Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  “Nicer than Ukiah, you’ll admit.”

  “It’s very crowded, though.” Peggy knew they would get to Curt’s story when he was ready. “Is it true what you wrote Donna about seeing the face of God?” she asked after a while.

  “In a manner of speaking. Speaking metaphorically.”

  “You were never religious at all,” Peggy said.

  “In a coma, you still have your brain process. Something goes on in there. It was then I underwent some changes.”

  “That was your medical condition, the drugs they pumped into you.”

  “Who knows? Here I am.”

  She sat back to hear his story. The only part of it that surprised her, when it came out, was the part about finding God. The rest had a familiar, literary feel: arriving lost and sick, getting into drugs and wandering, then a guru, reading, a monastery—the lot.

  “Well—what is God telling you to do?” Peggy tried to ask this in a straightforward, nonironic way.

  “It’s a path, it’s a path. The book says ‘Buddhism in its multiple forms acknowledges the radical insufficiency of this shifting world.’ ”

  “I suppose it must,” Peggy agreed.

  “It teaches that men—women and men—‘in a devout and confident spirit, can either reach a state of absolute freedom or attain supreme enlightenment.’ It’s a path.”

  “Path back to California, I hope. Your wife and kids—the twins are so cute, by the way—and now that Amy has paid off your mortgage…”

  That got his attention. He demanded an account of how this windfall had occurred, had not got Donna’s letters telling him about it. If she had written them. It crossed Peggy’s mind that Donna may not have told him everything. She described the dinner where Donna had announced her windfall, the surprise.

  “Amy did that because she was worried about Donna losing the house. If I went back, I’d have to reimburse her,” Curt said.

  “I don’t think so. Just someday when you sell.”

  “Where are you staying?” Curt asked. “How long?”

  “The Peninsula. Staying long enough to convince you to come home,” Peggy said.

  Curt laughed. “Settle in. It’s good you’re comfortable there.”

  “What do you do all day?” Peggy asked. “Hang out in bars? Chase bar girls? Do you have a job?”

  “In a way,” Curt agreed. “Tell me how everyone is. What about you? Didn’t Amy give you anything?”

  “How did you know? Nothing for me, nothing for Hams. Just perfect you and perfect Donna.”

  “Donna and Amy always got along. I hear Donna is amassing a nice little packet herself.”

  “It did cross my mind that Donna could share a bit with the rest of us, but silly me. There’s lots more news,” Peggy warned. “Mother and Armand-Loup are separated. Mother is back living in California. Gilda is pregnant. They’re afraid Misty is in a clinical depression.”

  “What went wrong with Mother and Armand?” He ordered them each another beer and sandwiches and settled in to hear the family doings. Peggy noted that apparently he spoke Thai and could read the strange curly script that looked like wood shavings. She brought him up to date.

  “Is Mother happy being back in the U.S.?” Curt wondered.

  “I guess so.” She hadn’t thought about it. “I don’t think of Mother as happy so much as busy. She’s busy, she’s sort of an art dealer now, and she goes out with the dean of the cathedral. And gives her lectures.”

  “Good God. Hams?”

  “Hams seems happy, except for the Misty situation and being so poor. He’s started working full-time, as a chef; hash cook would be more like it.” She also told him what she knew about Gilda, which wasn’t much.

  “Wait, wait, back up!” Curt pleaded. “Gilda? How old is Gilda anyhow?”

  “Fifteen. Dad and Amy are in France seeing to her, I think planning to take her back to the U.S.”

  “The Princess. What happened there?” The First Three, as they thought of themselves, never had known much about Gilda except that she would come into Amy’s money someday.

  “Teenage slipup, according to Julie. Julie spends—did spend—a lot of time with Dad and Amy and Gilda, and she says Gilda is not the spoiled brat you’d expect.”

  “How’s Julie? Is she a junior now?”

  “I guess, but she’s in Europe, kind of junior year abroad. I think there’s a man in her life, but I don’t know.”

  “Did you imagine when we were little we’d be so scattered around the world?”

  “When we lived on Lake Street, that was the world. No, I never imagined anything—French stepfather, zillionaire Silicon Valley stepmother, weird expatriate brother, that’s you…”

  “It’s how we live now,” Curt said.

  47

  Success does a lot to encourage revenge.

  In San Francisco, upon hearing that Curt had been found, Donna made up her mind: until now she had been able to keep her wounded vanity and fury at Curt at manageable levels, but the idea of him actually coming home made more urgent her need to do something irrevocable, burn his bridges. Curt had been swanning around Southeast Asia without telling them, allowing everyone to suffer; he had deserted them and she had not forgiven it.

  Selling the house was the best thing she could think of to retaliate, and then she would take the kids and go back to Delaware as she had long wanted to do. It was a better place to raise kids anyway. She called Ursula to say that she had decided to sell their house.

  Her sense of virtue and entitlement carried all before it. Donna knew she was behaving rashly, but she was done with Curt, with the Motts, with San Francisco. Yes, finished with Curt—it was what he deserved—and without her, he wouldn’t be needing this big house. Selling had to be done, or underway, before he got home. She had not even realized, until she brought herself to say a few things out loud, that she had been this resentful of Curt, this furious at his desertion, this angry at—some of the things he’d done. If she didn’t protect her situation, Curt would come home, take it over, and tear it down. In the meantime, she had built a future for herself. She had prepared a solid ground—had built up vegetal protein to a state Curt had only imagined, and started a relationship with Harvey Avon.

  She remembered that Ursula had mentioned a buyer who was eager, who particularly admired the house. Did her deal still stand, with Ursula reducing her fee to 4 percent, and had there been changes in the market that would affect the price, six million five, they’d discussed?

  “The market is not great,” Ursula said. “Dropping, in fact.” This was true, and had made her decide against her former idea of buying Donna’s house herself. She didn’t need such a big place, and the uncertainties of the economy had brought her to her senses.

  “Time is of the essence, though,” Donna said. “I’ve decided to go back East, where I’m from. Family reasons. I’d like to be at least in escrow before I go—for peace of mind.”

  “Escrow is not necessarily peace of mind,” Ursula reminded her. “Things fall apart. Often. Banks renege, people drop out.” Just to correct Donna’s misapprehensions about the real-estate business.

  “It can take some time to sell these high-end properties,” she went on to remind Donna. “I’ll go back to my Hong Kong buyers, but I can’t promise they’re still interested or ready to pay a premium.” Ursula’s suggested asking price was on the low side, priced to sell, and beneficial for herself, too, in case she changed her mind about buying it, as she admitted to Donna; she was in no way deceptive. “Say five million five.” Donna did the math and agreed with it. Okay.

  Ursula’s clients were the Chins, the couple to whom Ursula had rented the apartment next to Lorna while they undertook their real-estate searches. Ursula had shown the house to them when it was first on the market, and they had lost their hearts to it, but then Donna a
nd Curt had bought it first. Now they were delighted that Donna’s house had come back on the market. They were cash buyers, but luckily not so stupid as to have left the cash around the apartment, as the burglars had apparently believed. The cash was in the Sunshine Happiness Bank on Columbus Avenue and could be safely, electronically, transferred into escrow at a moment’s notice.

  Donna decided to say nothing about the sale to the Mott family, who would only want to deter her impulsive course.

  48

  It had been planned that Ran and Amy would spend the holidays in the rented house in Pont-les-Puits, but first they intended for Christmas itself to be in Paris with Gilda and Carla and, they had thought, Julie. But other matters in California impeded their Paris visit—the first Christmas of Gilda’s fifteen years not spent with her parents. To add to this, Julie had vanished, represented by cheerful emails sent from Portugal. There were other shadows. Poor Hams and Misty were obliged by Misty’s feelings about her pregnancy to stay in California, though Ran handsomely offered to pay their airfare. Julie’s absence annoyed Ran when he heard about it—he was paying for her studies, and they had had an understanding that she would be keeping an eye on things with Gilda and Carla, not taking up with some man. Nonetheless, he said nothing, for fear Gilda would feel herself too surveyed and spied upon if he mentioned Julie’s real role.

  Paris wore its usual Christmas finery, colored lights strung on the trees, across the boulevards, and along the Champs-Élysées, and store windows decked with holiday wares. After some shopping and Christmas matinees and one three-star restaurant, Carla and Gilda hired a car and, the day after Boxing Day, with Carla driving, spent three days touring in the Camargue to see the wild horses, bulls, and flamingos, a great success with both of them. They bought leather hats and objects bearing the strange half-Christian, half-pagan symbol of the region and ate the local pastry, aigues-mortes.

  At the end of the third day in the Camargue, they followed their GPS the couple of hours to Pont. Julie had just arrived there and had picked up the keys to the house—Julie’s grandmother’s former home—which Ran had rented on VRBO. Julie, even more healthy looking than usual, said she’d had a great time with her holiday temp job, and something about her, a certain smugness, confirmed this.

  “Well, where were you, anyhow?” Gilda wondered. “Was it interesting?”

  “Sure, yes. Lisbon. It was totally interesting. Beautiful tiled walls.” She would say no more than that.

  Julie remembered the house, her grandmother’s former house, from when she was a tot, when she and her parents had spent a couple of vacations there. Through its association with pleasant times, Peggy had always spoken fondly of it to Julie. Had her father Dick ever mentioned it? She couldn’t remember.

  In Paris, Julie had shown Gilda and Carla her old room on the website and recounted what faint memories she had. Now Julie had saved what they imagined had been the master bedroom for Amy and Ran, and then she, Carla, and Gilda each chose a bedroom; it was like having a whole hotel of choices. “You should take the one closest to that bathroom, since you have to pee so much,” Carla told Gilda. Gilda took everything in a genial light and was grateful for this nice room, where she’d be obliged to lie down for what seemed hours every day according to Dr. Karas’s instructions.

  Julie, Carla, and Gilda planned some expeditions to neighboring villages. Poor Gilda appeared to shock the locals with her big belly, almost like a clown belly with a stuffed-in pillow, so ill did it fit with the rest of her childish features and dramatic pallor.

  On New Year’s Eve they all decided to go out instead of firing up the imposing solid-fuel range and darkening the beautiful copper pots before Ran and Amy had seen them. It was at dinner that they heard from the waiter Luigi, who was perfectly informed of the connection of the newcomers to Monsieur Dumas, that Madame Dumas herself was back in town for the upcoming ceremonies in the graveyard, a measure of how festive a funeral it would be.

  “Grandma Lorna here? How weird. Where is she staying?” Julie asked. “Not at her house, because that’s where we are.”

  “Monsieur Dumas lives above the Pâtisserie Friandise—il y a un appartement.” But Julie found it hard to believe that her grandmother would bunk in with someone she was divorcing.

  They were eating at La Roulette, with its lace curtains, menu on a blackboard (rognons de veau, choux farci), the sideboard showing off giant magnums of poire and brandy. They were on dessert when a party of eight men and one woman came in for dinner. They could see their minivan parked in front of the restaurant but couldn’t read the writing on its door. The newcomers took the long table on Carla’s side, and one of them chatted up the girls in English, explaining their presence in this friendly village establishment.

  “We’re the Subcommission on Cretaceous Stratigraphy.” He explained that the département meant to make a geopark here in Pont-les-Puits and was investigating promising sites.

  “What is a geopark exactly?” said the young women cooperatively.

  It was a pedagogical park, an enterprise sponsored by the minister of the interior to showcase sites where geological features, with edifying labels, could be demonstrated to schoolchildren and amateur geologists. Little by little, they learned the details of what the party meant to find by discovering “the biostratigraphy, sedimentology, paleoenvironmental interpretations, and outcrop accessibility for candidate sections for the bases of the Valanginian, Upper Valanginian, and Hauterivian Stages or substages in the Pont-les-Puits area.”

  “My word!” Thinking of the bones they would dig.

  “I think myself that the topography is a little steep right around here for a park, but it’s very much a candidate. The fossils indicate it is Cretaceous, and there’s a perfect overhang for viewing,” the man went on.

  The girls also speculated about the news that the house’s owner, Monsieur Dumas, and Julie’s grandmother were somewhere around. Could they be back together? They lingered, they ordered coffee, but no Lorna or Armand-Loup. These two were late getting up after an afternoon romp for old times’ sake and were having a nip of porto in Armand’s rooms, only coming in to eat at quarter to ten, looking very cheerful and clearly had already had their apéritifs.

  * * *

  —

  Above the bakery, Lorna had done her best at getting presentable, for there wasn’t a long mirror in Armand’s rooms, only a shaving mirror over the washbasin in the bathroom, okay for putting on lipstick and combing your hair. Armand was wearing an old green shooting jacket and chinos and looked dashing, she thought. For people of their age, they were a handsome couple, showing that life had treated them well and they had not affronted the world, either. An intimation of felicity must have struck Armand-Loup at the same moment it had struck Lorna. He said, “Seems right to have you back here, Lo.”

  “Mm. Moi aussi,” she said. This sentiment just came out in French. She did feel very comfortable.

  “After you left, I came to realize how I miss you,” he said. Lorna was startled; he was doubtless referring to their last angry argument, her very well-founded accusations. “I’m sorry you left.”

  “No more reproaches from me. I came to realize people are how they are,” Lorna said. She hoped he wouldn’t take that to mean that she had come to accept his demeaning, unseemly chasing of women. But anyway, this was not a negotiation, their marriage was over.

  “I have come to realize many things,” Armand-Loup said, but they left it there. By the time they got to the restaurant, Julie and the others had gone, but had left a note in case Grandma came in.

  Back in Armand’s room again after dinner, Lorna put in a call to Hams, midafternoon in California, but Misty was asleep. “We miss you, darling,” said Lorna. “Courage.”

  Lorna reflected as she snuggled under the covers that it had been easy to fall into bed with Armand that afternoon—making such things easy had always
been his specialty. And kind of nice, with the ease of long practice together, love amid the fecund aromas of rising yeast and warm baking from Pâtisserie Friandise below. Really, late middle age was not so bad. She had never thought of it with dread, but now she appreciated its true comforts.

  * * *

  —

  Earlier she had been to see the village’s Woodses at the mairie—a serious holding requiring delicate and protracted management, if only for one reason, as Armand pointed out, to avoid flooding the market. Russell’s remaining dozen works—a couple of them less finished, and ten very fine ones—were stacked in Barbara Levier’s office at the mairie with newspapers between the canvases to prevent damage. She’d have to look up whether newsprint came off. The smaller paintings, each about two feet wide, could certainly be carried on an airplane without a problem. She could probably take two at a time as personal luggage. She didn’t want to know too much about the legality of that. “It’s probably okay,” Armand said.

  Lorna looked at the pictures a long time, thinking of Van Gogh’s crows, trying to see if something in them predicted Russ’s darkening mood before his death; had he felt a premonition, an approaching void? Russell had died suddenly of pneumonia, it was said. It had seemed such an old-fashioned way to die. She shivered a little. What was the new way? What better way? She saw that the last two pictures did use more black; the blacks were deeper and more enveloping, so that the gargoyles were almost hidden in shadow, glaring out ready to pounce.

  What tremendous good fortune that the task of seeing to them had fallen to Lorna. How strange that Julie and Ran’s daughter Gilda were here in Pont, in Armand’s house—the big house that had been hers, too; maybe she’d see the family and the house tomorrow before the ceremony for poor Russell. Her head was almost too full of dislocated and jet-lagged thoughts to sleep, but she slept well.

  * * *