Her daughter’s eyes closed, and her breathing turned regular and slow. Rebecca sat quietly by the bedside, in no hurry to go anywhere. No, she would not give in to that jangling world without a fight. She had something to offer too. She had the best thing.
PART II
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life….
MATTHEW ARNOLD, “The Buried Life”
Chapter Three
The offices of Utopian Images were located five blocks south of Market Street, on Stillman, near Bryant, in a half-converted warehouse under the freeway, on an alley that never saw sunlight. Rebecca stepped off the 45 bus on Monday morning just after 8:30, nursing a massive cup of Starbucks’ coffee, clad in her usual black tights and black skirt, sneakers, and a baggy black sweater, the casual attire still allowed the artists at Utopian Images. She felt the usual Monday sense of the week ahead as a dead weight to be lifted. It embarrassed her, to be so much a creature of the usual. She had vowed, when she was young, to never hate Mondays.
“Is Jeff here yet?” she asked the company’s receptionist, Moira Donnell, who was busy with a magazine and a bagel.
Moira, with her mouth full, just shook her head and kept reading Marie Claire. Staffing the front desk, she was the best-dressed employee in the place by far, a chestnut-haired, green-eyed young woman of twenty-five or so, almost beautiful in a determined, much-attended-to way, and seldom less than impressive. Today she wore a navy blue suit that deftly minimized a slight tendency to heft. Moira regularly gained and lost the same ten pounds, like the moon. A second bagel in the bag on the desk suggested that the current waxing phase had not yet peaked.
“Could you tell him when he does get in that I need to see him?” Rebecca said. “Like—desperately?”
Moira swallowed heroically. “Sure.”
The magazine’s cover promised 288 Cool Summer Looks, 4 Weeks to a Beach-Ready Body, and a Get-What-You-Want Guide to Sex, Love, and Money. Rebecca tried to recall the last time she had felt that her body was Beach-Ready or even within four hopeful weeks of being so. Like her attitude toward Mondays, it seemed like a kind of moral defeat that she still cared.
“How was your weekend?” she asked.
Moira brightened. “Super! Yours?”
“Super,” Rebecca echoed dryly, and they laughed. The contrast between Moira’s supposedly glamorous life and Rebecca’s mundane one was a running joke between them. Not that Rebecca would have traded places for a moment. Moira had way too much suffering ahead of her, following that glossy Get-What-You-Want Guide. But there was something touching about the younger woman’s faith.
Moira turned back to her breakfast. Rebecca went on, past the drooping fern and up the steps to the suite of offices. Most of them were still empty at this hour, but Bonnie Carlisle was at her console with her door ajar, and Rebecca paused to stick her head in.
“Boo,” she said.
“I hate EasyDraw,” Bonnie said without turning around.
Rebecca laughed. “Me too.”
Bonnie spun her chair. She was a solid woman Rebecca’s age, with intelligent blue eyes, sand-colored hair, and a dry, languid wit. Her face always seemed a little mournful to Rebecca, like a sad clown’s; there was an air of weary wisdom about Bonnie. But she had a magnificent laugh. She was Rebecca’s best friend at Utopian Images.
“I’m going to grab Jeff as soon as he comes in and demand help,” Rebecca said.
“Not if I grab him first.”
“It’s crazy. I spent half my weekend tearing my hair out.”
“Only half?”
They considered Bonnie’s computer monitor glumly. After a moment, the screen saver kicked in with a series of images from Georgia O’Keeffe. Bonnie reached for her coffee mug, a giant plastic thing that said 49ers on the side.
“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was your weekend?” she asked.
Rebecca shrugged and leaned back on the edge of the desk. “Quiet. Rory had Mary Martha. You?”
“The highlight was taking Bruiser for a walk on Ocean Beach.” Bruiser was Bonnie’s German shepherd—her “longtime companion,” as she liked to joke. “He almost caught a seagull.”
“I think those seagulls are just toying with Bruiser, frankly.”
“This one seemed genuinely scared.”
Rebecca smiled. This was the moment to tell Bonnie that Bob had proposed and have a big girls’ laugh over the ridiculous details, but Rebecca found that she didn’t want to. Bonnie had been insisting for weeks that Bob would do exactly what he had done, though she hadn’t foreseen the violin. What was even more awkward was that Bonnie had made it plain that she felt that Rebecca could do worse; she had been rooting, subtly, for a compromise, for what she called realism. To treat Bob’s proposal too scornfully or casually was oddly a sort of backhanded slap at Bonnie herself.
On the other hand, it was even stranger not to tell her. Rebecca said, “Bob asked me to marry him, Friday night.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Oh, he was serious, all right.”
Bonnie, seeing which way the wind was blowing, regathered herself to be supportive of the refusal. “Ah, you heartbreaker, you.”
“You are entitled to one I-told-you-so.”
“Well, I did.”
“That counts.”
“You weren’t even tempted? Not even a little?”
“Not tempted. The whole thing was a triumph of wishful thinking.”
“I still don’t see what’s so wrong with the guy, frankly.”
“Nothing. He’s beyond reproach. I’m just not in the market.”
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s true. I just can’t date anymore, I can’t have a relationship. It’s all so dramatic and overwrought. I’d rather stay home in my flannel pajamas and watch TV. I’d rather read a good book. I’d rather—oh, hell, I don’t know. I’d rather pull weeds.”
Bonnie laughed. “Of course, I forgot what a passionate gardener you are.”
“I was out in the yard for several hours yesterday, I’ll have you know.”
“And what about sex?”
“I didn’t think it would be appropriate, what with the neighbors and all.”
“I mean, forever. I mean, for the rest of your life.”
Rebecca shrugged. “My new tenant has been celibate for something like twenty years, and he seems happy enough. Well, actually, he seems miserable. But it seems like such a peaceful misery.”
“The monk?”
“He’s working at McDonald’s now, very serenely.”
“Yeah, he sounds like a great role model for the transition into spinsterhood.”
“The point is, Bob is all very well. Men are all very well. Rory, God bless him, was all very well. But I’d rather have friendship. I’d rather have frankness and freedom and belly laughs, and not this perpetual tiptoeing around, this constant, demeaning, junior high school concern for the state of the Relationship. It’s tiresome, isn’t it? I mean, is there a single man on the planet that you can talk to?”
“Well, when you put it that way,” Bonnie laughed. “But why stack the deck?”
“I’d join a monastery myself, I swear, if it wasn’t for Mary Martha…. And if I had a better relationship with God, I suppose.”
“Yeah, well, I think you’re bluffing.”
“Aren’t you happy, with Bruiser?”
“I love Bruiser dearly, Becca. I have a great life, and I’m very grateful. But let’s not fool ourselves. I’m an aging single woman with a dog, making the best of things.”
“And I’m an aging single mom.”
“Turning down marriage proposals left and right.”
“Just left, so far.” They laughed. “So you think I blew it, huh? I should have grabbed Prince Charming-Enough?”
“Oh, jeez, Rebecca. Nobody’s holding ou
t for the fairy tale thing anymore. Except maybe you.”
Rebecca blinked, stung. “Hey, I’m as thoroughly disillusioned as the next gal.”
Bonnie shrugged stolidly. They sat for a moment without speaking, watching the O’Keeffe flowers succeed one another on the computer screen, labial lilies and voluptuous lilies and lilies like a maw.
“Oh, what the hell,” Bonnie said at last, relenting. “He’s just a guy. There’s no sense getting too worked up about it.”
“Exactly,” Rebecca said, relieved.
“I ate an entire box of See’s chocolates this weekend. One after the other, like a machine.”
“I exceeded my cigarette limit both days. And I didn’t do the laundry.”
Bonnie nudged her mouse, and the screen saver dissolved into EasyDraw. “And now it’s Monday,” she said. “Can you believe this shit?”
Jeff Burgess came in just after ten o’clock, bristling and peremptory. He was spending a lot more time lately wining and dining corporate clients, and he tended to make up for being around the office less by acting more urgent while he was there. Rebecca could remember a time when marijuana, poverty, and an overlay of sixties’ idealism had made Jeff seem like a very mellow man, but as his responsibilities had accumulated over the years, his latent perfectionism had emerged. He was constantly trying to muffle the tendency, catching himself in midflare and saying, “Well, it’s no big deal, of course,” but all this had really accomplished was that among the employees of Utopian Images, “no big deal” was now a joking synonym for anything of enormous importance.
Rebecca tried to flag him down on his first pass through the commons, but Jeff waved her off furiously and hurried on to some more pressing crisis. She retreated to her office and waited. Twenty minutes later he charged by again, and this time she was able to get him to stop.
“I can give you thirty seconds,” Jeff said from the doorway. He looked like a kid who had been forced to dress up for a wedding, with his thinning brown hair still slopping over his collar, baggy gray pants and black leather shoes with tassels, a button-down white shirt, and a swirling yellow Jerry Garcia tie. Rebecca supposed that the tie was supposed to make some kind of statement. Cultivating his defiant little incongruities, Jeff thought he had pulled off a higher integration of hipness and capitalism, but basically he was just a corporate wannabe on the rise now, in need of a haircut and a shave. He was a nice guy who had tried to change the world and failed.
“This animation program is hopeless,” Rebecca said. “I can’t get it to do anything except make stick figures and play ‘This Land Is Your Land.’”
“It’s supposed to be the hot new thing.”
“I think I might do better with the old thing.”
Jeff sighed. “Let’s see what you’ve got so far.” He let go of the doorjamb, which he had been clutching as if to keep himself from flying off to other, more crucial, business, and crossed to her desk. Rebecca ran the lightbulb man sequences she had, to the maddening helium-voiced chorus.
Jeff winced. “Is that really the sound track we decided on?”
“You wanted ‘incongruity.’”
“And what’s that he’s wearing?”
“A tuxedo.” Jeff looked blank. “Fred Astaire. You and Marty Perlman at PG&E were ecstatic over the concept. Cross-generational appeal.”
Jeff considered the herky-jerky animation unhappily. “I don’t think you’ve got it yet. The lightbulb dancing—it’s a lark, see? You want a very smooth feeling.”
“I had it in the sketches. I just can’t make the machine keep that quality.”
“Perlman’s gonna shit when he sees this.”
“Well, I don’t think we should show him this.”
“He’s going to have to see something by next Monday. They still haven’t fully committed to this project, you know.”
Rebecca could smell Jeff’s fear, sweaty and metallic through the pall of his cologne. It was the wrong cologne too: he smelled like somebody trying to smell like somebody else. She had slept with Jeff for a month and a half some five years ago, not long after her divorce, about a year before he had married one of the other artists. Everyone in the company had been sleeping with everyone else at that point. Close to Jeff now, immersed in his alien scent, feeling how pathetically near he was to panic, Rebecca tried to remember that intimacy and could come up with nothing. Not even regret. It had happened and it was gone. All she felt was a weary, almost unwilling compassion.
She said, “I think that if I work like an absolute maniac, I could probably have thirty seconds or so of good dancing for you by Monday.”
“It’s not that big a deal, of course,” Jeff said, too relieved by half. “But thirty seconds would be great.”
Rebecca turned her computer off and worked through the afternoon with a pencil and paper, as she often did when she got stuck on a project. This was so pleasurable that it felt like cheating, as if she were back in her sixth-grade social studies class, sneaking sketches into her notebook while she was supposed to be reading about tariffs.
There were actually some interesting qualities emerging in the sketches, some relative subtleties. Absurd as the concept was, Rebecca felt that she had a good sense of the lightbulb man’s longing for grace in motion. It was largely unrealized, which was the character’s comedy and his pathos. He was shaped like a lightbulb, after all. He was a cartoon, at the mercy of bad music, in the service of a corporation. And yet he longed to dance.
This had happened to her before, on projects equally silly. Once you crammed yourself inside the premise and stopped fighting it, the small joys of craft took over. On the train ride home, she found herself humming cheerfully. Mary Martha had had a good day at day care too, and the two of them walked home together hand in hand, discussing animals and objects that began with the letter P. The answering machine light was flashing when they got home, but not even another plaintive message from Bob could shake Rebecca’s good mood. He had come around, he assured her. He was prepared to be her friend.
She stood by the kitchen window, listening with half her attention. The evening was balmy; the sun was still up, on a glorious summer day. She could see at once that Michael Christopher had been at work again in the backyard below. The cleared ground now covered almost a quarter of the yard in a spreading arc. It was almost too weird, this anonymous, invisible labor. The familiar tangle of weeds and dead shrubs had been a symbol to Rebecca of the mediocrity and inertia in her life for so long that she had come to take a kind of comfort in it. It was the devil she knew. She had believed it would take some heroic moral effort on her part to change the situation, some energy of will that it never seemed possible to sustain. Now the change was happening almost in spite of her. But did transformation count if you didn’t do it yourself? Was this unforeseen renewal a kind of grace, calling for a grateful acquiescence, or just another abdication on her part?
Bob ceased at last to ramble on. The upshot seemed to be that he would be anything she wanted him to be, which was just plain sad. Rebecca erased the message and put a tray of frozen fish sticks in the oven for dinner, to Mary Martha’s delight. There was the usual discussion over vegetables, and a compromise amount of peas was apportioned. Afterward they settled into the love seat in the living room and watched The Little Mermaid for perhaps the fiftieth time. The phone rang about halfway through the movie, and Rebecca let the machine get it but ran out to the kitchen to pick it up when she heard her mother’s voice.
“So, it’s all set for Saturday,” Phoebe said.
“What’s all set?”
“The baptism. Sherilou is thrilled with the idea. I told her we could have the ceremony at the beach near my place. Dress is casual, of course, though if the spirit moves you, anything goes. I thought we could just do some kind of picnic barbecue potluck and make an afternoon of it.”
“This may not be the best weekend for me. I’ve got a tough job with a Monday deadline.”
“Oh, really, Becca. I don’t th
ink you want to let your work interfere too much with your spiritual life.”
“This is Sherilou’s spiritual life, I think.”
“Still and all…”
Rebecca laughed. She had never quite understood what her mother meant when she said “Still and all,” but it had carried a certain unanswerable weight since her childhood. “Oh, we could probably get up there for the afternoon. Mary Martha loves that beach.”
“Of course she does. And I’m sure Brother What’s-His-Name will enjoy it.”
“What?”
“Your friend the monk. I’m sure it will do him good to get out.”
“Oh, Mother, tell me you didn’t.”
“‘Didn’t’?” Phoebe said, with that superb, slightly oblivious aplomb that seemed to carry her through everything.
“Didn’t base this whole thing on some wishful notion of Mr. Christopher’s participation.”
“Well, Sherilou was delighted, of course, at the idea.” There was a pause. “You mean you haven’t discussed it with him yet?”
“I certainly haven’t!”
“I distinctly remember you saying you were going to talk to him about it.”
“I distinctly remember telling you, ‘No way.’”
“Well, this is a little awkward. But not to worry. There’s still plenty of time.”
“Plenty of time to do what?”
“Why, to talk to the man, of course. I’m sure that once you explain the situation to him, a single mother who has wandered beyond the confines of institutional religion, an innocent child without a sacramental structure, and so forth—”
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