Through the swing doors up ahead they see the head of marketing approaching.
“Hi, Baz, can I see you in my office for a minute?” the Boss says.
Barry gives Marie an ironic little wave, using just his fingertips.
“Sure,” he says. “No problem, Bill.”
14
So, what’s the worst that can happen? Either you find yourself in the presence of the guy you worshipped and adored or he’s a sort of pickled Liberace.”
Carrie fishes the tea bags out of the mugs and drops them in the sink. “Do you want milk?”
“And sugar, please.”
“Milk in tea I can just about do. Sugar is kind of against my religion as a person from San Francisco,” Carrie says, reaching for the box of Tate & Lyle, which is soggy from standing too long on the draining board. “One lump of type-two diabetes or two?”
Petra doesn’t reply. It’s the start of the working week and she is fiddling with her bow. She takes some rosin and draws the bow across it, giving a little shudder at the beginning and the end. She pulls the cello to her and makes the loudest noise she can. Lately, for some reason she has taken to playing a few bars of Led Zeppelin as a warm-up. When she was in the sixth form at school, Led Zeppelin was what all the boys who couldn’t play the guitar played on the guitar. It doesn’t sound all that great on the cello, but she finds the burst of aggression strangely soothing.
The rain is tapping out a furious rhythm on the windows of the center. Inside, the two women feel as snug as if they were in the cabin of a tiny boat lit by oil lamps. The harsher the elements outside, the deeper their contentment. Carrie and Petra get a lot of client referrals from local hospitals and social services, kids from homes of scarcely credible brutality who often have an angry response to the therapy, at least at first.
“Shut yer face, woman,” one boy said to her over and over.
Karl, with a body two sizes too big for him, smashed an impressive number of percussion instruments, including a drum that, strictly speaking, should have been unbreakable. Such cases have lost their power to shock her. If you’ve never known harmony in your brief life and your days lack any rhythm because your drug-addict parents keep such strange hours, why wouldn’t you take it out on a snare drum? Many of the children Petra sees have severe learning difficulties.
“Your nutters.” That’s what Marcus called them. “For God’s sake, Petra, why are you wasting your talent on those nutters?”
Let me in, let me in, the rain taps irritably on the windows. The staff room overlooks a small park, really a picnic rug of grass that functions as the local dog toilet. When people in London talk about green spaces it makes Petra laugh. If you come from South Wales, the grass on the other side never looks greener; it always looks yellow, or shitty brown. As she gets older, she finds she suffers more from hiraeth; a word with no exact equivalent in English, it means a powerful yearning for the place you came from. She has lived in London longer than she lived in Wales, more than half her life, yet there is some stubborn part of her that prevents her calling this city home. The hiraeth feels like an extra muscle of the heart that contracts painfully whenever she thinks of the hills and of the rain falling in a curtain over the sea.
It is supposed to be summer, but the south of England has been hit by freak floods. In London it has been raining so continuously that you notice the deluge only on the rare occasions that it stops. Dogshit Park has become a lake of mud.
Carrie passes Petra her mug of tea and a packet of fig rolls, which have become the women’s private joke and their public addiction. Petra takes two and breaks one in half before biting into the figgy ooze.
“Hey, since you got back from Wales you’ve been inhaling sweet things?”
Carrie’s drawl swoops up at the end of the sentence, turning every statement into a question. It’s an inflection the Welshwoman and the Californian have in common.
“Stress,” Petra says lightly. “Death, divorce and what’s the third thing that’s meant to be one of the most stressful life events?”
“David?” asks Carrie.
“You’re just jealous.”
“Jealous? Of you going to Vegas to meet David Cassidy?” Carrie shakes her sleek gray head and her hoop earrings tinkle with silvery mirth. “C’mon, I wouldn’t have given David a suck of my ice pop. I was a Bobby Sherman girl.”
“Who’s Bobby Sherman?”
“Oh. Just the fluffiest, cutest-smiled, swingiest-hipped, hottest teen idol who ever lived, that’s all.”
“Bobby Sherman?” Petra speaks the name with the incredulous condescension that the true believer reserves for any teen idol besides her own. “How many fans did he have then?”
“Just thirty million, plus me and Marge Simpson,” says Carrie.
Petra sets down her bow and checks her watch. Nearly time for her next session. She must pop to the loo first; you never leave a class in the middle, it breaks the spell.
“Marge Simpson had a crush on Bobby Sherman? I thought she was a cartoon character.”
“They’re all cartoon characters, Petra, my dear, that’s the point. Bobby was my psychic pocket just like David was yours.”
“Psychic what?”
Before she specialized in music therapy and followed her husband, Don, to England, first to Oxford and then London, Carrie had trained as a Jungian analyst. In general, she speaks English around the center, but sometimes she drops one of her more obscure psychoanalytical terms into the conversation. Petra studies her friend fondly. She can see that Carrie is about to launch into one of those melodious explanations that drop from her lips like a waterfall. Rangy and athletic, Carrie looks like she was born with a golden tan and hiking boots. With her clear blue eyes and cinnamon sprinkling of freckles over nose and cheeks, she could be Robert Redford’s sister. Blessed with thick silver hair that somehow looks chic instead of elderly, she seems ageless and enviably self-possessed. On weekends, she loves to climb cliffs, and she is just as nimble at finding the mental toe- and handholds to get you through a difficult patch. Carrie has two grown-up daughters, one a doctor, the other on a permanent gap year, and she has been a lighthouse for Petra as she attempts to navigate Molly’s teenage storms; they start early these days. Twelve is the new sixteen. She knows she would be lost without the older woman’s relaxed assurances that bitter rows and equally savage silences are completely normal. Once or twice lately, Molly has even made Petra cry.
“What d’you expect? She’s a teenager. Put on earth to test the theory that maternal love can withstand any amount of shit.”
Petra envies Carrie; or rather, she wants to be her, to know what it feels like to live in a mind and body that certain and true. Compared to Carrie, Petra feels she is still driving with an emotional learner’s permit. Her mother’s death was such a shock. Not the fact of Greta dying; it was obvious for months that not even her mother could stare down the cancer, which had moved, without mercy, from organ to organ like an advancing army. No, it was the fact that Petra hadn’t expected to feel like an orphan. Not at the age of thirty-eight. Not when she was an adult. Nonetheless, orphaned is what she feels. Grief for her dad has surfaced again through the grave he now shares with her mother. She manages to be glad that neither parent lived to see the breakup of her marriage. Since Marcus left, Petra likes to sit near Carrie in the staffroom, the way animals lie beside each other in a stable.
“Psychic pocket,” Carrie elaborates; “it’s like the basket into which you put all your needs and longings.”
Petra frowns. “Isn’t that called love?”
“No, it’s pure fantasy. Very common, but also hopeless and inappropriate.”
“Sounds like love to me,” says Petra, picking up her cello and maneuvering it into the case. “Hopeless and inappropriate at love. I have a degree in that.”
At the door, she remembers something and turns back to Carrie, who is busily scouring a cup with a brush. “Why did you have to say that stuff about pickled Liberace
? You know that’s all I’m going to be able to think about when I go and see David. You’re supposed to be supportive. As my friend.”
“As your friend,” says Carrie, “I’m not here to make you feel better. I’m here to feel envious and competitive and subtly undermine you while pretending to be real sympathetic.”
“Oh thanks. You, you”—Petra stammers toward the insult—“you therapist,” she finally spits out. Laughter makes her body feel better. Her shoulder has been acting up lately, and she winces as she lifts the cello through the doorway.
The room she works in is a couple of doors down the corridor. Bare and tranquil with pale, clackety wooden floors, it has bulbous, podlike windows set in the ceiling. After dragging the instruments from the wall and setting them up on a table in the middle, Petra takes a seat at the keyboard and starts to play a few chords. On the flat roof above her, the rain creates a percussive hiss; it sounds more like static on the radio than water. Why is rain so comforting when you’re miserable and so damned annoying when you’re not?
As her fingers fall into formation over the notes, through the static a woman’s voice comes to her unbidden, one of the most beautiful voices she’s ever known. It is no strain to recall the song the woman is singing, no strain at all. Petra hums the intro and hears the woman come in on an impossibly low B-flat, a man’s note really. A woman had no business being able to sing that well that low.
“Talking to myself and feeling old.”
She and Sharon used to sing it together. When they first learned those words they were so young, babies; they couldn’t know. How could they possibly have known? What do thirteen-year-olds know about feeling old?
“Rainy Days and Mondays.” Luxuriating in the song’s sadness, Petra surprises herself by launching with sudden gusto into the saxophone solo. That shot of brass in the middle of such a melancholy tune, it shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Respectfully, she doffs her musician’s cap to Richard Carpenter. How well she remembers the chocolate-brown cover of the album and that ornate rococo lettering. Was it really gold? The Carpenters were supposed to be cheesy, a taste you kept to yourself she learned much later at college, but their melodies had outlived those of nearly all their cooler contemporaries. Far more complex harmonies, with words that felt like they sprang naturally from the tune.
She and Sharon used to love harmonizing on “Close to You.” Petra took the tune and Sha did all the waaaa-aah-ar-ahhh bits.
Karen Carpenter, lost to anorexia at—what, thirty-two? Such a stupid waste. Petra sees that beautiful face, framed by jubilant brown curls. Critics called Karen’s face cherubic, so the poor woman must have decided to starve it. Her cheeks were just bonny, that’s all. Karen’s voice had no strain in it whatsoever, no gear change; it moved from low to high as though a voice traveled through liquid, not air. Who else could do that? Ella, Barbra. Not many in pop, that’s for sure.
How she had longed for a dress she saw Karen Carpenter wearing in Jackie. Petra can remember it now, remember it far better than most of the clothes she actually owned. Long, frothy cream cheesecloth, with a high neck and strips of broderie anglaise down the bodice. It was the dress the sisters in Little House on the Prairie wore in their dreams. Didn’t Katharine Ross wear the same dress on the bike with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy?
Bowler hat. Paul Newman, not Katharine Ross. Now she is confused. Memory can do that to you. She is no longer sure if she is remembering things as they were or as she’d wanted them to be.
She must tell Carrie; she’s bound to detect some hidden meaning in that long cream dress with its hint of bridal chastity. When they first met, Petra had been quietly appalled by the American’s habit of treating her like a puzzle that needed solving. She was too Welsh to feel entirely at ease with the way Carrie picked over even the most minor detail of her life, hunting for clues. Petra’s bad headaches were just migraines, for God’s sake, not a sign of a crippling inability to assert herself in her marriage, as Carrie had suggested. One day over lunch at their local café, Petra mentioned a thank-you letter that had arrived from her mother that morning. Coming from Greta, it was a no-thanks thank-you letter. Only her mother could express gratitude without sounding in the smallest bit appreciative. Reading the letter a second time, Petra felt what small reserves of confidence she had deflating, as though her soul had a slow puncture.
“Well, what d’you expect? Your mom’s such a bitch,” Carrie said mildly, spearing a gherkin.
It was like a shotgun going off. The volume of the world changed. A fork that a woman put down on the neighboring table reverberated like a timpani section.
Who dared to call her mother a bitch? It had never occurred to her that she, Petra, was allowed to judge Greta. It was Greta who judged Petra and found her wanting, not the other way round.
“What d’you think, that you have to be the good girl forever?” Carrie said as she settled the bill. She was such a generous tipper that waiters regarded her with suspicion. Petra didn’t answer. For a few seconds, no more than that, she allowed Carrie’s suggestion to live in her brain, and then she banished it, like a wiper clearing a windshield.
Just the once, she had seen Karen Carpenter on a TV chat show; it must have been only months before she died. The singer laughed off the question about her weight loss. Denied it, charmingly, with that nicest-girl-in-the-school grin of hers. Then she walked across the studio and sang. Even when her body was gaunt and she had twigs for arms, the voice still poured out like cream from a jug. The voice didn’t know it was living inside the body of a starving child, and maybe Karen Carpenter didn’t, either. There were things about yourself that you couldn’t know, sometimes until it was too late.
Petra picks up the glockenspiel. Its glittering, wintry sound is a particular favorite of Sam’s. With a beater, she plays the tune they always use to say hello.
Sam should be here by now. The boy has a thing about not stepping in puddles or on the cracks in the pavement—his legs go stiff and he lifts them high like a Nazi storm trooper. Petra sighs. Elspeth, his mother, must be having a hell of a job getting him here in this rain.
So many fears once you have children in the world. Every night, Petra goes in to kiss Molly when she is asleep and she feels simple gratitude and relief that her baby has survived this long. Anorexia, which killed Karen Carpenter, is her biggest worry for Molly. Petra doesn’t remember its being such a big thing when she was at school; now, extreme thinness has become yet another way to compete with one another. Trust girls to get into a contest to make themselves disappear. She doesn’t want Molly to waste her life hating her body. Too much female energy goes into getting smaller instead of bigger and bolder. Petra switches off the keyboard and rubs her sore shoulder. She has always been harshly critical of her own body, even when there was nothing to find fault with. Now that there is plenty to despair of, Petra looks back in frank astonishment at the girl who skulked about in long, droopy cardigans, even in the thermometer-busting summer of ’76, because she was under the impression that she had fat thighs. Why the hell didn’t she walk down the street waving a placard saying I HAVE A 24-INCH WAIST? That’s what she should have done.
There is a sound of two hands banging on the door and Sam’s excited puppy yelp. Petra turns to welcome her client.
She has almost no memory of ringing the magazine company. It is the one small consolation in a sea of churning embarrassment. Blaming alcohol would be her best bet, but it had been only eight in the morning when she made the call. Things have gotten quite dark for Petra lately, especially during that 3 a.m. dread hour when she wakes to find all her fears congregated at the foot of the bed, offering to run a trailer of forthcoming disasters. Maybe she will lose the house. Maybe Molly will love her father’s new girlfriend and find the houseboat a cooler place to stay than her mother’s centrally heated suburban home. She knows that Marcus, who claims he is too broke to pay her maintenance, somehow manages to find the cash to lavish treats on Molly. Butterscotch milks
hakes and sponge cake, enjoyed by father and daughter in Fortnum & Mason’s over half-term, must have cost about a third of her weekly food budget; the thought rankles like a broken tooth. So does the fact that, as Mol let slip, Marcus swore her to secrecy, making Molly his gleeful co-conspirator against wicked, thrifty Mummy. Even so, Petra has no excuse for ringing a place that doesn’t exist at eight o’clock in the morning like a crazy old bat.
To say the action was out of character doesn’t quite cover the personality shift it required for Petra to ring up Nightingale Publishing. On the computer, she’d managed to find out that, in the late eighties, Nightingale bought out Worldwind Publishing, which, almost a quarter of a century ago, had declared her the winner of the Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz.
“How old did you say you were?” the woman who answered the phone had asked.
The woman said she was the editor of a magazine—Teenworld?—and she had been nice, more than nice, actually, but Petra could tell from the strenuously patient way she spoke, as though she were addressing either someone very old or very young, that the editor thought Petra was a loony time-waster. A view with which Petra had considerable sympathy. Still, stubborn as a child denied a balloon at its own party, she stood her ground. “I won,” she explained.
As a teenager, she had been unable to see things far away. Recently, things close up have also started to become a blur. Glasses have lost the four-eyed stigma they had had when she was a child. Molly declares that specs are hot, or perhaps cool. Petra can’t keep up with the temperature that is in fashion. Nevertheless, she comes from a generation that can’t quite shrug off the sense that specs make her undesirable. Reading glasses, even if they now come in a sleek dark frame that Carrie swears make her look like Ali MacGraw in Love Story, are further unwanted evidence that her body is in the business of betraying her. If she’s honest, there is also some niggling worry about a life that has not quite come into focus, and maybe it never will.
I Think I Love You Page 22