.
I looked around. There was no sign of a carcass. Whatever it was had escaped.
“There’s nothing here,” I said.
Mason was lifting his wife carefully from the vehicle. One of the women from the houses offered to help. “Ayee. La pobre,” she said, seeing Sally, shaky at the car side.
Sally leaned on her husband for support, dropping her head to his shoulder. Mason, looking down at her, reached up and stroked the back of her neck.
“It’s all right,” he crooned. “It’s all right.”
Bee Bee was fine. Ned, his arms around
her, called out, “Nothing broken.”
“Are you okay?” I asked Patsy. She was bent over rubbing her shin.
“Yes,” she answered, “I just scraped it jumping out.” Richard, joining us, said, “I must have fallen asleep. I didn’t see what happened.”
Patsy, looking over at Mason and Sally standing still entwined at the car side, said nothing.
“Me neither,” I said.
“Do you think we should take Sally to a hospital? Is there a hospital?” Richard asked.
“There is, a small one, on the other side of town. You would have passed the road where it is on the way back from the airstrip.”
“Right,” he said. “What do you think, then? Should we go?”
“I don’t know.”
Mason looked up. “I’m worried about concussion,” he said, tipping Sally away from him to look at her.
She raised her head like a doll. “I’m all right. I think.”
“Really?” Mason took her face in both of his hands.
“Yes.” She pulled herself upright.
“What about the car?” Ned asked.
“Could someone get me a cigarette before we start fussing about the wretched car?” Bee Bee muttered.
Patsy fetched cigarettes from the jeep and lit one each for her and Bee Bee. Ned left them smoking together and wandered around the car. It had attracted quite an audience of locals by then. One of them, a man with a belly protruding appleish over the sagging elastic of his shorts, spoke to Ned.
“Sorry, bud,” Ned said, shrugging, and gestured to me.
“The police will impound the car,” I translated.
“Sí,” the man said, nodding knowingly, running a thumb inside his waistband, “policia.” He gave me a shrewd look.
“If a car has been in an accident,” I explained to Ned and Richard, who had come up behind me, “the police can impound it. Plus they can fine you or jail you,” I said. “Things can get complicated, especially for foreigners.”
Ned nodded. “I don’t want to mess with any Mexican jail,” he said.
It crossed my mind that this was the sort of situation that Arturo Rodriguez could fix, but it was very late, and, anyway, the police could arrive at any moment.
“No,” I answered. “The smartest thing might be to just ditch the car.”
“What do you think?” Ned called to Mason. “Do we care about the car?”
“We don’t give a damn about the car,” he said. His arm was around Sally’s waist. “I just want to get Sally home.”
She gave him a wan smile.
“And Bee Bee,” Bee Bee said, dropping her cigarette and grinding it out. “Bee Bee might be in need of a little lovin’ care too, doncha think?”
“Come on.” Patsy took Bee Bee’s elbow and helped her into the Buick.
Ned said to me, “What do you think?”
“I we don’t care about the car, we can leave it to these guys. My guess is they’ll have it off the road pretty quickly.”
“And the plates changed pretty quickly after that,” Ned said, grinning a bit.
“Probably.”
“Come on then. Let’s go.”
I explained to the local men that we were in a hurry and worried about the ladies.
“Sí,” the fat man agreed gravely. He was worried about the ladies too.
So they ought to just do whatever was necessary with the car. We all understood each other. The fat man took his hand from his shorts and shook mine.
“Buenas noches.”
“Buenas noches.”
Patsy did not want to drive anymore. Richard took over at the wheel of the jeep and I got in with them, leaving the others the comfort of the Buick. As we drove around the wrecked Chevrolet, four men were heaving the front of it back from the pole.
“I don’t think it’s too badly damaged, actually,” Richard said. “Jus’ the hood and the grill. Prob’ly looks worse than it is.”
He was, I realized, still pretty unsteady. He drove cautiously, bending his arms unnaturally and concentrating his attention on the five yards of road directly ahead of us.
“Did you say you didn’t see what happened?” Patsy asked. It wasn’t clear who she was speaking to. Richard answered.
“No…nodded off I think.”
“Right,” she said, taking a cigarette and lighting it with her head dipped and her hand cupped over the flame. Her eyes narrowed against the flare.
“Did you?” I asked. “See anything? Sally said something ran out.”
Patsy turned to face the front again. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the back of Richard’s seat. In profile she shook her head.
EIGHT
CHRISTINA HAD BEEN in bed. Her hair was coming slightly loose from a long thick plait and the high neckline of a white nightdress showed above her dressing gown. Mason had shouted her name once when we arrived and she had materialized instantly from wherever it was that she slept. Tightening the dressing gown around her now, she attended to Sally.
“Really, Christina,” Sally said, “go back to bed.”
But Christina would have none of it. Mason, kneeling at Sally’s side, looked up at her. “What do you think, Christina? About Madam’s arm. Should she see a doctor?”
“Yes, sir. I think so.”
“Now, now, you two.” Sally turned her head from her husband to her housekeeper and back again. “I won’t have you conspiring. I’ve said I’m fine and I am. No more fuss.” She frowned prettily and then flinched as Christina made one more nimble inspection of her right arm. “I mean it,” she insisted. “I just need some sleep.”
Ned had poured brandies. Mason took Sally’s and held it to his lips. As if, I thought, she were dying.
“Please, Christina, we’ve disturbed you enough. Do go back to bed.”
Christina, reluctant, finally turned away.
When she’d gone, Sally pulled herself up a little and said to Mason, “We’ll have to arrange something about another car for her, I suppose.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Mason replied, consoling.
“All right,” she said, looking into his eyes.
He reached forward and lay a hand on her knee.
He did not come to my room and I suppose I had not expected him to, but I was disappointed nonetheless. Not immediately, because I fell asleep quickly, worn out by the evening and lulled by the brandy, but later, when I woke up and twisted the little clock on my chest of drawers to see what time it was. I flicked the lamp on and blinked. Five a.m. I knew he would not come.
I switched the lamp off again and lay back in the dark. Thinking. I had been surprised by the way Mason had acted toward Sally after the accident. I probably shouldn’t have been. She might, after all, have been seriously hurt. But I was. He had been so…affectionate. I punched a light depression in a downy pillow, knowing that this was a petty kind of jealousy. I felt it nevertheless, needling.
• • •
Is it acceptable to demand love? To be angry with those who withhold it from us? We behave as if it were, don’t we? We rear up on righteous hind legs and howl when our loved ones do not love us back. Like infants squalling for survival. I think that is what I would have done if the drama that was playing out in our home had been set only a year earlier. I would have demanded and then, in that hideous progression that so often comes when demanding is the start point, fallen to asking and then to begging. I’d have bayed for my husband’s affections, and my husband would probably have left me.
Phillip waited three days to pick up again on our short conversation about his affair, and I knew when he was about to do it, saw, in the seconds before he spoke, a slow readjustment of his features. Saw him summon the words and the courage he needed.
“I love you, Frances,” he said.
And then, as if exhausted by this declaration, he said nothing more for a moment and I thought, in that distant way I am capable of now, watching the actress in the movie of my life, what an ill-defined term lov
e is.
My parents, I am sure, loved me and certainly would have said so. They would have cited, I suspect, concern for my welfare, their desire to pass on to me the tools that they thought life called for, as evidence. And yet for many years I felt no such emotion from them, did not consider, even after I had married Phillip and found myself relying on the things my mother, in her tutorly way, had taught me—how to cook chickens, how to hang curtains, how to hem skirts—that this connection represented love. I did not realize through those years I spent packing lunches for Chloe that the skills that had gained me the life I wanted were the legacy of a childhood I had considered barren. And I am not sure that, even when we took Chloe to Singapore after my father’s retirement and watched them with her, formal, but kind and proud, too, of their sweet proxy grandchild and my role as wife and mother, I understood the kind of love they were offering.
Phillip finally lifted his head and looked at me, presenting his version of love, but I did not feel the need to say I know, or I love you too, not out loud. We were sitting in my dayroom, though it was evening, and Phillip was wearing a green sweater that accentuated the color of his eyes and a pair of faded corduroys. He had a tumbler of whiskey in his hand. He looked so comfortable, so husbandly.
“I did not stop loving you, no matter what you might think.”
Again I had no desire or energy for response, and anyway, none was sought. He seemed to need to speak, to unroll all before me, and I understood that, that craving for confession.
“But even when it began, with Josee”—he had hesitated, I felt, over her name, but he went on—“it seemed like something very different. I can’t explain it exactly. It was something that I didn’t expect and God knows wasn’t looking for. It was not like anything I had experienced before.”
He looked up suddenly, pained, guilty, conscious perhaps that he had said too much. It must have struck him that he was telling these things, things that he had probably wanted to tell somebody for quite some time, to his wife, his wronged, betrayed wife.
“What I mean is,” he said, steadying himself, his composure only slightly off-kilter, “it’s not like I met somebody and replaced you. It wasn’t like that at all. I really did try to make sense of it, and I know that I have hurt you, and I know that that is unforgivable, and I also know that it is trite and unreasonable to say that none of this is what I wanted, but really, really, it is true. I just wish you hadn’t ever…” He trailed off then, because we both knew that what was implied here was that it would have been better if I had died without knowing.
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