Blame: A Novel

by Huneven, Michelle

  Gilles had planned his own funeral, the menu, the flowers, the minister, the songs, the singers, who should speak and in what order. That’s what he and Brice had been doing together with the legal pad.

  Gilles left Patsy his diaries—she was his “literary executor”—and, as promised, the old rag. She offered the cashmere to Brice, who said its dispensation had been much discussed and long ago resolved.

  Gilles had started the diaries in Paris, but Patsy first read the last two, written since he’d come home. At first he’d been full of self-pity and despair about his lost glamorous existence. Then came much gushing about Brice—His nose! Aquiline supreme!—followed by little until he was diagnosed, when complaint and vituperation gushed from his pen. Patsy was relieved to discover he wasn’t so angelic after all. He wrote how his mother bought him the wrong kind of hand cream, then the wrong brand of orange juice, of disposable needles. She was vague, and a crybaby. Brice wasn’t around enough, and when he was, he couldn’t sit still, he had some kind of attention disorder and generally was incapable of love. Nor did Patsy escape the diarist’s bile. She had walked too heavily around him and made an unforgivable sound by dragging the tines of her fork against her teeth. Who knew? The Ox, he called her in many entries. Then Clumper. Clumper clumped in today and stayed for-fucking-ever. Only in Bakersfield would she ever be society.

  22

  Despite offers made in the heat of wooing, Cal didn’t want to buy a new house, at least not until March went away to college. So Patsy moved into the Flintridge Tudor. She brought her books, her clothes, one red glass vase, and one painting of a fish. She slept in Peggy Sharp’s marriage bed, ate off her wedding china, cooked out of her cookbooks, guided by her annotations. (Cal likes, she had written of an orange cake recipe.) Peggy had been Patsy’s age when she married Cal, and knowing this, Patsy came to conflate poor never-sober Peggy with her own former, wilder self—both of them, Patsy thought, well rid of.

  Patsy visited her stepdaughter’s room, browsing for clues to her nature. A shelf of soccer trophies, a nightstand drawer with crinkled tubes of acne cream. Above the headboard of March’s twin bed, precisely where a mother kissing her child good night would gaze, hung a small sign in an old-fashioned font:

  LIPS THAT TOUCH LIQUOR

  SHALL NEVER TOUCH MINE.

  So Patsy was not the first mother figure scorned.

  Oh no, said Cal. Those two fought to the bitter end.

  Deceased, Peggy had ascended in March’s estimation. My mother let me boss the housekeeper around/use good towels at the pool. My mother said I didn’t have to go out to eat/to the doctor/to summer camp.

  Unlike Joey Hawthorne, who hid out at their house, March did come home to her father most weekends. She emptied her suitcase into a snarled heap of clothes and books on the spare twin and either joined her father and Patsy for meals or refused to.

  At Cal’s urging, Patsy took March shopping for her sixteenth birthday to Bullock’s on South Lake Avenue in Pasadena. At five feet two, March was plump and short-waisted. A floral print shirtdress transformed her into a stout little housewife—an uncanny vision of things to come. She added crisp white blouses, gabardine slacks, and a tortoise-shell headband, her taste as starched as Patsy’s was rumpled. Patsy wrote checks without a word. She still wore T-shirts and wrinkled Indian cotton skirts, though her sandals were better made now, and Cal’s first birthday gift to her, a yellow-gold curb link bracelet, clinked softly when she moved her arm.

  They lugged March’s many shopping bags into the elevator and ordered sandwiches in the tearoom, with its panoramic view of the San Gabriel Mountains. Their older waitress said, Now let me guess. Aunt and niece?

  My stepmom, March answered without sweetness, but with such a lack of rancor Patsy considered the day a victory.

  By breakfast, the birthday clothes had joined the churning snarl on the bed and March refused to eat with them.

  The boys came and went that first summer, polite and good-natured. Patsy teased them; she knew how, from teaching. She called them “the hollow-legs,” professed shock at how fast they dispatched whole loaves of wheat-berry bread, jars of peanut butter, strawberry jam.

  A handwritten invitation to the Trinity Lutheran Youth Choir’s recital brought Patsy to the back row of a pink stone church in Pasadena. Mark Parnham caught her eye, mouthed a welcome. The ethereal sound of young voices made her weep. She wrote a check to the church—there was a locked wooden box for donations—and slipped out before the punch and cookies.

  In July she flew with Cal to his board meeting in Switzerland. The other wives, into whose company she was consigned, were older, and cool to her. Their eyes flickered at her more casual clothes; she was shouldered out of their shifting groups as they shopped in Gstaad and visited a cheese factory in Château-d’Oex. One morning, Patsy stayed in the hotel to read; at lunch Cal let her know that this was unacceptable. Mortified—she had thought it impossible to displease him—she rejoined the group and, over the years, at many such meetings, never went AWOL again.

  Cal took the whole family to the Kauai time-share in August. The large wooden house sat on stilts in the sand. Roberta and Minnie came for a week, along with Audrey, followed by Andrew, the eldest, and his family. March brought Joey Hawthorne, in whom Patsy had an ally. (At least he didn’t marry the housekeeper, Joey said within Patsy’s earshot.) The boys surfed, the girls walked to the shopping center. Cal and Patsy sat in the sun, read books, visited the local AA.

  She had not anticipated so much family life. She tried to do right by them, cooking, offering to do laundry, loading the dishwasher, sweeping the kitchen floor of sand and more sand.

  Once school started in the fall, the Tudor was empty again during the week, and Patsy had Cal to herself. I can’t get over how calm marriage is, she told Silver at the six-month mark. How adult.

  Say more, said Silver.

  I’m surprised, Patsy said. There really is a whole subtle world of adult privilege that a single person never accesses. I always suspected it. Marriage is the door, the key to the kingdom. And you get to be like the king and queen living happily ever after—or not so happily, as the case may be.

  In this case? How’s the queen?

  Me? Oh, god, happy. She laughed. You know, Cal actually is so regal. I was watching him work the room at a meeting last night, and he was like FDR visiting Congress: this elegant swan touring a duck yard.

  Swans and kings, said Silver. Sounds like a fairy tale.

  Don’t forget the evil stepmother, said Patsy.

  What about the more concrete, down-to-earth areas of the marriage?

  You mean sex? How’s our sex life? Patsy said, and recalled her husband’s assured, proprietary hand on her rib cage, his long, slim almost hairless leg hooking over hers. Proficient was still the word that came to mind. We get along, she said. No worries there.

  Patsy was putting on a bit of a show for Silver, to prove that she hadn’t rushed into folly and was as happy as she believed herself to be.

  She understood by then that Cal was neither as rich nor as influential as she’d assumed. He was employed by the family corporation, true, but he was not a major player there. The houses he’d offered to her early in their courtship were not, strictly speaking, his alone to give.

  Cal’s great talent and accomplishment was in AA, after all. She couldn’t admit this to Silver, could not bear to address the glaring comparison.

  I married my father, she did wail to Gloria, who was now over a year out of prison as well, and living in nearby Azusa.

  Who doesn’t? said Gloria.

  For the first year of their marriage Patsy went with Cal to meetings, sat beside him, holding her spine straight—Audrey had been on her for slouching—and ached with pride while waiting for the leader to call on him. Cal never had to raise his hand.

  And neither did she now. Husband and wife were asked to speak at meetings all over Southern California, separately and as a team. People called them
role models, proof that sober alcoholics could find love and happiness.

  The time came, of course, when subjects arose that Patsy couldn’t talk about in front of Cal. Nasty bits of her past that haunted. Feelings about his children, or living in right-wing, all-white Flintridge. Things Cal didn’t need to hear. Gloria directed her to go to women’s meetings and to seek out her own groups.

  They were almost two years into their marriage when Derek, of the thin ponytail and terrible necklaces, phoned Cal from County Hospital. He’d tested positive for HIV, his intravenous drug use coming back to haunt him. They rushed over, found him on a gurney in the hall.

  And so it began again, Cal bringing meetings, Patsy sitting bedside in the afternoons, picking up Derek’s mother at the airport, taking her to buy him pajamas, toothpaste, a hairbrush. After his third hospitalization Derek was too weak to live alone, and his mother could not afford another plane ticket, let alone a hospital bed. Cal said, Let me talk to the kids.

  The kids said, Just not upstairs. So Derek moved into the maid’s quarters off the kitchen. Patsy, Binx, and Caroline cleaned out his apartment, held a yard sale, dismantled his life. He lived at the Sharps’ house for six months, until his death.

  After Derek, they brought in a fifty-eight-year-old musician, also from the morning meeting, then a thirty-year-old gay banker. By then the disease was flaring all around them. The man who cut Patsy’s hair. Hallen’s librarian and the assistant drama professor. Binx’s brother. Only Brice evaded the virus, crediting a non-penetrative technique he called the Princeton rub, and then celibacy post-Gilles. Audrey’s Episcopal church in Pasadena set up a nonprofit agency to address the emergency. Audrey volunteered full-time, and Patsy spent three afternoons a week setting up clients with medical care and counseling. After three years, she was the only volunteer left from her group; the others had burned out, moved on. Even Audrey had left to become a docent at the Arboretum. The agency’s new director would have been glad to replace Patsy with one of his own people. She stayed on for two more years. She had found a way to be good.

  PART FOUR

  23

  Winter 1999

  Lewis came in with the fiddle player and her red-haired daughter. He slouched like a cat and laughed with pleasure when greeting Burt.

  After dinner, when the players were tuning up, Patsy saw him drinking a nonalcoholic beer. Does that actually taste like beer? she asked, and admitted she’d been too afraid to try one, afraid it would launch an old craving.

  I’m sober too, he said. Eleven years. And I never even tasted one of these—he waggled the bottle—until last year. And the strangest thing. I drank one and didn’t want another.

  He offered her a sip, but she declined. I better not.

  Oh, I see you two brains have met, said Burt. No? Well, you should. Professor Fletcher, Professor MacLemoore.

  Lewis was comp lit, French and Russian, but not tenured. He taught at three different colleges—a freeway flier. As he and Patsy talked, the red-haired girl, Susannah, ran back to him again and again. Eight years old, she perched briefly on his knees, hung an arm companionably around his neck. He kissed her red curls absently.

  The band played away.

  You ought to see my Cindy, she lives deep in the South

  She’s so sweet the honeybees swarm around her mouth

  After his divorce four years ago, Burt had moved to Rito, a tiny old town in the orange groves, and married Umparro, the broad-faced mandolin player in his bluegrass band. They held a potluck dinner and band practice every Thursday. Once a month, when her father drove down from Bakersfield, Patsy came up for a night or two. Burt’s kids came too, so the family was together.

  Cal demurred. He didn’t care for bluegrass—he was a Boston Pops man—and liked his own bed or those at the Santa Barbara Biltmore, but not the blow-up mattress Burt offered. Cal was in his seventies. A mattress on the floor, he said, was simply too far down there.

  Just as well. Patsy’s father and Cal had never struck the right note with each other. Cal called her father a sad sack. Her father found Cal kind but dry. I can’t really get at anything with him, he said.

  Me neither! Patsy said. But so what? What’s to get at, anyway?

  Get along home, Cindy, Cindy; get along home, Cindy, Cindy.

  Get along home, Cindy, Cindy; I’ll marry you someday.

  The fiddle player was marvelous, and Patsy said so.

  You should hear her play Beethoven, said Lewis, turning. You’re not Burt’s sister who’s married to Cal Sharp?

  The one and only, she said, and watched him process the age difference.

  So you kept your maiden name, he said.

  Burt forgets I’m a Sharp. And I publish under MacLemoore. When my thesis was coming out as a book, I couldn’t stand that Patsy MacLemoore did all the work and Patsy Sharp would get all the credit.

  Fair! Lewis said with an abrupt laugh.

  The little redhead ran up again and sat on his lap for a long time.

  As he left, Lewis touched Patsy’s elbow. I heard your husband speak at a retreat last July. Now, there’s a man with a beautiful soul.

  The next morning, Lewis phoned Burt’s house on the off chance Patsy was still there. He wanted her to speak that night at his AA meeting. A speaker had canceled.

  She brought along her father, Burt, and Umparro, who had never heard her story. Afterward they all went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant. That was when she found out the fiddle player was neither Lewis’s wife nor lover, but an old friend whose child, the red-haired Susannah, was his goddaughter.

  Within the week, Lewis wrote Patsy a charming note in dark gray ink to thank her for speaking.

  Your story was so moving and powerful. We’re all still ringing from it.

  When Patsy heard Hallen was looking for a French-language adjunct for the winter quarter, she phoned Lewis, then talked him up to the language chair, who hired him to teach French 2, a bore. But comp lit asked him to teach the Russian short story as well, which made the hundred-mile commute worthwhile.

  Patsy showed him around the Hallen campus, with its Mission Revival architecture, olive, oak, and eucalyptus groves. They split a sandwich at the student union. That weekend she brought him to the faculty picnic—Cal had long since bowed out of those—and they spent the whole two hours talking on Wes Gustafson’s sofa.

  He’d had one bad novel published—No, seriously, Patsy, it really is an embarrassment—and had started work on something else, about the drunk farm where he’d sobered up and the man who ran it, his first sponsor.

  It’s part memoir, part biography, he said. Which reminds me. For my research, I’d like to talk to your husband about how he runs his house.

  His house? said Patsy.

  Don’t you have some kind of unofficial halfway facility down there?

  No. A few boarders now and then, said Patsy. None if I can help it. It’s not a facility.

  She was already loath to bring him home. Lewis had idolized his former sponsor, the one he was writing about; he’d be just as susceptible to Cal, and Patsy didn’t want to share.

  •

  Patsy had long been looking for a new house—Cal being content in the Tudor—when six years ago, on a meandering trail ride together in the foothills, they’d come across a weedy four-acre spread. Built in the sixties by an industrialist, the eight-bedroom redwood-sided ranch house was modeled—loosely—on the famous home in a TV western. There was also a separate apartment that the selling agent called “the possum trot,” a cactus garden, lily pond, wrecked pool, falling-down pool house, and barn. Having languished on the market for years, the place went for a song, with escrow closing on the Sharps’ tenth wedding anniversary. All along, they swore they’d ditch the name, but they’d already gotten into the jokey habit of using it. The Ponderosa. The Pondo.

  The move had given them both a burst of energy; she painted rooms and furnished under Brice’s strict supervision. Cal rebuilt the barn, put in a pipe corral
and hay shelter. Antonia, Patsy’s former prison chum turned landscaper, restructured the gardens and stocked the lily pond with expensive koi, to the delectation of local raccoons. The canyon contained forty oak trees, plus citrus, loquats, persimmons, black figs, and a variety of purple-skinned avocados with oily, delicious flesh. They harvested in laundry baskets.

  Cal’s kids and sponsees cycled in and out, especially March. Brice rented the possum trot for two years after the Lyster sold, though rented wasn’t exactly accurate; some combination of bartered for and squatted in was closer to the truth. Lewis must have heard about the six months Burt lived with them after his divorce, for that in particular was a period of great conviviality. Boarders lounged around the living room as if it were the lobby in some rustic mountain lodge; they built eucalyptus wood fires in the gaping river rock fireplace, read, talked, napped. People took turns churning out dinners—Burt, at loose ends and on stress leave from his job, had cooked often. Someone would ring the rusty iron triangle hung from a porch rafter, and everyone would gather in the dining room, with its exposed log truss and chandeliers of tangled antlers. Cal and Peggy’s daily wedding china (place settings for twelve) was often augmented with the picnic Melmac, depending on how many girlfriends, boyfriends, and other drop-ins crowded around the table, with Cal always at the head.

  Patsy was spending long days in research libraries by that time, only sometimes showing up at the dinners; even then she might grab a bowl of stew or piece of chicken to eat in her office. She didn’t begrudge Cal the company he needed, and he, in turn, didn’t begrudge her the time and solitude for her work.

  Since Burt’s tenancy, things at the Pondo had quieted down. March had married, moved to Sunnyvale with her younger dot-com husband, and given birth to Ava. Brice, after another fling with high-paid commercial production, was house-sitting to get by. Now, only two AA newcomers bunked in the east wing, although Stan was splitting up with his wife and would no doubt move home.