After her brother died and her parents started killing themselves with drink and work, it was Jeanne’s salvation that a cook came before six to make the morning meal and see that the sitting room roses were fresh. She couldn’t control her mother’s condemnatory silence or her father’s subtle forms of abuse, but she could depend on the school cook—Billy Phillips’s mother at one time—could depend on dinner being served in the big hall at precisely six and there was never any doubt that in the fall there would be apples for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Are you happy?
Obviously Liz was. Hannah worried she had AIDS or cancer but Jeanne didn’t think there was a chance of that. She glowed with good health and seemed more confident than she ever had. And Jeanne didn’t have to be an expert on the emotions to see the way Liz looked when she spoke of Gerard. She loved him not in some intellectual, theoretical or practical way but . . . powerfully.
Just wait until she was actually married and a few years had gone by.
Jeanne had never spent more than a few moments thinking about what it meant to be happy. Maybe in a philosophy course there had been some determined argument between herself and a professor; it was the kind of thing one talked about in college and then forgot. She lived. She got up in the morning and ate and breathed and worked and did her best and then she went to sleep. She had always been perplexed by the line in the Declaration of Independence about the pursuit of happiness and didn’t know how a person would do this. She wasn’t sure she would recognize it if she saw it running up ahead, taunting her, daring her to chase after it.
She expected to work, to take charge, to be responsible and sufficiently disciplined to control her environment. And whatever resulted from her efforts . . . well, if it was happiness then good.
Liz’s question was typical of the emotional thinking Jeanne expected from her and felt compelled to put down. At the same time, if Liz had changed, Jeanne would have felt the loss keenly. Her friend’s peculiar observations could jolt Jeanne’s thinking in a way she did not like but recognized as, at least theoretically, good. Liz was in many ways a foreign country to Jeanne; and often their time together made her feel as she had on the walk to the flume—defensive and slightly third worldish. The years of friendship, the fights and making up and deep confidences, had never completely dispelled this sense of impoverishment. The sky-ey Land of Liz had resources of imagination and emotion absent from Jeanne’s gravity-bound world; and though she tried to believe this lack made her at least Liz’s equal and probably her superior, she never convinced herself for long.
She squinted at the clock beside the bed: 5:45. Too early to get up. She lay on her back, legs straight, arms at her side and imagined she was lying on the lion-footed bench in the rose cloister on a hot summer day. The sun would heat her skin and the smell of the flowers, the drone of the bees, would drown out whatever was in her head she wanted to ignore. She thought of her brother standing over her, shaking down rose petals and the sun behind him made a penumbra of gold around his handsome head. She wished she could believe in angels. It would have comforted her to know that Michael hovered nearby, watching over her.
In the spring of his last year at Stanford he and two other football players, drunk on a Saturday night, had become disoriented, bumped over a median strip and drove down an off-ramp onto Bayshore Freeway. Going north in the southbound lanes by Foster City they’d rammed a pickup truck head-on. Everyone died. Five people altogether.
Jeanne turned in bed and her hand grazed Teddy’s back in silk pajamas. They cost more than two hundred dollars a pair and he had a drawer full of them in maroon and navy blue and black with silver piping. Jeanne didn’t begrudge him the luxury of silk pajamas and Italian slacks and cashmere sweaters. Hilltop was a financial success in large part because Teddy was good at managing money and brazen about asking for it. Hilltop’s endowment, bank accounts and investments had soared on the Silicon Valley boom. But his gimme-gimme shamed Jeanne sometimes.
She remembered Simon Weed’s pudgy dimpled hands. Touching her they would be warm and soft as fresh bread. Almost dreaming, she remembered his kindness like a kiss. It stirred her to think of how he loved his son, and she wanted to touch herself, but she didn’t dare with Teddy sleeping beside her. Once he’d caught her, and his teasing shamed her for weeks afterwards. She did not tell him; he would not have understood that some mornings there was a valley of ache in her and she needed to be touched. She reached out and lightly stroked the muscular line of Teddy’s hip and thigh. Somehow he found time to go to the gym four days a week.
Jeanne moved her hand around to caress his stomach under the shirt of his pajamas. “Want to?”
“I’m asleep.”
“Let me wake you up.” Her fingers traced the line of curling hair from his navel to his groin. “Please.”
“I said I’m asleep.”
“Teddy, it’s been weeks . . .”
He hunched off to the far side of the bed. Jeanne laid her palm on the warm place where his body had been.
Her father would say, Happiness isn’t the point. There were good and bad times, disappointments and victories. Trade-offs. To expect more of life was romanticism, wind in the eaves with no storm behind it. Get on with business, Jeanne Louise.
Liz’s talk about Bluegang, that had been a surprise; and now, of course, details of that day rose to the surface of Jeanne’s mind like the plague of jellyfish that ruined her last visit to Hawaii. The boy’s brown blood on the rock and his startled mouth, the space between his two front teeth. Hannah’s bright toenails. Liz had brought these memories with her.
Jeanne had never second-guessed their actions on that day. For girls so young, they had behaved with laudatory pragmatism. Silence had protected both Hannah and Billy Phillips’s mother. If Hannah had told her story not only would she and her family have suffered, poor Mrs. Phillips would have been shamed and hurt. They had done what was best for everyone.
The school phone rang.
Jeanne reached out to answer it.
Edith White said, “Jeanne, I’m sorry to bother you early but I thought you’d want to know . . .”
“It’s okay, Edith.” Jeanne swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood. “I’m up.” She carried the phone to the window and watched a pair of mourning doves pecking in the unplanted garden. She wondered, as she always did, if it was true they mated for life.
“It’s that new boy. Adam Weed.”
Jeanne’s back stiffened.
“I was just getting started this morning when I saw him coming across the field.”
“Before first bell?”
“Oh, my, yes. Way before. It was just barely getting light. I watched him walk across the soccer field and back into the dormitory.”
Jeanne’s feet on the hardwood were blocks of ice.
“Did you speak to him?”
“I didn’t think it was my place. Not at this stage anyway. Him being new and all.”
“He has some learning problems. Maybe he doesn’t understand the rules yet.”
“What boy doesn’t know it’s wrong to leave his room in the middle of the night and go wandering all over heaven-knows-where?” Edith asked. “That’s more than learning problems, if you ask me.”
From her bed in the guest room on the second floor Liz watched a pair of doves side by side on the phone wire, chic in their black-and-white and pearl gray ensembles. They seemed fond of each other. If she said this to Gerard he would laugh and say she was anthropomorphizing. But he would not try to change her thinking, nor would he be critical in an unkind way. He let her think as she wanted, do as she chose. Once she had believed this tolerance meant he didn’t really care for her. It had taken time to realize that Gerard believed in her in a way she did not believe in herself. He assumed she would do the right thing or as close to it as she could manage at the time. He did not think she needed him at her elbow directing and admonishing. What freedom had come with this? To say what she wanted. To do wh
at she thought best. To make mistakes and to ask advice or not.
She shifted her position, trying to get comfortable. Her pregnancy barely showed but internally her body had changed and there were times like now when she felt possessed by an entity that meant to do her harm. This baby was a freak occurrence that never should have happened. Gerard said it was the evolutionary drive of the body to reproduce itself before too late. As if labeling a disaster made it any less a disaster.
She folded her hands over her stomach. Sometimes she woke in the middle of the night and thought she felt the baby move but the feeling passed so quickly she could not be sure it wasn’t just gas, what Hannah’s mother used to call cobby-wobbles. She was grateful movement hadn’t yet begun. She knew herself. When the bucks and rolls began she would imagine communication, personality, a life would unspool in her mind and she would not be able to stop it.
She wished Gerard were beside her now. After less than a week she missed him and this was unexpected. Without noticing it until now, her affection for him had settled at a deeper level, like rocks and sand and soil at the end of a long subsidence.
Rap reverberated through the wall between Liz’s room and Eddie’s. The house throbbed and sang with the sound of piped water.
Family.
Saturday morning.
In the big double bed, she stretched her long legs and like a little girl tried to make her toes reach all the way to the end of the mattress. They didn’t and her right foot cramped.
Middle age.
She sat up and bent her toes against the cramp until it released. Gingerly she let them go; gently she massaged them. Her fingers touched the poison oak rash. It was dry and harmless now. A dab of Dan’s wonder drug had done the job. In the mirror across the room she saw herself and thought, not bad. She might be cramping up like a beached starfish, but for fifty, she looked okay. From across the room she couldn’t see the creases around her eyes or the tiny lines around her mouth. If she squinted she looked pretty much as she had the last time she slept in Hannah’s guest room.
But I’m still too old to have a baby.
A tap on the door. “I brought you a latte, Aunt Liz.” Ingrid held out a paisley printed coffee mug.
“Bless your mother,” Liz said, inhaling the aroma of espresso and steamed milk.
The pretty face frowned. “It was my idea.”
“Of course it was. What a doll.” Liz patted the bed. “Sit down and share it with me.”
Ingrid made a face as she settled herself. “Too bitter.”
Liz took a long sip. “I think I was born craving coffee with my mother’s milk.” Not that Dorothy Shepherd had nursed her only child. What a ridiculous thought that was.
“Mom says the first time you guys went to Europe mostly all you did was sit in cafés and drink coffee. She said Aunt Jeanne did a bunch of stuff on her own ‘cause she was mad at you for wasting time.”
“Here’s a word of godmotherly advice, Ingrid. You can tour any time, you can even do it on the Net; but you’re only young in Paris for a moment. One hallowed moment.”
Between their sophomore and junior years in college she and Hannah and Jeanne had spent a week in Paris bars and bistros, staying up late every night, walking through the neighborhoods, soaking up Paris.
I’ll live in the Latin Quarter someday.
Who would you sleep with, Picasso or Hemingway? What about Yves Montand?
French men have sexy eyes.
Simone Signoret must have slept with every good-looking man in Paris.
Frenchwomen are sexy even when they’re old.
Liz had wanted to live in France since grammar school when she read Our Hearts Were Young and Gay and even more in high school when she struggled through Swann’s Way. The day after she graduated from San Jose State she was on a plane with a B.A. in French, a minor in Art History, and her parents’ distracted blessing
“I’m not even sure I want to go to college. Not right away.” The bed creaked as Ingrid got off. Liz watched her roam the bedroom, saw her cast a critical look at her chin in the mirror and try to flatten her long fair curls. Not as curly as Hannah’s. More like the ripples in a heat mirage. She flung herself down on the window seat. “I just know I don’t want to have an ordinary life. I’ll die if I stay in Rinconada. Remember when me and Mom met you in New York last year? Didn’t you love it? Don’t you wish you lived there?”
“I enjoyed it because I was with you.”
“You don’t know how awful it is around here. In my high school most of the kids are just so . . . crass. You know? Half the guys are computer nerds and the rest want to own a Ferrari dealership. Can you believe that? Can you imagine your highest aim being to sell cars for a living?”
She groaned and looked so miserable Liz didn’t know whether to weep for her or laugh.
“I’d just wither up and blow away if I had to live out my life in this hole.”
Liz remembered being sure of the same thing.
“Sometimes Paco and I talk about moving to New York.” Ingrid looked over at the bed—quickly, shyly, Liz thought—to see if she was being taken seriously. “He’s a terrific writer. Not poetry and all but analytical stuff. Someday he’s going to write books about politics. That’s what he wants to do.”
“What about you?”
Ingrid looked down at her toes painted blue-black. “Promise you won’t say anything? I can never talk about stuff like this with Mom and Dad, especially Mom. She would just totally freak if I told her I think I want to be a model. Not like Cindy Crawford because obviously I’m too short and my boobs are too big, but shoes and nylons and stuff.” Ingrid stretched one bare leg and foot toward the bed. “This guy’s who’s a photographer told me my feet are perfect for modeling because they’re narrow and the arch is perfect and I’ve got great ankles. See this toe?” She pointed to the one next to the big toe. “Shoe designers like it if this toe’s longest. Kids used to tease me about my toes but now I see it’s an advantage. Plus, I’ve got good legs, which is absolutely essential if you’re gonna model shoes.”
Liz saw only a foot, the kind that would probably do all the mundane and essential things expected of it for eighty or ninety years. She wanted to tell Ingrid she could do so much more with her life than pose, but she remembered being seventeen. It was a time all about posing.
“If Mom knew I was thinking about not going to Stanford, she’d go ballistic. She wants me to do everything just the way she did.”
“I think she wants you to be happy.”
“Right.” Ingrid rolled her eyes. “When she thinks about me at all.”
She resumed her prowl of the bedroom.
What do you mean, when she thinks of you at all?
Ingrid sighed and sprawled on a little upholstered armchair across the room. “See, the thing is, I don’t want her in my stuff all the time. I don’t want her asking me questions or picking through my drawers, you know?”
Liz nodded.
“But I’d like to think . . .” Another deep sigh. “Well, she just doesn’t care much anymore. You know what I mean, Aunt Liz. We never talk. She never asks me what I think. She’s always either busy or depressed or talking about that crack baby.”
“She cares, Ingrid. When you were born—”
“I know, I know. But I’m not a baby anymore. I’m a grown-up. And grown-ups don’t really interest my mom all that much. She thinks she knows me, but she hardly does.”
Liz sipped her coffee, burned her lips buying time.
Ingrid began to prowl again. After some moments she said, “Can I ask you a personal question, Aunt Liz? I mean, this is the kind of thing I would, like, never ask Mom and if you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to. Okay?”
Everything else had been preamble; it was for this Ingrid had come in bearing coffee. Liz pushed her pillow against the headboard and leaned back.
“You won’t say anything to Mom?”
Liz crossed her heart.
Ingrid trace
d the cloisonné mosaic on the back of Liz’s hairbrush. “This is pretty. Where’d you get it?”
“Gerard gave it to me.”
Ingrid dug a big toe into the carpet. “What’s he like?”
“Is that what you wanted to ask me?”
“It’s sorta hard.”
Under the bedclothes Liz brought her knees to her chin and wrapped her arms around them to contain a burst of silly joy.
“Do you like sex?”
Liz must have looked surprised.
Ingrid’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I mean, I just assumed . . . I mean, you do have sex? Don’t you? I know you do. Of course you do. Oh, shit.” Her round face was scarlet, more seven than seventeen. “Mom and Dad do it. I’m not an idiot who thinks her parents are, like, . . . celibate. But Mom’s in the middle of The Change. Dad says that’s what’s making her so weird. So I’m pretty sure she isn’t interested.”
Liz could interrupt, take the girl out of her misery; but it was fascinating to watch this display of youth. She had forgotten the importance of sex. Once it was all she thought about.
“I gotta say, you seem a lot younger than Mom. And I thought because you and Gerard aren’t married—”
We have sex constantly.
She mustn’t smile. It would be so easy to offend Ingrid’s dignity.
“Fifty isn’t so old, Ingrid.”
“I wasn’t saying you were old-old. Shit, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”
“And you certainly haven’t done that.” Liz patted a space beside her on the bed. “Tell me what you want to know. Sex is one of the few subjects I can speak on as an expert.”
Ingrid blushed a deeper red.
I love you. You will never know or even guess how much.
Ingrid asked, “Do you really like it?”
“More now than when I was young, actually. Although it doesn’t seem nearly as important as it did then. It’s not exciting in the same way.” An interesting question and difficult to answer candidly. What would Hannah think of all this candor? Maybe Liz should extract a promise of silence from her goddaughter. “The first time—”
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