Everything and More

by Jacqueline Briskin

  Call me an interfering old mother-in-law, Gerry, dear, but you belong right here, making sure that Roy takes care of herself.

  Love,

  Mother Wace

  Althea looked across the booth at Gerry. “Then you’re going back to California?”

  “I’m staying put.”

  “Because of me?” It amazed Althea how secure she felt as she asked the question.

  He shook his head.

  And even more amazing was that this negation did not destroy her. She dipped a bite of blini in sour cream. “Why, then?”

  “When she puts the emotional screws on me, I can’t give in. I want to, but I can’t. It’d be one hell of a lot easier to mouth a few nice, sympathetic words, give her the reassuring pat that she wants. But something always stops me. A black, mean mulishness.”

  “I’d call it a sense of decency,” Althea said. “They whine, and your guilts gush. It’s Pavlov’s dog pure and simple. Well, who likes to be reduced to a bundle of animal reflexes?”

  That night they returned to her apartment.

  They were drinking in the library when the telephone rang. It was Charles.

  “Mother, I was hoping to get you,” he said, his adolescent voice briefly cantilevering into a bass. “Have you made any plans for Christmas vacation?”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  “Naismith”—his roommate—“has invited me. His people have a place in Maine with skiing.”

  “I hear the powder’s been perfect there.”

  “Before I accepted, I wanted to talk it over with you.”

  “Charles, we can see each other the weekend before.”

  “I don’t want you to have a lonely time. It’s the first Christmas since Father died.”

  Neither had to remind the other that she had been divorced from Firelli for many years. But except for those three hectically busy Christmases when she had been tied to Aubrey Wimborne, she had made it a point to spend the holidays in Eastbourne with her son and the stout, jolly old maestro.

  “I have a million things I can do,” Althea said.

  “You’re sure you won’t be alone?”

  “Charles, I’m delighted that you’re getting along so well. I want you to go.”

  As she replaced the phone, Gerry’s eyebrow went up, and she found herself flushing. Charles’s father, she thought. “My son,” she explained.

  “It’s great, the way you talk to him. Straight out. No browbeating or phoniness.”

  “That’s how we are.”

  “I gather the kid’s busy over Christmas. What about coming to Oaxaca with me?”

  “Oaxaca?”

  “I was planning to do a Mexican series.”

  “Will you stop off in Los Angeles on the way?”

  Gerry shrugged ruefully. “I guess. That’s how it goes. In the end, I always play it her way, but as rottenly as possible.”

  She walked across the room to kiss his creased forehead. “I haven’t been to Mexico in ages,” she said.

  49

  Their suite in Hotel de los Reyes had a narrow balcony overlooking Oaxaca’s main square—the Zócalo. With its bird flocks rising and dipping amid shade trees, its splashes of hibiscus and salmon-colored bougainvillea, the Zócalo entertained an unending parade. All day black figures came and went from Oaxaca Cathedral. In the early-morning coolness, the beshawled old Indian tortilla vendors shuffled under the colonial arcades with the covered baskets that held their steaming wares. When the wooden cathedral clock (a gift from the Spanish king in 1735) was chiming 9 A.M. the tourists were already sitting at sidewalk cafés while itinerant peddlers displayed their gaudy heaps of serapes, rugs, and shawls. Around noon rambunctious marimbas serenaded, and musical groups began alternating in the spoolwork bandstand. When early evening fell, young men with patent-leather hair stalked arrogantly around the square in one direction while clusters of girls sauntered giggling in the other. At all hours there circled ancient cars and grandiosely finned new cars, ramshackle trucks, ox carts, bicycles, and burros—a cacophonous blaring of horns and ringing of bells.

  Althea arrived in Oaxaca on December 23, the Fiesta of the Radishes, when enormous radishes were carved into saints’ likenesses. She arranged for demi-pensione at Hotel de los Reyes. Gerry flew in five days later, on the day of the Breaking of Plates, when buñuelos were eaten from earthenware plates that were then enthusiastically hurled into churchyards. He said nothing about his Christmas with Roy, but Althea surmised without recrimination that he had slept with his wife, showed up with her at holiday gatherings, and growled a justification for this trip—a new series of paintings, dammit.

  Althea and Gerry’s days slipped into an unassuming pattern of contentment.

  They slept until 8:30, when a little maid with a pure Mayan face brought them thick-crusted bolillas, strawberry jam, and a spouted pot of steaming chocolate whose foamy richness she gravely poured into huge, green pottery cups.

  Gerry would drive off in their rented Studebaker to stare at Monte Alban, the hilltop city that millennia before the Spanish conquest had housed a population of forty thousand. He hadn’t yet decided which of the mighty ruined pyramid temples, bizarre palaces, ball courts, and ceremonial squares to tackle.

  Some mornings Althea might browse through Oaxaca’s vast mercado, protected from the sun’s glare by strips of wood or canvas overhead. She bought Gerry pleated shirts and herself a collection of the local brilliantly embroidered cotton shifts. Saturdays, the Mixtec and Zapotec Indians from crazily named nearby villages brought their wares, and she picked out inappropriate gifts for her friends: naively brilliant wool serapes from Tlacolula, embroidered Mitla belts, a huge leather toy burro from Otzompa to make Charles laugh. She even selected a handsomely glazed black pottery urn from Ocotlán for Gerry to send Roy.

  Most mornings, though, she would take her pastels or watercolors onto the narrow balcony, attempting to capture one moment of the perennially changing Zócalo. Compared to the vivid reality, her renderings seemed pallid and awkward. Yet they gave her a sense of owning the square.

  Around one Gerry would return to the hotel. They would lunch at a sidewalk café on the Zócalo, generally ordering tamales Oaxaqueno—banana leaves wrapped the rich masa which enfolded a delectable concoction of meat and the peppery mole sauce that left an aftertaste of chocolate on the palate.

  During the siesta, they made love and slept heavily in each other’s arms.

  In late afternoon they drove, exploring the surrounding honey-toned hills and flatlands. Oaxaca’s pre-Columbian inhabitants had raised innumerable tombs, and despite the ecclesiastical efforts to extirpate these marks of the ancient Mixtec and Zapotec religion, many remained. Althea and Gerry returned again and again to “their” tomb. Over its entry lintel stood paired busts of a heavyjowled man and a delicate-featured woman, obviously man and wife, a couple dead for long centuries yet joined in their cozy five-room eternal resting place. “When the time comes, I’d a hell of a lot rather be here with you than planted in Forest Lawn,” Gerry said.

  In the swift maroon twilight, they slowly sipped margaritas, tapping their salt-rimmed glasses in time to the Zócalo’s strolling marimbas. At ten they would go inside to the candlelit, tapestried hotel dining room to eat a four-course dinner. Long before midnight they were asleep in their big soft bed.

  * * *

  One exceptionally hot morning in mid-January, Althea took her pastels to the ravishing green gardens of Oaxaca Courts, a hotel maybe two miles north of the center of town. By noon even the shady trees and her big straw hat no longer protected her, and she started back. Within five minutes she regretted not having taken one of the cabs lined outside the hotel. Sweat dripped between her breasts and down her sides and she filled her mind with visions of the rewards at journey’s end—a cool bath, a big glass of icy Dos Équises beer.

  Dots were moving in front of her eyes by the time she reached the Zócalo.

  “Althea,” a woman called, “Althea
!”

  Althea jumped. Though some tourists had attempted conversation in the hotel or at the cafés, she and Gerry had remained aloof. Baffled, she stared in the direction of the call.

  A young woman wearing a sundress that bared freckled shoulders was waving vigorously from an umbrella at the Café Manuela.

  It was Roy.

  Seeing Gerry’s wife—her onetime friend—Althea first felt a hard clutch of fear.

  She shifted the basket with her art supplies, wishing she could rush to the hotel, shuck off this moist, stupid native dress, bathe, and coolly armor herself in one of her cruise silks.

  Roy waved again.

  Althea drew a deep breath and avoided traffic to cross to the Café Manuela.

  Roy hugged her with that remembered warmth. “This is absolutely wild! Here less than an hour, and I run into an old friend. I can’t believe it’s really you.”

  “It’s me, but I won’t be around to tell the tale if I don’t get something cold to drink.” She raised her hand and the stout waiter with the wispy Charlie Chan mustache sped toward them. Althea ordered rapidly in Spanish.

  When the waiter left, Roy said, “Mucho impressive. You didn’t learn that at Beverly High.” She beamed at Althea. “This is so fabulous. Gerry—my husband—is painting here. Remember, the last time I saw you, we were living in sin.”

  Heat had swollen Althea’s hands, and the chunky jade ring that Gerry had bought her cut into her finger. Roy was so ebulliently certain of herself that it was impossible to believe that Gerry was unwarned of her visit. Why didn’t he tell me? Althea thought, wrenching off the ring. Why the secrecy?

  “. . . all go to dinner,” Roy was saying. “I’m dying for you to meet him. Oh, that’s right. You know him. Have you bumped into him?”

  “The place simply swarms with Americans.”

  The happiness faded from Roy’s face, and she looked down at her glass. “I remember . . .” she said uncertainly. “You and he didn’t get along, did you?”

  “Dear heart, that was in my infancy.”

  The waiter brought Althea’s beer, and she drank half of it swiftly.

  “I love that dress.” Roy had recovered her bounce. “The embroidery’s fabulous. Where did you find it?”

  “At one of the stalls in the mercado—it’s owned by a cross-eyed Indian woman.” Althea, too, spoke convivially. She sipped the remainder of her beer, describing the shrewd widow who sold junk to American rubes, treasures to the cognoscenti. A bitter skill of hers, this, mining small talk out of her darkest anxieties.

  Roy was laughing. “I’m too dumpy for loose things, but I adore that. Lead on, McDuff, to the wall-eyed lady.”

  “Where’s your loyalty? I thought you only shopped at Patricia’s.”

  Roy was not listening. She was staring over Althea’s shoulder, an expression of rapt adoration transfixing her face. “There he is,” she murmured. “Gerry. In that car.”

  Gerry was pulling into one of the slanted parking spaces in front of the Hotel de los Reyes.

  “So he is,” Althea said, drawing in a breath.

  “Maybe, well . . .” The umbrella shaded them, but Roy’s face was red, as if from heat stroke. “Maybe it would be easiest if you . . . uhh . . . let us be alone for a few minutes. I’m surprising him.”

  So Gerry did not know of Roy’s visit!

  Althea felt strength flow into her, and a measure of kindness. To preserve Roy from humiliation, she said quietly, “You’re silly to have come.”

  “Don’t I know it. Gerry’s not like other people, he’s an artist, he needs his individuality. That’s why he’s here—he’s beginning a new series of paintings, and he wanted to get away from all the distractions.” Rising, she reached for her big straw purse. “Better get it over with.”

  “Wait.” Althea curved a restraining hand on Roy’s wrist. “We need to talk.”

  “Later.”

  “Before Gerry sees us together.”

  The flush had faded from Roy’s face and her makeup base showed like a film over her freckles. “What are you trying to say?”

  “I knew Gerry years before he met you,” Althea said rapidly. “He was still in the Army, an outpatient at Birmingham Military Hospital in the Valley—”

  “Yes, you told me. You and he were both at the art school.”

  “We fell for each other.”

  “You what?”

  “We had a big thing going.”

  “He hated you,” Roy refuted flatly. “He called you Miss Rich Bitch.”

  “My parents broke us up, they did it in a rotten way—I didn’t know about it, but he blamed the mess on me. I blamed him. We pretended we hated each other—you can see the logic, can’t you? When we met again this last November—”

  “So you’re what kept him in New York.”

  “Yes. It started all over again, and we arranged to come down here.”

  Roy was clasping her straw purse to the bosom of her sundress. A drop of perspiration showed on the side of her cheek. “He’s had other women. You aren’t the first. You won’t be the last.”

  “Roy, I’m not trying to harm you.”

  “How could you? You’re just another tramp to him!”

  “Hardly.”

  “I’ve made a home for him, a place where he can work.”

  “Roy, will you stop acting like this is the fall of the Holy Roman Empire—”

  “You’re such a cold fish!” Roy’s pupils glinted, and in this fleeting instant there was something unfamiliar about her, a gross intensity, a wildness. The ringing of the cathedral’s ancient wooden clock set up a deafening reverberation. “You took Dwight Hunter away from me by sleeping with him.” Despite the tintinabulation Roy’s low voice somehow managed to be clearly audible. “Well, this time it’s different. You aren’t getting Gerry. He’s my husband.”

  Gerry slammed the Studebaker door, moving toward the hotel’s shadowy, deep-set entry arch.

  “Gerry!” Roy’s cry shrilled over the antiphonal church bells and the clatter of traffic. “Gerry!”

  He turned, raising a hand to shelter his eyes, looking toward the Café Manuela. He froze momentarily in that position; then his hand fell to his side, his shoulders slumped. In this attitude of defeat his stocky body seemed thicker. For a moment Althea was positive he would cross to them. But he wheeled about, barreling into the dark hotel entry.

  Roy darted into the street. A peddler’s bicycle laden with tourist machetes swerved to avoid her, the wheels flapping as the rider steered frantically out of the way of a large truck. The bike fell toward the dusty pavement, the noisy bells covering the crash.

  Roy had disappeared behind the thick, nail-studded doors of the Hotel de los Reyes.

  Althea stared up at the windows of the rooms she shared with Gerry. The shutters had been closed against midday heat. She could see nothing.

  50

  Gripped by the violence of her need to confront Gerry, Roy was scarcely aware of demanding that the gray-haired desk clerk give her Señor Horak’s room number. In the creaking elevator she held a hand over her heart. Calm down, calm down, she ordered herself. Calm down.

  Though Gerry’s other flings had driven her wild, she had recognized them as casual alliances, no proper threat to her marriage. But this—whatever denials she had hurled at Althea—she accepted as catastrophe. Pure catastrophe. For her mind had sped back through the years to when she had first mentioned Althea’s name to Gerry: he had reacted as if to live electricity.

  The elevator decelerated, stopping a foot or so above the third floor; then the young operator jerked them down a few inches too far. Roy stumbled over the rise. Fleeing the boy’s rapid Spanish apologies, she searched through the dim, cool corridor for the door affixed with the brass number 334.

  She dabbed Kleenex at her brow and upper lip before rapping tentatively.

  “Yeah?” Gerry asked. “What is it?”

  At his voice, a mawkishly grateful relief swept through Roy. S
he felt as if she had been rescued from oblivion.

  The door was unlocked, and she let herself in. The exterior shutters of the high-ceilinged sitting room had been closed, and her first impression was of a dim cave where animals hibernated—animals that immediately became massive, old-fashioned pieces of upholstery.

  Silhouetted in the archway to the bedroom stood Gerry. It was not light enough to see his expression, but his sandaled feet were apart and his arms bent at the elbows, a defensive stance. She had to fight that old painful need to figuratively kneel in humbleness and plead with him to love her.

  “Okay, so you’ve discovered I’m not baching it in Oaxaca.” His truculence sounded forced. “No law says I have to eat shit about it.”

  “I didn’t come here to spy.”

  “Then what the fuck are you doing down here?”

  “I wanted to surprise you,” she said quietly. “But I’m the one who got the surprise.”

  His head cocked as if her dignity astonished him. Did she usually rant like a fishwife when faced with his infidelities? Yes, she thought, oh God, yes.

  “It’s a shame you had to find out this way,” he said in a less surly voice.

  “Althea explained,” Roy said in the same calm tone. “She’s always been the one for you, hasn’t she?”

  Her eyes had adjusted and she could see that trapped misery on his broad face. Nodding, he said, “That’s about the size of it.”

  For a moment a pain, sharp and physical, stabbed her chest. “And what about me? Didn’t you ever feel the least little something for me?” There it was, that involuntary, degrading shrillness.

  He grew wary again. “You wanted in, baby. If you recall, marriage was your idea.”

  “Gerry, can’t you see you’re killing me?” She began to cry. Why must she forever hunger for what he (or anyone else) was incapable of bestowing on her? Love.

  Gerry’s expression remained stony. “Right on cue, the waterworks.”

  “I can’t help it,” she wept. “. . . the way I feel about you is worse than having Parkinson’s or diabetes or . . . some other incurable disease. . . .”