Rubicon Beach

by Steve Erickson

  * * *

  Still, he hadn’t seen the kitten. They got to his suite, which struck Richard for the first time in the eight months he’d been there as tidy in a way that indicated inactivity. It had always been so tidy but it had taken this experience, leading this strange young girl through the door, to make him realize that it looked like the room of a man with nothing to do but keep it tidy. He wanted to rush ahead and dishevel it. Instead he sat her down at the small round table by the window that looked out toward the Hollywood Hills. There was a bowl of fruit and a basket of pastries left over from the morning. “Sit,” he said, taking her by the shoulders and directing her to the chair. When he went to make the phone call in the bedroom she unwrapped the kitten. She took the coffee creamer and poured some cream into a clean glass ashtray and put it in front of the kitten.

  In the other room Richard made his call. “Maddy?”

  “Hello, Richard,” she said on the other end, and added, without a moment’s pause, “he’s not home now, he’s at the studio.” She was decidedly cool.

  “Maddy, I have an astounding surprise,” said Richard, “I am not calling to talk to your husband. I am calling to talk to you.” She was surprised at that. “Still without a housekeeper since the last one quit?”

  “No housekeeper,” answered Maddy, “the house is a shambles and Janey’s home from school sick. Care to work for a living, Richard?”

  Richard laughed theatrically. “That’s extremely amusing, Maddy. In fact I have a solution to your troubles.”

  “Such as.”

  “Such as a housekeeper of course,” he said, peering around the door. Catherine was sitting at the table staring out the window. “A girl I just found in front of the hotel, with no shoes and, far as I can tell, not a syllable of English in her—”

  “How can I resist.”

  “And,” he added emphatically, “nowhere to be and probably here very illegally. Which means, as hired help goes, rather in your price range.” He had to twist the knife a little; there was silence on the other end. “Since you’ve had problems financing your housekeepers lately, I thought this might be just the ticket. How much sign language does it take to get a dish washed?”

  “This is very thoughtful of you, Richard,” Maddy replied acidly.

  “I freely admit self-interest in the matter. Domestic bliss in the Edgar household means Mr. Edgar gets down to business a little sooner, which means I get down to business a little sooner.”

  Maddy said, “Do you ever think what happens if he doesn’t get down to business soon? If he doesn’t get down to business ever?” Said in a way that betrayed worry; said very quietly.

  Richard answered, just as quietly, just as worried, “No, I don’t think of that.”

  He heard her sigh deeply on the other end of the line. “I don’t either.”

  “Bad news for me, Maddy, if he doesn’t get down to business soon, let alone ever. I’m counting on it.”

  “So am I.” She said, “Send the girl over, Richard. Has she a name?”

  “I haven’t the faintest.”

  * * *

  Down in front of the hotel, Richard had trouble getting Catherine into the cab. “I’ve had enough of navigators,” she told him, standing away from its open rear door. “l transport myself from here on.” Richard got in and out of the cab several times trying to show her it was all right. “See,” he said to her, “I’m in the cab now. Nothing happens. It doesn’t eat me.” He thinks, Catherine told herself, that I’m afraid of the machine. “I’m not afraid of the machine,” she said to him. I’ve been in one before.” All this conversation, of course, took place between them with complete incomprehension.

  Richard wound up taking the cab with her, finally determining it was the only way he’d get her in it. He was nervous anyway since his discussion with Maddy, and when he got nervous he always went somewhere. He had gone to Beverly Hills to see his agent when he feIt like this, but lately his agent had made him more nervous, not less. “Hancock Park,” he said to the driver. ‘The cab cruised down the long Ambassador drive onto Wilshire Boulevard and west on Wilshire to Rossmore, where it turned right. During this trip Catherine didn’t watch out the window but stared straight ahead of her; she was keeping the city at bay. Since the river had deposited her on the northern banks of Peru months earlier, she had switched off her capacity to be overwhelmed. She had never been in a place like this before and she was concentrating on retaining her facuIties of self-possession. She acknowledged what was around her while refusing to submit her consciousness to it. I’ve been falling, she thought, and until I land there’s no use watching the scenery. She absorbed each new shock as one absorbs the light of the sun without staring at it.

  In Hancock Park she was surrounded by homes so large she assumed they housed whole tribes. I’m in a forest of Crowds, she was thinking, at the center of this monstrous village erected on borders no one sees but everyone knows are there. The trees sheItered the street and the taxi sailed beneath them as though on the rivers of her home. Richard gave the driver the address. The house was red brick with a white door, near a corner at the edge of the park; it was one of the smaller houses in the neighborhood. The driver seemed a little disappointed when he saw it. “Right here,” Richard said. They parked on the street; Richard got out and ran up the lawn to get Maddy, trying to think of a way to get her to pay the fare.

  * * *

  Madeline Edgar was an athletic-looking red head in her early thirties. On this day, beset by circumstances, she answered the door with even more impatience than usual. Catherine was inside the house about twenty seconds when Maddy whisked her to the back. “Richard, are you sure about this?” she said to him; actually he didn’t look all that sure. “What are you doing here anyway, does the girl need an escort?” Richard explained he couldn’t get her to take the cab alone. Maddy gave him five dollars for the cab and another twenty, which she called a “finder’s fee” She cracked, “If she doesn’t work out you can give it back.” Richard handled the twenty as though it were soiled.

  A service area was behind the kitchen, and there was a room behind the service area: very bare, with a single bed and a chest of drawers, a sink and a tub. “This is where you’ll live,” Maddy told Catherine, “I’d rather you ate your meals here as well. Do you understand what I’m saying?” Catherine gazed at the room around her; Maddy was already on her way out to the kitchen, beckoning Catherine to follow. She explained everything to the girl and then found herself miming as well; she knew little Spanish and was not used to dealing with Latins. The last housegirl had been British. Her name had been Catherine. Within five minutes Maddy was calling the new girl Catherine. Catherine had no idea why she was being called Catherine but didn’t contest it.

  That night the two women had their first breakthrough in communication. Both understood the word “leche,” on which Maddy produced for the girl a glass of milk. When the mistress was gone, Catherine gave the milk to the kitten, who now lived in the bottom drawer of the chest.

  * * *

  The Work Catherine did in the Edgar house wasn’t unlike the work she had done in the governor’s hacienda at Guadalajara, except on a smaller scale. She cleaned the kitchen and handled the laundry, and on her second night she helped Maddy prepare a meal. She met the Edgar child the first morning, a six-year-old recovering from the chicken pox who came into the kitchen and gurgled, “Hello: orange juice,” at the new housekeeper. Maddy came in and said, “You don’t need Catherine to get your orange juice, Jane. It’s where it always is.” Jane said to her mother, “Catherine? Is everyone in the universe named Catherine?” When Jane was gone, Catherine noticed Maddy looking at her the way other people had looked at her; she was seized by dread.

  Maddy realized with some annoyance that she’d passed some twenty-four hours with this girl under her roof and hadn’t really looked at her. She could be anybody, Maddy thought; she’s a complete stranger and I’ve brought her into my house where my six-year-old sl
eeps. The other thing that annoyed Maddy, as a thought that didn’t coalesce until later when she was driving Jane to the doctor, was that for the first time ever, in the midst of a thousand girls in Hollywood with whom her husband came into contact all the time, Maddy was intimidated by a woman’s beauty. She may be the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, Maddy realized: how could I not have noticed that yesterday? I must have been distracted. It was as though her face weren’t there, as though it became part of the house as soon as she stepped into it. All Maddy had seen were her bare feet. Maybe it’s an attitude I have about servants, she thought, maybe Lew is right: growing up in Pasadena made me a rich bitch whether we had money or not.

  In fact she still hadn’t told her husband about the new housekeeper. He had passed an entire night without knowing that someone else was in his house. That night she told him first thing. “I hired a new housekeeper yesterday.”

  “Oh,” he answered. A moment later he said, “When’s she start?”

  “What?” said Maddy.

  “The new housekeeper, when does she start?”

  “She started. Yesterday/”

  “Oh,” he said again. He looked in the direction of the kitchen door. “Is she here now?”

  “Well, she’s in the back room. Richard recommended her.” She said this as though it would bolster her case, though considering Richard, she supposed it didn’t.

  “Richard? What’s Richard know about housekeepers?

  What’s her name?”

  “Catherine.”

  “The last one was named Catherine.”

  “There can be more than one Catherine.”

  “Is she English too?”

  “I think she’s Hispanic of some sort.”

  “ ‘Hispanic of some sort’?”

  “Don’t get liberal on me,” said Maddy, “you know what I mean.”

  “But not Catherine.”

  “Why not?”

  “Catherine? What’s her name. Katrina maybe . . .”

  “Not Katrina. Her name’s not Katrina. Wouldn’t it be worse to latinize her name when it isn’t even her name? To be honest I’m not sure the last one was named Catherine. I think it was the one before and I just called the last one Catherine out of habit. I call this one Catherine out of habit. I’ll call the next one Catherine out of habit.”

  “But the last one was English!” he protested.

  “Now who’s stereotyping whom?”

  He shook his head. “Is everyone in the world named Catherine?”

  * * *

  The following morning Catherine managed to put the kitten behind her back just as Llewellyn Edgar walked into the service area looking for clean laundry. Llewellyn was athletic-looking like his wife; in a couple of years he’d be forty but he didn’t show his age. He had light longish brown hair and a mustache. Catherine steeled herself to the impact of his regard.

  His eyes fell on her for a moment, and then he turned away. He turned away too quickly to notice whatever she had hidden behind her; he walked out of the service area without even getting the shirt he had come for. He walked through the kitchen into the dining area where he met his wife. “Going to the studio today?” she asked hopefully.

  “No. We can’t afford a housekeeper,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We can’t afford the housekeeper,” he said again. He headed toward the study. “I’m going to do some work.”

  “We’re not paying her anything,” Maddy said, “except room and board.” He seemed funny to her.

  “Uh”—he patted his pockets for his keys—”I have to go out after all. I forgot something” He went directly to the front door and opened it, leaving without any of his work or his papers, and in his undershirt.

  “Lew?” she said.

  “We still can’t afford her,” he muttered before closing the door.

  * * *

  At night Catherine sat in her room in the back of the house, without a picture on the wall or a television or a radio or a book, none of which she missed, since none of them she knew to miss. There wasn’t even a window. A small light burned on the chest. She was content to play with the kitten, who bounced across the room and the bed and insisted on perching herself at every precarious point, balancing on the side of the bathtub and tumbling into impossible corners. Both Catherine and the kitten were perfectly satisfied to be in this room with each other. Catherine sat on the bed for hours laughing at this crazy little white cat. She realized, watching the kitten attack her scarf ferociously, that except for her father this animal was the only actual friend she’d ever had, and for an hour after that she didn’t laugh any more.

  * * *

  Since Catherine had no clothes and wasn’t being paid a wage, Maddy bought her a minimal wardrobe: two simple light-brown dresses, some underwear which the girl seemed disinclined to use, and a pair of shoes half a size too large. Maddy didn’t invest in a more extensive selection since by the end of the first week she’d decided Catherine wasn’t going to be around very long. Someday she would learn not to listen to Richard, who wasn’t exactly ringing the phone off the hook for progress reports on his new discovery.

  One morning she decided to bring Catherine out of the back of the house and put her to work in the living room entryway. There wasn’t any doubt that the girl worked hard, and Maddy had her own things to do upstairs. Jane was on the mend from her chicken pox and would be back in school the following week. “The mantel over the fireplace needs cleaning,” Maddy said to Catherine, still manually illustrating every point, “and you can dust the tables. Use the window spray on the mirror.” She squirted the spray as an example. “When you’re through with that I’ll show you how to run the vacuum. God, do you understand anything I say?” Actually, thought Maddy, she’s not at all a stupid girl. “Jane,” she said to her daughter, who was at the foot of the stairs, “don’t bounce the ball in the house.” Jane had a translucent red ball with glitter on it. “If you have that much energy you ought to be in school.”

  “I’m sick,” Jane explained.

  “Yes, I can see.” She handed Catherine the dust rag and spray gun and went upstairs. In her bedroom she spent a few moments attending to the unmade bed before sitting on the edge of it, looking out the window to the drive, wondering if Lew would return today at noon or three or ten. He had come back at different hours the three previous days, out there driving around; she knew he wasn’t at the studio, since he’d been leaving and arriving without carrying any work. Of course she considered the possibility that he was seeing someone, but she didn’t believe it; she had the feeling it was something worse. How can it be worse? she thought. She sat on the bed with her hands in her lap, looking out the window about five minutes, when she heard a tremendous shattering in the room below.

  She leaped up and ran down the stairs. In the living room she found Jane stunned and motionless, the translucent red ball rolling at her feet. The housekeeper stood at the side of the room in terror. In the middle of the floor was the glass of the mirror in pieces, its remaining edge framing a white gouge in the wall. “Christ!” Maddy exploded. She came down the stairs and took her daughter by the hand. “I told you not to bounce it in the house,” she said in rage; the child, amazed, just shook her head. The mother looked at the mirror again and began leading the child up the stairs.

  “No,” Maddy heard someone say; it wasn’t lane. She stopped on the stairs and stared down into the living room. “No,” Catherine said again, quietly, the first word Maddy had ever heard from her; and Catherine pointed to herself and pointed at the pieces of the mirror on the floor. She was shaking, struggling for composure. Then Maddy saw her hands. They were slivered with glass, small dots of blood turning to wild streaks down her arms.

  With one shard of the mirror and her own bloody hands wrapped in the skirt of her dress, the girl ran from the living room out to the back of the house.

  Maddy stood on the stairs several moments before she realized her daughter was watching he
r, looking up. “Go to your room,” the mother said quietly, “it’s all right. Just go play in your room awhile, okay?” Jane walked slowly to her room, and Maddy finally came down the stairs to pick up some of the glass. She watched in the direction of the kitchen, expecting to see or hear something unimaginable. Then she turned to the front door and said, “Lew?” as though he would arrive on command.

  * * *

  Catherine lay naked on her bed, her hands wrapped in what had been her dress. Her white kitten dozed on her chest between her small breasts, and in her sink lay small pink pieces of glass from her arms. Occasionally she would hold up in front of her the shard of mirror and look into it several moments, for as long as she could stand it. When she didn’t look in the shard she saw her face anyway on the wall in front of her. Over all the months between the jungle and Los Angeles, over the thousands of miles, there was no telling how many hundreds of times her reflection must have flown past her in a mirror, or a window, or on a bright metallic surface. In ears, in boats, in the backs of houses, in entryways and pyramids, in the passage of place and time, opportunities abound for those who know their own faces. She had never known her face. She was as unconscious of its existence as she was of her heart, of which one is aware only when one stops to listen for it. She’d never looked for the image of her face by which she blended into jungles and houses, by which she signaled ships and persuaded men to wager all they had. When she stepped before the Edgars’ mirror, she saw what she’d come to know as the image of treachery and cowardice, by which her father had died, her village had been ripped asunder, and her life changed forever. That the image belonged to her, that it was attached to her hands and body, didn’t aIter what it embodied to her. That it was not a shivering creature in water, that the Edgars’ large living room mirror placed her face in another context (when she raised her hands, the image raised its hands; when she gasped, it gasped) did not aIter either the treachery or the cowardice but only attached those things to her. All those people, she thought bitterly to herself now, who’ve considered me a fool were right. I’ve betrayed myself with my stupidity, I’ve worn on the front of my head the villainies I loathed. She put the shard down on the bed and grabbed at her face; had her hands not been wrapped in the dress she would have torn at herself. Murderer of my father! she said to her face. She stumbled to the sink crying, to put her head under the water of the faucet, but when she got there she saw little pink pieces of her face staring up at her.