CHAPTER SIX
Eventually it started to get colder, and every day a few more leaves would blow into the pool. I was scooping out a leaf one morning when Julia’s mother pulled up to the hotel in this black convertible I’d never seen before. She honked the horn until I realized she was honking it at me. Then she waved me over to the parking lot. I remember these bright red tights she had on, and her shiny white fur coat, and how she’d put some new orange streaks in her hair since the last time I’d seen her. Right away she started talking to me in this very casual way, as if we were already good friends.
“Hope you’re hungry,” she said. “I’ve been craving Chinese all morning.”
I stood there just smiling at her for a second, until I remembered that she’d offered to take me out to lunch the week before. At the time I didn’t think she was serious and so I’d forgotten about it pretty quickly, but now it was actually happening. I didn’t feel ready for this at all.
“Of course I’m hungry,” I said. “I’ll just let Julia know I’m leaving.”
I went into the lobby and told Julia what was going on. She seemed even more nervous than I was.
“I should have seen this coming,” she said. “My mom just can’t mind her own business.”
“What should I talk about? I don’t even know what to call her.”
“Call her Ms. Delancey. She won’t answer to the name Manning anymore.”
“Why don’t you come?”
“I can’t. That’s probably why she came today, because she knows Mondays I have lunch with Granddad. And that’s why she sprang it on us this way, so I wouldn’t have time to reschedule.”
“I’ll have to eat Chinese food.”
“You can still back out, you know. Just go out there and say you might be coming down with something. That’ll scare the crap out of her. She won’t go near you for six weeks.”
“Are you nervous?”
“Why?”
“I won’t go if you don’t want me to.”
“No. It’s fine.” Julia took a deep breath. “I can’t act crazy just because she does. Just promise you won’t remember anything she tells you.”
“Okay.”
“My mom has a lot of wild ideas, and she’ll probably try to tell you a bunch of really confusing lies. But you won’t pay attention to her, will you, Joe?”
“I never pay too much attention.”
“That’s what I’m counting on. Tonight you’ll tell me all about it.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Julia buttoned the jacket of my suit and kissed me, and then I went back outside and got into Ms. Delancey’s car. Right away she asked me to put up the top because she wanted to play me some music. By the time I got my seat belt on, we were listening to this very bouncy country song. As we were pulling out of the woods onto the main road, she asked me what I thought of it.
“I think it sounds pretty good.”
“That’s nice of you,” she said. “You’re probably just being polite.”
I had no idea what she wanted to me to say. “It really sounds like music.”
“Don’t you realize who’s singing?”
Luckily she wasn’t expecting an answer to this impossible question. She fished under her seat and pulled out this plastic double-sized CD case. On the cover was a young, sort of trampy-looking woman, about to kiss a microphone. I remember that Ms. Delancey’s hands were shaking as she handed me the case.
“My stage name was Marilyn Starr.” She sighed. “It seemed so clever at the time.”
I finally put everything together and took another look at the CD cover. Her hair and her lips and her face all looked totally different, but you could still see that it was Ms. Delancey, maybe twenty years ago. Now that I knew she’d sung the music we were listening to, I tried to hear it better. I thought the song was too fast and there were too many instruments, but I think her voice sounded okay. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear it on the radio, although I probably would have turned it off.
“I like it,” I said.
“The music business is too risky,” she said. “You can spend your whole life waiting for your break, and it still might never come. Almost everybody gives up. I gave up the day I realized I’d taken a job singing at a funeral. That was the last straw for me. And the very next day I met Bill.”
She turned up the music and was quiet for the rest of the ride. The bouncy song ended and a much slower one came on. It was this really sad song about a girl who loves her boyfriend even though he lies to her and smacks her all day long. About halfway through, Ms. Delancey started to sing along as she drove. She looked pretty funny, with her face all screwed up, with one hand sort of pushing into her belly, and the other on the steering wheel. Some verses she sang with her eyes closed, and so the whole performance was extremely dangerous for both of us, but the sound that came out of her mouth was actually really beautiful to listen to, and I almost started to cry. It sounded so much better than that CD, so much softer and clearer, and I remember thinking that she never should have given up, because she’d only needed some more time.
It took us six or seven songs to get to the restaurant. It was this very fancy Chinese place, with beautiful purple walls and perfect air conditioning. We ate at a booth with two glowing lanterns on the table. I was regularly eating about half of the McDonald’s menu by this time, but I still didn’t stand a chance in a restaurant like this. I tried to pick the foods that seemed the least disgusting, but Ms. Delancey was constantly suggesting things and offering things from her plate, so I had to eat a lot of things I knew I’d hate. That was one of the most difficult times of my life, eating that Chinese food. I choked down the little spring rolls, and this really smelly soup, and all these little nasty peppers, and rice full of disgusting pork, and my mouth felt all slippery and gross, and it didn’t help that Julia’s mother was chirping the whole time about how delicious it all was and dumping more nasty things onto my plate constantly, but I was a champion and ate it all. I ate it all for love.
Ms. Delancey seemed like a teenager in a lot of ways, and not just in her clothes and how her hair was cut. She actually reminded of me of Cecily and her friends. When I was around her, I always had a feeling something was about to get broken. At one point she knocked a whole tray of food on the floor—and when the waiter came to clean it up, she somehow got everybody to act like it was his fault. But I still basically liked her. I liked that she was interested in me, and I loved her clothes and how gorgeous she was, and I could almost imagine that I was eating in a Chinese restaurant with Julia in twenty years.
Once we were finished eating, she asked me, “How would you like to see Golden Oaks?”
“What’s that?”
“Doesn’t she tell you anything? That’s the name of the house Julia grew up in. I’ll give you the whole tour.”
I felt like I didn’t really have a choice. It turned out to mean almost another hour of driving by all these huge fields and farmhouses, and then a few miles of woods, and we had listened to Ms. Delancey’s entire double-CD by the time we turned off the road. Then we drove across a wooden bridge, and crossed a little creek, and she told me to get out and unchain this big, rusty gate. The house was on top of a hill, so we had to drive up this long, narrow dirt driveway that was starting to turn back into a forest. Then we came around a bend and slapped through some branches growing over the road; and right away I recognized the huge wooden mansion from all the pictures I’d seen in Julia’s room. It turned out to be even bigger than I thought and much older too. Nothing had been painted recently, and the wood was rotting in some places, and the lawns were all crappy and ruined. Nobody was taking care of anything.
Ms. Delancey turned off the car and said, “I’ve got a cramp in my calf from driving. Will you rub it a little bit, Joe?” She rolled down her tights and threw her leg into my lap. I rubbed out the cramp as well as I could, and then she laughed; and we got out of the car and we
nt inside Golden Oaks.
It was the biggest house I’d ever personally been inside. For a second—right when I walked in—I got a feeling it would be impossible to breathe in there. It turned out that I could breathe just fine, but I still knew something smelled strange in there, and later I realized what it was.
“This place was really much too big for us,” said Ms. Delancey. “At least, it seemed that way until Houston came along. Then it seemed too small.”
The ceilings were incredibly high. There weren’t any rugs, or clothes, or telephones, or any other sign that somebody was living there. Ms. Delancey showed me the rooms where Julia and Cecily and Houston had grown up, but they were all empty now, except for some old broken furniture. There were at least two enormous curving staircases in that place, and I saw the huge master bedroom, and the parlor, the kitchen, the lounge, the den, the playroom, and the pantries and the galleys and the rooms where the servants slept a hundred years ago. I saw where Julia slipped and broke her leg, the room where the dog had her babies, the nook where they kept the computer, and rooms with names I’d never heard before.
We stopped in the room where Mr. Manning’s grandmother used to make her own clothing. Ms. Delancey sat down at this big wooden loom and showed me how to use it, weaving some imaginary fabric. Then she asked me, “How old do you think I am, Joe?”
I knew I couldn’t guess too high, but it didn’t matter, because she wasn’t waiting for my answer. “I’m forty-five years old. But I’m often mistaken for thirty-five. Were you going to guess thirty-five?”
“I think so.”
“Do you know what I do all day?”
“No.”
“I sue my ex-husband. I’ve been suing him now for a year. It’s by far the easiest job I ever had.” She giggled and then stopped. “Aren’t you going to ask me why we’re getting divorced?”
“If you want me to.”
“Sometimes I wonder, if Bill and I met again tomorrow for the first time, would we fall in love again?” She jumped up from the loom and went over to sit on this black couch in the corner. When she sat down, I remember that a little puff of smoke rose up into the air. “When I first met him I fell in love with him immediately. On our very first date, I saw him save a man’s life. There was an Italian tourist choking on a steak bone, and Bill ran over and squeezed him from behind and jarred it loose. I’d never seen anything like that before—but it wasn’t the first, or the second, or even the third time he’d saved somebody’s life that way. Before I met Bill, I used to think a person could choose to have an interesting life, but now I think some people are just born into the thick of things. Don’t you want to sit down?”
“Okay.”
When I went over and sat next to her, I realized the sofa was all covered in black dust. It got all over my hands and on my clothes. Ms. Delancey paid no attention to the dust, but once in a while she touched my knee while she was talking.
“On our third date, Bill took me fishing on Porcupine Lake, and I caught a nice little trout. While he was showing me how to clean it, he mentioned that he’d be in jail for the next few weeks. He said it was a misunderstanding with the IRS—but it was a pretty halfhearted lie, and he’d obviously been to jail before, and so I understood that I was falling in love with a criminal. Did you know he was a criminal?”
“I’d heard it before.”
“And you don’t care?”
“I’ve never even met him.”
“I didn’t care. I was young. I loved him. I thought he would clean up his act once we had enough money. That was my mistake. I thought he did it because he needed to. But he does it because he can’t stop, no matter how much money he makes, and that wears on a woman after a while. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore.” I remember that her face was calm, but that her shoulders were all tensed up into this little angry shrug. She didn’t look like Julia anymore. “After the divorce, every single one of our friends took his side. They all think I’ve gone insane. And maybe I have gone a little bit insane. Sometimes I call the phone company and talk to the computerized receptionists. They’ll talk to you all day. But now I’ve embarrassed myself. You’ve got to tell me something embarrassing too.”
It took me a while to think of anything. “I used to think my teachers lived at my school,” I said finally. “I thought they slept there and waited for us to arrive in the morning.”
“He’s brainwashed my children against me.”
“What?”
“They hate me.”
“Julia doesn’t hate you.”
“How would you know?”
“I just think she would have mentioned it.”
“I’m insanely jealous of her.”
“Why?”
“Don’t act so shocked. She’s beautiful and charming, and everyone that meets her falls in love with her. That would make any woman jealous.”
“Well, I still don’t think she hates you. And Houston certainly doesn’t.”
“Are you kidding? Houston is the biggest lock of all. He’s always hated me. From the minute Bill adopted him.”
“I’d know if he hated you.”
“Why? Because he’s your friend?”
“That’s right.”
She laughed out loud, but there wasn’t anything happy about the way she did it.
“He definitely cares about you. But he’s not your friend. Oh my God. Am I really telling you this? I promised my therapist I wouldn’t. But I promised myself I would tell you, for your own good. No, I won’t tell you. It’s none of my business. I’ll only recommend that you be careful with him. Just look what happened to her last boyfriend.”
This conversation was starting to put me on tilt, and I wanted to get out of there. I didn’t want to hear any more of her stories. It was starting to seem difficult to breathe again, and my eyes were starting to itch.
“What about him?”
“Houston practically ran him out of town. I heard that right after he fired him, he threw all his clothes out into the street.”
“Houston thought he was a bad influence on her,” I said. “He was probably right.”
“And you’re a good influence?”
“He thinks I am.”
“Are you on drugs, Joe?”
“No.”
“I hope I didn’t offend you by asking. It’s just that sometimes I wonder if you’re stoned. Am I really going to say this? Here I go.” She took a deep breath. “Houston has always been in love with Julia.”
It took a minute for me to make sure that I understood what she was saying. “He’s her brother.”
“I didn’t realize until he was fifteen or so, when I found some of his notebooks hidden in his bedroom wall. Poor thing. I watched him try to fall for other women. He could make it last a month, sometimes a year, before he found some reason to be unsatisfied with them. A woman can live up to a man’s ideal, but not if that ideal is another woman. Now he pretends to have a girlfriend in Chicago, just to keep things simple.”
She stood up and went back over to the loom and started working the pedals. She gave me this little smile, like she was proud that she’d made me too confused to speak.
“It was always interesting to see how he’d react to Julia’s boyfriends. If he felt threatened he would plot against them, find some way to poison her interest. It was never very difficult, because Julia always looked up to Houston. But if he saw that her new boyfriend was just a stupid crush and wouldn’t last, then he’d stoke the fire, tell Julia that he approved, and try to make it last as long as possible. His favorite was a Swedish exchange student she went out with. Houston would drive them to the movies and take them out on dates, because everybody knew they couldn’t last. But Alvin was a different story. Alvin scared him.”
I knew I wasn’t supposed to be listening to her. Julia had warned me that her mother would try to give me a lot of strange and terrible ideas, and I could tell that’s what was happening right then. But it was impossible not to hear her voice.
“Alvin was a legitimate threat to take Julia away. He was making Julia question her own father. She was talking about leaving Tennessee.”
“Julia said I shouldn’t listen to you.”
“You don’t have to believe me.”
“You’re saying he wants to marry her?”
“No, not yet. He probably doesn’t want to make a move while Bill is still around, but I’m not sure how long he can afford to wait. He’s risking a lot even letting her go to college. Plenty of girls still find their husbands in college.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to,” she said. “Just ask yourself sometime why Houston is so nice to you. Personally I’ve never trusted anything about him. When a boy keeps a secret his whole life, the secret eventually covers him completely, until nothing about the boy is true. Don’t you wonder why he’s putting on these absurd formal airs all the time? Why he talks like a middle-aged man? He found a way to act where he could be around Julia without exploding. The real Houston we never got to see.”
Sometimes everything is so complicated that you just want to cover your eyes and pretend it’s not there. I felt exhausted and confused, like I was trying to solve one of Alvin’s damn puzzles. Julia’s mother had put me on this very bad and worried tilt, and suddenly I badly needed to go outside.
“Thanks for showing me the house,” I said.
She nodded and stood up from the loom. Then she came over to the couch, leaned down, and kissed me on the forehead.
“You’re not listening. It’s fine. It’s better for you. I probably wouldn’t tell you if I thought you could understand me. But now that the tour is finished, there’s one more thing I’ve been dying to ask you. Did you even notice this whole house is burnt to a crisp?”
This One Time With Julia Page 12