Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  As the time came to leave the cabin an awkwardness settled on them, at first lightly while they had chores to do before leaving, but then more heavily as they travelled west in the car. They were silent much of the time and it seemed impossible to make conversation: all the spontaneity of their earlier talking had gone, and he found himself feeling the edgy anxiety of their first lunch, just forty-eight hours before, even though at the beginning of the day, when they had made love for a second time, he felt he had known her for months. Had he done something? Not that he could think of; perhaps this was just her way of establishing distance, making it clear that yes, it had been fun, thank you very much, but now we had better forget about it.

  Which troubled him more than he wanted to admit, and in turn made for an internal sense of annoyance which translated into coolness. They slowly edged their way in traffic over the Bay Bridge and into the city, just as the sun was setting on the west side of the peninsula, its final strands of light the colour of pink grapefruit, reflecting off the skyscrapers of the financial district. Once off the bridge, he drove quickly to her hotel and parked with a small screech of brakes in front.

  ‘How vibrant,’ she said, with mock respect, and he grimaced, which he realised must seem to say that that was that, thank you very much, so he almost jumped with the coincidence when she said, ‘So is that that then?’ And in his surprise he lifted his eyebrows, which must have conveyed some measure of – what? disdain? contempt? in any case nothing very pleasant, for with an impulsiveness which seemed to match his own, she grabbed for the door handle and made to get out, and her face was thunder.

  ‘I hope not,’ he said out of nowhere, instinctively really, and the door was halfway open before she seemed to take this in, but then her foot, which was reaching out for the street, hovered in air and came back into the car and Kate closed the door. Without looking directly at him, she said, ‘Well, that’s nice to hear. I couldn’t really tell. You’re not the easiest man in the world to read.’

  ‘Likewise,’ he managed to say. And recovering he added, ‘You still haven’t seen the city, you know.’

  She looked down at her lap. ‘Is that an invitation?’

  ‘I think even Americans call it that.’

  She turned to him, looking happier, but then her lips set and her face grew serious. ‘I’d like to, Renoir.’ This sounded so strange that it took him a moment to realise that it was the first time she had called him by name. ‘But . . .’ she said.

  His disappointment was immediate, and in his usual effort to suppress it he said hastily, ‘I know, I know, you’ve got to get home. Don’t worry, it was just an idea,’ and he doubtless would have continued to babble in this vein had she not reached out with her hand and placed it on his.

  ‘Sh-sh-sh,’ she said, only slightly louder than her whisper in bed when he’d come out of his dream. ‘It’s not because of work and, yes, I would like to. But it wouldn’t be fair to Emily to stay any longer. It’s half-term and she shouldn’t spend her holiday with school friends. I really have to fly.’

  It was so sincerely put that he admired her diplomatic way of saying no. She looked searchingly at him. ‘You think I’m just being polite, don’t you?’

  He didn’t know what to say and she continued to stare at him. ‘Renoir,’ she said for the second time, instead of ‘Jack’, and he knew that if he did ever see this woman again this was going to be what she called him. ‘Don’t be an idiot.’ The tone was instructional but affectionate. ‘Planes that go to London have been known to come back from London. I may fly out of here, but I can fly back again, you know.’ And she smiled at him so disarmingly – her eyes alive, the upper lip slightly curled, that he suddenly felt that she would.

  She came for three days, on her way back from a pipeline visit in Alaska, where she claimed to have seen more bears than women, bringing with her a soapstone Eskimo carving he put on the mantelpiece of the fireplace that didn’t work in his Lake Street apartment. She stayed with him there, which surprised and initially alarmed him – he took a day off work to spring clean and iron the fresh sheets for his big double bed. He had tried to warn her off when she phoned from Anchorage, but she’d refused to take the hint.

  Fortunately, she seemed to like his place, which he’d always kept simple: sanding down the floors to show off the maple boards, which he waxed once a year and kept to a warm shine; painting the walls white, so the feeling was of a light and breezy summer house, rather than the small and thin apartment it really was. He had photographs on the walls, mainly of the woods in the Presidio, which he’d taken during a short-lived photography phase when he’d first come out of the army, and a few simple watercolours, usually of ocean vistas, which he had found in his weekly visits with Jenny to antiques stores.

  Kate made friends at once with the Korean family in the grocery shop downstairs, and appreciated the park across the street where early in the morning from his front windows you could sometimes spot a buzzard in the high eucalyptus trees. They did some tourist things – walked the Embarcadero, took a cable car up and down Russian Hill, and ate one night in a ritzy place south of Market. The Giants were in town, and he thought of taking her to the ball park, with tickets from work, where his boss Eckerly sat on the board of directors and thus had access to the company box. But he found he didn’t want to share the limited time he had with her with anybody else – much less 40,000 fellow spectators. So the company they kept on this visit was their own, and what he liked was how the almost premature intimacy of their weekend at the cabin was easily resumed.

  There was such a strong sexual attraction between them that they spent a lot of time in bed, where they each liked taking care and being taken care of in roughly equal measure; Renoir found that as often as he felt eight years old again so equally often he was the one in charge. To his slight surprise, she seemed sexually experienced, indeed a little more adventurous than him, without the act becoming depersonalised – he never felt he was just the latest in a list.

  But even in bed they talked, continuing the conversation they had begun on a walk through the Presidio, then carried on in the living room with the fan going full blast until the exceptional heat for spring in San Francisco drove them into the bedroom, putatively because it was air-conditioned but also because they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Yet even the intensity of sex took second place to talking – ‘I can’t remember,’ said Kate during one afternoon’s story of a trip to the desert in Qatar when her driver got lost, ‘whether we’ve made love yet.’ He touched the soft inner pad of her thigh under the covers and she said with her eyes closed, ‘I remember now.’

  She got up and used his grandfather’s brush from the top of the chest of drawers to try and smooth her hair, which was naturally straight but now tangled from humidity and an hour of rolling around his brass bed. She winced as she pulled out strands of hair.

  ‘Ouch,’ he said sympathetically.

  ‘Il faut souffrir pour être belle.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Don’t you know any French, Renoir?’ She said his name again with Parisian zeal. ‘Monsieur Renoir.’

  ‘Not a mot. I told you, my papa skedaddled when I was rising three. So tell me, what’s it mean?’

  ‘“One must suffer to be beautiful.” My mother used to say it when we complained that nanny brushed our hair too hard.’ She put the brush back on the chest of drawers and added, a little wistfully, ‘I always thought it was her way of letting us know that she was beautiful, which she still is, or that we weren’t.’

  ‘Or just that you didn’t like to suffer?’ Renoir offered. He was always amazed how women carried their problems with their mothers deep into adulthood. With fathers they were either adoring daddy’s girls or contemptuous of the male pig who brought them up; with mothers it always seemed so complicated. Even when there’d been a nanny.

  She laughed. ‘Golly, there’s no self-pity allowed around you, is there?’

  ‘None.
This is a zero tolerance zone for self-pity.’ Lying on the bed, he gave her an appraising look, as she stood at the end of his bed wearing a pair of white panties and nothing else. She had a lovely figure by any standard – those legs for one thing – but he liked the unusual traits even more: the slightly prominent rib cage, as if she’d trained as a dancer (she hadn’t), or the dime-sized mole on her upper chest, about four inches up from her heart.

  She didn’t seem to mind this scrutiny and put her hands on her hips as she looked back at him, stretched out on the bed. ‘Is that your grandmother’s influence?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘She must have been tough.’

  ‘She was in some ways. My grandfather died early – drank himself to death before he was fifty. Then she got to watch her daughter follow in his footsteps.’ He was shaking his head.

  Kate said, ‘Did she have any other children?’

  ‘One. My uncle.’

  ‘Was he a drunk?’

  ‘No,’ he said. Despite himself, he knew his voice had gone quieter; he tried to lift its pitch but couldn’t. ‘He was an apple farmer.’ And a few other things besides.

  ‘Ah, “top fruit”,’ she said knowingly. ‘Where does he live now?’

  ‘He doesn’t. He’s been dead for almost thirty years.’

  Kate’s eyes widened. ‘I am clumsy, Renoir. Were you close to him?’

  He shrugged as nonchalantly as possible. ‘I didn’t know him for that long.’

  She looked at him curiously, started to say something but thought better of it. She kept brushing her hair with hard, short strokes, then asked, ‘Did he die suddenly?’ she asked.

  Does three seconds – that was about the time it took – count as ‘suddenly’? He said in a flat voice, ‘It was an accident.’

  They were both silent for a long time. At last Kate remarked, ‘It sounds as if your grandmother had a hard life. No wonder she was tough.’

  ‘But she wasn’t grim,’ he protested. ‘She could be fun. I mean, considering that in her sixties she got stuck with a ten-year-old boy to raise, she did pretty well. She liked to play cards.’

  He said this as if card playing were an infallible indicator of high spirits, and Kate looked unpersuaded. ‘Was she very old when she died?’

  ‘No, she had just taken retirement. She was thinking of moving to Florida. “Somewhere sunny”, she said, after a lifetime of fog. The Sunset District gets the morning mist, you see. But before she could do that she had a heart attack and died.’

  ‘Were you there?’

  He shook his head. ‘I was still stationed in San Diego.’

  ‘It must have been a shock.’

  ‘I don’t know. She smoked a pack of Pall Malls a day. “Smoke the Red, you’re dead” – that’s what they used to say in the service. She always had a terrible cough. And wheezing. If she hadn’t had a coronary I’m sure she’d have developed emphysema.’

  ‘She doesn’t sound very Californian.’

  He laughed at the bluntness of this. ‘She wasn’t. Or if she was it wasn’t the cliché. She was decent Irish working class, though she didn’t conform to that stereotype either.’

  ‘Why?’ Kate sat back on the bed and tucked her legs under her. And he wondered, why are you so interested? ‘She was Catholic, of course, and she went to Mass on Sunday. But she never forced me to go.’ He remembered his obstinacy when he had first come back to live with her, still shell-shocked, how he’d shook his head when she had proposed his joining her that first Sunday morning. What kind of God would have done that? he’d thought; his grandmother must have understood what he was thinking, for she accepted his initial no and never asked again. Miss Lily, the old black lady next door (there couldn’t have been more than half a dozen black people in the entire district) looked after him on Sundays while his grandmother went to Mass, though by the time he reached the age of fourteen he realised he was keeping Miss Lily company rather than being looked after.

  ‘And look how well you’ve turned out,’ Kate teased. ‘Come on, get up. I bet your grandmother wouldn’t let you lie in bed when the sun was shining and there was hard work to be done.’

  ‘What work?’

  ‘I need feeding,’ she declared. ‘It’s your job to put the bread on the table.’

  The visit must have been a success because she came again, three times in fact over the next three months, and Renoir found himself looking forward to her visits so much that during the weeks in between he stopped seeing any of the other women he had been dating before, finding he preferred being on his own, missing Kate, to taking solace in secondary consolation elsewhere.

  He and Kate continued to spend almost all their time together alone, and he kept her a pretty fair distance from his drinking buddies, many of them ex-Service, who had a tendency to act like the bar crowd in Cheers – friendly but relentlessly male. And the friends he’d had with Jenny, a circle really of other couples, had dropped away on her side of the post-relationship divide.

  The exception to this unsociable behaviour was Ticky, who to Renoir’s surprise telephoned his apartment after he let slip that Kate was coming for a visit. He had never seen Ticky outside the confines of the company, and in general didn’t carry work friendships into non-work arenas, but he needn’t have worried since it was Kate she wanted to talk to, not him. ‘You’re jealous, aren’t you?’ Kate said mockingly when she arranged to meet for lunch with the AI head, and he admitted he was – he didn’t really want to share Kate with anyone. Though on Kate’s next visit Ticky took her on an all-day expedition to Sonoma County, which Renoir was happy enough to miss.

  For these visits Kate had no excuse about being in the neighbourhood, since she was in New York on each occasion, talking with Mobil. She flew out Friday afternoon, before returning to London either late on Sunday or – if she could swing it – on Monday night. She was coming a long way just to see him, and perhaps that instilled a note of pressure in their time together that had not been there before. But he found there was so much he liked about her, and so little he didn’t. She was funny, sharpish at times, but never towards him; she was objective, too, which meant she was unusually generous about even those people she didn’t like or approve of.

  Her education, so much more extensive than Renoir’s, didn’t sit like a divider between them, but was instead something which gradually, tactfully, she was able to share, without impugning his pride. He knew perfectly well he wasn’t stupid, but knew too just how many fundamental items of a sophisticated liberal arts education – who was Dante? What were Keynesian economics? – he did not possess.

  She was also pretty, increasingly so the more he knew her; that her face was so expressive that some days she could look downright plain meant he treasured her usual prettiness all the more.

  For all their talk, they did things, too, for she insisted they get out of his apartment however much he wanted to make love and eat Chinese takeaway for the duration of her stays, which seemed achingly short. He was usually quite sedentary, rarely straying from a semi-commuting path between his apartment and either the office near Union Square or the office in Cupertino; all that distinguished them was that one was a two-mile commute, the other twenty-five. He was not insensitive to the natural beauty of his surroundings: the placement of the city on the ocean and Bay, and its own extraordinary, vertical topography; or the varied landscapes within fifty miles on any side except the west, where the Pacific provided its own diversity. He was not insensitive perhaps, but hardly took full advantage. His exposure to the wildlife and countryside which he professed (even to himself) to love was confined chiefly to the paths and walks of the Presidio, the vast park and military complex where he had spent so many of his army years. There, a remarkable habitat for flora and fauna and birds lay within the confines of a major American city, but was inevitably limited and in no sense real country.

  Kate took him out of this, forced him out of the city in a series of short trips, south down the peninsula, n
orth over the Bridge (he could cope with Marin, which was south of Sonoma, and was happy to do the wine tours of Napa). Yet the activities didn’t seem forced, and she was never keen to stay away overnight – in fact she liked nothing better than an early night in, when they could pretend to watch a DVD and read their books, her thrillers and his outdoors writing by Jim Harrison or Thomas McGuane.

  She surprised him almost continuously, by the energy she seemed to have for everything (jet lag never seemed to slow her down), by her willingness to think and think hard about almost everything. She seemed endlessly fascinated by his native city, and perhaps she had a sense of her own tutelage by him as he gradually unfolded the city’s rich tapestry of neighbourhoods for her – from the Italian bakery in now trendy North Beach to the discount clothes emporium South of Market. He realised how much he’d fallen into a rut, and how near-reclusive he had become. He had seen people – that wasn’t the issue – but he had not engaged with them.

  Yet if he found himself awakening, he often wondered just what was in it for her. He was flattered that she was willing to come so far and so often to see him, but he was puzzled, too. For he didn’t know what this very classy lady could possibly see in him. He wasn’t really a hard guy, that clichéd object of desire. Though he was sufficiently familiar with the stereotype to know that it was often true. She seemed too old, moreover, to be acting out some kind of adolescent rebellion – picking someone ‘unsuitable’ as an act of defiance against both her parents and upbringing. If that had been the agenda, surely she would have acted it out already with her first husband – who was in fact, Renoir gathered, a wealthy Scottish landowner.

  And from her own words, Kate didn’t seem to be hung up on class issues.

  ‘Renoir, if you were in the army so long, why don’t you have any tattoos?’

  ‘I may not be well educated, but I’m not entirely stupid.’

  ‘But these days everybody has tattoos.’ This was true: even middle-aged and middle-class ladies were contemplating the addition of, say, a small green anchor on their left haunch.