Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  It was nice to be in America. Looking back, she’d come to feel that some essentially American part of her had been stifled in France, but was now reawakening, some innate appreciation of local efficiency and traditions of welcome she’d forgotten about. Like Rip van Winkle, she told Hams, she had been in a long French fugue. Now, speaking of her time in France, she caught herself perpetuating certain American myths about French coldness, rudeness, in comparison with here, though in fact no one had ever been rude in Pont-les-Puits. Cold, maybe, but for other reasons—her American-accented French, her idiotic cookery.

  Yes, she was happy to be back in America, she told herself, even if it was not as—not as nice, really. Life was harder in San Francisco. In France there were trains and medical care. Here the news featured people being evicted and living in containers. Her emotions churned in a confused, deracinated way; people (Pam, on the telephone) inevitably told her it would take time to put down new roots or find her old groove.

  There was also the issue of invisibility. When she had left America to marry Armand-Loup, she was still a pretty young woman, and the world responded to her. Now, twenty years later, however good-looking she was for a person of her age, to the world she had entered the invisible phase you always heard about. Whether she talked to the butcher or the banker, she did not experience that animated twinkle from the man she was talking to, that special energy that was the product of, well, sex. More precisely, fertility. In France, though, men sustained the twinkle longer. Armand-Loup did for sure. In America it was extinguished early. American men evidently didn’t have the same appreciation for women of a certain age. It was a cultural almost as much as a biological issue.

  * * *

  —

  There was an electric stove already in the apartment, which she was sure she’d hate but would get used to. In Pont there was an old farmhouse stove, built to use either gas or wood. But she was charmed by her slick new cookware with its nonstick coating. She liked the old-house smell. The garage was hers, a valuable feature, though for the moment she had no car. “In this neighborhood you could rent it out—you can ask four hundred a month for it,” Ursula told her. “People will kill for parking places.”

  It was fun settling in, finding joy in each item she added in the name of livability. She found a big glass vase at the secondhand store on Polk Street, thinking wistfully of the vases in her cupboard in Pont—Baccarat, Lalique, and the handsome local stoneware. But even in a Mason jar she would still have flowers, and books in the bookcase she would fashion from cinder blocks and a board, like a college student. Bunches of flowers took away the impression of sad austerity. She knew that books would accumulate soon enough, it was the way of books to proliferate, but meantime, when the bare booklessness of the living room bothered her, she bought an armload from the same thrift store, Athena’s Shelf, and propped them on the windowsills. Art books nobody read, with reproductions of Verrocchio and Giorgione. And, as if owing to her acquisition of a fixed address, she was immediately invited to a dinner party by Nancy and Howard Fludd, people she’d known forever, museum people she’d kept up with over the years.

  She subscribed to the Chronicle and the New York Times both, and read diligently, somewhat appalled by her growing sense of the tone, especially in the Times, of people’s discontent with all aspects of life—their gender mostly, but qualities in their mates or coworkers, ethical questions people seemed no longer to know the answers to, where people of Lorna’s age knew the answers perfectly well. “My coworker is having an affair. I am having lunch with his wife. If I accept her hospitality, is it moral to conceal what I know about her husband?” A layer of moral anxiety thickened the air now. Maybe it was just the people who wrote in to newspapers who felt it. Maybe it was good that people recognized the existence of a moral dimension, but there was a new level of self-involvement that seemed to Lorna not to have been there before, or at least not to have been “out.” That was it, there was a new level of outness about everything, and it was aggressive. And all the new etiquette about roommates and one-night stands. There was so much to learn, not that a person of her age would be having one-night stands. She did begin to be solicited for e-dating services for people with silver hair—that is, her age group: the widowed, the late divorces.

  For someone very experienced at dinner parties, she was more pleased and excited than she ought to have been about the Fludds’ dinner, she knew, but couldn’t keep down a tingle of anticipation. Going to a dinner party on your own felt different from the way you felt when the actual or merely virtual moral presence of a husband went with you. In her husbandless interregnum between Ran and Armand-Loup, she fitted into the raffish category of the husband-hunting divorcée; obviously, no one would think of her that way anymore, would not feel they had to invite an eligible man to make up the party, or be thoughtful about the seating. What a relief to be done with all that.

  She was chagrined, though, to feel herself still worrying about what to wear. She really had nothing to wear, had come away from Pont-les-Puits with nothing, and, too, what people wore in San Francisco was slightly different, in what way she could not say, beyond that San Francisco was a city, not a village, and the seasons had changed. She could justify a new dress and would make a hair appointment on the day. The words of the old gay baron in Proust came to her: “Of course I’m no longer five-and-twenty, they won’t choose me to be Queen of the May, but still one does like to feel that one’s looking one’s best.”

  She saw, arriving at the Fludds’, that when reentering society after a long absence, you came in by the same door you had left it, both in the minds of your hosts and in your own; if your last party was when you were fourteen, your emotions now, at a certain age, were of a fourteen-year-old, as if no time had passed. When she’d first moved to France, her French had been at the level of junior high school, the age she had studied it, though she was by then a woman over forty, and so people seemed to think of her as mentally fourteen. Her life was like lace, or net, or laddered stockings, with many holes between the ruptured threads.

  It was ruddy-jowled Howard Fludd who welcomed her in, gave her a kiss on each cheek, two—whether in deference to her recent return from France, where two kisses were required, or because two were meant to convey especial warmth, an escalation of the conventional American single air peck.

  “We tried to call you and Armand last year when we were in the Luberon,” he said. “Are you still there, in Pont-les-Thing?”

  “Armand-Loup is,” she said, not clear whether Howard understood why she was back in San Francisco alone. At table, a man she didn’t know, Ray someone, was to her right and asked about her children. Howard Fludd, to her left, mostly had to deal with the hostlike administrative duties of serving and passing. As a well-socialized female of her generation, she was meek about dinner conversation and was content to respond to questions and, above all, ask them of male dinner partners, although, after all those years in France, she had learned not to ask American-style personal queries like What do you do? but more general questions like What will happen to the mayor if the bridge inquiry goes further? or What do you think of the museum’s new Monet? Or Don’t you think we should spend our funds on Diebenkorns? assuming a collective interest in the art museum, local politics, or some new film. The financial crash seemed to be a touchy subject: What do we think about the bailout? Voices were raised, but rancor was avoided. One of the guests, Marina Box, she knew was the art museum director, so Lorna could slyly insinuate into the conversation her opinion that the museum ought to spend its funds buying local painters like Diebenkorn and Thiebaud, not French Impressionists of another day.

  Later, at the table, she had a success telling the story of the slipping graveyard in Pont-les-Puits, but it was her only moment of speaking up.

  “It must be so dull for you, being back here,” said Carol—Mrs. Ray. “After France. We always have such a nice time in Paris. Of co
urse you’re out in the country, aren’t you?”

  “Armand-Loup keeps a little pied-à-terre in Paris,” Lorna said.

  “We go every June,” Carol said. “We have a restaurant list if you’d like me to pass it on. Out-of-the-way places, not Americanized.”

  “Thank you,” Lorna meekly said. “I’d love that.”

  “France has seen its day,” said Howard Fludd. “You’ve probably bailed out at the right time.”

  “Bailed out,” Lorna heard her own voice uncertainly repeat. She suddenly saw it: she had bailed out and was now at a dinner party in San Francisco, having recently given a lecture in Bakersfield, hoping for Fresno, in a country experiencing a crash.

  “That’s a country that’s over, but they don’t know it,” said Carol’s husband—wasn’t that Ray?

  “Did you happen to know Russell Woods?” asked Marina Box suddenly, and a whole new topic blossomed for Lorna, her friendship with Russell, his death, his life. She felt she could add something to the evening after all. “In some fashion, I’ve become his executor,” she said. This, she saw, got Marina Box’s attention.

  “You must come to lunch at the museum next week—we have so many new acquisitions, and you may not have seen the redo of the atrium,” Marina said, and Lorna thought she saw a petal or two of her immediate future unfold.

  Still, in a further week, she had not heard from any museum, university, or lecture agent to whom she’d reached out professionally. She did have a phone call from Carol, wife of Ray, the woman she’d met at the Fludds’.

  “You know we have this group—it doesn’t meet too often, no panic: Friends of Proust. We’d love it if you’d join us. You must have such a great sense of the social realities he’s talking about—the whole background—and we need someone who’s spent so much time in France. I know you’ll enjoy it—we read a few pages aloud, and then someone gives a report. ‘Menus at the Duchesse de Guermantes’—that was a recent one—or ‘Proust and the Theater.’ ”

  For a moment, Lorna was abashed—she was no Proustian. Still, she had always meant to go beyond Swann’s Way, which is where she had stopped. Poor Russell had been so keen on the character of Elstir, the painter. Yes, she ought to carry on reading Proust. Still, how embarrassing: twenty years in France without going beyond Swann’s Way. And she was a scholar! Would she be exposed? Did she have time to catch up? She thought of that party game Humiliation, in which you confessed the most shameful omission in your education.

  25

  Loyalty is a virtue everyone admires, especially the disloyal.

  Julie ignored her mother’s advice to stay out of Gilda’s worries, and agreed to go down to Woodside for dinner and be there when Gilda revealed her plight to her parents, who, in their leafy paradise, had remained innocently unaware of everything that had happened. Gilda had pleaded with Julie to come, and promised that Carla would drive her down to them and back to the city afterward, or they could organize for her to take one of the tech buses that made the trip often. Gilda came along with Carla to fetch her, but they naturally couldn’t discuss the pending matter in front of Carla. Carla was playing an old Santana CD too loud to talk anyhow.

  Carla Alvarez had worked for Amy Hawkins since before Amy married Ran Mott, nearly sixteen years ago, certainly entitling her to be thought of as a loyal retainer, though she was not forty and was still planning to study to be a CPA when she got the money together, and to marry and have a family, and to travel. Carla looked like a college girl, but called herself a personal concierge, was unnaturally taciturn, and seldom spoke even to Gilda, but smiled pleasantly under all circumstances. She’d begun as an office helper for Amy, but evolved into a driver, occasional cook, confidante, and unofficial nanny; Gilda had had an actual nanny, too, when she was younger, but not since she began school. “Call me Figaro,” Carla had once startled them by saying.

  She had a nice apartment over one of the garages, and since her family lived in Mountain View, she was just the right distance from them, not too far but not too close. She feared getting dragged back into their Beaner ways, as she thought of them—the basically high-fat, high-carb Hispanic cooking of her mom, their lack of interest in music; Carla had excelled at her music lessons at school, had received a violin, had even played for a while when younger in the junior orchestra of San Jose. Unlike her mom, she did not go to church. Mr. Alvarez, her father, had been doing the Mott yard for years, but lately had gone into making dry-rock walls and now had a fairly successful landscaping business, more in San Jose than Woodside.

  When they got to Woodside, they pulled up to some high wooden gates painted black-green, concealing what lay beyond, and Carla pushed a button on the dashboard of her Chevy Tahoe to make them slowly open. Julie had been to Grandpa Ran’s place here years before, she forgot why but supposed with her mother; she didn’t really remember it and was unprepared for its comfortable grandeur, if these were not contradictory terms, the ivy growing over the garages, and a rose hedge, the doors dark green and shiny, the brass latches polished to gold. With a sidelong glance at Gilda, she saw the girl’s lips tightly pressed together, as if so in dread of the coming scene she could barely force them open.

  The evening started in an ordinary fashion. Gilda and Julie joined Ran in his study where he was watching the news. The economy was looking very bad; foreclosures were crashing the housing market; people were living in boxcars. “The bastards have to forgive the mortgages,” Ran said. He was having a glass of white wine and asked Julie, but not Gilda, if she would join him. Gilda’s mother was not around, but stuck her head in around seven o’clock to say “À table.”

  Julie noted the dining room furniture in pale woods, like the glamorous interiors in vintage films of the forties where the actresses wore feather-trimmed dressing gowns. Was it a real Picasso over the buffet? There was soup to start, served from an antique tureen, then chicken with artichokes and preserved lemons. At dessert, when Carla, who served the dinner, was not in the room, Gilda, dawdling with healthful orange sections dusted with coconut, brought up her situation. She falteringly announced that there was something she wanted to tell Ran and Amy.

  “You aren’t going to like it,” she added. They looked a little alarmed at this warning, at the solemnity of Gilda’s tone, not the usual tone at their dinners, and Julie felt them glance at herself, as if she ought to corroborate or was somehow behind Gilda’s gravity. Or, horrors, had instigated it.

  “I have a problem I think you should know about,” Gilda said. “I’m pregnant.” As she expected, she had their instant attention; they were the most attentive parents possible. She hastened to embroider: “Uh, it was an accident, I can explain…” The thunderstruck parents said nothing for what seemed to Julie an excruciating pause. Then Ran rose from his chair.

  “Did someone hurt you?” he asked with menace building in his voice as he imagined violation by the gardener or some teacher at her school. No other explanation seemed very likely. She had never had a date, though there were school dances to which boys were invited en masse. After the ineffable silence, Amy rose, too, and came around the table to hug Gilda and say, “Oh, honey, are you all right?” her expression one of love and motherly concern. “Oh, honey, surely not?”

  The parents continued to look stunned, though only for a moment more. Then there were questions: “What happened? How do you know?” Deeply embarrassed, Gilda described coming home with Ian the night of the gala and admitted to the brief tussle in the car behind the garages, and, without going into detail, since her own grasp of the details was extremely vague, explained about the heavy petting and then the pregnancy test, and that Julie had helped her confirm it. Julie felt their accusing gaze, as her mother had predicted.

  Gilda’s parents persisted in unexpectedly kindly tones with questions. Since her ideas of anger, ostracism, and disgrace had been taken from nineteenth-century novels, and she had built a solid edi
fice of mental preparation, she and Julie were both a little disappointed at their relative calm.

  It also became quite clear to Julie as she followed the conversation that Gilda’s parents were mainly stricken with guilt, feeling they hadn’t given her adequate instruction in the ways of the world, hadn’t talked about contraception, had not realized she was getting to the age…Gilda found herself reassuring them as to their excellence as parents, their total guiltlessness, her confidence in them.

  “You guys have been wonderful parents, you should talk to my friends. You have no idea. I know how lucky I am…”

  They heaped her with reassurance in turn. She was not to lose her self-esteem or feel that her future was changed in any way. “We’ll get through this, darling girl, everyone has a bit of trouble of some kind at some age, no one comes out unscathed…”

  Her father was concerned about her health. Had her blood sugar been normal, was she under control?

  “I’m fine, everything is normal. Really.”

  As to what to do, “As a procedure, it’s nothing,” Ran said, “the work of an afternoon, a minor intervention.” He became aware that both his daughter and wife were looking at him with astonishment. “Absolutely no implications for future childbearing, really very simple.”

  This sounded horrible to Gilda. How could he talk that way? It was a baby after all and, with such a beautiful father, bound to be a superior baby, if it didn’t get diabetes.

  “I think we ought to think about this,” said Amy, with a meaningful glare at Ran intended to convey, We’ll talk about this between ourselves, without Gilda.

  It seemed to Julie that they glared at her, too, as if she’d done something horrid to Gilda to cause this—procured her for Ian, or pep-talked about sex. An ignominious wave of envy washed over Julie at the privilege that enveloped Gilda, the kindness and understanding that it seemed to convey. Lucky Gilda had everything; even her unfortunate pregnancy was not the doing of some grubby high-school hood but the dreamy Ian Aymes, a trophy boy.