“James,” Diana said.
But James was looking up at Billie, who loomed over him now, hands on her hips, her pointy elbows shaking. “I’d marry him before you any day of the week,” she said.
“No one’s asking you to marry me,” James said quietly.
They stared at each other, Billie in a stance of pure childish defiance, James with a kind of confusion, as if the anger he felt toward this young, beautiful girl were a mystery to him.
“I’d go back to my fiancé first,” Billie muttered.
“Give that some thought,” James said. “Because if Sonny still remembers your name next month, you’ll have done better than most.”
Billie hesitated, smiling uneasily. She looked unsure of what James meant at first. Then she said, “I don’t believe you. You’re just jealous.”
James said nothing. He looked suddenly tired.
“And even if he used to be like that,” Billie said more loudly, “I couldn’t care less, because Sonny loves me.” She turned to Sonny. “Right?”
But Sonny’s eyes were closed, and he appeared lost in some private contemplation. Billie watched him, waiting. Finally he managed to open his eyes and look at her, squinting as if she were a piece of bright foil. “That’s right, baby,” he said. “It’s different this time.”
Billie held very still, as if waiting to experience the comfort of these words. Then she began to cry. Her shoulders curled, and she lifted her hands to her face. Diana left her chair and took the girl in her arms.
Sonny shut his eyes again. Sunlight poured over his face, and sweat glittered in the creases of his skin. He opened his eyes and looked at James. “I slept with your wife,” he said.
Diana froze, still holding the sobbing Billie. Everything seemed to tilt, and a finger of nausea rose in her throat. “James, it was a hundred years ago,” she said.
“I don’t remember it,” Sonny said, “but I know it happened.”
James rose slowly from his chair, and went to the edge of the boat. He gazed toward the shore. Billie had quieted down and was looking with smeary, fascinated eyes from Sonny to James.
James turned and veered toward Sonny, who rose halfway out of his chair before James hit him twice in the face, knocking him backward over the chair and into the rail. Billie screamed and clung to Diana. Sonny lay with his mouth open, blood running from his nose.
Billie and Diana went to Sonny, took his arms and tried to haul him to his feet, but he shook them off and stood up slowly. His breath stank of alcohol, not just a few drinks but a thick, rotten sweetness. Drops of red bloomed on his collar. He hovered unsteadily, pushing the hair from his eyes. “I’m gonna kill you,” he said to James, “I swear to God.”
“Do it,” James said.
Sonny came at James and attempted a clumsy punch, which James blocked easily. But Sonny followed almost instantly with a second, jabbing James high under his ribs, seeming to force the breath from him. Then again, in the chin, so James staggered backward.
“Stop it!” Diana screamed, and tried with Billie to come between them, but it was impossible; the men shoved them away and lunged for one another in a frenzy, pounding, grunting, as if each believed his own survival hinged purely on the other’s annihilation. Blood ran from Sonny’s nose over his teeth, gathering in the cracks between them. He choked and started to cough, then went at James again, slugging his ear before finally James caught him in that boxing hold Diana had seen on TV, when the fighters seem to hug each other, heads down, so neither can move.
A perfect stillness opened around them. Everyone seemed to wait. Diana noticed the whiteness of Sonny’s cuffs, a scar behind James’s ear from his basketball days, the slick, marmalade-colored planks at her feet. The world disappeared; the only sound was the men’s breathing.
Finally James let Sonny go and waited, poised for a response. But Sonny was barely able to stand. His eyes were running—it could have been the sun or the blow to his nose. Diana had never seen him cry in all the years she had known him, and found it hard to watch. But Billie couldn’t take her eyes away from Sonny. She wore a look Diana recognized, the sick, scared look of a girl whose mischief has gotten her in trouble, who suspects her life will never be the same.
Sonny went to a chair and sat down heavily. He picked up a glass and downed what was left inside it, then fumbled for the bottle. “I can’t kill you, buddy, I just realized,” he said, making an effort to smile. “I’d be too lonely without you.”
It was not until James started the motor that the world seemed to move again. A wind blew, the boat shook, and Diana inhaled the smell of gasoline. From the deck she watched her husband swing the boat around, his knuckles on the wheel, the hollow of his spine against his shirt. She was afraid to go near him. Sonny hadn’t moved from his chair. His head was thrown back, and under his nose he held a towel filled with ice Billie had brought him. One eye was already going black.
Slowly Diana inched toward James, hesitating behind him on the flybridge. He had not glanced at her once since the fight with Sonny, and she felt as if he never would again. Finally she went around in front of him and touched his cheek, which was swollen and bloody. To her surprise, James grinned. Diana studied him, not sure what this meant. “The good old days,” he said, and shook his head. He put an arm around Diana, and they stood side by side watching Billie, who was hunched alone at the bow. As the boat thumped over the lake, she leaned forward, watching the thick folds of water peel aside. Her curls had vanished, and now her thin, straight hair whipped madly around her head. Diana had an urge to go to her, to promise Billie she would thank God one day that none of this had worked. But she doubted the girl would believe her.
More than a year passed before James and Diana saw much of Sonny again. By then Diana had earned her Ph.D. and was teaching in the Film Studies Department at the U. of I.’s Circle Campus. Sonny had grown even fatter, and his complexion was the color of raw oysters. The doctor issued continual warnings, but Sonny’s only response had been to take up occasional smoking. Diana noticed that he flicked the cigarette constantly, so that it never had time to gather any ash.
“Remember that time I almost killed you?” he would ask James sometimes when they’d had a few drinks. “I should’ve let you have it—don’t know what stopped me.”
“Willpower,” James said, grinning at Diana. “Pure self-restraint.”
“Don’t kid yourself, buddy. It was pity.”
This was one story James and Diana never told at parties. Except sometimes the beginning, where Sonny made off with a bride on the eve of her own wedding. The rest they kept to themselves, hardly mentioning it, lest it take on that eerie power of old movies and faded snapshots, an allure against which the present day could only pale.
Now and then Diana still thought of Billie, who had gone back to her original fiancé and married him. Somewhere in the Deep South, Diana guessed, the girl must occasionally tell the story of her brief elopement with a madman. “It was terrible!” she would say. “It was something out of hell.” Yet Diana guessed that when Billie looked at the familiar trappings of her life and recalled that strange day, she was sometimes wistful.
PASSING THE HAT
The first time I saw her, she was waiting in line for a chairlift. “There’s Catherine Black,” someone said. “Jack Delancey’s girlfriend.” I saw a tanned, buxom woman in her late twenties (the authenticity of whose breasts I immediately questioned), wearing a pair of skintight blue ski overalls. One strap ran straight down the middle of each breast. She had a wide, pretty mouth, and struck me as someone I knew without having to meet her: sexy and brash, filled with loud and abundant laughter, not afraid to drink too much. The sort of woman married men dream about, but who is rarely married herself. And of course, I disliked her instantly.
Jack Delancey was part of the crowd my husband, Ted, and I belonged to, young stock brokers and investment bankers and their pretty wives, all of us making money, having children, and intending to do a great
deal more of both. Most of us had moved to San Francisco recently from drab Midwestern towns (Springfield, Illinois, in our case) and regarded our arrival here as a near escape from a disaster. We were giddy. While other people our age were protesting the Vietnam War and experimenting with communes, we were buying and redecorating vast houses, overextending ourselves on private schools, and throwing summertime parties in Belvedere and Tiburon, where late at night you were likely to be shoved, fully clothed and still holding your glass, into someone’s swimming pool.
Catherine Black must have been at most of those early parties. I hardly remember her, though, except at one Ted and I gave, where she wore a white backless summer dress with a high collar. Her back was tanned and very smooth, the skin tight over her ribs so they rippled like a seashell. We were the same age, more or less, but she had that perfect seamlessness of waist and hip that comes of not having been pregnant.
“Charlotte,” she cried as the evening wore on, “I’ve broken my glass.”
She held it out for me, the long, thin shards like blades of ice. “I’m so sorry,” she said, smiling drunkenly, then looked as if she might cry.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Forget it.”
I took the shards from her, but by the time I reached the garbage, I’d cut myself. Blood ran between my fingers, gathering around the nails.
I try sometimes to remember what dessert I served that night (my frozen avocado mousse, which sounded so awful and tasted so good?), or who told the funniest story at dinner, or whether anyone ended up pitching into the deep beds of ivy outside our front door. But I can’t recall. Once I’ve released Catherine’s glass from my bloodied hand, that evening blurs in my mind with other parties we gave—the living room crowded with laughter and smoke, the sweet odor of gin, our daughter, Jessica, pigtailed and barefoot in her nightie, proudly serving drinks. And here I am, fifteen or so years later, pausing on this foggy street while the black Labrador puppy I still cannot believe I own snaps at dry leaves. For years my children begged me for a dog, but I wouldn’t allow it. I call her Rover, hoping irony will rescue me from self-contradiction.
It’s nearly dark. Below me the bay is covered in fine, watery light. I’ve taken a break from emptying my closet, pulling out clothes I haven’t looked at in years, clothes bundled in plastic. I’ll send them to Jessica, back East, where she is a sophomore in college.
I was making soup for dinner once, and as I placed the pot in the sink and lifted its lid, Ted came up behind me and reached around my waist. The windows above the sink were squares of bright black, and steam clung to them like frost. As it melted away, we saw ourselves reflected in the glass. Ted kept his arms around me. We listened to the thump of Joel’s and Jessica’s feet above our heads.
“God knows what they’re doing up there, the little hell-raisers,” Ted said, grinning at our reflection.
“God knows,” I said.
We rocked back and forth, watching the picture we made. Neither one of us spoke. Ted’s heart seemed to push directly against my ribs, and with each breath his stomach filled the hollow of my back. Our life pulled in around us for a moment, a thing we could measure and hold. We had what we wanted.
Now I wonder why I remember that night. There must have been a hundred other times when Ted and I stood before that sink, endless pots of soup whose lids I lifted. We even made love on the floor of that kitchen once, when we first moved in—a sort of earthy christening. I know that happened, but I can’t remember it. Instead, what comes back again and again is the two of us standing there, watching ourselves rock. And of course, I’m glad to have it. When it comes to memory, I suppose, we’re all passing the hat.
Catherine Black and Jack Delancey were together two years, and after they broke up he married someone else. Catherine dated Chuck Peyton after that, one of the last single men left in our group, then had a series of shorter affairs with people I knew less well. When our friends Wally and Clara Davidson separated, Wally dated Catherine, and the rumor was that they’d been involved long before that. Clara Davidson disappeared from sight. People were cool to Wally at first, but it was hard to sustain—he and Catherine were everywhere that winter, giving parties, going to parties, having long, boisterous lunches in the ski lodge at Sugar Bowl, where Wally owned a house. Catherine had never looked happier, I thought, as if there were some thrill, some rarefied pleasure most of us would never know, that came of stealing a man from his wife.
I ended up in Wally’s sauna that winter with a group that included Catherine, who wore a sparkling green bikini. Her torso and limbs looked stringier than they had a few summers before, and her skin seemed leathery from one too many Caribbean vacations. She was drinking a glass of wine, and began dipping her fingers into the glass and then flicking white wine onto the hot, dark stones of the grate. The stones gasped, and a burst of winy steam filled the room. We felt its tartness in our throats. My daughter watched, wide-eyed with amazement and delight, as if Catherine had shot columns of flame from each of her long red fingernails.
The next morning, after putting the kids into ski school, I discovered too late that I was right behind Catherine Black in the lift line. We both feigned delight at the coincidence, this long-awaited chance to really talk, then struggled to fill the silence.
“Where’s Wally?” I asked as the chair lifted us from the ground.
“He went up early with Mike Minetta,” she said. “I think they’re skiing Siberia.”
“Ted, too,” I said. “They must be up there together.”
The lift whispered along its track. It had snowed the night before, and beneath us the untouched hill was smooth and white as eggshell. The small trees buckled under their load, slim trunks bent. I looked down at Catherine’s thighs, then at mine, pleased to find hers slightly thicker. Her perfume was strong for so early in the day.
“You’ve made quite a hit with my daughter,” I said, groping for some topic.
“Really? With Jessica?”
It surprised me that she knew my daughter’s name. “Oh yes,” I said. “She thinks you’re wonderful. She told me you looked like a movie star.” My words amazed me—what compliments dislike could generate!
“God,” Catherine said. “What do you know.”
Without turning my head, I glanced at her broad, tanned face, the eyes deeply lined by now, the cheeks faintly shiny with makeup. It had been five or six years since I’d first seen her, waiting in line for the chairlift. It seemed to me she wasn’t aging well.
“I like kids,” she said.
“That’s funny,” I said. “I never liked kids until I had them.”
“I’ve had longer to think about it.”
This puzzled me. I had always assumed Catherine chose the sort of life she led; a taste for children didn’t seem to fit. “Well,” I said, “if you and Wally …”
Catherine laughed—a loud, reckless laugh that startled me. I felt I’d been caught in a lie, and blushed to my neck. “Come on. Wally won’t marry me,” she said.
“I hadn’t given it much thought,” I said, “frankly.”
“Well, he won’t,” she said, lighting a cigarette with a slim, ovalshaped lighter, then snapping it shut. “Everyone knows that.”
I watched her face arrange itself around the cigarette, as if every crease had been formed by this act. Strangely, I had an urge to smoke one myself, which I hadn’t done since college.
Catherine wasn’t laughing anymore, but looked as if she might start again at any moment. “It’s funny,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “There are things you’re just positive will happen to you. Then there’s that second when you realize, Jesus Christ. Maybe they won’t.”
She was watching me closely. Her eyes, I noticed, were bloodshot. I shifted the ski pole under my leg.
“Have you ever had a feeling like that?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” I said, uneasy. “I guess I have most things I wanted.”
“You’re lucky.”
I felt
her envy, sharp as the tang of her cigarette smoke on the cold air. We were far apart, I realized then, and this filled me with relief.
Catherine flicked her half-smoked cigarette into a snowbank. “Of course,” she said, “getting what you want is only the beginning. The hard part is holding on to it.”
I was annoyed. “How do you know?”
Catherine took a while to answer. She seemed deep in thought. “I just know,” she finally said.
As I head toward home, I find myself studying the neighborhood, now that I’ll be leaving it for good. Houses have changed color again since I last noticed, houses whose hues seemed so indelible when we first arrived that the neighborhood will always look fake to me. Most of our friends have split up and moved; different cities, different countries, strange, unlikely fates. Someone told me Katy Alistair’s daughter is a stripper in Guam; Joel’s childhood friend Bobby Zimmerman was found hanging from a light fixture in the Tenderloin. But these are only the most dramatic cases; most kids have simply gone off to college, their parents divorced, husbands married to younger women and starting second families. I see young, strange faces through the windows of houses I’ve been inside so many times, unfamiliar children hitting tennis balls against garage doors. It galls me, how at home they seem. I have a lunatic urge sometimes to go up to one of those kids and say, “Understand something, junior: you don’t really live here. Not like we did.”
Two different families have lived in our house since we moved. The second, the Weisels, invited me to a dinner party several weeks ago. Against my better instincts, curiosity led me to accept. I wandered through the familiar rooms, remembering the paint samples and fabric swatches Ted and I had argued over—all gone, the curtains gone, the walls a different color, a vast Chinese urn where we used to put our Christmas tree. I could almost hear the scuttling of Joel’s footed pajamas across the floor—those same boards! I searched the walls and corners for some trace of our lives, something left behind by mistake. But there was nothing. The house might never have existed before that night. As I ate my lemon mousse, I felt lightheaded, giddy, as if I myself had narrowly escaped the same oblivion. I drank another glass of wine. By midnight, I had to ask where to find the bathroom.
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