Bill grinned. “At least a person wouldn’t have any trouble getting out of here.” Five doors led out of the living room. Hope opened the main door, the front door, which led out onto the front porch, and Bill came to stand beside her. “Let’s take a walk,” they said at the same time, and laughed.
Two mulberry trees stood like benign sentinels in the golden glow from the house lights. Bill stopped under one of them and turned back to look at the house, lighted and cheerful and homey-looking now, with wooden benches on the porch, a dinner bell hung over the porch steps, a pile of firewood neatly stacked. “I love it,” he said again. “I never want to go back to L.A.”
“There’s a river down here,” Hope said, walking past him. He caught up with her and they walked down the road they’d driven up, through the gate, where they left the road and stood at the edge of a hill dipping down to the river. In the distance, below them, they could hear the rush of the water. “It’s the Tule River,” Hope said. “It’s not real big, but it’s nice and clean, and there’s a nice little sandy beach down there, great for swimming.”
She took out a cigarette and Bill lighted it for her. He didn’t smoke, but he had never complained about her smoking; he never complained about anything she did. They stood for a while in the moonlight, in no rush to get anything said. They walked slowly back up the road, past the house, around to the side where the car was parked, facing the dark mountain. Hope held the back door open for Bill as he carried in the grocery bags. “Let’s have a drink,” Bill said. “And how about a fire?”
“There’s wood by the fireplace,” Hope said. “At least there should be. Jim Webb is supposed to keep wood ready. Anyway, there’s some on the porch. I’m going to change.”
She carried her small suitcase through the living room and into the corner bedroom at the front of the house, which looked out onto the front lawn. The two twin beds in the room were pushed together, making one bed, but with separate twin-sized bedspreads. Hope opened her suitcase and took out a long, light pink brushed-cotton gown. Then she walked from the bedroom into the small hall, around the corner to the bathroom.
When she came out, Bill was kneeling by the fireplace, with the fire already leaping. “One more log,” he said, and heaved a small one onto the fire. He drew the screen shut and stood up. Hope walked back into the kitchen, turned off the light, then she turned off the living room lamps. Bill settled at the end of the sofa nearer the fire, with his drink on the coffee table. Hope sat on the floor at his feet, right up close to the fire, with a glass of white wine.
“It’s after midnight and I’m not the least bit tired,” she said.
Bill reached out and touched her hair. “You look nice,” he said. She reached up and took his hand, still gazing into the fire. She did look nice, with her long hair falling softly past her shoulders, her soft, little-girl gown; she looked nice and fragile and very innocent.
“Bill,” she murmured, “I feel so lucky. I mean, it’s extremely lucky that we really, really like each other’s children, isn’t it? We’re so lucky that we can treat them all the same and really, really mean it.”
“I know,” Bill said. “And it’ll be great when we have a place of our own, like this, and they can all play together.” They sat silently for a while, watching the fire. Then Bill shifted a little, on the sofa.
“Hopie,” he said, “what do you think I should do about Sandi?”
Hope looked at the fire, not at Bill. “I think probably you should see her again and see how you feel,” she said.
“I don’t want to see her again,” Bill said. “I knew six months before I met you that it was over between Sandi and me. But she keeps calling me. She called me at the office nine times yesterday. Four times she called to say she was never going to call again.”
“Well, I just think you’re going to have to see her in person and look her straight in the eye and tell her you don’t want to see her again,” Hope said. “I think you have to do that because you’ve only talked to her on the phone and she probably thinks that if she can just see you once more, you’ll feel differently. And I’ve told you before that I don’t want to get six months down the road with you and then find out that you still love Sandi.”
“God, Hopie,” Bill said, “I don’t want to see her, just the way I don’t want you to see Lionel.”
Hope sighed a little. This was not a new conversation, this talk of Sandi and of Lionel. The discussion about Sandi had been going on as long as she’d known Bill, and she had urged him again and again to see Sandi, preferably at lunch, and have it over with. Whenever Hope had a problem with a man, she tried to arrange a lunch date. “It’s neutral territory,” she explained, “and nobody is likely to freak out in a restaurant.” She had asked Tom Masters to meet her for lunch and she’d told him then that it wasn’t going to work out, two weeks after they were married.
As for Lionel, she knew Bill was still jealous, worried that Lionel might reenter Hope’s life. Her relationship with Lionel had been the more recent, and the more serious, of the two affairs she’d had between the time she split with Tom and the time she met Bill. The first was with Michael Abbott, a young law student—quiet, good-looking, earnest—who had lived with her on the Drive for a few months. They had shared a bedroom but also financial problems, and she’d sewn many patches on Michael’s jeans. After a while, Michael needed more quiet time to himself than Hope’s boisterous household, with three young children, assorted maids, cats and kittens and guinea pigs, was able to provide, and he’d moved out. He introduced Hope to a friend of his, Lionel, the screenwriter. Hope’s children took to him instantly and noisily. In fact, they clamored around Lionel so relentlessly that sometimes he and Hope would take their drinks and disappear into the walk-in closet in the bedroom, where they would close the door, sit on the floor, and talk privately.
Lionel was debonair, handsome, and charming, a wonderful raconteur and cook. But he had a habit of saying to her, sometimes in the middle of the night, “I’m going to Europe,” and then he would be gone, never a phone call or even a postcard, leaving Hope feeling abandoned. Sometimes he didn’t even tell her; she would just wake up in the morning and find him gone, leaving her and the children to wonder where he had gone and when he would be back, if ever.
He’d always come back, to cry on Hope’s shoulder and to tell her he’d never do that again, though he always did. She would ask Michael’s advice. “I can’t figure it out,” she’d tell him.
“You don’t have to figure it out, Hopie,” Michael would say. “You’re getting hurt.”
When Lionel went to London to work on a television version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he didn’t write or phone, which confirmed Hope’s feeling that Lionel was basically inconsiderate and not truly her friend. In fact, she had told him so. “You may or may not be my lover, but you’ll never be my friend.”
Being friends with a man was important to Hope, perhaps even more important than being lovers, though if the two could be combined, as she had done with Bill, that was the best of all possible romantic worlds. Michael Abbott remained a close friend; he often came by the house, bringing a bottle of wine, when Lionel was away. He and Hope would sit by the gas fire, sip wine, play chess, and give each other advice. Even after Bill moved in with her, Hope stayed in close touch with Michael; she had called him to tell him about Bill’s commercial making the “ten-best” list, and she had told him she and Bill were coming up to the ranch. She thought Michael and Bill were very much alike, and she had repeated to Bill Michael’s theory about why a relationship fails.
“Michael says there are three kinds of needs,” Hope explained. “Number one needs are essential. Number two needs are important, but not all of them are essential. And number three needs are adjustable. My number one need is to be important to somebody, to a cuddly warm person I can communicate with. Number two is sex; that’s pretty important. Number three needs, like, what kind of movies do you like? and, what time do you like to get up in
the morning? can be worked out.” Hope and Bill had discussed their needs and had agreed that their number one needs were all covered, their number two needs were pretty well balanced, and their number three needs, though very different, were easily worked out.
Hope had brought other men to the ranch, but none of them had seemed to enjoy it as much as Bill was enjoying it now, on his very first visit. Even Michael, easygoing as he was, had grumbled a bit the last time he’d come for a weekend, because Hope had asked him to help her with the children, and Michael hadn’t been able to take a horse and ride by himself and do the things he’d have done without all the children underfoot. Later Hope had tried to make it up to Michael by asking him again, just for the day, with his friend Billy. Billy had called a friend of his who lived in Porterville, and Hope remembered how the three men had spent a good day together, riding and swimming.
Hope glanced up at Bill and marveled at how contented he looked. He smiled down at her. “Someday we’ll have our own fireplace, Hopie, with a house to go around it.”
“We have to figure out how to make some more money first,” Hope reminded him, and they talked again about TV commercials. Hope felt that, besides the print ad for the insurance company, she might be able to model in a few commercials, considering Bill’s contacts. She was young and beautiful enough and she had some acting experience. She’d never taken a regular acting job, though she’d had offers, because it required too much of a time commitment—getting up at five in the morning—but she’d worked as an extra on a few films. She’d worn pale makeup and a Depression outfit in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? In The Great Bank Robbery she wore a prostitute’s costume, a purple dress with lots of feathers and ribbons, but that didn’t work out well. “Kim Novak took one look at me and I was banished to the other end of town,” Hope recalled. She’d worked fairly regularly on the TV series “The Virginian” because she knew the producer. She had a bit part in another series, “It Takes a Thief,” until she met the star, Robert Wagner. “I guess I didn’t flatter him enough,” Hope decided. “He came up to me one day and said hello, and I said hello and went back to reading my book. Next thing I knew, I was banished from the main set.” When she was getting nothing but “boring bits,” she concluded that “pretty people don’t make good extras,” and she more or less got out of that line of work, although she made a sales film for Franciscan china. Not long after that, she had a call from a woman who’d gotten her name from the photographer on that film, inviting her to appear on “The Dating Game.” “How much does it pay?” Hope asked, and the woman sounded shocked. “Pay?” she exclaimed. “People are dying to appear on this show. And you’ll meet a lot of guys.” Hope turned it down, saying she had enough guys already.
Bill made more drinks, and they kept talking about the future, about the house in the country they would have someday, how good it was that they had found each other. “I used to think I was happy,” Bill said, “but now, every day, I look forward to coming home at night to you, and if I ever thought I couldn’t come home to you, I’d rather be dead.”
“You’ll always come home to me,” Hope declared. “And don’t worry for a while about dying. You’re forty, remember.”
“I’m not worried about actually dying,” Bill said. “When you’re dead, you’re dead, and that’s it. What really bothers me is the thought of getting old and sick.” Hope knew about his fear; he had told her how he had watched his father die slowly of cancer when Bill was seven years old. She had tried to talk him into believing in God and in an afterlife, but he was hard to sway. Hope’s attempts to bring him around to her way of thinking were somewhat complicated by the vagaries of her own thinking. She did not question the existence of God, or a life hereafter, but she had spent years questioning the earthly means to that divine end. One of her friends had taught Hope the Hail Mary when they were little girls, and for a while Hope collected rosaries to hang on her wall. But as she grew up, Hope came to know so many Catholics whom she considered guilt-ridden that she was leery of getting more involved with that faith. Technically, she was an Episcopalian, by baptism and through her mother’s church membership, but she had never felt comfortable at All Saints because of the social aspect. She remembered one lonely stretch of time when she had attended church regularly. “No one spoke to me,” she recalled. “No one ever made me feel that I belonged to the family of God.” So she had stopped going, although she was very fond of the pastor there, the Reverend Kermit Castellanos. He had visited her in the hospital when K.C. was born, bringing her a handful of flowers from the altar, and she had chosen her baby’s initials, K.C., in his honor. But she had refused to have K.C. baptized. “It’s basically a casting out of the devil, isn’t it?” she asked Reverend Castellanos. “Well, we prefer to think of it as a kind of initiation,” he said, but he had agreed with her that, according to the words of the rite, it was indeed designed to cast out the devil. “I refuse to believe that there’s evil in a tiny baby,” Hope said. She didn’t think anyone was truly evil, actually, only that people fell into two categories: good, and not so good. She felt she had always tried to be good to other people, especially to those who needed friends. When a classmate of hers at L.A. High, named Posie, was excluded from certain groups because her mother was Catholic and her father Jewish, Hope had made a special effort to befriend her. A few years later, when Posie was nineteen, she was killed in an air crash, and, not long after, Hope said she heard Posie talking to her in the night, asking Hope to talk to Posie’s father. So Hope wrote him a five-page letter, telling him that Posie had told her to tell him not to worry about Posie and not to feel bad and that Posie knew her father had had a hard time understanding the Catholic service that had been held for Posie, but that was okay. Later, Hope heard that her letter had stopped Posie’s father from committing suicide, which made her feel very good, because she felt that was the whole point of religion, to help others. She looked for guidance herself from various sources, including religious programs on television, books on astrology, and assorted churches and spiritual self-help groups around town. Once, just to please her, Bill had gone with her to one of the churches, the Self-Realization Garden, and afterward had sounded less skeptical. “I have to admit, maybe these people have something,” he told her, which made Hope think she was making some headway.
“You won’t get real sick,” Hope told him now. “You’re in great condition; you’re at the absolute peak moment of your life. And when we do get old, we’ll do it very slowly and gracefully. We won’t even bother to dye our hair when it turns gray.”
“Okay,” Bill said, laughing. “In the meantime, we’d better get some sleep. It’s five o’clock.”
Hope didn’t want to go to bed at all. She wanted to sit by the fire until daybreak, then make coffee and walk up the back of the property, past the lower lake and the upper lake and part way up the mountain, which she knew would be covered with budding wildflowers now. But she knew Bill was right. With the reporter due at one o’clock, they had to get some sleep. She got up from the floor, feeling a bit stiff, and stood for a moment, looking down at the dying fire. Bill put his arm around her and snuggled his face in her hair.
“I love you,” he murmured. “And I’m so lucky.”
Hope didn’t sleep well. Sometime during the morning she heard cars passing the house; she dozed again, but then she heard a noise on the roof, as though someone were walking across the roof. She woke Bill and told him; he said there was no one.
When she heard Bill moving around the house, she got up and wandered out to the kitchen, where Bill had made coffee. “It’s ten-thirty,” he said, “so I thought I better shower and shave and get the place in order.”
Hope poured herself a cup of coffee. “The place is okay,” she said, yawning. She set her coffee on the table by the phone and dialed Jim Webb, but there was no answer.
“I took a little walk,” Bill said. “God, it’s beautiful up here. Those trees are loaded with oranges.”
“You can make a terrific screwdriver with those oranges,” Hope said.
“And that mountain,” Bill continued, standing at the sink, looking out the window above it. “How high is it?”
“I don’t know,” Hope said. “It’s called Snailhead Mountain, I know that.” She lighted a cigarette and wandered back into the bedroom. She opened the curtains and sat on the edge of the bed for a while, in her usual morning daze, then she got back into bed. She drifted in and out of sleep, but she was awake when the phone rang. When she got out to the living room, Bill was telling the man to wait in Springville, and Hope shook her head. “It’s silly for you to go all the way there,” she said. “Give me the phone and I’ll give him directions.”
Bill handed her the phone.
“Just come back out of Springville, the way you came,” Hope said to the man on the phone, “for about a mile. Watch for a dirt road, and make a left. You come across a little bridge and you stop at the first gate on the left. Then wait there for Bill to come down and open the gate.”
“How will I know my left?” the man asked. “Oh, I know. That’s the hand with the rock in it.”
Hope laughed at the old joke, and hung up. She turned to Bill. “Wait about ten minutes and then go down to the gate and let him in.” She went into the bathroom, rinsed her face, brushed her teeth, and rolled half a dozen curlers loosely into her hair. Back in the bedroom, she pulled out a pair of brown pants, and a matching vest and a pink silk blouse from her bag and dressed quickly.
In the kitchen, she took a liter of chilled Almaden Chablis from the refrigerator, opened it, and poured out one glassful. She had a theory that guests felt uncomfortable when they saw you opening a new bottle of wine just for them, so she always tried to pour out a little before someone came. She put the glass of wine into the refrigerator, then she carried the bottle and some glasses into the living room and set them on the coffee table. She made another trip, carrying cheese and crackers, then she went back into the bathroom and studied herself in the mirror, wondering whether she should put on makeup. When she had been with Tom she’d worn a lot of makeup, but Bill preferred her plain, and she’d pretty much gotten out of the habit except when they went to a party. She was thinking about it when she heard the car alongside the house, followed by the sound of men’s voices. She opened the bathroom window.
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