by Sharon
"I'm going to fire those drooling kids," he would say, to make her laugh. He taught her to drive and worried about her in the sea of erratic traffic, worried more about her becoming lonely.
She explored his culture, connecting in unexpected ways. She delighted in sequoias and flamenco guitar and wok cooking and reruns of "The Beverly Hillbillies." The representations of human figures in classical art were graven images to her—that prejudice hung on—but she admired abstract artists like Rothko and Pollock. The expression of mood and theme with color she understood at its most obscure and esoteric. It was reminiscent of what she had been doing for years with quilts at home.
Many things she "didn't care for." Billboards. Perfume. Horoscopes. He'd given up trying to predict. Mimes, he would have guessed. But when they walked in a downtown park on Sunday and ran into a small troupe, Susan watched them, smiling. When it was over, one of the mimes, a young man with his hair in a ponytail, handed her an imaginary flower. She took it home, planted it in their yard, and every morning he saw her going outside to pretend to water it. Once he asked her what kind of flower it was, and she said a lily. He never could bring himself to ask her if it grew. There was a passage in Rachel's book:
To the casual observer, an Amish home will seem colorless in its lack of ornament. But take a spring walk with me around my sister Susan's garden. That rose of Damascus by the corner there is nothing more than a thicket of sticks recovering from a hard pruning. Nothing will tell you that it was a wedding gift from Fanny, planted for a surprise out of the blue while Mother kept Susan distracted on the old farm. From the petals of the very first rose, Susan made Fanny a sachet that she keeps in her linen drawer. The apple tree bears a graft John tended with care to give Susan the same sweet Macintosh apples she'd eaten as a child. It's too early now for apples, too late to see buckets on the sugar maples catching sparkling ribbons of sap, but I can hear the trickling sound as the bucket fills with bright, transparent sugar water. At the boiling, the scent of maple steam reaches far out in the fields and down the road, and neighbors come with their kids in hay wagons for fresh maple candy. The cellar doors are closed over the new stair-case my Dad built when he'd become anxious that the steps were too steep to be safe. The Persian lilacs by the paddock—those are softwood cuttings grown especially for Susan by John's mother from her own bush. Under the birch are blue irises that grew on Grandma's farm. There are other flowers, too—day lilies along the walk, coral bells, cornflowers, daisies. I could pair each with the name of the neighbor or relative who'd shared a garden with her, as she was starting to share now with the younger ones who followed. In this way, we bond.
Harvest time arrived back in Wisconsin. Susan stopped talking about her family. She became quieter, pining, hiding it.
The way an American student of the Orient remains an American, Susan remained Amish. Learning more about his world had not made her a part of it. In her own society, she had been a complete person. In spite of her struggle to assimilate in his, he could feel she was always navigating. She was separate.
He tried, with every last atom of his love and intellect, to find ways to dim the faraway voices that called to her. So often he would succeed, and they would spend long halcyon hours together, and the world was nothing to either of them.
Yet when he awoke at night, he found her still and wakeful, her eyes a subtle sheen in the darkness. Sometimes he made love to her until they were both drained and silly and exhausted, and then she slept. Other times he took her in his arms and rocked her, his cheek on her hair, and when she fell asleep he stayed as he was, holding her.
He hoped it might help her to get away, so they flew to Arizona, to Dash's ranch, for the old cowboy's thirtieth wedding anniversary. Susan blossomed there in the cluster of kids and grand-kids and messy, happy celebration. When they came back she was quiet, sad again. At the airport, photographers caught them and she walked close to him, her legs unsteady, her hands cold and bloodless. Afterward she rubbed her eyes until the lids were sore and told him she kept seeing the print of the strobe flashes. That night, neither of them slept, and he went to the piano to smother the strain in brilliant sound.
The morning was cool and misty, wet enough to need the windshield wipers. He had to work, and he drove, away with the agonized sense that he was leaving behind the immeasurably more important work of his life. At Armageddon, the last man and woman would find themselves balancing their checkbooks.
He had day meetings, then a night meeting. She drove to his office to meet him for dinner, charming him, caressing his hand with her fingers. Her smiles were wistful. She was cheerful when she kissed him good-bye, and wandered off to visit David, where he was filming a thriller on a sound stage. That old monster, she called him.
Alan was preparing to leave his own office, when David appeared at the door, the famous slough-black hair windblown, his clothes smelling of makeup, hot lights, and movie smoke.
"Alan, have you talked to Susan in the last couple of hours?"
"Wasn't she with you?"
"She was, but—" David went to the telephone. "How do I dial your house? Never mind, I see—" After a minute he cradled the receiver. "She isn't answering. Look, Alan, she might be in trouble. Tonight she ran into one of the kids who was with us in Wisconsin, Brian something. He was a grip, and I'm not sure if you were aware of it, but he's been dealing drugs in a minor way. Apparently he overheard her talking to me about having trouble sleeping, so he gave her some pills."
Alan was on his feet. "What kind of pills?"
"Maybe Seconal. Maybe Quaaludes. He's changed his story a couple of times. She asked him how to get to Griffith Park Observatory and left, but he saw her stop by the coffee machine on the way out and swallow the pills. She must have had no idea how they work. He tried to catch her, but she'd left very quickly, and for two hours he was too scared to tell anyone."
Ice spears pricked along Alan's spine. He heard himself say, "Griffith Park."
It would mean headlines, but he called the police. There was no alternative. Griffith Park could be a bad place after dark—a very bad place.
They came across her car almost immediately, but there were four thousand acres of park to comb through, looking for her, and Alan spent more than an hour listening to his heartbeat before she was found unconscious under a tree. They let him come and wake her.
They had wrapped her in blankets, and dense red from the revolving emergency light on the ambulance pulsed on her still face. There was no trace of movement under the blanket. He couldn't see her breathe. Far away, at the dim end of a long tunnel, someone was speaking to him, telling him that the officer had found her wearing no shoes or stockings and that her feet were bleeding.
He was kneeling, and felt cold, cold as though he were dying. He wanted to hold her and weep. He wanted to take her place, to be the one lying in the open with chilled skin, and have her be somewhere else, anywhere, to have her safe and warm, not here in a world where she had no defenses.
He touched her icy cheek.
When she opened her eyes, his heart contracted. He said her name softly. She didn't seem to know where she was at first. She was bewildered, like a bird blown from a nest.
"Susan… How are you, my love?"
"It's nice here… like home. I got lost, I think…"
He stroked the fragile wing of her cheekbone. "Did anyone hurt you?"
"Hurt me? No. I—Do you have my shoes? I took them off… Barefoot is—"
"—the best feeling." He kissed the damp bluish chill of her mouth and gently uncovered her feet. They were torn and bleeding, cut by litter and glass she'd stepped on, not able to feel the cuts in her anesthetized state.
She slept again, drifting in the heavy chemical trance.
At home, clean and warmed in bed, she stirred. He took her hand. For a long time they stayed so.
She spoke quietly. "I've been dreaming they're dead. My family."
The cold, crushing sensation sharpened in his chest. He
slid his arms under her and held her against his pain.
"I see their graves so clear," she said. "Dad and Mother, my brothers and sisters, the babies too… Carolyn, Katie. They're all gone." Her fingers moved with drugged languor on his shirt buttons. Her head rested heavily against his bare skin. "I've buried them."
He murmured something, a comfort, a protest.
"I have, though. I'll never again .tug Dad's beard, or taste Mother's bread, or touch Grandma's hair. And when Anna and Luke and Levi and all the others have children, I'll never know them and they won't know who I am; I'll be like someone in the far past who died before they were born and you can't even miss..."
The pain in his chest was so deep, he could hardly breathe. His hands moved blindly in her hair.
Presently she said, "Do you remember the night we chose a star together?"
"I remember."
"Last night I tried to see our star from the garden. I hadn't seen it in so long. It wasn't there, Alan. It was just like it had vanished right out of the sky. I thought, maybe those flashing lights from the cameras at the airport did something to my eyes. Or maybe it was all drowned out by the city lights. Light pollution, you called it once. I thought I would find the observatory and try to see the star from there."
"Could you see it, Susan?"
He waited.
Finally, with wonder, she said, "No."
When she slept again, he brought over a chair and sat watching her, feeling a love for her so strong, it burned with every breath. A truth occurred to him, a simple, certain truth, and he said aloud, "I've got to get you out of here."
In the morning she went outside to water the imaginary lily and found that he had planted a real one in its place.
Chapter 25
Rachel knew that Alan Wilde was coming. He had sent her a telegram.
He couldn't have called. She had no telephone. She'd had one for a while after she left home, taking uncanny pleasure in the act of mild defiance, proving she could have a telephone if she wanted. There, see, I have a phone. Haha. Except that she began to meet people and the phone began to ring. When she was in the shower, it rang. When she was writing, it rang. She discovered she didn't like the sound of it, so she got rid of it.
Alan Wilde wanted to come talk to her. Alan Wilde had to send a telegram. No, a cable. Maybe she should call it a cable. Maybe "telegram" was an outdated word, one of those that still spotlighted her Amishness.
Her first cable. There'd been an old-fashioned B-movie drama about its arrival. She imagined herself in grainy black and white, tearing it open and fainting. She hadn't fainted, of course, though it had been rather exciting. She decided to send one to Daniel sometime, for fun. DEAR DANIEL STOP HOW GOES IT STOP YOUR SISTER RACHEL.
Being excited about Alan Wilde's cable didn't mean she was excited about Alan Wilde's visit. When the initial confusion cleared about why he wanted to talk to her, worry set in. There were no subjects he'd want to talk to her about that wouldn't be painful. Talking to him carried by extension the same emotional hazards as contact with her family. It had taken weeks for her to recover from that one visit to see her parents, from the unhealthy triumph of confronting her father, from the crashing depression that came after. She was tired of hurting, impatient with it. She'd left them behind to become fully herself and here she was, perpetually entangled. One ought to be able to divorce one's family. You ought to be able to say, "I divorce thee" three times like a Moslem and have done with it. Why did she keep loving them so?
She'd had just the one letter from Susan since Susan's excommunication, that sweet, punctilious, economical account of her expulsion from the church and her subsequent marriage.
She'd put some time into thinking about how to respond to her distant exiled twin, and finally decided to send a plant. Heck, it was perfect; after the uneasy years together and the spectacular soap opera of their various departures from faith and family, the gift seemed an appropriate and funny anticlimax. Maybe Susan would take it as a gesture of reconciliation. Maybe Rachel wanted her to.
Except the plant never made it to Susan. The Los Angeles florist couldn't deliver it—there was some code; it had to be marked personal, or something. Faceless minions whose job it was to accept or not to accept offerings to the famous director hadn't recognized her name and had rejected it, politely.
She said, "Screw it, then."
Anyway, she didn't have to gear herself up to dislike Wilde. She merely assumed she wouldn't like him. His callous seduction of the chaste sister she had loved and rebuffed since birth would have been enough to make her hate him. Even without that, she didn't think she approved of people who allowed themselves to make a fortune in the arts. Artists should be outlaws, stragglers, chronic misfits, filled with pity, accepting none. They shouldn't grow rich and complaisant and lose their passion. Perhaps no one should own a disparate share of the world's resources. Perhaps she was a communist. DEAR DAD STOP JOINED THE COMMUNIST PARTY STOP LOVE RACHEL.
She laughed out loud. That was how it had been before she'd begun writing seriously, the lonely search for that moment of self-discovery, the way to justify in a word all the rebellion and tiresome sensitivity that had made growing up such a pain in the neck. Oh, those wonderful, absurd revenge fantasies where she said, "Dad, I'm gay,"
"Dad, I'm psychic,"
"Dad, I'm from another planet." She could imagine trying to explain "gay" to her rather. Anyway, none of it had turned out to be true, and when her book was published the seeking vanished. She was a writer, and that explained everything, and she had a vocation and a place in the universe.
When Alan Wilde arrived, she was cleaning her typewriter keys.
She opened the door, unexamined tension curdling in her stomach, a cup of lukewarm coffee in her hand.
The face was familiar, but newspaper photos showed only one more polished celebrity. They masked the fascinating smile and warm skin tones, the hinted strength of mind and humor. He was incurably sexy. She spilled coffee on her fingers.
She made a welcoming gesture, shut the door behind him, sucked the coffee from the back of her hand, and found herself under his light, discerning scrutiny.
Okay, you, she thought, let's see how easy you are to embarrass. "Yes," she said, "Susan is the undisputed beauty of the twin set."
She'd misread him. Rather than apology, his eyes held a self-deprecatory amusement that would have warmed cold ash.
"Did I stare? I apologize. I was thinking how well you'd film. It's something I do. A bad habit."
It was nicely done. The delivery was so easy and charming that, barring polygraphic analysis, you'd have no idea if the words were sincere. She wished suddenly that she hadn't read the harrowing unauthorized biography of his childhood. We're all Christs, she thought. We've all been crucified; She could sense it in him.
In the brief silence, she heard Ginny, in the apartment downstairs, beginning to practice her harp. The song was "In the Mood". Rachel took a breath.
"I find .meeting you under these circumstances to be extremely uncomfortable. Left with the initiative, I'll probably make it harder on both of us. Since you're clearly the more socially able, I'd be grateful if you'd put me at my ease, if you can."
She gave the man credit. If he was disconcerted to have the whole thing dumped like wet pudding in his lap, he didn't show it. He glanced around the room and focused on Blister, sunning himself in the front window, and said, "Ugly cat."
Talk about disconcerted. Surprised into a smile, she looked at the cat, sprawled like a balding feather boa on the narrow ledge. "Yeah," she said, "he's ugly, all right." Then there was the second surprise, his hand in a persuasive, yet matter-of-fact grip on the sides of her face, his lips in a brief, sexless visitation of her brow, his breath cool and pleasant on her skin. He stepped back smiling and she understood why Susan had lost her head.
"If that's how you put chance acquaintances at their ease, what do you do when you want to really relax someone?" She watched the vol
tage of his smile soar.
"Excuse me," she managed to say, mumbled something about preparing some refreshment, ,and went to the kitchen to recover. She spent several minutes gloomily examining the color spots on her cheeks in the refrigerator chrome before it occurred to her that she'd better produce something to eat or drink, or she'd have to go back out and say, "There's to be no refreshment after all."
She returned with hot tea and found him gazing out the window, one long, beautifully shaped hand stirring the cat's marmalade fur. In the powdery sunlight, the room began to seem to her like the interior of a dream.
Downstairs, the harp had begun to produce the "Blue Danube Waltz"—la da da da da, plink, plink, plink, plink. She remembered reading that he was an accomplished musician. She'd better face the music.
"I tried to arrange weeping violins for your arrival, and look what happened. I hope you like the harp."
"It's… heavenly." He was grinning, damn him. "So you live above a harpist?"
"A harper. She plays folk harp. If you play a pedal harp, you are a harpist. If you play a small folk harp, you are a harper."
He gave that a moment's cheerful thought before he added, "If you're part bird and legendary, you're a harpy."
"And if you leap at whales and try to stick them, you're a harpoon." Chalk one up for me, she thought. "When she plays in the evening while the birds sing, I feel like a mouse in a cartoon that gets hit on the head with a mallet. If you'd like, you could come back tomorrow. Fridays, she practices her accordion."
"Well… How are Saturdays?"
"She has friends over to sing madrigals."
"You'd better move." They were smiling at each other again, which was crazy and not what she'd anticipated at all.
"But on Sundays and Wednesdays she bakes bread and gives everyone in the building a loaf. Sit down, if you'd like."
He did. He picked up his cup and she saw suddenly that she'd forgotten to add the tea bag. It didn't seem to perturb him. He looked like one of those Californians who wasn't surprised by anything that happened in Middle America. Probably he thought it was a regional custom, serving hot water. They were frugal out here.