Almost Paradise

by Susan Isaacs

  She hadn’t minded coming to Cecily’s. She’d agreed to it. “I’d love to,” she’d said directly to Cecily’s questioning eyebrows. She was all right so far. But she didn’t like being left alone on the screened porch while Cecily took a telephone call upstairs in her bedroom. She felt fine, though. Here she was, having lunch at her friend’s, on a brilliant blue day.

  It was June 1969, a year since they’d moved to the house. Jane had gotten to know it well. Extremely well, since she did not like to leave it, at least not when she was by herself.

  Before Nicholas came home from California, she’d had three attacks: two while driving the car, one while waiting on the checkout line in the supermarket. That third time, she’d been waiting with a full cart behind two other women. She’d picked a magazine from the rack and to pass the time was flipping to “Fifty Fast Halloween Treats for Young Tricksters.” She was looking at an ad for salad dressing. She remembered that: the celadon of iceberg lettuce, the purple slivers of red cabbage, the slimy red-orange sheen of the dressing. Suddenly a wave of dizziness slammed her so hard she was knocked sideways. The magazine fell out of her hand. She grabbed the handle of the shopping cart.

  This was brutal. A blitz. Nothing gradual like the other attacks. It hit her like an ax crashing down on her skull. Terrible disabling dizziness. The floor would not stay under her. The supermarket was a giant cube, tumbling, like a child’s block hurled into space. And an instant later the most horrible nausea. She stopped leaning over her shopping cart. People were looking. She might throw up all over her groceries, a cascade of vomit over the yogurt and the Clorox and the acorn squash.

  The dizziness got worse, blocking out everything, even the awful sickness. She was going to faint right there with everyone already staring at her because she hadn’t been able to stop: she’d moaned when the nausea hit, capturing everyone’s attention; even the checkout girl had stopped punching the cash register in the middle of a giant stack of someone’s Hawaiian Punch.

  Jane couldn’t help herself. She dropped to the floor to keep from fainting and cracking open her head. People surrounded her, a barricade of legs. Through the dizziness, all those knobs of knees at eye level, all those people knew exactly who she was, where she lived, and they’d never forget her losing control like this. Never. And they’d tell their friends, and when they met her at church or at the library they’d pretend they’d never heard about it. They wouldn’t be sure whether to let their children come to the house to play with her children. She wasn’t in control. Such terrible dizziness. She lowered her head, but that only made the nausea come back, rise up her chest to her throat. So sick.

  The embarrassment was sickening, the helping hands extended down, the “What happened?” “Can you hear me?” “Are you all right?” The low chorus of speculation.

  “Attacks?” the doctor had demanded. He’d sent her for tests. Heart. Blood. Brain. “Nerves,” he told her.

  “I’m not nervous,” she said. “Really.”

  “Take time out every day. Read a book, take a nap in the afternoon. You can arrange it if you really want to.”

  “It was physical.”

  “The mind can do that. Just try to relax. And while you’re relaxing”—he closed her folder—“it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take off ten pounds.”

  It wasn’t nerves, she’d told herself. Even if it was, which it wasn’t, Nicholas’s being home would make it better. But less than three weeks after he’d come home, when he was in the city rehearsing A Second Opinion, she’d taken the girls to the library for story hour and, as she was browsing through the mystery stacks looking for a book for Nicholas, it came again. Dizziness, nausea, and her heart too this time, banging arrhythmically, smashing against her chest as if trying to beat its way out of her body.

  What is happening to me? she’d asked herself. Just what is this? By the time story hour ended the attack was over, but she was so weak she was trembling. She drove the girls home, amazed and thankful she had the control, the strength, to get them home. And then she did not drive again.

  Cecily came back to the porch. “Sorry, but this one’s too good to rush off the phone. They’re lining up for him.”

  “Is this the surgeon?”

  “No. The editor. Six foot two. Congenitally tweedy.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Socially impeccable. Rich. Tall.”

  “Is he nice?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only gone out with him a couple of times. Probably not.”

  At first glance, Cecily Van Doorn did not look like the sort of woman a socially impeccable, rich, tall man would call. Her round face might be called pretty, especially with her bright, wide-spaced brown eyes, but the fan of laugh lines at the outer edges was not merely sketched in, but etched deep. She looked—and was—ten years older than Jane. Cecily’s thin, straight hair, brown also, was quite short; she usually kept it off her forehead with a tortoiseshell headband. Often tufts of hair would pop out, and she was continually removing the headband, flattening her hairline with a forearm, and slipping it back with her other hand. The best that could be said for her figure was that it was average. It hadn’t changed in the twenty-one years since she’d first been a bride.

  Still, she had a way with men. Whatever prettiness she had was mixed with intelligence, humor, impudence, and self-reliance, and the combination was, Jane realized, effective. Cecily sparkled, and an astounding number of men were drawn to her brightness.

  “If he’s not nice,” Jane asked, “why are you going out with him?”

  “Well, he’s nice in that he’s certainly polite. Opens car doors and doesn’t scratch his privates. And he’s good company. I just can’t believe that anyone who’s such a great catch can remain uncaught as long as he has—he’s been divorced nearly ten years—without something being wrong. Ten years of dating can’t be fun. How many times can you ask ‘Where did you go to college?’ I think he probably doesn’t have a kind heart.”

  Cecily—she had been Cecily Stettin—had first been a bride at eighteen, when she quit the University of Connecticut after half a semester and married Chip Van Doorn, the twenty-three-year-old son of the president of Connecticut Sand and Stone and Farcroft’s richest citizen. It was a move up. Cecily’s father drove the local taxi. Everyone in town, including her own parents, assumed she was pregnant and couldn’t understand why Chip’s father hadn’t bought her off. A year later, when Cecily and Chip threw themselves a first anniversary party, everyone eyed Cecily’s flat stomach. Many people assumed she had miscarried, although the president of the Farcroft school board confided in the town’s leading dentist, “You wouldn’t believe it to look at her, but I hear she goes in for some far-out stuff. That’s why he married her.” Like what? The dentist’s face grew damp and pink. The school board president shrugged his shoulders. It was 1949, and he was at a loss for words.

  The marriage lasted longer than anyone predicted. It lasted nine years, until 1957, when Chip was killed when his car went out of control on the Merritt Parkway.

  Cecily Stettin Van Doorn, then, was a childless widow at twenty-seven, and a relatively wealthy one, since—besides the money Chip had saved from his handsome salary as vice-president of Connecticut Sand and Stone—several of Chip’s college friends were insurance brokers, and Chip had been an obliging fellow.

  After Chip’s funeral, everyone in Farcroft, including Cecily’s own parents, sat back and with the farsighted, unembarrassed eyes of small-town citizens waited to see what she would do: take a world cruise, take a lover, take a college degree, take to drink. Cecily had always been a great girl, great fun, but after this—well, she was always driving into New York to go to museums and concerts with Chip and who knew, with all Chip’s money now it could go to her head and she could just up and move to Greenwich Village and marry a beatnik and have him go through her inheritance in a year or two and then she’d have to come back to Farcroft and face the music.

  For a year and a half s
he did nothing. She stayed the same old Cecily, maybe a little quieter now, but still—her bouncy walk gave her away—the same happy-go-lucky girl. Being a widow didn’t make her act like one.

  And contrary to all speculation, Cecily stayed right where she was. She remained in her jewel of a cottage on Old Mill Road just off Main Street, took walks with her golden retriever and bought five books a week from the local bookshop, a store that sold three gardening books for every novel. Now and then she’d get real wise, like asking Mr. Krinski at the delicatessen if he charged extra for the mold on the liverwurst, but that was hardly news, especially where Cecily was concerned. She replaced her old washing machine with a Maytag. Her parents came every Sunday afternoon for dinner. Her life was too boring even for Farcroft. People stopped watching her.

  And when they did, near the second anniversary of Chip’s death, she married her widowed father-in-law.

  She was twenty-nine and Chuck Van Doorn was nearly forty years older. He sold his company to a conglomerate, retired, and stayed home with Cecily. Once a week he left their stately hilltop house for an afternoon and played golf, and the men at the club whispered about the bloom in his face and the spring in his step. For the first time, he broke eighty. There was only one question on Farcroft’s collective tongue: What does Cecily have? Two questions, actually: What do they do all day in that big house? Mrs. Greer, the lady who cleaned for them, could not be persuaded to discuss the Van Doorns, leading to talk that she’d been bribed into silence. The theories about what went on were diverse and imaginative. In 1967, when Chuck died in his sleep of a stroke, the answer died with him.

  Cecily wasn’t talking. She bought herself a collie puppy—the golden retriever had died several months before Chuck—and continued living in the huge house on the hill. The only change was noted by the grocer: she no longer purchased Ovaltine. That was hardly satisfying, but it had to suffice. Until Jane moved to Connecticut in 1968, Cecily had no close friends in or around Farcroft.

  “Where did you meet this editor?” Jane asked.

  “Actually, he played golf with Chuck a few times. His uncle belongs to the club. After Chuck died he wrote a nice note and I wrote a nice note back, and then all of a sudden, about two weeks ago, he called and said he was at the club and could he drop over and say hello. And one thing led to another and that was that.”

  “Cecily,” Jane said. Then she looked at her friend. “That’s why people never stop talking about you. You’re so vague you leave everything to people’s imaginations. ‘One thing led to another’! It sounds like you shook hands, said hello, and began rolling around on the rug.”

  “We had a few drinks first.”

  “Oh. I didn’t mean—”

  “That’s all right. Do you think that’s why people talk about me? If I was very specific would they keep quiet? Come on, Jane. I’ve lived here all my life.”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, what’s the editor’s name?”

  “Ted Treadwell. He has a very deep voice and whenever he calls he says ‘Hi! Ted Treadwell here.’ I think he gets great pleasure from hearing himself speak. He’s always throwing in extra words. ‘Thank you very much.’ ‘You look really nice tonight.’”

  “Cecily, you’re being picky.”

  “Probably. I don’t think this one is a match made in heaven.” Cecily drew her legs up under her. She was wearing jeans, a white cotton sweater, and her usual smear of pink lipstick. “Speaking of matches made in heaven,” she added, “how is yours?”

  “Fine.”

  Outside the house, hidden by one of the undulations in the hill, the gardener was working; the lawnmower’s voice went from a hum to a whine as it neared the house, then back to a hum as it rolled farther away. The clean smell of the grass mixed with a trace of gasoline fumes from the mower’s engine permeated the porch. Being with Cecily was almost as good as being with Nicholas: she felt free, certain no attack would come in their company. She wasn’t sure how she was certain, but she was. With Cecily, it would have been better to have been at the farm, but she’d been evading Cecily’s invitations for too long.

  “Fine?” Cecily asked.

  The porch was Jane’s favorite room in Cecily’s house. It was all white—painted wood floor, wicker furniture—and flowery. There were flowers on the fabric covering the cushions and pillows; flowering plants in mid-sized pots were suspended from the ceiling and overflowed giant white cachepots and baskets on the floor. Whenever a breeze blew through the screen walls of the room, one of the plants would respond by emitting a spray of perfume.

  “Yes, fine. Well, Nick’s not too happy with the play, but I told you about that. His agent says he should stick with it until the movie opens, and that’s what he’s doing.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Well, he doesn’t like running around stage half-naked eight times a week and he’d prefer doing Lear, but he says—”

  “Jane, come on.” Cecily took a cigarette from a pack she’d placed on the floor beside her. She lit it with one hand, by holding the matchbook on her palm and striking the match with her thumb. She blew out an impatient stream of smoke. “You’re no longer driving. You’re no longer going into town. Nick comes home after a month in California and finds a wife who’s going from doctor to doctor—”

  “He doesn’t mind.”

  “—and then who stops going because she can’t drive and she doesn’t like traveling on parkways. Come on, Jane! Don’t tell me he doesn’t mind.”

  “I stopped going because they all told me the same thing. And Nick doesn’t mind. He’s been very…” She really wished she could ask Cecily to drive her home right away.

  “He’s been very what?”

  “Very understanding. Marvelous.”

  “He doesn’t mind chauffeuring you around?”

  “Cecily, he always drives when we go someplace. I don’t think I’ve ever driven when he’s been with me. I mean it.”

  “He doesn’t mind chauffeuring the girls?”

  “No.”

  “No? He doesn’t think it’s peculiar that you can’t drive and you can’t go to the library and—”

  “I can. I just don’t feel like it.”

  “Jane—”

  “He understands. He says I should lean on him a little, that’s what he’s there for.”

  “Does he understand?”

  “What do you mean?” Jane’s hands were moist. She wasn’t going to have an attack. She didn’t think she was. Still, she was no longer comfortable. Cecily snuffed out her cigarette and the tip smoldered in the ashtray, giving off an acrid odor. Jane rubbed her hands together.

  “Am I upsetting you?” Cecily asked. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Jane, does he know you won’t go into town?”

  “I do, Cecily. We went to a movie last night.”

  “You go with him. Does he know you won’t go anyplace by yourself?”

  Jane stood. “That’s not true!” she said. “Not true!”

  “Where do you go? Come on, Jane. I’ve been at your house enough times and seen enough deliveries. Groceries. The stores. United Parcel could get up your drive blindfolded. You’re ordering everything by phone because you can’t go—”

  “I can. I’m just not in the mood.”

  “Oh, Jane!”

  “Really, I’ve been feeling much better the last few weeks. I’m just taking it easy.”

  “And Nicholas approves.”

  “He understands that it’s easier to call a department store and have something sent instead of making the trip and wasting a lot of time. He doesn’t mind.”

  “I wish you’d talk to somebody about this.”

  “Cecily, I’ve been to four different doctors. They all say it’s nerves or stress. I have a prescription for tranquilizers if I need them, but I’m telling you, that’s not the problem. I’m fine. I’m happy.”

  “Jane—”

  “I’m just the complete homebody. That’s al
l there is to it. I’m happy when I’m making a dinner party or curled up on the window seat reading. That’s what I like best. I’m home so much because that’s where I really want to be.”

  The studio’s New York screening room was a small, narrow theater on the nineteenth floor of an office building. The seats were uncommonly comfortable, except that they were covered in a material that felt like a blend of suede and human skin.

  “No popcorn?” Winifred murmured to Nicholas. The man seated in front of her turned and gave her the glance awarded by insiders to those outsiders naive enough to condemn themselves by their own words: ennui enlivened by a slight sneer.

  “It won’t seem like a real movie,” Nicholas remarked.

  The man in front of his mother probably worked for the studio. He wore a business shirt and tie without a jacket, and his lounging sprawl indicated he was in possession of his customary seat. The man glanced toward Nicholas, ready to sneer more broadly, but when he saw Nicholas’s face his mouth puckered for an instant into a circle of recognition, the silent “oh” of the urbane fan. But something about the way the man continued to stare at him gave Nicholas the sense that the man knew his face from the movie, not from having seen him on stage; the man obviously felt no compunctions about staring because, to his mind, Nicholas wasn’t quite real. Nicholas fought the urge to avert his head. He peered directly into the man’s eyes, as if he were nine years old and having a staring contest with Thomas. It took less than five seconds for the man to give up; he raised his eyes above Nicholas’s head as if all along he had been searching out the location of the projection booth.

  People were still coming in, searching along the rows for familiar faces, waving, mimicking a swoon of amazement at seeing someone they probably hadn’t seen in a week and a half. This was the first New York screening. Most of the people in the small theater had something to do with Urban Affairs, the final title of the movie. He and the man who’d played a hippie artist were the only two actors present, but he’d recognized one of the screenwriters and a few other people he’d met out in California. The head of the publicity department, a man with a satanic goatee, had waved at him wildly and thrown a loud, chirpy kiss to him from the front row. But he’d never seen the man in front of his mother.