Blame: A Novel

by Huneven, Michelle

  I said I didn’t want to gossip. And how I didn’t want a social life. That I wanted to be a better person.

  She’d also said that she didn’t want to get involved with anybody, but she didn’t want to remind Silver of that, because as soon as they were done talking about this, Patsy wanted to tell her about Ian.

  Well, chances are good that whatever it was will come up again, Silver said. So let’s watch for it, and next time we’ll discuss it as it happens.

  Patsy was impressed by Silver’s calm intelligence and heartened by the implied promise of the therapy continuing.

  So I guess I should tell you that I met someone.

  Ahh. Someone in particular?

  A man, Patsy said. We met weeks ago but went to a movie last night.

  Did you enjoy that?

  Yes, but I don’t want to start thinking about him him him. I can’t be distracted by a man right now. But it’s been such a long time since I had any affection—let alone sex—it’s hard to resist. Not that there was any sex. But I can see where things are heading.

  So maybe you want to take it slow. Not jump into anything.

  Honestly, it already feels full speed ahead. Walking next to him and bumping into him—I got these big, full-body emotional rushes.

  And that means?

  You know. Chemistry.

  Yes, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a choice.

  What—to see him again or not?

  Silver gave her a wry look. I meant, you don’t have to rush into anything or lose yourself if you choose not to. You can take things at your own pace.

  So you think it’s okay for me to go ahead and get involved with him?

  Is it okay with you?

  I don’t know! I don’t even know this guy.

  So get to know him a little before you decide anything.

  How do you get to know someone when every time he brushes up against you, it’s a tidal wave of lust?

  Silver smiled her small, sly smile. Now, doesn’t this seem like the perfect opportunity to figure that out?

  •

  In her dream, she ran down hallways with yellow lines and no doors, no end. She awoke, panting, before sunrise in her cool gray room, and rose, looked out her window. The world was colorless and still. It was Sunday, she would go to a noon meeting with Gilles. She made tea, lit a candle, pulled her books from a drawer. Today’s saint was Saint Vincent de Paul, parts of the entry underlined in her mother’s hand. A mother mourned her imprisoned son. Vincent put on his chains and took his place at the oar, and gave him to his mother . . .

  Oh, Mom, she said.

  The sky was a whiter gray. Still, no sun had risen. There was a knock on her door—not Gilles’s quick gallop of fingers, but a sharp, peremptory rap. Patsy tied her kimono securely at the waist. Who is it? she said.

  Jeffrey Goldstone.

  He was going hiking, he said, and had thought to pay her a call en route. He stood in the living room in his orange Sheriff’s Department T-shirt, khaki shorts, and glowing white sport shoes.

  Do I take you on a tour?

  I’ll have a look around, if you don’t mind.

  And if I did?

  She trailed him into the kitchen, past the breakfast nook, where The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and Lives of the Saints were open by her lit candle. Jeffrey Goldstone took notes, sketched, moved on through the living room to her bedrooms, Patsy right behind him. The rooms suddenly seemed sparse to her, underfurnished.

  A little messy, she said about her unmade bed, yesterday’s cotton dress on the bedroom chair, underpants she’d stepped out of on the floor.

  No fugitive cowered in the closet. No needles were shoved under the bed. Yet her heart raced as if he were on the verge of such a discovery. What if she was doing something wrong and didn’t know?

  In her breakfast nook, he touched the alabaster wall sconce. For my own curiosity, he said, can I ask what rent you pay?

  Two hundred.

  Not bad.

  Her hands shook as she closed the door behind him.

  •

  Walking home from another movie, this one about a woman whistle-blower who gave up job and love to tell the truth, Patsy again asked Ian questions, gentle ones, such as females are tutored to ask, to indicate an interest. Did he like teaching? Who were his students? He seemed to find even such mild queries invasive. I do it for money, he said. College students.

  So she scuffed alongside him in silence. After some blocks, he took her hand, effectively discouraging any further attempts at conversation. He’d be appalled, she thought, to know how intense her desire was. She herself was ashamed to feel so much with so little encouragement.

  Ian stopped, pointed to a metal ammunition box in the window of a surplus store. Great verdigris on that, he said.

  A wood-burning stove at the fireplace store drew his next comment. That would be good in my house, he said.

  Emboldened, she pointed out a small oil painting in the Sunflower Thrift Shop window, a bouquet of lilies. Not bad, he said, but it’s so sun-damaged, you’d end up repainting the whole thing.

  At the Lyster’s front steps, his swift kiss to the corner of her mouth left her with the afterimage of a bleached-out lily.

  •

  After the next movie, he did not hold her hand or kiss her.

  I’m a history professor, with a Ph.D. I can’t believe I’m talking this way, Patsy told Silver. Like I’m in junior high. He loves me, he loves me not.

  Do you love him?

  I only meant love rhetorically, she said. I hardly know him. He hardly talks. He’s laconic, mum’s the word. You’d laugh to see us, a couple of mutes trundling along Colorado, bumping into each other accidentally on purpose.

  How do you feel about him?

  I don’t know. Drawn in. He’s so beautifully made, small and so intense.

  And you like that?

  I don’t know. I guess so, she said, thinking how even the most incipient forms of sex—brushing his shoulder, holding his hand, receiving his good-night peck—were momentous.

  Gilles, her other confidant, said, They say drinking stalls you out, and when you sober up, you’re the same age emotionally as you were when you started drinking.

  Which for her meant thirteen. Yes. That’s exactly how old she felt.

  Saturday we’re going to an opening in Santa Monica, she told Gilles.

  An opening! That means he’s showing you off.

  Patsy wore the ivory shift dress and the blue silk-covered shoes. Ian said, Wow, when she opened the door, and blinked as if she were bright. She should’ve changed then, because at the opening, among the artists and students in their dark, severe clothes, she was the only person in pastels, and the shiny silk shoes revealed themselves for what they were, prosaic bridesmaid pumps devoid of style or irony.

  Ian pushed her through the crowd, his hand at the small of her back. They couldn’t see the art for the crowd. Many people spoke to Ian, but he was brief, even curt in reply. He grabbed a glass of wine and pulled her outside again, where a sharp-featured woman in a dress with many zippers kissed him and talked intensely about the art school where they both taught. Unintroduced, Patsy stood to one side, ablaze in ivory and baby blue, the dress too scant in the cool ocean air and her sweater locked in the car. A few cups of rotgut Chablis, she thought, would start to set things right.

  Ready to go? Ian said. I sure am.

  He knew how to get a small private upstairs room in a Little Tokyo restaurant, where once again the dress proved problematic, this time for sitting on the floor. She tucked her legs sideways, tugged constantly at the hem.

  Ian held a lengthy, low-voiced consultation in Japanese with the waiter.

  I didn’t know you spoke Japanese, she said.

  I was asking if they had any whale.

  Whale? she said. Who would ever eat whale?

  You would. It’s the most delicious sushi of all.

  Never, she said. Sushi had come into f
ashion while she was in prison; she’d had it only once before, at the home of a Japanese colleague, and a lot of rice—and sake—was involved.

  A glass platter of halibut sashimi was set before them, the garnish a cucumber slivered to look like a chrysanthemum. In her mouth, the cool, translucent flesh repulsed her. Sorry, she said. I’m been living on sawdust, more or less. I’m only now getting used to real cheese again, and avocado.

  He ordered miso soup for her, and a bowl of bright green steamed spinach, tea. He drank sake from a wooden box. The opening had stirred him up. He talked with contempt about a gallery owner who’d asked to see his paintings, and an artist who was a fake but was having enormous success.

  Patsy pulled on her hem, listened. She apparently had missed an entire undercurrent of jockeying, hypocrisy, and insult at the opening. Ian laughed a little and said in his Southern drawl, And then there was you—

  Me? What about me?

  They were beside themselves, he said. I thought I was going to have to run interference on everyone gawking at your legs.

  Sorry, she whispered, tugging on the dress.

  Hey, don’t you apologize. Ian traced her ankle with his finger.

  At the Lyster’s medieval wooden door, he wrapped his arms snugly around her and kissed her. His lips were firm, and he tasted, distantly and sourly, of alcohol.

  Shall I come up? he asked.

  Oh! Not tonight, she said, startled.

  I can’t come up? he murmured, kissing her again.

  She’d prepared herself for the usual peck and run, not this. She didn’t like him very much at the moment, after so much self-pity and ill will toward others, not to mention whales.

  Ian, she said. We have to stop.

  •

  In the lobby, Gilles was reading a newspaper in one of those pitched-back hotel chairs. What are you doing down here? she said. Waiting up for me?

  Oh, hello Patsy, he said, peering through his bangs. Is that what you wore?

  I know, I know.

  You look like you’re going to a Nazarene wedding. Where did you get those shoes? Ohmigod. Take them off right now.

  Stop, Gilles. I can’t handle it. I am not cool. I never will be cool.

  I grew up at openings, he said. I could’ve sent you off in style.

  I hate men anyway, she said. Heterosexual men, I mean. What is their problem? They strut and posture and eat whale and don’t talk, except to rant. Then all of a sudden you’re supposed to make out with them?

  Exactly, said Gilles. Shoes, please.

  She stepped out of them, and Gilles left by the front door, the pumps dangling from his fingers. Patsy heard them hit the Dumpster. Boom, and boom.

  15

  Ian had two dogs, a black Lab-shepherd mix and a little orange terrier. His dark-shingled, one-bedroom cabin stank of turpentine. A high platform bed took up most of the living room. Like a monument, she thought, or a pyre.

  He painted in the bedroom, he said, and motioned her to follow.

  The windows were covered in foil, all the light was fluorescent. An easel, a metal stool, a filthy cart holding crumpled paint tubes were the only furnishings. Ian had used one whole wall to wipe his brushes on; the smears of color radiated outward like an explosion. Groups of canvases leaned, face-backward, against the opposite wall.

  To see a house put to such irregular use! Not until he began turning the paintings around did there seem any reason for it. Then, fat tunas shone like battered silver bins, a school of anchovies flashed like dinner knives. A big, stupid-looking brown grouper drifted in pale green light outside his dark hole of a cave in a reef. The paint was a thick, luminous impasto. All the water, even the deepest blue-black depths, swelled with volume and light.

  If we ever live together, Patsy thought, my house could be for sleeping, eating, our civilized life. She said, Do you put something in the paint to build it up like that?

  Nah, he said. It’s solid mistakes.

  They’re so strong yet childlike, she said, thinking that some were silly too.

  He looked with brightened interest at his own work. What else?

  Patsy talked off the top of her head. Playful. Dark. Existential.

  Yes, yes. Pleased, he waited for her to say still more.

  Fumes scorched the back of her throat. It’s like you’re painting the mind, she said.

  Exactly, he said, yes, exactly. He looked at her with animation and grasped her wrist.

  Patsy thought, We could sell both our houses and buy one in Sarah and Henry’s neighborhood, and make our ballroom into a giant studio. Desecrate the whole thing, top to bottom, with paint.

  He led her to the living room and backed her onto the high bed. Pleasure sluiced through her chest and limbs in warm, fast currents. Alerted by their gasps and cries, the terrier stood by the bed and barked, and wouldn’t stop.

  Afterward, they sat out on his back patio. He brought her a wineglass of berry juice, and pistachios in a black clay bowl. The old Lab mix curled at their feet. They ate the nuts, dropping the cupped shells into a rusty coffee can. The terrier snuffled under the oak trees. Patsy drifted, twitching with residual pleasure as her body settled. Shells clattered into the can. And then a shift, as if a sheet of glass slid down, a window shut.

  Hey, she said.

  He didn’t answer. Perhaps he didn’t hear. Oh, but he must have.

  Hot shame spread through her, and she remembered the nakedness and noises and frantic arrangings, the long, sweet looks. Now he wanted her gone. She stood. I need a ride, she said.

  He stood as well. No problem.

  They drove in silence. Pulling up in front of the Lyster, he waited until she’d opened her door to speak. You know, Patsy, that this has nothing to do with you.

  I don’t know that, she said, and closed the door.

  •

  Who did it have to do with, did you ask? said Silver.

  No.

  Why not?

  He can’t handle direct questions. He finds them prying.

  Are your questions prying?

  To him.

  And so you . . .

  I don’t ask them.

  They’d been too ardent, or she had. Whenever she thought of their lovemaking—her noises and tenderness—shame washed over her.

  She didn’t need a lover, anyway. Not now. Persevere in your good resolutions, said Lives of the Saints. It is not enough to begin well; you must so continue to the end.

  But he called and asked her to a movie. They went back to sitting in the dark and intermittent, chaste hand-holding, as if nothing more had ever passed between them. A whiff of solvents from his clothes made her ache. When they reached the Lyster, he’d hug her briskly and leave. No more kisses. Once, he came up to see the apartment. She made twig tea. He soon handed her his mug. I hope you’re okay with things like this, he said.

  My shrink thinks I should go slow too.

  Slow, yes, he said. But slow still implies a destination.

  Slow to wherever, she said, shrugging to match his indifference. Alone, she still recalled his intense, affectionate lovemaking and imagined revolving in and out of each other’s houses, Pomelo to Oleander Street—this could happen yet, she believed, if she didn’t scare him off.

  •

  The Mojave Club now shared the grounds and services of the Altadena Country Club, another old-fashioned privately run institution with its own dwindling membership. The adjacent golf course had long since gone public.

  Gilles insisted they have dinner on the terrace to celebrate Brice’s new job. After working as a freelance producer on local commercials, Brice had been hired by the production company. They’d called that morning, and he’d already pre-spent a week’s salary on an expensive pair of sunglasses that he continued to wear long after the sun slid behind a dense screen of eucalyptus trees. They ordered cheeseburgers and Cokes. Brice, Patsy noted, had adapted his drinking to Gilles’s habits, as he once had adapted to hers. Their talk was punctuated by the pock o
f the tennis balls, the screams and splashes of children in the pool below.

  God, look at those mountains, said Brice, who was always happiest when he had a real job, a fact he never remembered. Don’t you love it here, Patsy?

  She smiled, but no, she didn’t. When the Mojave Club was at the grand old Bellwood, she’d been impressed and intimidated, but this small, local, members-only private club with its anti-intellectual, probusiness Eisenhower parochialism was the culture that grew her. The world she fled for Berkeley. Around them, families were joined by fathers still in business suits from downtown offices and banks. She had her eye on the young father at a nearby table. With a plump two-year-old daughter on his knee, he ordered a second and a third double vodka rocks. His wife and children would leave, she knew, and hours later he would follow, perhaps to pass out on the sofa or dismantle the living room.

  Well, well, well. To what do we owe this honor?

  Why, Auntie, said Gilles.

  Cal Sharp smiled down on them. Of course he would be here too. A club man, even yet. His Mojavian drinking adventures were AA legend—Round for the house, round for the house! One year, he’d told the meeting, his bar tab amounted to the median home price in Pasadena. Luckily, he’d owned the bar.

  Brice, he said. Patsy. And shook their hands.

  He ruffled Gilles’s hair, and Gilles’s eyes went soft with pleasure.

  Sit down, join us, Auntie.

  Now, Patsy, I’ve been meaning to ask you a question. Do you ride?

  Me? Horses?

  Sit down, Auntie, said Gilles. Don’t loom.

  Yes, please, sit. Patsy touched the empty chair beside her. I used to ride, she said. The usual horse-crazy adolescent girl thing. Not so much recently.

  Cal had horses that needed riding. His kids weren’t around, he couldn’t exercise the whole stable. Could she help him out, ride with him on Saturday?

  Sure, she said, knowing that it wasn’t about helping him out. Cal looked for ways to encourage people, the ones who were new to sobriety or having a rough time. A kind comment. A free meal. A job he happened to know about. A horseback ride.

  •

  Patsy wondered how many other women had given Cinder a turn. A small, thin-legged bay mare, she had a pretty little canter and a nasty temper. She’s gone a bit spooky on us, said Cal. Watch out, she’ll shy at a stinkbug.