Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

Jack looked at the sliding door and cursed his haste in leaving the deck. He tried to shrug, as if to say who knows? but couldn’t seem to manage it, and he knew his face was starting to flush. He wouldn’t look at Will.

  ‘Did you see my visitors?’ Jack hesitated, and Will made a cluck with his tongue and went out onto the deck. He stood where Jack had been just five minutes before. ‘A bird’s eye view,’ his uncle announced loudly and shook his head. When he came back in he closed the sliding door behind him and looked down at Jack. ‘Did you know what all that was about?’

  And very slowly Jack nodded, though in truth he didn’t know for sure. He was frightened now that Will would get angry again, but instead his uncle’s face softened and he said, ‘I’m not wild about the business myself. But you see, apples just don’t pay. At least, not enough they don’t. Mine anyway. Still, I’m sorry you were here. The last thing I want is to drag you into my business.’ He paused and looked at Jack. Now his tone was even softer, almost imploring. ‘I’d like to ask you a favour, okay?’

  Jack waited, but when Will did not go on he nodded his assent. Will said, ‘Could you not tell Maris about those guys coming here today?’ He gestured with his head in the direction of the barn. ‘Do that for me please. There’s no good going to come from her knowing about it. It will just upset her.’

  Jack realised that Will must be even more anxious than he seemed, that this was something he – Jack – could do to help him. So he said, ‘Okay, Will,’ dropping the ‘uncle’ because for just a moment, a fleeting split second, he felt they were equals.

  Yet when they ate the supper that night which Maris cooked, fish wrapped in foil over coals with local corn, French bread and a tomato salad, Jack felt deeply uncomfortable. He had never had any secrets from Maris or Will, except for the times when he felt intermittent sadness about his mom. This was different, keeping a secret with one of them from the other. It would have been easier the other way round – conspiring with Maris to keep Will in the dark. He didn’t know why, but it was true. This he didn’t like at all.

  School was out at last, and they went for a weekend camping in the upper part of the state, almost four hours’ drive, to the northernmost redwood park called Jedediah Smith State Park. Here they pitched a tent at a campsite, and grilled steaks on a brick barbecue. Jack had a kayak lesson in the Smith River, and Will fished with no luck for king salmon from the bank. There were plenty of other people camping there, but Maris seemed far happier than she’d been at Salt Point, though she went off in the afternoon of their second day there, saying she had some errands to run.

  ‘See what you want?’ asked Will when she returned just before suppertime.

  ‘There’re a lot of nice places and a lot cheaper than Sonoma. I’d say land is about two-thirds the price, and the houses can’t be half as much.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Maris was looking at real estate.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, feeling as if a sensor had set off an internal alarm.

  ‘In case we wanted to move. Who knows? It might be nice to have a change.’

  Maris was watching him carefully, Jack could see that, but he couldn’t help his reaction. Change was the last thing he wanted. In his experience change was bad – it was precisely the recent lack of change in his life that had made him happy.

  ‘Jack, we wouldn’t go anywhere you didn’t like,’ she said soothingly.

  ‘But I like the farm,’ he protested.

  ‘I know you do,’ said Maris, and she went off to get groceries she’d bought out of the car.

  ‘She’s talking dreams, Jack,’ said Will in a quick whisper. ‘That’s all.’

  *

  But it was real, as became clear on their return to Sonoma the next afternoon. After supper, Maris brought out a list of properties she’d gathered on her side trip. There was one place in particular she liked, an old wood farmhouse with forty acres of mixed top and soft fruit. It didn’t have a pond, but it bordered the Smith River, the same one which ran through the state park and was, said Maris, the cleanest large river in the state. The house was older than theirs, set back from the nearest road with shutters on the windows, and a lawn in back that ran down into meadow and the edge of the river. On a hill, just visible in the particulars, were the soft fruit plantings, stretched like grape vines across the slope, with the orchard above it.

  Even Jack could see it was pretty, but he was determined not to say so. He kept quiet while Maris made a pitch for the place, talking money numbers he couldn’t follow, except their drift – which was that their current bad situation could be reversed if they moved.

  Will listened patiently until Maris finished. Then he said, ‘Well, it’s a hell of a big decision. Maybe we should have a vote on it. I’ve got one vote, you’ve got one, and it’s only fair that Jack here’s got a little bit of a vote. You want to go there; I want to stay here, at least until next autumn. Jack, what do you think?’

  He felt shy, especially when Maris didn’t make it any easier by staring at him. He looked down at his knees as he said, ‘I’d like to have this school year here,’ thinking that maybe in a year Maris would change her mind.

  ‘That swings it,’ Will declared. He looked at Maris, whose face was stony now. ‘Don’t be a sore loser, darling. Fair’s fair.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, and it seemed worse to Jack that her voice was so level and subdued. ‘You win. But when we do move your crop selection’s got to change.’

  ‘It will,’ said Will, trying to be accommodating.

  ‘You’re not going to grow prunes instead of apples are you?’ demanded Jack, but the two were looking directly at each other now. He might as well have not even been there for all the attention they were paying him.

  Maris said, ‘I wish you’d forget this year while we’re at it.’

  ‘Darling,’ Will said, ‘you don’t want to throw all that money away. That’s the whole point of staying.’

  ‘It’s not going to be much use to us if you land yourself in—’ and she looked at Jack as she broke off. Shaking her head she walked away, and a moment later they could hear the kitchen screen door slam and her footsteps sound on the outside deck.

  ‘Thanks, Jack,’ his uncle whispered. ‘Thanks for the support.’ And Jack basked in this only briefly, since part of him knew that his vote of confidence in Will had also let Maris down.

  Through two days of coolness she let him know it too, and she was still acting frosty when she called to him one Saturday afternoon while he was catching and releasing frogs at the near and algae-coated end of the pond. ‘Jack, hurry up and come to town with me. I forgot all about your shoes for school.’

  He came up to the back deck where Maris was cleaning out the ash from the barbecue. ‘Why can’t I wear these?’ he said, pointing to his sneakers.

  ‘Because they’ve got holes in both toes is why. Now come on.’

  So they got into Maris’s car, and she rolled down the window as she turned around, shouting to Will in the barn that they’d be back before supper and that he should shuck the corn, and then they moved along the track. Jack sensed Maris was still annoyed with him, so he didn’t say a word, until as they approached Truebridge’s shack he saw another car up ahead, heading their way, which pulled over. As they approached them, Jack said, ‘Who are they, Maris?’

  She shrugged. ‘Pickers maybe, looking for work. They’re not local, I know that,’ and she barely slowed down, saying, ‘I’ve got to get you to the store before it closes. I’m not having you go to school looking like Oliver Twist.’

  And that would have been that, except as they passed the car, waiting off to the side of the track, the man who wasn’t driving suddenly raised his arm and put a hat on his head, and it was a Stetson, and Jack saw with a thump of recognition that it was the same man he’d seen hoisting bales out of the barn with Will not two weeks before.

  Why are they back here? he thought to himself, and he decided he just ha
d to tell Maris about them, and the fact that he had seen them before and seen what they had been doing. But he didn’t know how to say all this, since telling her straight out would seem such a betrayal of Will – though not telling seemed suddenly an even greater betrayal of Maris. And he considered how he could best inform her, without seeming a snitch. And he thought of their prospective move to the northernmost part of California, and he wondered what good would that do. Why would it change anything? Why would Will not just repeat this shady business of adding to his apple income by growing the sinsemilla there?

  So since Maris now seemed at least willing to talk a bit, he said tentatively, ‘Maris, if we do go up north . . .’ He hesitated, trying how best to get to the point, which was to let her in on the secret he so unhappily carried.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, sounding wary but not altogether hostile.

  ‘I mean, what actually would change? If Will’s no good at growing apples . . .’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, and the wariness was gone altogether, replaced by anger. And she pulled over on the mountain road, not that there was space to, but it didn’t matter since there was hardly ever any traffic on the road, and as she slowed Jack noticed the most enormous redbud growing on the side of the road, which normally he would have commented on, but not now because he sensed he had said something terribly wrong, and sure enough Maris shouted, as the car came to a stop, ‘How dare you, you little . . . bastard! How dare you criticise your uncle, after all he’s done for you?’ She was furious.

  He felt so crushed – tart as she could be, Maris had never called him that before – that he gave up right then, abandoned his subtle plan to divulge the earlier visit of the bale-packing marijuana-dealing crooks (they must be crooks, he figured; it was illegal wasn’t it?). And he put his hands in his lap and looked down at them and muttered, ‘Sorry.’

  And he felt Maris’s angry gaze on him as she said, in schoolteacher mode, recovering herself, ‘I should hope so too.’ And then she pulled out again, quite sharply, and they drove to Healdsburg in silence to buy him new shoes before the store closed.

  He was going to stay after school and watch the varsity football team scrimmage, then go home with Maris. But when the bell went he found Maris waiting discreetly outside class. ‘Jack, would you mind taking the bus home today? I’ve got a teachers’ meeting this evening and a lot of stuff to do before then, so I haven’t really got time to go out to Will’s. Do you mind?’

  She must have seen the disappointment in his face about missing the football practice, because she said, ‘If it’s a problem you can always stay with me in town tonight if you like. I’ll call Will and let him know.’

  He shook his head. For some reason, the prospect of staying in town alone with Maris – something he had never done before – made him feel awkward. ‘That’s okay, Maris. I’ve got a lot of homework anyway.’

  ‘So what are you going to cook Will for supper then?’ Maris asked.

  ‘Pot luck,’ he said, expecting Maris to laugh.

  But she didn’t, saying only, ‘See you tomorrow.’

  So he caught the bus, sitting right behind Sam the driver, and he talked with his friend Ernie Weiskranz as the bus left town and went east along the Russian River, before eventually swinging north and climbing, then descending west into the valley of the local wine country. The bus stopped every few minutes to let other kids off, and after one of the kids from junior high got out at Dry Creek Road, the bus began to climb up to his uncle’s place. There was only Ernie and two other kids left, and by now Jack and his friend had pretty much run out of anything to talk about and both were tired, as was Sam, who drove the morning shift as well. Sam didn’t like to talk while he was driving, but he did mutter to himself, and today he was saying hot, whew it’s hot repeatedly, and it was true that even with all the windows open the temperature was unpleasantly high, and though the air circulated this did not serve to cool things off. So Jack was glad when the bus stopped at last, and as he got up and said goodbye to Ernie and got ready to say goodbye to Sam, he thought how nice it would be to be in the dark cool house and have a long cold drink and how maybe he would go swimming in the frog pond, especially if Will went swimming with him, and then he stepped down into the heat and dusty gravel of the roadside.

  A Private Affair

  ‘I SHOULD THINK HE weighed almost thirty stone,’ said Kate, able to find comedy in even the driest of oil producers’ confabs. ‘He was so large!’ she added unnecessarily, beginning to laugh again, hard enough that in a minute Renoir wouldn’t be able to understand what she was saying. ‘And he got into the lift and said . . .’ She stopped to giggle at the memory of it. ‘“I like Helsinki. Though the food’s a little thin on the ground.”’

  He laughed too, as much from happiness at seeing her so relaxed as at anything she said. They were sitting in the sitting room of the flat, he in the rocking chair, she lying down on the sofa with her work shoes off and her suit jacket – Donna Something? He could never remember the designer names – folded on the coffee table. Each of them held a large drink in hand, bourbon and ice for Renoir, gin and tonic for Kate. It was like old times, he thought, then smiled inside at the thought of ‘old times’ in a relationship less than two years old.

  It was that point in early spring, towards the end of March, when the days were long enough that they could sit like this after work with daylight from the window and no lamps turned on. And everything else seemed to be lengthening as well – the leaves on the trees, the shrubs, flowers, the grass in Hyde Park. It was the time of year when everything was still to play for.

  He liked the fact that though their talk was always easily come by they didn’t ever feel the need to fill the silence, and now they listened to the early spring sounds of school kids back for bed from playing in the park, and couples returning from restaurant meals, and the cars and cabs moving faster now in the distance on High Street Kensington and down Queen’s Gate.

  They would sit like this most weekdays, over a drink, comparing notes on what had happened to each of them since the morning. Kate’s accounts were full of meetings and people, but Renoir’s was also rarely empty. For ‘what to do today’ was never a problem for him; he woke each morning with the day before him like a painter’s palette. He had the most open-ended of routines, but he was never bored. He ran errands and bought the groceries, since Kate was so busy at work and, besides, she shopped like a bachelor banker; she’d buy a six-pound chicken, then wonder why dinner took two hours to cook. In the afternoon, he read books and listened to music and cooked supper.

  And he liked to walk. Knowing San Francisco so well from a lifetime there he was initially frustrated by moving to a city he didn’t know at all; the solution was to walk it daily, and he’d done so with the vigour of an apprentice cabbie learning the Knowledge. He was learning London like a language; after more than a year he was starting to feel almost fluent.

  Six weeks before, when Kate returned from Dubai, he did not say anything about the GPS reading. But within a week he felt forced to do something, not because of anything Kate had said or done but because of his own need to know. Know what? Know that she still loved him, or, and he swallowed hard contemplating this, know that she didn’t any more.

  Such was the company of the thoughts he had kept, running like wallpaper on a PC screen, and he could tell that if he did nothing about them they would soon poison his life with Kate. Black-and-white Renoir had come back with a vengeance. Try as he did, he could not help but examine everything she said, each gesture she made, for signs of a change she was hiding from him. The mundane became forged with meaning, which in a relationship was an unbearable state of affairs. Clarity became a necessity.

  Fortunately it was not difficult to engineer. One afternoon he went to the garage and downloaded the data from the car recorder, then printed it out at home. He left it with a Soil Society pamphlet on organic orchards in the flat’s front hall, in the big blue china bowl which sat on th
e Regency chest of drawers.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Kate. She had just come in from work that evening and it was still just light outside, which now marked for Renoir the true beginning of spring. She was looking through the post.

  ‘Oh, when I took the car out to go to Belfield, the GPS was going on and off. I thought I’d make sure it was working in case anything happened.’

  She came into the living room, studying the printout. ‘We don’t use the car much, do we?’

  ‘No, we don’t. Just Belfield, pretty much.’

  ‘Not even Belfield, I see,’ she said with a laugh. ‘And we certainly don’t need the GPS any more, do we? Not if we’ve got the garage.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Should I get it taken out?’

  He waited as she continued to inspect the paper. ‘I see it logged my visit to Burdick’s Farm. I stopped there when I went down after Christmas. The Benedicts were just moving in and I dropped by to say hello.’

  Why? he thought, and this must have been apparent in his eyes when she looked at him, for she said, ‘Have to be polite, you know. Neighbours and all that.’

  He nodded grudgingly and she continued. ‘Helena Benedict wanted to see the Gatehouse so she drove me over.’ She held up the printout. ‘That’s why I never got as far as Belfield.’

  He could feel her eyes on him but he kept his glued to the page of the Evening Standard. ‘I didn’t know you knew his wife,’ he said as casually as he could.

  ‘Who, Conrad’s? I barely do. But when she asked to see the Gatehouse, I couldn’t really say no.’

  ‘I saw him at Belfield, you know. He was shooting with Roddy.’ She looked at him, giving nothing away. He went on, ‘He came to dinner with Helena. He’s not at all what I would have expected.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘He’s not very tactful, is he? He started banging on about the Irish and his time in Northern Ireland when he was in the army. It made you realise why there was so much trouble there.’ Kate shrugged. ‘He didn’t know I was Irish, I guess, or he probably wouldn’t have been so candid.’