“Mom, look at me.”
Judson, on the neighboring recliner, in baggy new swim trunks, was aiming his camera at her. The camera briefly whirred.
“Sweetie, why aren’t you in the water?”
“I’m busy.”
“You have the whole pool to yourself.”
“I don’t feel like getting wet.”
Something moved in her, a flutter of fear or guilt—a memory. The girl she’d been in Rancho Los Amigos had had a phobia of water on her skin.
“I want to see you dive in the water. Can you show me your dive?”
“No.”
He hunched over the camera and adjusted a dial. The camera seemed too complicated for a nine-year-old, and she’d tried to discourage him from bringing it on the trip. On the flight from Chicago, instead of reading a book, he’d fiddled with the thing incessantly, clicking and turning every clickable or turnable part. He’d done the same thing at Disneyland. He had only three minutes of film, and he was anxious, visibly stressed, about misusing it—kept raising the camera and hesitating, fiddling with it, frowning. She was anxious herself, about the freeway, and needed more cigarettes than she felt she could smoke in front of him. It was only three thirty when he ran out of film. Money had been spent, Frontierland not yet visited, but he said he’d had enough. In the Disney parking lot, before returning to Pasadena, she’d smoked two Luckies.
“Put the camera down,” she said. “You’ve played with it enough.”
He set it aside with a theatrical sigh.
“Are you unhappy about something?”
He shook his head.
“Is it me? Is it my smoking? I apologize for smoking.”
The oriole was singing again, so very yellow. He glanced at it, reached for the camera, and caught himself.
“Sweetie, what is it? You haven’t seemed like yourself.”
His expression became morose. With the return of ordinary hearing came a more general sharpening of her senses.
“Will you tell me what’s bothering you?”
“Nothing. Just … nothing.”
“What is it?”
“Perry hates me.”
She had another flutter of guilt, more pronounced.
“That’s not true at all. There’s no one Perry loves more than you. You’re his special favorite.”
Judson’s mouth curled inward as if he might cry. She moved over to his recliner and pressed his face to her chest. He was so skinny and unhormonal, she could have gobbled him up, but she could feel his resistance. Her old bathing suit now gaped at the top and gave her breasts a wanton latitude. She let him pull away.
“Perry’s sixteen now,” she said. “Teenagers say all sorts of things they don’t really mean. It has nothing to do with how much your brother loves you. I’m sure of that.”
Judson’s expression didn’t change.
“Did something happen? Did he say something that upset you?”
“He told me to leave him alone. He used a bad word.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”
“He said he was sick of me. He used a really bad word.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”
She embraced him again, this time positioning his head on her shoulder. “I don’t have to see my friend today. I can stay here with you and Antonio. Would you like that?”
He squirmed out of her grasp. “It’s okay. I hate him, too.”
“No, you don’t. Never say that.”
He picked up the camera and clicked something. Clicked it. Clicked it. She’d never had to worry about Judson, but his absorption in the camera recalled her own unhealthy absorptions. Out of nowhere, she was seized by an image so vivid that she quaked with it, an image of her soul mate on top of her, rampant in her utter openness to him. Her bathing suit was loose on her—she’d lost thirty pounds—for him—it was crazy. Oh, the relief of being obsessed, the blessed banishing of guilt. The switch in her was still there to be flipped.
“Judson,” she said, her heart beating hard, “I’m sorry if I haven’t been myself. I’m sorry Perry hurt you. Are you sure you don’t want me to stay here with you?”
“Antonio said he’d play Monopoly with me.”
“You don’t want me to stay?”
He gave a shrug, a child’s exaggerated shrug. The right thing was to stay with him, but an afternoon of Monopoly would pass quickly enough, and Antonio had promised to make crispy tacos. Nothing she could do today was so urgent that it couldn’t be done tomorrow, except seeing Bradley.
“Let’s go inside, then. Maybe Antonio will make you a smoothie.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Did you not see the sign? No unaccompanied children under twelve.”
Antonio had introduced Judson to the concept of a “smoothie,” a sort of milkshake blended with banana. Antonio had retired from the job that had brought him and Jimmy to Los Angeles, but he was still vigorous, his hair splendidly white, his face handsomer than ever. He could easily have found a new lover, but instead, every morning and every evening, he visited the nursing home where Jimmy was bedridden. She saw that in her youthful prejudice, because Antonio was Mexican, she’d misread his relationship with her uncle. Antonio, not Jimmy, had always been the man of the house. Jimmy’s art had never really found a market, and now he was just a sack of bones, his vertebrae so badly crumbled that even a wheelchair was uncomfortable. All he had left were his wits. When she’d inquired about his brother, Roy, he’d mentioned that Roy’s first great-grandchild had been born on the day Nixon was elected. “I’ll let you guess,” he’d said, “which of those two events made him happier.”
It wasn’t easy to apply eyeliner with a shaking hand. The face in the guest-room mirror again had prominent cheekbones, but her skin was finely scored with wrinkles previously hidden by fat; poor light was required to see her as the girl she meant to be. At least her new dress fit this girl. She’d asked the dressmaker on Pirsig Avenue for something summery, something of the sort that Sophie Serafimides said lifted a man’s spirits, and she’d delayed the final fitting as an incentive to keep shedding pounds. The dressmaker, declaring that she looked darling, had taken the money she’d earned by proofreading a reader’s guide to Sophocles.
When she’d exhausted the money embezzled from her sister’s estate, and had charged as much as she dared on the family BankAmericard, she’d asked around the church for leads on work suitable for a literate person with no employment history, and a parishioner had connected her to a woman on maternity leave from the Great Books Foundation. The proofreading work was tedious but doable with frequent cigarettes. It kept her mind off food and further limited her interactions with Russ and the kids. In four weeks, she’d made nearly four hundred dollars, enough to pay the credit-card bill, cover the cost of a rental car and Disneyland, and buy sundries like the rolls of film that Judson wanted for their trip. Bradley had once said it himself, in a sonnet: she was capable.
Before going to say good-bye to Judson, she stepped onto the guest-room patio with her purse. It took her a while, after she’d smoked, to notice that she was crossing the lawn toward the parking lot, rather than going back inside. Apparently it wasn’t necessary to say good-bye?
She was too terrified to judge. Her brain felt like a banana in a blender. It was unclear if the source of the terror was the prospect of the freeway or simply the arrival of the moment—the moment when past and present would connect and thirty intervening years would disappear. Obsessed though she’d been with creating this moment, its arrival had caught her by surprise.
She wasn’t capable. She’d memorized the directions that Bradley had sent her, she’d tested herself by reciting them verbatim, and now she couldn’t remember a word of them. She had his last letter in her purse, but she couldn’t read and drive at the same time.
She started the car, which was baking in the sun, and turned the air-conditioning on full blast. The fabric of her dress had sparse green paisleys on a
background of ecru that would show her sweating, which was already considerable. She would have to talk to Mr. Shen, the dry cleaner in New Prospect. Mr. Shen was ever pessimistic when she showed him a bad stain, ever able to perform the miracle of removing it. The thought of Mr. Shen returned her to ordinariness. The worst case—that she’d be back in Pasadena in four hours, able to swim in the pool, unphobic, ordinary—wasn’t such a bad case. Tiny treats, an air-conditioned car, a drink by the pool, an after-dinner cigarette, could get a person through her life. Looking forward to treats was a coping skill for which Sophie Serafimides had praised her. It was strange that she’d felt compelled to inflict such terrors on herself.
Another adage of the dumpling: It’s better to function than not function. Once she was on the freeway, she found that she remembered the directions perfectly. The freeway experience was itself a helpful obsession, a state of mind so consuming that the world outside it barely registered. All she had to do was stick to the rightmost lane and attend to road signs. Of the millions of people who drove in Los Angeles every day, very few were killed. When she’d made it past the San Diego Freeway without dying, she had the thought that, if she ended up moving here, she might even come to enjoy driving.
It was a mistake to think this. Only by luck did she emerge from her fantasies in time to take the exit for Palos Verdes. Pushed relentlessly by cars behind her, she drove all the way to Crenshaw Boulevard before she could pull over and collect herself. She angled a cold-air louver at her face, which felt red, and patted her underarms with a tissue from her purse. The haze outside the car had a marine quality, cooler in color than smog, merely dimming, not effacing. A sign on a nearby awning said PERRY SUMMONS REALITY.
The words swam in her vision.
Their reemergence as PERRY SIMMONS REALTY didn’t lessen her fear. Not wanting her dress to stink of smoke, she got out of the car. The air was ocean-cool and sharply scented with asphalt from a repaving job across the street. The words on the awning were too strange, too apt, to be anything but a sign from God. But what did it mean?
She hadn’t had a real talk with Perry since the night of his sixteenth birthday, three weeks ago. She’d detained him in the kitchen, after dinner, and privately handed him two hundred dollars, the same amount she’d given Clem at Christmas. After Perry had thanked her, she’d noticed that someone’s slice of cake had hardly been touched, and he’d admitted it was his. Did he not like chocolate cake anymore? “No, it’s delicious.” Then why wasn’t he eating it? “My butt is fat.” His butt wasn’t fat in the slightest! “You’re the one with the crazy weight-loss program.” She was just trying to get back to her proper weight. “I’m doing the same thing. You don’t have to worry about me.” Was he sleeping? “Sleeping fine, thanks.” And he wasn’t still … “Selling weed? I told you I wouldn’t.” Did he still smoke it? “Nope.” And—did he remember what else he’d promised her? “Trust me, Mother. If I notice anything amiss, you’ll be the first to know.” But he seemed a little—agitated. “Said the pot to the kettle.” What did that mean? “Your own mental health doesn’t strike me as the finest.” She was—it was only some trouble between her and his father. The point here was that a growing boy needed to eat. “What sort of ‘trouble’?” Just—nothing. The sort of trouble that married couples sometimes had. “Does it have a name? Is it Mrs. Cottrell?” What made him—why did he ask that? “Things I’ve heard. Things I’ve seen.” Well—yes. Since he was nosy enough to ask—yes. And, well, yes—it was very upsetting. If she hadn’t seemed like herself lately, that was why. But the point—“The point, Mother, is that you should worry about yourself, not me.”
With the help of two Luckies, by the side of the road, she understood that the building with the awning was just an ordinary realtor’s office. Looking around, she saw ordinary asphalt, ordinary streetlights, a hillside covered prettily with coastal heather. She unwrapped a stick of Trident and got back in the car.
Palos Verdes was one of countless neighborhoods she’d had no reason to visit in her youth. The streets were empty of pedestrians, and the houses were blander, more homogenous, than the ones in West Los Angeles. In the dimming marine mist, the place seemed abandoned and melancholy. Reaching the street called Via Rivera, she found that she was ten minutes early.
Bradley’s house was less than grand, and it didn’t have the ocean view that she’d imagined; a burgundy Cadillac was in the driveway. She stopped her own car well short of it and took the gum from her mouth. Would her smoking repel him? Or would the smell of her Luckies take him back, as it took her, to the Murphy bed in Westlake?
His first letter, which had arrived a week after she’d written to him, contained sentences of inexhaustible interest—I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought of you, how often I’ve wondered where you were, how worried I was that something terrible had happened to you—and many smaller items of interest, such as the fact that he wasn’t married. He’d been divorced from Isabelle after their younger boy finished high school, and divorced a second time, more recently, from a woman I should have known better than to marry. Also of interest were the excellence of his health and certain suggestions of wealth. He was now in the vitamin business, not as a salesman but as the owner of a company, based in Torrance, that employed more than forty people. Although his report on his sons was not of interest, she’d studied the details and filed them in a mental drawer that also held the name of every member of First Reformed. She was a pastor’s wife, skilled at politely remembering, no longer scary, and she wanted Bradley to know it.
At one minute past twelve thirty, she rang his doorbell.
The man who answered was somewhat like Bradley but jowlier, sparser of hair, wider in the hips. He was wearing loose linen pants and an oversize sort of toreador blouse, pale blue and halfway unbuttoned. Also a frightful pair of sandals.
“My God,” he said. “It really is you.”
She had two related thoughts. One was that she’d somehow projected the height of her husband onto her memory of Bradley, who in fact had never been tall. The other was that Russ, besides being tall, was by far the better-looking man. The man in the doorway was blowsy and yellow-toenailed. If she’d daydreamed for a hundred years, she couldn’t have imagined him in sandals. This led to a third and very unexpected thought: she was doing him a favor by seeing him, not the other way around.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to find me,” he said, beckoning her inside. “How was the freeway? It’s usually not bad at this time of day.”
He shut the door and made a move to hug her. She stepped sideways. The house was a split-level and smelled faintly of old person. The art and the furnishings were tamely Far Eastern.
“What a lovely house.”
“Yeah, I have the vitamin craze to thank for that. Come in, come in, I’ll show you around. I was thinking we could eat on the patio, but it’s a little too cool, don’t you think?”
“It was nice of you to make lunch.”
“God, Marion. Marion! I can’t believe you’re here.”
“I can’t either.”
“You look—you look like yourself. A little older, a little grayer, but—great.”
“It’s good to see you, too.”
Broad in the beam, favoring an apparently sore hip, he led her down into the living room, from which a tall hedge and a flower garden were visible. The clamminess of her dress, a vestige of her terror, seemed sad to her now. On a wall lined with bookshelves, she noticed recent Mailer, recent Updike.
“I see you still read.”
“God, yes. More than ever. I’m still working, but the company kind of runs itself. A fair number of days, I don’t even go down to the office.”
“I don’t read the way I used to.”
“With a house full of kids, that’s not surprising.”
Her fourth thought was terrible: she’d killed the baby he’d fathered. Not once in three months had it occurred to her that she might have to mention this to him. She wondere
d if she should do it right away. Their entire history was coiled up tightly in her head. If she let it out, it might obliterate the reality of how he looked to her, the sad smell in his house. But was this a favor she felt like doing? It was confounding to recognize how much she had, compared to him. Not only many more years to live but full knowledge of their history. The story resided in her head, not his, and she felt a curious reluctance to share it, because she was its sole author. He’d merely been the reader.
He was staring at her, his smile almost goofy. In her evident fascination to him, she felt a stirring of the role she’d once played, the role of dangerous-crazy, the role of bluntly saying whatever came to mind.
“Did you live here with your second wife?”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “I cannot believe I’m seeing you. How many years has it been?”
“More than thirty.”
“God!”
He came at her again, and she slipped away to the rear windows. He hastened to open a French door. “I’ll show you the garden. I love the privacy of it.”
In other words, he didn’t have an ocean view.
“I’ve got the gardening bug,” he said, following her outside. “It comes on like clockwork when you’re sixty. I always hated yard work, and now I can’t get enough of it.”
There was a large bed of roses. The sky was gray-blue in the haze, the shadows of the patio furniture indistinct. A bird was buzzing in the hedge, perhaps a wren. She could hear it very clearly.
“Your second wife,” she said. “Did she live here with you?”
He laughed. “I’d forgotten how direct you are.”
“Really? You forgot?”
It was an unfair thing to say. She’d forgotten, too, for many years.
“I want to hear about everything,” he said. “I want to hear about your kids, I want to hear about—your husband. Your life in Chicago. I want to hear about everything.”
“I’m just curious about your second wife. What was she like?”
His face soured. “It was painful. A mistake.”
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