The rats were leaving the ship, wise creatures. “I’ll take it under advisement,” he said.
“I called the airline and got two seats on a flight that’s leaving this morning. There are a few more spaces available, if you want to change your reservation. We have to leave for the airport in ten minutes.”
“Can you be ready to leave town in ten minutes?” he asked Jane. She was lying on her back, her eyes and mouth wide open, and didn’t move. “We’ll be staying.”
“Oh, well, since you are, I’ll stop by your room and give you a list of all the video equipment, just so you won’t forget anything. And I’ve written up a little contract for you to sign, saying you take full responsibility for getting it all back to Boston.”
“What if we’d decided to come back with you?” he asked her.
“You didn’t,” she said. “Also I’ve got your airline tickets, the paperwork on the van, the receipts for the deposit on the rooms . . .”
A few minutes later, she knocked on his door, handed him a fat manila envelope of paperwork, her handwritten contract, and a pen. “I’ll have to have my lawyer check this over first,” he said.
“Very funny. The main thing is, don’t check the equipment at the curb. Flag down a skycap—make sure he’s a real one; you can tell by the photo ID and the shoes. If they’re all beat up, get someone else—and follow him to the counter.”
“I will. Anything else?”
“I’m just trying to be helpful, Desmond.”
“I know that, and you are. In fact, you’ve been extremely helpful all along, and both Jane and I appreciate it.”
Tim was standing at the edge of the curb, and when a taxi pulled into the parking lot of the hotel, he waved his scrawny arm to flag it down.
“And we appreciate Tim’s help, too.”
Chloe had an efficient black suitcase, a little canvas sarcophagus on wheels. So far, he’d seen her in three different outfits. How she managed to fit them all into such a tiny case was a mystery. She passed the suitcase to Tim. “Load it in the trunk,” she told him. “And make sure there’s nothing on top of it because my PalmPilot’s in there.” She peered over his shoulder, into the room. “Is Jane still there?”
“I think she’s in the bathroom.”
“Tell her I’ll see her back at the station.” She leaned in and gave Desmond a soft kiss on the cheek, almost as if she were bestowing a gift. She smelled of bergamot and orange oil, and her lips were warm, and watching her walk to the taxi, toss her lush black curls, and step into the back seat, Desmond felt as if a gift had been bestowed upon him.
2.
As they drove through the swampy, overgrown back streets on the outskirts of Gulf City, Jane noticed that many of the houses had their windows shuttered. She ought to be concerned about the storm, she knew, but this hateful, selfish part of her had to take into consideration the fact that no matter how many roofs leaked and how many houses suffered damage from water or wind, not one of them would be hers. Her house, she supposed, was suffering damage of a different sort. Tropical storm Jane had blown through and thrown life there into disarray, and she didn’t know how to start the cleanup. Make a resolution, that was usually the way she began. Except that now she was beyond resolutions. She’d broken too many. She no longer believed herself. This project was rapidly spinning toward disaster, and she was spinning right beside it. She’d bared her soul to Desmond, revealed every piece of information she could think to reveal, until finally she’d ended up feeling shredded. And she still didn’t have a clue what to do to put her life back together. I’d be happier if you were my wife. But what if now, after her transgressions this fall, she didn’t know how to be his wife?
They stopped at a light, and off to the right she saw a low, stucco house with an overgrown lawn, and an immense satellite dish off to one side. Three children in bathing suits were chasing each other with buckets of water, while their mother, hair in curlers, cigarette in mouth, washed the car. That was the sign of either reckless optimism or stupidity, washing your car as a drenching tropical storm bore down on the Gulf. The woman looked up at the car, and Jane waved at her. Good job, she wanted to tell her. The car looks great. When you’re done, want me to help you wash your windows?
Outside Lorna’s house, a thin man was standing on a stepladder, adjusting the shutters over the big windows of the living room. “That’s Frank,” Desmond said, “Lorna’s husband. He’s the principal at the school where she teaches. I imagine that’s how they met. Not a bad guy, but he’s used to having the last word, so it’s best not to contradict him.”
“In that case, I’d better keep my mouth shut.”
Desmond pulled into the drive, shut off the engine, and they stepped out into the hot, soupy air. The sky was a deep, dark green, a lovely color for a ginger ale bottle, but a little disconcerting for the usually cerulean heavens.
“Can I help you?” Frank asked as they approached the house.
“We have an appointment to see Lorna,” Desmond said. “Although we might be a few minutes early. I don’t know if you remember me. I interviewed you a couple of years ago about your mother-in-law.”
“I remember you,” Frank said. “I just can’t believe you’d come out here with this storm on its way. Lorna’s not going to want to talk to you today. Don’t you listen to the weather?”
Principal or not, Jane didn’t see the point in merely caving in. “It’s terrible the way they report things, isn’t it?” she said. “The media is completely out of control.”
He looked down at her disdainfully from his perch on the third step of the ladder. “As I understand it, you’re both from the media, one way or another.”
The wind blew Jane’s hair into her face. Maybe she should have taken her own advice and kept her mouth shut.
“We left some equipment here yesterday,” Desmond said. “We’ll just pick it up and be on our way.”
“Well, you’ll have to check that out with Lorna first.”
He, no doubt, was as terrified of litigation as everyone else in the country. Personally, Jane loathed the kind of people who reach for a lawsuit at the first signs of damage or disappointment. One of the women who worked at the station had discussed, with astonishing sincerity, the possibility of suing her son’s school for not giving him a passing grade in biology. Even if she’d never consider actually filing a lawsuit, it was certainly handy having them around as loose threats.
“The equipment is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she said, “and we’d hate to burden you with the responsibility of having to shelter it and make sure nothing happened to it during a storm.”
When Lorna finally came to the door, she told them they’d have to postpone the interview. “You don’t think I’m going to sit in there and talk about mother with the house washing away, do you? I’ve got too many storm preparations. You can come back tomorrow if you like.”
“The fact is,” Desmond said, “I think we’ve got as much information as we need. We want to pick up the equipment and go.”
“You’re giving up,” Lorna said, triumphantly, as if she’d known all along her dead mother would ultimately prove too much for weak-willed people like them.
“We haven’t decided yet,” Desmond said. “Right now, we need to get the equipment. You agreed to let us in and we’re not leaving without it.”
Lorna finally stepped aside and opened the door for them. “Ten minutes,” she said. “That’s it.”
As Jane was stepping into the house, she looked up to the green sky. They were all overreacting. It was nice, for once, to be the person who was taking things in stride. A drop of rain hit her on the side of the nose and exploded against her skin, cold and wet.
3.
Almost all the windows in the house had been shuttered and the rooms were dark and cool. There was something comforting about the way the house felt, lit in this dim way by a few lamps in the suffocatingly floral living room. Judging from the smell, Lorna’s storm prepara
tions included baking; Desmond was almost overwhelmed by the smell of cookies and chocolate. How worried could she be about the weather if she’d spent most of the morning whipping up a batch of toll house cookies?
“Everything’s out there,” Lorna said, pointing to the sunporch. “Right where you left it. What happened to your young helpers?”
As Desmond wandered out to the sunporch, he heard Jane telling Lorna something about Chloe’s and Tim’s return to Boston on the last flight out. The light filtering through the cracks in the shutters did little to illuminate the sunporch. It was much cooler in here than it had been yesterday, but the humidity was still stifling. This was a room for storing exotic tropical plants or cigars, not a collection of perishable paper and vinyl. Tim had arranged the black canvas bags and the metal suitcases and the lights and the tripods in a neat pile by the door. It would take several trips to get it all out to the van. He picked up two heavy cases, carried them into the living room and set them beside the front door. From the kitchen, he heard Jane say, “Coffee would be fine, if you’re making it. They’re very good. Mine always come out dry. My son is trying to teach me how to bake, but I’m hopeless.”
He stepped back into the hot air of the porch. It had started to rain. He could hear it drumming loudly against the roof, but nothing out of the ordinary, certainly not the predicted apocalyptic deluge. He heard a rustling at the far end of the room, near the tables stacked with the Pauline Anderton collection. Probably an animal, come inside to take shelter from the rain, eating its way through the stacks of old clippings. Too bad they hadn’t been able to film that—mice munching on the last remains—a perfect shot to begin the documentary. The documentary that wasn’t to be. He gathered up an armload of cases.
A branch scraped against one of the shutters, and then, from the far end of the room, he heard a rustling of fabric and what sounded like a fart. Desmond peered down the narrow room to the shadowy far end where Lorna had dumped the furniture ousted from the living room during the floral makeover. He set down the cases and flipped a switch by the door. A coneshaped wall lamp cast a beam of faint, yellow light into the gloom and lit up the abandoned chairs and end tables. He heard another sound—a groan, he was almost certain. He adjusted the lamp so the light shone first on one of the windows and then on a high-backed chair. There, hunched over and mumbling, sat an old woman in a floral housedress. She straightened up, shielded her eyes against the light, and barked out two or three unintelligible words.
“Excuse me?” he said, hoping he didn’t sound as stunned as he felt.
“Lower it,” she commanded.
He readjusted the light and maneuvered his way to the back of the room. “I’m sorry,” he said, squatting down until they were at eye level. “I didn’t see you sitting here.”
She gazed at him through a pair of square eyeglasses. “Who?” she asked. “Who did?”
“Who did . . . what?”
Perhaps he’d woken her up. One of her hands was wrapped around a coffee mug she had resting on the arm of the chair. She lifted it to her mouth and took a sip. “What noise?” she asked.
“Noise?”
“What is it?”
“Ah. It’s rain,” he said. “There’s a storm on the way, and it’s started to rain.”
She nodded, and her whole body bobbed forward from the waist. “Oh, yeah. Sophia.”
Sophia? And then he remembered: the name of the storm.
“Same crap,” she said. “Can’t trust anyone.”
Whatever that meant. “No, you can’t. You know, you might be more comfortable in the house. I think Lorna’s baked some cookies for you.”
Margo—for surely this was Pauline Anderton’s senile sister—scoffed at this comment and stuck out her tongue. “She makes lousy cookies. I wanted pie, but she wasn’t in the mood for pie.”
There was a wooden folding chair leaning against the wall. Desmond opened it up and set it on the floor across from Margo. She would be in the neighborhood of eighty-three now. She looked tiny, sunk into the cushions of the chair, but her face was so smooth, her skin so pink and translucent, she appeared to have entered a second infancy. She was wearing a faded white and blue flowered housedress with a smock over it. Although “wearing” didn’t seem the most apt word, since it looked as if the clothes had been buttoned onto her with little thought as to whether or not they fit.
“We visited your old house,” Desmond said.
She opened her eyes a bit wider. “What old house?”
“Your old house in Waugborn. Massachusetts.”
“I never had any old house in any Waugborn.”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, you did. You and your husband had a little ranch. Raised ranch, might be the right term.” He gave the street address and described the neighborhood as he imagined it had been when she lived there.
“That was a new house,” Margo said, “not old.”
“Good point. These days it’s starting to show its age.”
“I hated that house. Always smelled of bananas.”
“From what I’ve read, it sounds as if you and your husband were quite happy there.” And then because he wanted to wedge the name into the conversation, he added, “Until Pauline showed up. Then I gather things got rocky.”
“Hah.” Margo knocked back the rest of whatever was in her coffee mug. “Don’t talk to me about Pauline. I’m sick of hearing about Pauline. They ought to let Pauline rot in peace.”
“I’m beginning to think I should have done just that. I’m writing a book about her. A biography. I’m afraid I’m not doing a very good job of it.”
Margo pressed the boxy glasses against her face and peered at him. “You’re the one. Lorna said something. I can’t remember anymore. That’s why they stuck me in the loony bin.”
“You don’t live here?”
“I’m on a day pass. Listen, who do you think’s gonna read a book like that about Pauline?”
It was a reasonable question, one his nonsenile editor had asked him years ago. “At the moment,” he said, “I’m more concerned about finishing it. There are too many questions I haven’t been able to find answers to.”
“You know what I say: don’t know the answer, make it up.”
At least there was a consensus on this point.
“Down at the loony bin,” she went on, “they ask me a question—’Did you eat your dinny-dinny tonighty-night?’ How the hell am I supposed to remember? And who gives a crap anyway? ‘Oh, yes, nursey, I ate it all up. Yummy yummy.’ “Her body shook with silent laughter.” What do you want to know? Did I eat my dinny-dinny?”
Desmond wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or performing a monologue for an imaginary audience, but he decided to give it a try—probably an indication that he was on the verge of senility. “I can’t figure out what happened after Michael died,” he said. “Pauline’s husband. I can’t figure out why she just stopped singing.”
Margo began laughing at this, so hard Desmond was afraid she might rock herself right out of her chair. When she finally quieted down a bit, she roared, “Pauline never could sing. You didn’t know? Loud and raw, that was it. All heart, no talent.”
“I don’t agree with you there,” Desmond said. “Her records were brilliant. Some of them, anyway. It took talent to express all that heart.”
Margo handed him her coffee mug and told him to set it on the floor. Milk! she sneered. What did they think she was, a g.d. baby? “Pauline had no training, couldn’t control her voice. No technique.”
“Yes,” Desmond said, “but she had—”
“Come here, buster. Your ears don’t work. She had nothing. Except . . . Michael. That lousy son of a bitch was the inspiration for everything. How come you don’t know that?”
“I’ve read all of her letters,” he said.
“Every song was about loving Michael. He dies—no talent, no technique, no inspiration, no nothing. So why bother? Some things you can’t fake.”
“B
ut they didn’t have a close marriage,” Desmond said. “Michael didn’t encourage her. Michael wasn’t—”
She leaned forward in her chair and swatted her hand at him. “Michael . . . was the key . . . to everything. What kind of biographer are you? Go get me some more milk and those cookies, before the wind blows the roof off this crate. Are we in a house?”
Are we in a house?
The overhead lights went on. “What on earth are you doing out here?”
Desmond leapt up from his chair. “The cameras,” he started to explain, and then realized Lorna wasn’t talking to him.
“You told me you were going to stay in the bedroom. This room isn’t air-conditioned, there’s a storm out there, and there’s a live oak right over the roof of this porch.”
Jane was standing in the doorway, holding a glass of milk in one hand and a cookie in the other. She was looking at Desmond for explanation, but all he could do was shrug. He didn’t want to irritate Lorna, and have her cut off the conversation. “I was suggesting she move into the house,” he said. “She told me she was more comfortable out here.”
“We were talking about Pauline,” the old woman laughed. “He liked her records. Dummy.”
Lorna took the old woman’s arm and lifted her up out of the chair. The two of them shuffled to the end of the porch, up over the doorstep, and into the living room. Jane offered him a piece of her cookie. “Is that the sister?” she asked. They could hear bickering in the other room, something about tuna-fish sandwiches.
“I’m not so sure.”
Lorna reappeared in the doorway and told them, pointing to the pile of equipment, that she’d given them ten minutes and they’d been there for twenty already. It was time for them to go.
In the living room, the old woman had been planted on the big puffy sofa with all the other flowers and was contentedly munching her way through a plate of fresh cookies. “I don’t mean to spoil your snack,” Desmond said to her. “I just have one more question.”
True Enough Page 35
